Women Photographers Among Women Artists: Presentation of the Upcoming Book

Traditionally, art history elevates artists who are men, and pushes women artists to the margins as not so important, as repetitive, as non-existent ones. Therefore, "Kitos knygos" publishing house decided to publish a book presenting the most prominent women creators of Lithuania’s visual arts. This idea was provoked by Flavia Frigeri's book "Women Artists" that appeared in the series of art essentials by the publishing house "Thames & Hudson", whose Lithuanian translation came out in 2019. Although the author tried to select women artists from different regions of the world, there are no Lithuanian surnames in her book. We proper are partly to blame – we do not take enough care of the promotion of our women artists' work. We hope to improve the situation in the book that Ieva Burbaitė, Laima Kreivytė, Agnė Narušytė and Audronė Žukauskaitė have been writing to present the most prominent women who engaged in creative work in Lithuania in the early 20th century to now. Some of these women were photographers, so we will talk about them in the lecture.

Agnė Narušytė (b. 1970) is art historian, photography and art critic and exhibition curator. In 2005, she presented her doctoral thesis "Aesthetics of Boredom in the Lithuanian Photography of the 1980s" at the Vilnius Academy of Artsand published a monograph based on it (VDA, 2008). She has also published the monographs “Lithuanian Photography in 1990 to 2010" (Baltos lankos, 2011) and "Camera Obscura: Lithuanian Photography in 1839 to 1945" (in cooperation with Margarita Matulytė, VDA, 2016). In 2019, along with Lolita Jablonskienė, Laima Kreivyte and Jolanta Marcišauskyte-Jurašienė, Narušytė renewed the permanent exposition of the National Gallery of Art, which tells the history of Lithuanian modern art.

Photo by Violeta Bubelytė. 2019