reframing: women artists in the berea college art collection

This exhibition has concluded but a virtual catalog and exhibition gallery can be accessed here.

During the Spring 2025 semester, students in ARH/WGS 243: Women in Art explored the roles that women have played in the history of art across time as artists, as subjects, and as active agents of change. Towards this goal, we examined and questioned long-accepted models of artistic creativity, scholarship, and curatorial practice that have upheld the ideal of the “male artistic genius” which has largely resulted in the exclusion of women from the mainstream art historical canon. To better understand the structural barriers that have inhibited women’s full participation in the arts, we have also looked to feminist scholars and curators who have worked to recover women artists from the past and to reframe how art history has been written, exhibited, and taught since the 1970s.

To put what we have learned into practice, we turned to the College’s permanent art collection and set out to curate an exhibition of women’s art following a feminist art historical model – one that is collaborative, exploratory, recuperative, and actively resistant to traditional narratives. reframing: women artists in the berea college art collection brings greater attention to the varied ways that women have achieved professional success and personal fulfillment through their creative practice. As these artworks show, in spite of very real and challenging obstacles, women have pursued art in order to pass down collective histories, create and foster kinship bonds, share their own perspective, and challenge dominant discourses and representations of the so-called “feminine” experience.

This exhibition has concluded but a virtual catalog and exhibition gallery can be accessed here.

Image credit: Rosemary Feit Covey (South African, b. 1954), Reflection, etching, late 20th century, Gift of Shelly and Gerald Elliott, 2024