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A Unique Art Museum Shows Only Work by Women


INTRODUCTION:
It may be the only museum of its kind in the world. The National Museum of Women in the Arts was established 25 years ago to show the work of women artists from around the globe and across the centuries. Carolyn Weaver has a report.

NARRATOR:
Wilhelmina Holladay, the wife of a Washington, D.C. builder, was traveling in Europe with her husband in the 1960s when they first saw the work of a 17th century painter named Clara Peeters. Although the Holladays were both schooled in art history, neither had ever heard of her.

WILHEMINA HOLLADAY:
"And when we came home, we took out all of our sourcebooks, and we discovered there wasn't one woman in any of our sourcebooks. And I'd worked at the National Gallery of Art when I was young, so I went down and found a little bit of information, but not much. So we decided that there was this gap in the history of art, because we knew there had been women painting successfully in their day, there had to be. /// So that's how we decided to collect work by women."

NARRATOR:
The Holladays' collection grew to include work by many recognized masters such as French painters Rosa Bonheur [BOHN-ur] and Berthe Morisot [BAIRT MOR-ee-zoh] and Americans Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keefe. Yet even by the late 1970s, major museums and galleries still rarely showed work by women. And so an idea that had seemed like a joke at first, Mrs. Holladay says, became increasingly serious: to use the collection to found a National Museum of Women in the Arts. Established in 1981, the Museum opened its doors in this imposing building in downtown Washington six years later. [OPT NEXT BITE]

SUSAN FISHER STERLING
"When I first came to work for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, I actually thought the museum might be able to cease to exist in ten or fifteen years. I thought that maybe women artists would become recognized in such a way that you would no longer need a museum of this type. But it's almost twenty years now, and times haven't changed that much." [END OPT]

NARRATOR:
Chief curator and deputy director Susan Fisher Sterling says that women artists today still are undervalued and under-exhibited - which makes the Museum a revelation to many visitors.

SUSAN FISHER STERLING
"When someone comes into the Museum and takes a look at the work we have here, the first impression we have is not, 'wow, these are paintings by women, I can tell based on the way they look--' Instead, it's 'gosh, I never knew there were so many women artists, how come I never heard about these people before?'"

NARRATOR:
Painters like Judith Leyster [LIE-ster], Elisabetta Sirani and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun [vee-ZHAY-luh-brawn] had been important in 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe, working for kings, queens and Roman popes. But when they died, they were soon forgotten.

SUSAN FISHER STERLING:
[OPT]"And it's only in the last, say 40 years, that women artists have become important enough as a subject for study that we've been able to resurrect their reputations. [END OPT] And that's one of the main purposes of the Museum at its inception, was to rediscover women artists and put their works on the walls."

NARRATOR:
"Alice Neel's Women," a recent show at the museum, featured a painter whose sixty-year career exemplifies the struggle of women artists in the last century. For many years, Alice Neel's work was little-appreciated, says Susan Fisher Sterling - in part because she was a figurative painter at a time when abstract expressionism held sway. Neel painted New York artists and intellectuals, and members of her own family, always with a penetrating but understanding eye. [OPT] As critic Charlotte Willard wrote, "even fully clothed, Neel's sitters appear naked before us in their vulnerability, their bewilderment, their self-concern, their resignation."

VISITORS:
"The feeling is in a lot of the personality that you find in the facial expressions, I think." "I think that she put all her emphasis in the eyes of whoever she painted. She also combined the color very nicely." [END OPT]

NARRATOR:
The National Museum of Women in the Arts has previously featured work by Latin American and Arab artists, and upcoming shows will bring Korean and aboriginal Australian women's art to the capital. Founder Wilhelmina Holladay says she hopes such shows will increase international understanding - and help the careers of female artists around the world.

WILHELMINA HOLLADAY:
"I think probably an equal amount of creative talent is born in both men and women. Opportunities to develop that talent have differed -- greatly."

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