The Exhibitionists Take AWE

The Exhibitionists is a fluidly organized collective of figurative woman artists. While individual exhibitionists move in and out of the group, their shared focus remains the same: how to authentically capture the contemporary experience of being a woman by disrupting and expanding the nude tradition.

Art Windsor Essex has a collection of roughly 4,000 works of art, but fewer than 20% of those works are made by women. The Exhibitionists, who mostly came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, are almost the same age as AWE, which began as the Willistead Art Gallery of Windsor in 1943. As the Exhibitionists studied art and began their careers, AWE’s holdings were growing alongside them. But here, as elsewhere, as these artists gained confidence and grew in their practices, AWE was still not seriously collecting women artists.

For The Exhibitionists, the female body is a contested site of power and celebration, of play and vulnerability. Chappus, Collins, Draisey and Renaud Fisher have selected work from AWE’s collection that reveals the institution’s strengths and gaps. They have placed their work and the work of other Exhibitionists alongside AWE’s collection to reveal what’s possible when we centre equity and bravery in our collecting choices.