Counting Change and Change that Counts: Gender Equality in the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now

Abstract

The National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now was a gender equity project which showcased more than 400 works by 170 women artists across the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in a two part exhibition during 2020-2022. Alongside the exhibitions’ were a number of other projects such as the display of works by women artists from the NGA collection on billboards and signage across the country, a major catalogue publication and an international conference. Know My Name (KMN) aimed to ‘celebrate the work of all women artists to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.’ Yet to my mind, the physical exhibitions left little space to acknowledge the nuances embedded within the term ‘woman’, at the risk of reproducing reductive modes of representation and reinforcing the very gender binary that engenders essentialism and inequality. Within the term ‘woman’ there are hierarchies of race yet these stratifications are erased in Know My Name. In the first section of Part One of KMN, the display thematised as “Lineages and Remembering” aimed to problematise chronology and temporality, following no historical period or common style. Instead, the seemingly randomised hang claims to create a new ‘lineage’ based on diachrony, polyphony and numerous points of references. Hence Kate Beynon’s circular Self-portrait with dragon spirits (2010) is hung next to Dora Chapman’s Sunflower (1969) which is displayed adjacent to Bea Maddocks’ Four finger exercise for two hands (1982). Moya Dyring’s Melanctha (c.1934) is next to Yvette Coppersmith’s Nude Self Portrait, after Rah Fizelle (2016) and so forth. In principle the lack of a systemised hang may represent a collapse of authority, inviting viewers to make their own connections, in practice without any curatorial guidance or attention, viewers are only left with the collective understanding that all the works displayed are expressions of femininity and womanhood. In so doing the multiple registers of interpretation operating within a single artwork are reduced to a single framework. Furthermore, all the works seem to operate on the same playing field. Yet as Indigenous scholars have pointed out, the playing field is riddled with