What’s Happening? Feminism, Gender, and the Art Museum

In 2015, Denmark’s national gallery, The National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), explored the importance of the so-called second-wave feminist movement for the Danish art scene during the 1960s and 1970s with the expansive exhibition What’s Happening? With the exhibition, the National Gallery not only gave feminist art an authoritative stamp of approval, it also underscored feminism as a crucial component in addressing the question of the contemporary that has preoccupied art historians and institutions over the last two decades. Nevertheless, the museum situated the feminist art of the period within the context of concurrent male-dominated neo-avant-gardes. Although the ambition was to generate a new, productive discourse among the two factions and appear relevant with regard to current issues of gender and representation in the art world, the emancipatory activism and creativity embedded in the original feminist artworks was institutionalized within a rather conventional patriarchal and nationalist framework. By applying the critical thrust of the exhibition’s title one aim of the essay is to illuminate to an international audience the feminist art projects of the period, many of which were groundbreaking and visionary. The other objective is to address the possibilities and problematics regarding the curation of “second-wave” feminist art and how it has been instrumentalized in shaping our understanding of the contemporary.