Every year in January, I pull together a list of the best exhibitions to see in London. This year I couldn't help but notice something that gave me a rush of joy. Amid the Francis Bacons and the Frank Auerbachs, the Michelangelos and the Yinka Shonibares, something is bubbling up; something is changing. From the Tate to the Whitechapel Gallery, 2024 is the year of women artists.
Just look at it all! In February, Barbara Kruger – who made memes before memes were invented – is getting her first solo institutional exhibition in London in over 20 years at the Serpentine. She's the first of a trio of female American contemporary artists being shown at the gallery – she'll be followed in May by the pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago, then by rising African-American star Lauren Halsey in October.
But that's just one venue. Women are everywhere. Also from February, emerging artist Anna Perach will mount a solo show at Gasworks in south London, followed by Rahima Gambo in June. Later this month, The Drawing Room will open an exhibition focusing on the drawing practices of women artists and their impact on feminist activism since the 1980s, which is about as woman-ey as you can get.
Yoko Ono will be the subject of a large-scale retrospective from late February at Tate Modern, while Tate Britain will be hosting its landmark exhibition Women in Revolt! until April. Soon after which it will be replaced by a show that made me want to punch the air when I heard about it, Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920.
Who knew that there were women miniaturists at the Tudor court? Not me, because NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THEM. It's all Nicholas Hilliard-this and Isaac Oliver-that. This show will bring out of the shadows so many women whose work has been lost, entirely forgotten about, often despite them being celebrated in their own lifetimes, or (enraging) attributed to men.
Other historical artists getting their due this year include Angelica Kauffman at the Royal Academy (one of only two female founder Academicians in 1768 – the next woman to be elected was Dame Laura Knight... in 1936), and Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, two pioneers of photography working a century apart, being shown together at the National Portrait Gallery.
Then there's French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira coming to the Whitechapel with the brilliant immersive installation she presented at the French Pavilion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and her neighbour at the British Pavilion, the recently honoured Dame Sonia Boyce, who will present two new bodies of work at the same gallery, in response to another exhibition there by a woman artist, Lygia Clark – the first major UK public gallery survey for the Brazilian artist. And you may not know the work of Haegue Yang, but the Korean superstar will be bringing her work to the Hayward Gallery in the autumn. Outside the capital it's a similar story, with institutions from Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Leilah Babirye, Bharti Kher) to Kettles Yard in Cambridge (Megan Rooney), Baltic in Gateshead (Hannah Perry) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Claudia Martinez Garay) hosting major exhibitions by brilliant women in 2024.
I mean, it's about time though right? The appetite has been there for a while, as the success of art historian and writer Katy Hessel's book The Story of Art Without Men, which in turn came out of a massively influential Instagram and podcast, shows. And it's important, too, not just for women.
"Art history encompasses so many different subjects," says Hessel. "It's the history of the world through an individual's perspective, but it doesn't matter if you're a scientist or an engineer or a sports person, that art will be relevant for you in some way, and it will teach you something about yourself. And if you're not seeing artwork by a wide range of people, then you're not seeing society as a whole."
I think what we're seeing is a ripple effect. More women are running things in the art sector; exhibitions take time to make, change is now visibly happening. And as museums start to champion women, so their status rises, and so do their prices. Collectors become more interested, dealers begin to cater to that need. It's all symbiotic.
So it's a move forward, no question. But as Hessel points out, this glorious proliferation can't be the whole story.
"It is all very well having exhibitions by women artists, but I also really hope that museums do something to put them in their collections as well, because it's that kind of legacy that's going to be long lasting," she says.
She cites the example of the American artist Lee Krasner – "There was the most phenomenal exhibition [of her work] at the Barbican in 2019. But there's still only one Lee Krasner in the whole of the UK public collections, at Tate, which personally I don't think is a particularly good one," she says.
"We're so lucky to have these curators and these shows, but I just hope that museums also make a conscious effort to make sure that [these artists] are being integrated into our national collections."
Several are making strides in this area, it's true, notably the National Portrait Gallery and Tate, for example. But it's only when the sight and equal status of women artists is so normal, when I'm not literally whooping at a bunch of ladies' names on a list on a wet January day, that we'll really have got to where we need to be.
