Park Avenue Armory celebrates womens suffrage with 100 artists


Artdaily_NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- One hundred years ago, the ratification of the 19th Amendment granted (some) women the right to vote. On Thursday, the Park Avenue Armory announced that it had invited 10 cultural institutions in New York City to commission 100 female artists to create work that both celebrated and interrogated the history of women’s suffrage.

The project, called “100 Years | 100 Women,” was conceived in partnership with the National Black Theater and also involves the Apollo Theater, the Juilliard School, the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Laundromat Project, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, National Sawdust, New York University and Urban Bush Women. Each will commission 10 artists.

The artists’ names will be announced Feb. 15 as part of the Armory’s annual “Culture in a Changing America” symposium. The commissioned projects — which will include dance, film, photography, visual arts and performance — will be showcased in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall and reception rooms May 16.

The image of women’s suffrage is often predominantly white and doesn’t usually recognize the work of women of color like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee — and indigenous women like Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin.

“Artists will be looking at who is missing in the picture to bring them forward and amplify their participation,” said Avery Willis Hoffman, program director at the Armory.

Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater, said the project is an incredible opportunity. “This is our present pulse, our day-to-day mission: knocking down these walls and shining lights in the darkest corners of our own stories,” she said.

“100 Years | 100 Women” builds on the Armory’s conversation series, “Interrogations of Form,” which brings together artists, scholars, activists and community members.

Recent large-scale gatherings included “Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination,” in which more than 300 black artists and allies convened; a Lenape powwow in 2018, the first gathering of Lenape leaders on Manhattan Island since the 1700s; and “The Shape of Things” a 2017 event focused on the political and social climate in America, curated by former Armory artist-in-residence Carrie Mae Weems.