Women's history event at Zimmerli Art Museum may 'spark' your interest

March marked the beginning of Women’s History Month, and I got the opportunity to celebrate by attending one of the Zimmerli Art Museum’s SparkNights events.

SparkNights are art parties hosted on the first Thursday of each month from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., each with a specific theme. SparkNights during February featured a celebration of Black artists for Black History Month, while next month’s April edition will highlight LGBTQ+ artists. Naturally, this month focused on the museum’s artists who are women.

Before the main part of the event, attendees enjoyed refreshments, including wine, soda, water, a few snacks (all of which were available for free or donation) and lovely music by several artists — in attending earlier in the night, I was treated to jazz by the Ariana Sowa Trio.

The peak of my evening was the museum tour that was provided. Student-led tour guides took groups around the museum, discussing its showcased pieces in "Art of the Americas" by artists who were women.

Our tour guide, School of Arts and Sciences senior Isha Shah, did a wonderful job of describing the art to us and the stories behind each piece. She assisted us in analyzing the piece in relation to its artist and contextualizing the identity of each woman found in her art.

The tour was inclusive, fun and informative — though I think I was the youngest person in the crowd at a night that seemed mostly full of graduate students and senior citizens. Additionally, the encouragement to ask and answer questions definitely promoted healthy dialogue as we went through the museum.

Some more highlights of the evening and the tour were the stark distinctions between the lived existence of many of the artists showcased over the different years they worked in.

Seeing work from a woman creating gender-diverse art in the mid-2000s is a vastly different experience to that of an artist creating portraiture of George Washington, which is also different from the experience of feminist artists of the 60s and 70s.

The experiences of women of color compared to their white counterparts were also discussed on the tour, and I was happy to see pieces by Black and Indigenous artists being featured.

Often times in showcasing art in an attempt to uplift women, diversity in other areas can falter and fail. But of the limited pieces we saw on our tour, I was relieved to see intersectionality highlighted and the lived experiences of women of color or different ethnic backgrounds being shown.

Though in the art world, there's always a need for improvement in highlighting artists of color.

Speaking of other diversity, though toying with gender expression was discussed with some of the pieces we looked at in terms of the art, I would have loved to have knowledge of the inclusion of queer women in the Zimmerli’s collection.

As a lesbian myself, I was interested in hearing about lesbian and bisexual artists, and I also hoped for and wondered about the inclusion of trans women in the collection. Especially if they were, as they should be, considered in statistics revolving around just how many women are represented in the collections at the Zimmerli.

Though certainly, next month for the Zimmerli’s LGBTQ+ SparkNights, some of these questions might be answered, and I look forward to seeing if I can attend then as well!

Though less exciting than the tour itself, an art activity inspired by some of the museum's pieces was provided and definitely made for a fun break where I could sit down after wandering around the museum and consider what I had seen so far.

Perhaps the only low of the night was an incident with a man on my tour, though it was through no fault of our guide or the Zimmerli. A man on our tour redirected us to a piece he personally knew about to share a personal anecdote — the piece, of course, on this Woman’s History Month tour, was one created by a man.

It was, though, a particularly infuriating incident. This perfectly sums up exactly why nights like this are needed, even if it didn’t seem like this man, in particular, was learning anything on our informative tour.

No matter how diverse a collection is and how much that's highlighted as important, someone will always attempt to undercut the art and artists simply because they are diverse.

The entitled "why not me" nature might be a better example of Women’s History than anything the Zimmerli could have shown me hanging on a wall. Nevertheless, SparkNights was a great night, and I found myself wishing I had attended its previous iterations, and I am excited to attend the next one.

The Zimmerli has a clear dedication to highlighting its diverse artists and creating a space for art lovers to have conversations about art history and the representation it has for us, bubbling under the surface of an art world where the "icons" are seemingly all part of the same demographic.

SparkNights was fun and wholly educational — and everyone working the event, from the directors at the Zimmerli to the tour guides to the musicians, all clearly had a passion for showcasing the importance and the impact women have had in the art world. That’s certainly something to celebrate.

Just watch out for who might be on your tour.