Carrying the house: memory, craft, and the work of women in art

INTRODUCTION: A HOUSE WITHOUT WALLS

Every era inherits a story of art that pretends to be complete. It isn’t. Canonical art history, with its confident timelines and its neat pantheon of “masters,” is less an objective record than a curated memory, a memory shaped by who had access to training, who had patrons, who was documented, who was collected, who was allowed to sign their name. And for centuries, that memory excluded half of humankind.

Women have always created. They painted caves, shaped clay, built ritual objects, illuminated manuscripts, embroidered cosmologies into cloth, carved altars, produced ceramics, designed tools, made images, invented domestic aesthetics long before “design” became a marketable term. But most of these contributions were never recorded as “art,” because the institutions deciding what counts as art rarely cared to look inside kitchens, bedrooms, convents, weaving rooms, or community workshops. If the site of creation was domestic, communal, practical, or feminine-coded, it was classified as craft, hobby, or anonymous labour.

Today, we live with the consequences of this selective memory. Contemporary art institutions are busy staging retrospectives of women who died decades earlier, as if discovering them for the first time. The market is finally catching up, slowly, unevenly, recognizing that visibility and value were never a matter of quality but of permission. And yet, structural inequities remain. Women dominate art-school enrollments yet remain underrepresented in blue-chip galleries. They lead influential artistic movements yet lag in market valuation. They innovate with materials that critics and collectors still dismiss as “decorative,” “crafty,” “domestic,” “minor.” The hierarchy of media, painting as the apex, textiles as the footnote, continues to reproduce hierarchies of gender.

Against this backdrop, THE HOUSE WE CARRY positions itself not as another exhibition on “women’s work,” but as an argument — spatial, conceptual, political — for rethinking the architecture of art history itself. Instead of fighting for a room in the old patriarchal house, it proposes a house without walls: a structure made of gestures, traces, memory, objects, care, resistance. A house assembled through the works of seven artists whose practices expand, destabilize, and reconfigure the relationship between domesticity, femininity, authorship, and value.

Before we enter that house, we need to trace the ground on which it stands. Not the simplified timeline of “women in art,” but the deeper, more complicated history of erasure and emergence, the history that explains why such an exhibition is still necessary in 2025.

Sylwia Zawiślak installation, THE HOUSE WE CARRY

CHAPTER 1 — WOMEN THROUGH ART HISTORY: A LONG STORY OF VISIBILITY AND SILENCE

The history of women in art is not a marginal footnote; it is a parallel narrative running alongside the canonical one, obscured not by absence but by omission. Women produced images, objects, and cultural artefacts across all civilizations. What they lacked was not creativity, but permission, institutional recognition, the legal right to own property, or the ability to sign their names. When historians claim, “there were no great women artists,” they are really saying, “we did not look.”

Let us look.

Prehistoric and ancient worlds: the first traces

The earliest visual culture we have — Paleolithic cave paintings — already carries women’s hands. Literally. Research on handprints in caves such as Pech Merle indicates that many of the creators were female, based on bone structure and finger length ratios. Women were likely involved in ritual imagery, mark-making, and symbolic storytelling long before the words “artist” or “art history” existed.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, women made textiles, ceramics, jewelry, ritual objects, and architectural decorations. These media were central to cultural life, yet centuries later relegated to “craft.” A Greek painter like Timarete, or Iaia of Cyzicus, celebrated in ancient writings for her technical mastery, survives only through textual fragments, her works lost, her legacy speculative. She was known, admired, respected, then erased by the simple fact that later scholars decided her medium, her gender, or both were not valuable enough to preserve.

Thus begins the pattern: women’s creativity visible in the archaeological record, invisible in the canonical story.

The Middle Ages: convents, manuscripts, collective hands

The medieval period was far from artistically barren for women. Convents were intellectual hubs where nuns produced illuminated manuscripts, embroidery, metalwork, scientific illustrations, and devotional objects. Hildegard of Bingen, composer, visionary, polymath, produced rich visual and spiritual manuscripts that are today considered masterpieces.

