Why are art museums still lagging behind when it comes to collecting and representing art made by women? What are the frameworks for building collections today, and how are they rooted in storytelling and ideology? And not least, how can we make space for women’s art and culture? 

These are questions we ask ourselves in the research project The Feminist Legacy in Art Museums. Museums’ inability to provide space for women as actors and cultural producers in both the present and the past is a democratic problem and a deficiency in museums as managers of cultural heritage.

We argue that the lack of attention paid to and research on art made by women in art museums and in collections is connected to a general lack of recognition of the feminist project in art history. We shall conduct empirical studies of the feminist avant-garde in the 1970s, its forms of exhibition and social spaces, and examine the institution’s ways of collecting and representing art.