Why Rewrite Art History

In 1971, Linda Nochlin asked: why have there been no great women artists? The question was never meant to be answered on its own terms. It was a provocation, designed to expose the assumptions embedded in the question itself, assumptions about genius, about institutions, about who is permitted to enter the historical record in the first place.

A Global History of Women in Art begins from the premise that the absence of women from the canon is not a natural fact to be regretted, but a structural condition to be examined. Works are not simply lost to time. They are misattributed, reclassified as craft, excluded from workshops, academies and markets, or never collected at all. This is not an accident of history. It is a mechanism, and mechanisms can be studied, named and challenged.

This project is not conceived as an addition to the existing canon, a matter of inserting missing names into a narrative whose structure remains otherwise intact. It is conceived as an alternative canon, global in scope, intersectional in method, and grounded in archival and material sources rather than inherited assumptions.

Art history is still being written. Attributions are corrected, archives recovered, overlooked figures restored. This project grows with the research, and remains open to collaborative contributions from scholars worldwide.

Twelve percent of proceeds are donated to organisations defending women’s reproductive and civil rights worldwide. Historical knowledge and present justice are, in this project, understood as inseparable.