Women artists take over museum schedules in 2020 to coincide with US presidential election

While it is yet to be decided if a woman will be on the ballot for US president in 2020, an art-world project will ensure that women get more of a platform at the museum level around election time. Started by the curator Apsara diQuinzio, the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) is a loose, grassroots organisation which aims to promote dozens of women-first exhibitions, performances and programmes in autumn 2020.

“The idea, for me, really came out of the election of Donald Trump and feeling this urgent need to do something,” says diQuinzio, the senior curator of Modern and contemporary art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She says she was inspired by the 2017 Women’s March and “the way people were able to collectively come together in this important way to send a message about women’s rights”.

DiQuinzio reached out to a few museum curators to create a working group, secured a $50,000 curatorial grant from the Warhol Foundation in 2017, held a roundtable the following year, and quickly started inviting other US non-profits to participate. “We sent out mass emails to everyone we knew in the field and pitched it at several conferences, so this was meant to be a word-of-mouth, democratic process,” she says.