The library was to hold material relating to women's work, too. This year's centenary is an opportunity to celebrate the institution's unique holdings.
Billed as 'the world's biggest, most comprehensive festival celebrating women, girls and non-binary people', Women of the World festival, or WOW for short, has announced its return to the Southbank Centre next year. WOW is the brainchild of theatre director Jude Kelly CBE, who launched the festival in 2010 when she was artistic director at the Southbank Centre.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
Historically, architectural culture has been organized around narratives of singular authorship and individual recognition. These frameworks often obscure the collaborative nature of design and marginalize contributors who do not occupy positions of institutional authority. Women architects have long participated in shaping buildings, cities, and architectural discourse, yet their work has frequently been overlooked or attributed to partners, firms, or broader teams.
While being treated for a serious mental breakdown in 1940, Carrington passed her days by filling sketchbooks with art that reimagined the hospital as an 'underworld' inhabited by strange, hybrid beasts.
We visited the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, in Mougins, a small village on a hill near Cannes. Full of exclusively female artists from Berthe Morisot in the 19th century and Frida Kahlo in the early 20th to contemporary figures such as Tracey Emin it houses an incredible collection of often overlooked art and artists. We visited on a rainy October day and it was remarkably quiet and calm. I particularly enjoyed the abstract works well worth a trip up the hill.
Founded in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the esteemed Whitney Biennial, the Every Woman Biennial has evolved into an intergenerational showcase that mixes emerging talent with established feminist art stars while maintaining the scrappy, activist energy that inspired it in the first place.
What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.
I really wanted to look at the differences between films made by men ... when they're directed by men, it's very taboo, it's sensationalized, it's explicit and it's often violent .... (with) the films made by women, or best case, lesbian women because it's so different, it is like night and day. I'm trying to show that contrast, and that difference.
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
Art, at its very best, reminds me that there is a world out there that I not only belong to but trust - perhaps even love. Sandra Vázquez de la Horra's beeswax-dipped drawings of erupting women, mystical landscapes, and hallucinatory flora in The Awake Volcanoes at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, did just that. Oh, that old mystery of finding oneself reflected in the material fragments of someone else's private imaginary.
If you want to paint, put your clothes back on! That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?
The first-ever exhibition on Europe's most important early female painter, Catharina van Hemessen, will open later this year in Antwerp and come to London in 2027. It starts at the (15 October-31 January 2027), a museum of 16th- and 17th- century Flemish art in the city where she worked, and then goes in a more focused form to the National Gallery (4 March-30 May 2027).
