Dr. Asma Naeem | Raw and Radical Women in the Arts Podcast

Asma Naeem, Chief Curator for the Baltimore Museum of Art, discusses women and gender fluidity representation in the BMA 2020 Vision initiative. Today I am very excited to welcome Dr. Asma Naeem to the On Display podcast. Naeem is an art historian and is currently the Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She brings a unique lens and motivation to her work, curating art pieces and installations that directly address issues of social justice, under-representation, and inequity. The Baltimore Museum of Art recently made headlines for their 2020 Vision initiative, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States. Commemorating women and gender fluidity in the arts Naeem says that while discussing how to commemorate the occasion, the question really became how to recognize the event while also being provocative about social justice issues and representation. “We decided that the best way to discuss the trajectory that women have made in the past 100 years was to devote an entire year of exhibitions to women artists or artists who identify as women, as well as to focus our acquisitions on works that were made by women,” Naeem says. The decision to include women artists and artists who identify as women has generated a great deal of discussion. While some responses to the decision and the initiative itself were predictably adverse—questioning the need to have a focus on women or to be inclusive of transgender women artists—overall the comments have been robustly positive and have even questioned whether the museum has gone far enough to make a real, lasting difference. Read the story HERE! For more information please visit our website www.rawradical.com and follow us on social media: instagram, facebook, twitter