Recently, the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) showcased the “Making Their Mark” exhibition, displaying the work of impactful female artists in honor of Women's History Month. The exhibit highlights the artistic genius and innovation of female artists that have often been overlooked for years due to gender-based discrimination within the art world. With this exhibit, artists break through prejudice with their creative work centralized around being resourceful and using whatever is available.
“Making Their Mark” was partially created in order to address a staggering and alarming statistic about the disparity between men and women on the global stage of art. According to a study by the Williams College of Art in 2019, only 13 percent of art acquisitions by the top 26 American Art Museums between 2008 and 2018 were produced by female artists. In response, former business executives turned art collectors Komal Shah and her spouse Gaurav Garg collaborated with BAMPFA to create the Shah Garg collection, a gallery adorned solely with the work of women artists. Furthermore, as a tribute to Women's History Month, the museum and Komal Shah hired Chief Curator Megan Norton to select a variety of artworks that were especially connected to the core themes of the collection for the “Making Their Mark” exhibition.
“One of my biggest hopes for this exhibition is for every young girl and woman who visits this show to walk away feeling empowered and inspired. ‘Making Their Mark’ is a testament to the power, value, and talent of women. I want this show to uplift the voices of the artists who are included, and for these artists to in turn raise up the women who encounter their works,” Shah said.
As well as providing an engaging experience for the viewer, those behind "Making Their Mark" have found a way to benefit artistic youth at Berkeley High School. On Wednesday Nov. 6, 2024, students of the Arts and Humanities Academy AP Art Class explored the exhibit and created an artwork inspired by one from the collection. All of the works will be displayed at BAMPFA upon completion, a priceless opportunity for young artists to expand their horizons.
The exhibit succeeded in inspiring young female artists. BHS senior Madelline Melendez's artwork pays homage to the challenges women face through her textile artwork.
“I wanted to give another perspective on (the way that textiles reflect the human experience). So mine is supposed to be in the shape of like a baby that's been swaddled, and it also shows the different dilations that women go through in labor, to show the transition between child and motherhood,” Melendez said.
According to students participating in this project, one of their favorite aspects is that they have been able to broaden the variety of media they work with, both in creative style and the physical material. For example, Colin McAllister, a BHS senior, very rarely experiments with abstraction. However, because of how abstract the theme he was working off of was, he needed to adapt.
“I also really enjoyed stepping out of my comfort zone with this, because it's more of an abstract piece,” McAllister said.
Nova Duchateau, also a senior at BHS, greatly enjoyed expanding his artwork into the realm of abstract expression. “I don't usually do abstract and so I got to try new methods I hadn't tried … I just tried a lot of different things, and I painted a lot more loosely than I usually do,” Duchateau said.
According to Norton, the displayed artworks were chosen from the Shah Garg collection to illustrate the ways in which remarkable female artists have challenged patriarchal standards of art.
“It's about how their work transcends these regimented systems that the art world has prescribed,” Norton said. Norton also discussed the importance of demonstrating the unique and beautiful creativity of female artists in the setting of a curated collection.
Visitors of this exhibit were struck not only by the breadth and diversity of the showcased pieces, but also by the variability in how the artworks are displayed. “I like the variety. And I really liked the three dimensional kinds of artwork … I think they did a really masterful job of displaying big, big artworks that you don't usually see,” Alec Dara-Abrams, a BAMPFA visitor, said.
According to another guest, Diz Swift, the artwork is incredibly visually interesting because of its expressiveness and poignance, and because it displays the vast time period that female artists have created art with diverse mediums and creative techniques.
“Seeing the length of time that women artists have been so productive in such a wide variety of ways, not really representational art, but some beautiful, abstract, expressionist … it's very evocative,” Swift said.
Ellie Penner, a PhD student at University of California Berkeley’s graduate program of art history and the docent of “Making Their Mark,” provided her academic interpretation of the meaning of the collection and its connection to women's history.
“I think this exhibition, honestly, does tell a lot of stories that haven't really been told in museums before — and so it has a very didactic function of teaching in some ways, and then at the same time, it's very expressive and immerses you in color and form,” Penner said.