Art Herstory is humbly grateful to the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG), which has awarded its 2020 Digital Scholarship, New Media, and Art Award to the Art Herstory website.
Praise from the SSEMWG Awards Committee
The citation letter from SSEMWG Secretary Grace Coolidge reads (in part):
“The awards committee noted that the site celebrates the contributions of women artists of the early modern period. The painters recognized here were famed in their day, but have often been overlooked in modern histories and museums. Art Herstory is an active participant in recent efforts in the art world to right this wrong, and you … work with guest editors to provide news and blog posts about these female Old Masters. With its beautiful design, online shop (featuring elegant note cards), and social media presence, the site appeals not only to scholars, but also to a broader public interested in recapturing the import of these talented artists.”
A Few Website Features to Highlight
As the website evolves, there are elements that readers seem to find particularly useful. So on this basis, we have developed some permanent features, and some recurring themes:
Artist resource pages
In the navigation menu at the top right of the landing page is a drop-down menu labeled “Artists.” The menu includes all of the artists associated with an Art Herstory product. Of course there are many more early modern women artists than appear in this list. We will continue to add resource pages as the Art Herstory line expands. Each page includes a brief statement about the artist. But more important, it includes lists of books and free-access online articles—including relevant Art Herstory blog posts—about the featured artist.
Guest posts
The “News/Blog” heading in the navigation menu takes the reader to a list of titles and authors of blog posts, listed in order by most recent. At the end of each is a clickable list of other blog posts with themes that relate to that of the post on the page.
We welcome new guest authors, and topics that relate to any time period. The only real rule is that an Art Herstory post must be about at least one artist who identifies female. To discuss a blog post idea, please send an email to erika@artherstory.net.
Any Art Herstory blog posts that relate to premodern women artists are listed, with live links, in the free online bibliographical resource Premodern Women Artists and Patrons. Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance/Early Modern. This important resource is developed and maintained by Patricia Simons and Tracy Chapman Hamilton.
Quarterly round-ups of books about women artists
In September 2019, we created the first Art Herstory “new books post” because the list of new titles published that month was too long for the monthly email update. That post was so popular that it has become a regular feature. Now, once per quarter Art Herstory presents a list of new books—adult and juvenile fiction, trade non-fiction, and scholarly—about women artists. The most recent iteration is New Books about History’s Women Artists | July–Sept 2020. After the final entry on the page, you will find a list of links to posts from previous quarters.
To be honest, we often learn later of books that should have been included in a new books post for a given quarter. In those instances, we are not above adding entries after the fact…
Exhibition reviews
“Artemisia” at the National Gallery: A Review, by Sheila McTighe, is the latest in a thread of reviews of exhibitions around the US, the UK and Europe about history’s women artists. See the bottom of that page for a clickable list of other show reviews from recent years.
Heartfelt Thanks to the Art Herstory Community
The Art Herstory project is very much a community effort. Heartfelt thanks to everyone in the overlapping categories of supporters:
- Guest bloggers
- Institutions and individuals who/that make their art available in digital form, often at no cost to the user
- Customers (retail and individual)
- Readers of the monthly email newsletter, and/or of Art Herstory blog posts
- Post commenters
- Social media followers, re-tweeters and sharers
- Art Herstory team members (printer, website expert, designer, etc.)
- Friends who send information about news and events
- And more.
Your contributions are invaluable. Please continue to enrich the Art Herstory community with your participation!