But authorship was rarely individual in medieval Europe, and women’s names dissolved into the anonymity of monastic life. The rise of guilds with their strict male membership, further restricted women’s access to training, mentorship, and patronage. Women could work in family workshops, but rarely sign their work. When they did contribute, their labour was either anonymised or attributed to male relatives.

Women were present. Their names were not.

Renaissance & early modern period: breaking entry

The Renaissance is celebrated as the birth of the artist-genius, a myth that conveniently excluded most women. Art academies, life-drawing classes, and professional guilds were designed to train men. Entry barriers were structural, not personal.

Yet some women broke in anyway.

Sofonisba Anguissola became an internationally known portraitist. Lavinia Fontana ran a professional studio, something rare even among male contemporaries. Artemisia Gentileschi, after surviving violence and public trial, established herself as one of the great Baroque painters, working across major courts and cities.

They succeeded not because the system welcomed them, but because their talent, stubbornness, and circumstance forced the door open. They are remembered because they were exceptional and because someone, at some point, decided to record their names. For every Gentileschi, we can assume dozens whose work was absorbed into male-dominated workshops, unattributed and unremembered.

The Renaissance loved the idea of genius, but only if the genius was male.

XVIII & XIX centuries: more access, more limits

In the Enlightenment and early modern period, women’s public roles expanded. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman achieved elite status, though never without the weight of criticism for stepping outside their prescribed gender roles. The academies admitted very few women, usually with condescending restrictions.

Women could paint, but “feminine” subjects only. Portraits, flowers, still life, miniatures, all acceptable. Large-scale history paintings? Rarely allowed. Access to nude models, essential for academic training? Prohibited, to preserve “modesty.” The system shaped not only who could paint, but what they could paint. And then critics used those constrained subjects as evidence that women lacked ambition. A perfect circular logic.

In the 19th century, Impressionism brought new visibility. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt contributed fundamentally to modern visual language. Their subtle, quiet works were later interpreted as feminine softness rather than modern mastery, again, a matter of interpretation shaped by gender.

Women expanded the canon, but the canon refused to expand with them.

XX century: modernisms, revolutions, yet still not enough

Modernism, with all its declarations of radical newness, inherited many old prejudices. Many movements were built by women whose contributions were later overshadowed or absorbed by male partners or colleagues.

Sonia Delaunay co-developed Orphism but was long overshadowed by Robert. Hilma af Klint was producing radically abstract spiritual works years before Kandinsky, hidden away because the world “wasn’t ready.” Lee Krasner shaped Abstract Expressionism but was reduced to “Pollock’s wife.”

Feminist artists and scholars in the 1970s: Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and others, detonated the foundations of canonical art history. They asked the questions institutions avoided: Why didn’t we know these women? Who decides what art is? Who decides who counts? Who benefits from the narrative of genius?

Their response was not simply to add women to the canon but to expose the conditions that determined what the canon was.

By the turn of the XXIst century, the field began expanding, but unevenly, reluctantly, and often too late for the women who had shaped it.

The contemporary landscape: progress, tension, and contradiction

Today, women dominate art-school enrollments. They direct museums, shape discourses, and push the boundaries of what art can be. Yet the institutions of value: the blue-chip galleries, the auction houses, the major collections, still lag behind.

The current art market shows signs of correction: more representation, higher sales, more visibility. But the statistics reveal the same pattern as history: women succeed more quickly in emerging-art segments, but the upper tiers of value remain heavily masculine.

Women are visible — but still less valued.

Women are present — but still less collected.

Women lead trends — but still receive fewer retrospectives.

Women sell — but still at lower prices.

The system is changing, but the architecture of inequality is deeply rooted.

Which brings us to the next chapter: how exactly those roots operate.

