Women and Public Art features student-driven, collaborative projects that examine how ancient and present-day women live in public spaces through art, monuments, and performances.
The essays and artworks reflect the creativity, engagement, and research of undergraduate students from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. The students were enrolled in interdisciplinary seminars taught by Dr. Patricia E. Kim: "The Art and Archaeology of Royal Women from the Ancient Mediterranean" and "Women and Public Art." Students consolidate their knowledge by using curatorial, archaeological, and other humanistic methods to 1) examine monuments from the ancient Mediterranean and present-day New York City and 2) imagine new futures and public spaces through speculative monument proposals.
These academic and creative interventions consider pressing questions related to the study of the premodern world, including:
How do art-historical and archaeological methods account for the presence of women? What kinds of spaces do women occupy (if at all)? Which groups of women are visible or invisible? How are concepts of femininity constructed through monuments? And, what kinds of public art and engagements might we imagine to represent the complexity, histories, and differences of women?
Moreover, students analyze gender's relationship to political power, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and status in the past and present.