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Portraying Womanhood in Art: Standout Exhibits in 2024
BluPrint’s 2024 in Art yearend series seeks to highlight exhibits that deal with the complexities of womanhood and gender politics in society today. The fight for gender parity and equal rights for women rages on, whether it’s on issues on body autonomy, reproductive rights, or even transgender rights. Womanhood—the concept, its relations to the patriarchy, and its praxis—continue to be interrogated on an international scale.
For these exhibits, they explicitly discuss patriarchal attitudes and the way it affects women today. But more than that, they highlight the experiences of women, and let them define themselves in their own words and images. However one wants to approach the identity of womanhood, these artists find freedom in what artistry can provide.
‘Alburoto’
A NO Community-run Space exhibition, the works showcased here created a narrative for the importance of women in labor rights. The patriarchy tends to degrade “women’s work” as a thing of lesser importance, but this exhibit emphasized not just the importance of women’s work, but the importance of women in the efforts of attaining stronger rights for all.
Different images here depicted women on the frontlines of the labor rights effort. “Women’s work” are shown in their full importance, from mass food cooking for the needy to protest and community-building.
This exhibit was an explicit rebuttal of womanhood as weak: these women, on the frontline of the protests, activists and workers helping out laborers, are important. Regardless of their gender, they find their strength and bravery separate from the bravado of masculinity, and they get the job done.
Read more: ‘Alburoto’: Recontextualizing Labor Rights as a Women’s Issue
‘Bliss: Khajuraho Sketches’
Society can be a lot more prudish that we would like, especially with women’s bodies. The government, religion, and men in general attempt to censor and hide women’s bodies like they are something to be ashamed of.
This exhibition by Agnes Arellano for Everything’s Fine Bookstore strikes against that. It instead produces an ethos of comfort for the self and for our sexuality, to explore who we are individually instead of conforming to the biases of the patriarchy.
It produced examples from different cultures that explore sexuality as a human trait, something to be proud of instead of something to be ashamed of. And in the end, it gave permission to our more conservative society to find freedom in our bodies, whether that be alone or shared with others.
Read more: ‘Bliss: Khajuraho Sketches’ and Finding Freedom in Sexuality
‘Enigma’
In Christianity—as in most religions within the patriarchy—women’s bodies are policed and their accomplishments buried. But for this group exhibition at Modeka Art, a spotlight shined on the many important roles that women play in the Biblical lore.
From figures like Ruth and Naomi to Hannah, the prophet Samuel’s mother, to Mary Magdalane and Salome, the roles women play in the Bible showcase their independence and fearlessness even in the tide of patriarchal attitudes during the period.
Read more: ‘Enigma’: How Women’s Courage Moves Religious Belief and Progress
‘Counting the Tears that Water the Earth’
How does womanhood exist in the spaces we have today? This Vantage Contemporary exhibit put together multiple women to ruminate on the need to cultivate spaces for creative expression and thinking.
The works here came from multiple female artists utilizing a smorgasbord of methods and mediums to express the need of private space made specifically for creativity. From pottery to crochet to paper cut-outs to mixed-media collages, it encompassed these styles to capture a specificity of need and experiences.
It tackled important issues related to mental health, and it really highlighted some of the unique isolation that women experience in a world apathetic to their pain. There’s a sense of fracturedness at times at how it depicts women in general—separated from society and crowded out by everything inside it.
Read more: Five Noteworthy June Art Exhibits You May Have Missed
‘Pasilip’
For this Gravity Art Space exhibit by Maricar Tolentino, the perspective centered on how womanhood has no equal spaces or safety in the patriarchy. Women’s bodies, activities, and the like are heavily-controlled, even in spaces like the household that they should control.
Are women really in control of the household? Tolentino’s exhibit represented the toxicity of these spaces in this exhibit, the safety of women here fragile and objectified by the system.
The works here really communicated the idea that power structures that subjugate are untenable for the safety of the subjugated in general. Even the women who bow to the power of the patriarchy find no safety there. In systems like these, power can only be taken, not given, and Tolentino captures that fragility well.
Read more: ‘Pasilip’: Maricar Tolentino Explores Femininity’s Fragility Under the Patriarchy
Going Beyond Bodies and Gender
Womanhood is complicated, especially as society’s regressive values prevent most people from ever interrogating their own perspective. Society seeks rigid binaries, referencing absolutism that narrowly defines gender with stereotypes and utilizes patriarchal values that don’t reflect the person’s lives.
But that’s why art exists, in this scenario: breathing room to probe, to seek what’s uncomfortable with the status quo. These exhibits don’t define men and women by their gendered roles, but by their personhood—and in the process, they create something new that reads true for their own individual lives as people.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: Women Run Design: Being female is not an excuse nor a limitation—Cathy Saldaña
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