Fanie Simon, Giulia Seri, Juliette Lepage Boisdron, THE HOUSE WE CARRY

CHAPTER II — HOW INEQUALITY SHAPES ARTISTIC PRACTICE

The history of women in art, demonstrates that progress has been neither linear nor comprehensive. While structural barriers have slowly shifted, the architecture of inequality remains deeply embedded in the ways art is produced, circulated, collected, and valued. Contemporary women artists operate within this landscape: they respond to exclusion, negotiate visibility, and challenge the hierarchies that have historically devalued their work. To understand their practices is to understand the persistence of these systemic roots and the creative strategies developed to navigate them.

Materials and Domestic Labor

One of the most visible ways inequality manifests in contemporary art is through the material choices of women artists, many of which are rooted in historically gendered labor. Domestic media: textiles, ceramics, tufting, found objects, household tools, carry centuries of association with women’s work in care, maintenance, and domestic space. These materials were traditionally deemed “craft” or “decorative,” dismissed by academic and institutional hierarchies in favor of painting and monumental sculpture, the so-called “high arts” dominated by men.

Artists reclaim these materials, not as nostalgia or sentimentality, but as critical tools. Cloth, thread, and ceramics are imbued with histories of labor, care, and repetition. Using them foregrounds invisible work: sewing, cleaning, cooking, mending, nurturing. These activities, long excluded from the canon of artistic labor, become both medium and message. In doing so, women artists challenge the cultural logic that equates visibility and value with masculine-coded forms and materials.

By elevating domestic media to conceptual art, these practices expose material bias in both historical and contemporary art worlds. The materiality of work becomes a site of inquiry: who determines what is worthy of exhibition or market recognition, and why are certain forms persistently devalued?

Process and time

Time itself, as mediated through artistic labor, becomes a political tool. Women’s lives are frequently shaped by fragmented schedules: domestic responsibilities, caregiving duties, and economic precarity create rhythms that are discontinuous and cumulative rather than linear. Artists working within these temporal frameworks translate lived experience into durational processes, repetition, and accumulative gestures.

Repetition, whether in stitching hundreds of threads, layering pigment across a surface, or producing multiples of an object, resists the modernist ideal of the single, heroic gesture. It asserts persistence over spectacle, endurance over speed. Time-intensive methods make labor visible: the work embodies hours, days, months of effort, mirroring the uncounted, invisible labor historically performed by women.

Cyclical processes also reflect embodied rhythms: breathing, menstruation, care cycles, migration patterns, grief, and memory. By structuring works around these temporalities, artists critique the linear, productivity-focused temporality imposed by capitalist and patriarchal systems. Art becomes a temporal archive, encoding the lived realities of persistence, endurance, and invisible contribution.

Scale, repetition, and embodiment

Scale is rarely neutral in contemporary artistic practice. The choice to create monumental works, intimate objects, or repetitively small elements signals embodied negotiation with space, audience, and visibility.

Large-scale works can assert presence and demand attention, yet often deploy soft, domestic, or fragile materials, inverting the traditional association of monumentality with masculine power. These works create immersive environments that communicate without aggression, allowing fragility to operate as strength.

Conversely, small-scale works cultivate intimacy and attention, requiring viewers to engage physically and temporally with the piece. These encounters replicate the careful observation and patience demanded in daily life, particularly in the labor and care often performed by women outside public recognition.

Repetition amplifies this dialogue between scale and embodiment. Multiples, serial objects, or ritualized gestures establish rhythm, persistence, and presence. They transform labor into a language of resistance: each repeated mark or action asserts both continuity and endurance, demonstrating that accumulation itself is a form of authority.

Language and silence

Language in these practices functions less as narrative or explanation and more as evidence of experience, constraint, and resistance. Fragmented text, repeated phrases, handwritten inscriptions, and erased or overwritten words become material marks that operate alongside gesture and object.

This approach reflects the lived realities of women whose voices were historically suppressed. Fragmented language mirrors interrupted attention, micro-aggressions, and the constant negotiation of visibility. Silence, space, and absence operate alongside text to create tension, demanding active engagement from the viewer.

