Bonn Women's Museum
Encyclopedia
The Bonn Women's Museum is a women's museum in Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It was founded in 1981 by Marianne Pitzen (the current director) and an interdisciplinary group of working women, and claims to be the first museum of its kind in the world. It hosts temporary exhibitions (over 500 since its founding) and accompanying events, and is run by the society "Women's Museum – Art, Culture, Research".

Activities

The Women's Museum promotes female artists
Women artists
Women artists have been involved in making art in most times and places. Often certain certain media are associated with women, particularly textile arts; however, these gender roles in art change in different cultures and communities...

 (both German and international) through a changing program of exhibitions, and examines their work in the context of art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

. According to the museum, a number of artists who were first exhibited there have since established themselves on the world market. Female artists and academics work together on the large thematic exhibitions. Furthermore, women's history
Women's history
Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history, together with the methods needed to study women. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, the examination of individual women of historical significance, and the...

 is examined in the context of new experimental art and through the events which accompany the exhibitions.

The museum's own collection includes works by Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century...

, Katharina Sieverding
Katharina Sieverding
Katharina Sieverding is a photographer known for her self-portraiture. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. She is a professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin.- Early life and education :...

, Valie Export
Valie Export
Valie Export is an Austrian artist...

, Maria Lassnig
Maria Lassnig
Maria Lassnig is an Austrian artist. Her paintings are an exploration of the body, a central theme which she calls "body awareness"....

, and Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

. It also includes a library with an archive on specialist topics: women in art, history and politics; feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

; cultural politics; art of the 20th and 21st centuries; art since 1945; concrete
Concrete art
Concrete art and design or concretism is an abstractionist movement that evolved in the 1930s out of the work of De Stijl, the futurists and Kandinsky around the Swiss painter Max Bill. The term "concrete art" was first introduced by Theo van Doesburg in his "Manifesto of Concrete Art"...

 and constructive art; and architecture and design.

The museum's academy organises meetings, seminars, workshops and advice services on topics of interest to female artists. Other research themes include the women's movement and gender politics. The work of the Bonn Women's Museum has led to the founding of women's museums elsewhere, for example in Merano, Switzerland and Hittisau, Austria
Hittisau
Hittisau is a municipality in the district of Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria.Attractions include Hittisau Women's Museum, devoted to the achievements of women.-References:...

 (see Hittisau Women's Museum
Hittisau Women's Museum
Hittisau Women's Museum is a museum in Hittisau, Austria, devoted to women. It was founded in 2000 and is the only museum of its kind in the country....

).

The museum is involved with the Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. Artists and writers associated with German Expressionism shared a rebellious attitude toward the materialism and mores of German imperial and bourgeois society...

 Prize for female artists. It also hosts art and design fairs, and has its own gallery, studios and publishing house. The Frauenmuseum Haus in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

is also connected with the Bonn Women's Museum.

Further reading

  • Zwanzig Jahre Frauenmuseum. (Incl. contributions by Margarethe Joachimsen, Annette Kuhn, Marianne Hochgeschurz, Marianne Pitzen and Heli Ihlefeld- Bolesch.) FrauenMuseum, Bonn, 2006. ISBN 3-928239-49-X.
  • Marianne Pitzen (editor): 25 Jahre Frauenmuseum: Alles Prophetinnen! Unsere Besten. FrauenMuseum, Bonn, 2006. ISBN 978-3-928239-53-0.
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