Women Artists Take Center Stage in Centre Pompidou’s New Museum Tour

Though most of the world’s art museums continue to be dominated by male artists, Paris’s Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou is teaming up with AWARE: Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions to highlight the women in the institution’s collection.

The partnership marks the 15th anniversary of the Pompidou’s influential exhibition of its female artists, “elles@centrepompidou,” curated Camille Morineau. It was the nation’s first all-female museum exhibition, and it drew 2.5 million visitors.

Five years later, Morineau went on to found AWARE, creating a free online content library (published in both English and French) celebrating 19th- and 20th-century women artists. Women artists have long been denied the recognition afforded their male peers, a historical imbalance that this effort hopes to help rectify.

At the Pompidou,  AWARE has sprinkled QR codes across the museum, creating a women-themed walkthrough that directs visitors to a wealth of information about 40 women artists of the 20th century in the collection. There are famous names like Joan Mitchell, Jenny Holzer, and Frida Kahlo. Other featured artists are slowly becoming more widely recognized, such as Eva Hesse, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Natalia Gontcharova, and Claude Cahun.

“elles@centrepompidou,” featuring works of more than 200 20th-century female artists at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images.

There are also plenty of other women that even seasoned art reporters who fancy themselves as specializing in female artists might not know. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Gunta Stölzl, Gloria Friedmann? I confess, their names are new to me. (Mancoba was an avant-garde Danish sculptor, Stölzl was a German textile artist from the Bauhaus school, and Friedmann is a German French sculptor and installation artist.)

But at your next visit to the Musée d’art, a quick scan with your smartphone will take you to the AWARE website, where there are biographies, articles, interviews, videos, and podcasts about these women—and many others. These online resources about women artists will be available not only to researchers, but to the general public. (There will as be a joint social media campaign.)

The project is part of a multi-year project in which the museum and AWARE are joining forces in their efforts to research and promote the work of women artists, as well as defending women’s rights.

The Centre Pompidou. Photo by Firas Abdullah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

The initiative will continue during the Pompidou’s controversial planned closure for renovations from 2025 to 2030, with QR codes at offsite exhibitions held as part of the institution’s “Constellation” program.

Here is the full list of featured artists: Laure Albin-Guillot, Anna-Eva Bergman, María Blanchard, Pierrette Bloch, Sonia Boyce, Claude Cahun, Wook-Kyung Choi, Yvonne Chevalier, Parvine Curie, Jacqueline de Jong, Sonia Delaunay, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Gisèle Freund, Gloria Friedmann, Natalia Gontcharova, Roberta González, Samia Halaby, Annemarie Heinrich, Florence Henri, Jenny Holzer, Frida Kahlo, Germaine Krull, Lotte Johanna Jacobi, Samia Halaby, Ergy Landau, Klára Langer, Marie Laurencin, Verena Loewensberg, Joan Mitchell, ORLAN, Ulrike Ottinger, Marta Pan, Alicia Penalba, Judith Reigl, Germaine Richier, Juliette Roche, Gunta Stölzl, Dorothea Tanning, Rosemarie Trockel.