The Art Museums Network of Catalonia has started working to give greater visibility and presence to women in art museums, within the framework of a more global project that aims to offer readings and talks about the collections also in a perspective of gender and diversity, affective sex and LGTBI community.

Among the annual projects lay out by the Art Museums Network of Catalonia (integrated by 20 museums throughout Catalonia) one of the most relevant will be to give more visibility to the active role of women in artistic creation, breaking the heteropatriarchal perspective that for centuries has relegated the figure of women in art.

Two first questions have been asked: How many women artists are preserved in the collections of Catalan museums? And how many works of women artists are there in the permanent exhibitions? Although women have had very limited access to artistic practice, Catalan art museums have women in their collections, with a more significant presence in contemporary art. However, they are still largely absent from the permanent collections. The list of women artists’ names is long, especially and mostly from the twentieth century, but most are not visible in the permanent speeches of the different centers and just over 5% are displayed in museums.

The presence of women artists in the collections of Catalan museums is a silenced reality that we want to break from the network, adding to actions like those already promoted by the Network of History of Catalonia Museums and developing our own.

The final goal is to bring out the women, from the inspiring muses to the promoters or patrons and, especially, the artists and designers, promoting changes in the speech to incorporate them in the stories of the different museum centers. From the outset, a complete list of the number of works and names of creative women present in the collections of the 20 museums of the Network has been prepared with the aim of publishing and disseminating them.