By embedding language within domestic, tactile, and performative frameworks, artists reclaim authority over symbolic systems that have historically marginalized them. Text becomes both trace and protest, simultaneously documenting social constraints and asserting presence within the art-historical canon.

The interplay between structural roots and artistic strategies

The practices outlined above are not aesthetic choices divorced from systemic conditions. They are responses to persistent inequality. The use of domestic materials, time-intensive processes, scale negotiation, and fragmented language all trace back to:

• Historical exclusion from training, institutions, and patronage.

• Gendered valuation of labor and materials.

• Persistent invisibility in markets, museums, and public discourse.

Through these strategies, contemporary women artists expose how structural inequality operates while simultaneously proposing alternative logics: work that values care, accumulation, memory, fragility, and relationality over spectacle, speed, and singular authorship.

In this sense, contemporary artistic practice functions as both mirror and intervention: it reflects the persistent inequalities, while actively reconfiguring the terms by which value, visibility, and authority are assigned.

Nika Timashkova installation, THE HOUSE WE CARRY

CHAPTER III — INFRASTRUCTURES OF INEQUALITY AND STRATEGIES OF NAVIGATION

While, we examined how contemporary women artists translate systemic inequality into formal strategies, through materials, temporality, scale, and language, let's now interrogate the broader infrastructures that shape, constrain, and sometimes enable women’s artistic work. These infrastructures are complex and interrelated: economic systems, institutional hierarchies, domestic labor expectations, and cultural valuation frameworks. Understanding them is essential for situating the work of women artists within both the market and the social fabric of artistic production.

Economic structures and market valuation

The commercial art market has long reflected and reinforced gendered hierarchies. Even as more women are represented in galleries and fairs, systemic biases persist in pricing, promotion, and long-term valuation.

Historically, artworks by women were often labeled “craft,” “decorative,” or “domestic,” leading to diminished market value. Portraiture, flower painting, and still life, genres deemed appropriate for women, were considered secondary to historical painting or monumental sculpture. These categories, codified by both academic institutions and collectors, devalued the labor, technical skill, and conceptual depth embedded in women’s work.

Recent data indicates measurable improvements in market representation, yet inequality remains:

• Women dominate emerging-artist galleries but remain underrepresented in top-tier, blue-chip galleries.

• Auction sales show growth in volume for women artists, yet a small number of high-profile names account for the majority of total value.

• Media historically associated with women, textiles, ceramics, domestic objects, remain undervalued relative to painting and sculpture.

These dynamics reinforce a dual structure: greater visibility but persistent economic inequity, meaning that recognition does not automatically translate into financial parity or career stability.

Institutional access and gatekeeping

Institutions—museums, galleries, academies, and residencies—continue to shape which artists gain recognition, which narratives are canonized, and which works enter public memory. Women encounter systemic barriers at every level:

• Exclusion from historical archives: The erasure of women in historical records perpetuates selective institutional memory.

• Access to training and networks: Even where formal admission exists, mentorship, patronage, and collector networks remain disproportionately male.

• Curatorial priorities: Women are often included in thematic or feminist exhibitions rather than in general narratives, reinforcing separation from “mainstream” art history.

Artists develop adaptive strategies: leveraging alternative spaces, participating in collective exhibitions, reclaiming domestic media, or foregrounding relational and ephemeral practices that escape institutional codification.

Domestic labor and the invisible economy

Women’s work in domestic and care roles directly impacts their artistic careers. These responsibilities shape not only the time available for production, but also the scale, rhythm, and scope of creative labor. Artists working within domestic spaces often turn everyday objects, textiles, and furniture into artistic materials, embedding care and memory in their work. Time constraints encourage repetition, modularity, and accumulation. Domestic labor becomes a site of both limitation and inspiration: it informs subject matter, materials, and formal strategies while simultaneously restricting visibility and mobility.

Recognition of domestic labor as a creative site is itself a form of critique, an argument for expanding the definition of artistic production beyond institutional or market-centric models.

