Feminism and the digital: towards a database of Argentine women artists

Feminism and the digital: towards a database of Argentine women artists

Gluzman
Georgina Gabriela

Universidad de San Andrés, Argentine Republic
georginagluz@gmail.com

2014-12-19T13:50:00Z

Paul Arthur, University of Western Sidney

Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia
Paul Arthur

Converted from a Word document

DHConvalidator

Paper

Short Paper

database
women artists
Latin America

art history
gender studies
English

Digital humanities are slowly beginning to take shape in Argentina, hand in hand with the country’s economic growth in the last decade. So far, the most important digital efforts have been undertaken by researchers from the fields of literature and history.
But what happens when digital humanities meet art history in the Argentine context? A few digital art history projects have been active since the 2000s, funded by several governmental institutions and private museums. However, most of them are repeating the art historical canon, maintaining a narrative organised around styles and masterpieces, while obliterating the careers of women in art.
Gender studies in art history are still thin on the ground in Argentina. In scholarship terms, research focused on women artists is very recent, having begun in the 1990s. There is much to do ahead, fostering the investment of undergraduate students, museums’ staffs, and the public.
So what happens when digital humanities meet feminist efforts in art history? This paper aims to discuss and present a digital humanities project that has developed from my doctoral dissertation research. This project will attempt to encourage visitors to contribute information on women artists, helping to destabilise art historical narratives and to encourage the interest in women artists from Argentina. MArEAr (Spanish for ‘making dizzy’) hopes to make widely available the information collected for my doctoral dissertation, which will encompass the careers of women artists from the 1880s to the 1920s. These artists are not featured in survey books and are also absent from many encyclopedias. Their works are scattered in museums and private collections. They are, even today, little-known names not connected to any work visible in museums’ galleries.