The newest exhibit at the Trout Gallery has just opened. Girl in Slacks aims to explore the role of female artists over the centuries, and, according to the Trout Gallery website, the exhibit “considers how women artists challenged conventions and faced issues of sexism, racism and identity in their work.”
The exhibition consists of works by many women artists including: Isabel Bishop, Elisabetta Sirani, Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, Rosa Bonheur, Violet Oakley, Faith Ringgold, Hung Liu, Shan Goshorn, Käthe Kollwitz, Louise Nevelson, Minna Citron and more.
It chronicles the evolution of art made by women over 400 years, while also looking at how women were denied positions in formal art academies and had their art considered, according to the gallery pamphlet, as“automatically inferior” to male artists. The exhibition examines how, beginning in the Renaissance, women had to fight to make positions for themselves in the art world, and how this status-quo did not change until the feminist movements in the 1960s.
The gallery’s title is taken from one of the pieces, an ink drawing by Isabel Bishop, also titled “Girl in Slacks” from 1962. Bishop, who the gallery was inspired to create this exhibition by, depicts the working women of the 1920s and 1930s in her art, focusing on “progressive representations of gender and sexuality.”
Among the other artists featured in the exhibition are Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s portrait painter; Violet Oakley, the second woman to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA); and Elisabetta Sirani, a 17th century Italian artist who opened a studio for other female artists.
The exhibition chronicles how, throughout time, female artists have worked much harder than male artists to gain any recognition, which was still not equivalent to what their male counterparts recieved. However, the exhibition also shows that, through resilience and persistence, female artists have made spaces for themselves in the art world.
The gallery is open from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday to Saturday and is located in the Weiss Arts Center at 240 West High St.
