This conference explores the multifaceted roles women have played in shaping museums, both nationally within the UK and internationally, particularly institutions that specialise in historic art. We examine how women have entered museum spaces as visitors, benefactors, patrons, collectors, trustees and staff, including curators and photographers. These contributions, although often shaped by existing institutional and societal structures, have changed museum cultures in subtle and significant ways, sometimes by challenging established norms, and at other times by working within them to expand what museums could be and do.
Centred on the idea of ‘hidden histories’, the conference asks how women’s work in, with and around museums has been recorded – or overlooked – within dominant narratives of art and institutional history. What forms of labour have gone unrecognised? What social and economic conditions enabled certain women’s participation, and what connections, whether familial, financial or colonial, made that participation possible? And how might uncovering these histories shift our understanding of museums themselves: not simply as neutral repositories of art, but as cultural systems shaped by gender, power and care? The day’s papers explore how women’s contributions have been remembered, marginalised or erased, and how attending to these complexities can reframe our understanding of both museum history and art history today.
‘Hidden histories of the museum’ forms part of the programme for the National Gallery’s Women and the Arts Forum, generously supported by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona in honour of her mother, Stacia Apostolos.
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