Emotional labor and affective economies

Alongside domestic and professional labor, women frequently bear the burden of emotional and relational labor in the art world:

• Mentorship, networking, and community building are often unremunerated yet essential for sustaining careers.

• Collaborative and participatory practices, while socially rich, may be undervalued in market and institutional terms.

• Women’s art often engages directly with social, political, and familial histories, embedding affective content that resists commodification.

By foregrounding memory, care, vulnerability, and relationality, contemporary women artists challenge the market’s fetishization of spectacle, heroic authorship, and object-based value.

Alternative economies and collective practices

To navigate systemic inequities, many women artists engage in alternative economic and institutional models:

• Artist-run spaces, collectives, and pop-up exhibitions provide visibility without dependence on traditional gatekeepers.

• Direct-to-collector sales, cooperatives, and online platforms circumvent market biases.

• Collaborative labor models foreground collective authorship and shared value, resisting the myth of individual genius.

These approaches reveal that inequality is structural, not personal: the system privileges certain forms, scales, and modalities, and artists respond by creating networks that redistribute authority, recognition, and financial benefit.

Negotiating visibility and legacy

Finally, women artists negotiate visibility and legacy through conscious archival and curatorial strategies. Documenting domestic and ephemeral practices preserves labor that would otherwise remain invisible. Integrating personal, collective, and historical narratives asserts the value of lived experience in artistic discourse. Curatorial projects, such as THE HOUSE WE CARRY, situate work in relational, immersive frameworks that link domestic and public spheres. This negotiation signals a shift from individual career ambition to collective memory-building, challenging the ways history and value have been coded by patriarchal norms.

The infrastructures that shape women’s artistic labor, economic, institutional, domestic, emotional, operate together as a complex web of constraints and affordances. By understanding these structures, we can read contemporary women’s art not only as aesthetic production, but as strategic, critical interventions within a persistent architecture of inequality.

Pemanagpo installation, THE HOUSE WE CARRY

CHAPTER IV — CASE STUDIES AND THE EXHIBITION: THE HOUSE WE CARRY

Exhibitions serve as critical nodes, where historical exclusion, material labor, domesticity, and institutional politics intersect. THE HOUSE WE CARRY exemplifies how these dynamics operate: it transforms domestic materials and invisible labor into public, critical, and aesthetic discourse. By examining individual artists, media, and curatorial strategies, we can see how inequality is both acknowledged and resisted.

Curatorial concept: home as structure and memory

At the heart of THE HOUSE WE CARRY lies a question: what constitutes home?

Home is more than architecture; it is memory, labor, ritual, and gesture. The exhibition reimagines domestic space as fluid, porous, and relational, delineated not by walls but by traces, objects, and actions. Invisible rooms: bedrooms, kitchens, living spaces, are suggested through material interventions: lines on the floor, fragments of furniture, scattered domestic objects.

The curatorial gesture is itself an intervention against patriarchal spatial hierarchies. By collapsing public and private, monumental and intimate, fine art and craft, the exhibition emphasizes care, memory, and domestic labor as central to artistic production. This approach directly responds to the inequalities discussed earlier: the persistent undervaluation of domestic media, the invisibility of labor, and the marginalization of women in institutional frameworks.

Juliette Lepage Boisdron: memory, myth, and the generative feminine

Boisdron’s works inhabit the exhibition’s ancestral and memory-infused spaces. In her Goddesses series, hair becomes a site of floating presences, heads, memories, invisible lives, that fuse myth, memory, and maternal care. These luminous figures foreground generativity as power, asserting women’s labor in both biological and cultural reproduction. Her Under the Cherry Tree series on the other hand merges houses, roots, and nature, translating domesticity into a living archive of belonging. The tree becomes both home and womb, reflecting intersections of domestic labor, memory, and resilience.

Boisdron’s jewelry practice, using found objects, cardboard, and beads, highlights resourcefulness and memory over luxury, transforming discarded materials into carriers of personal and collective histories. Within the exhibition, these works inhabit invisible rooms as traces of care, maternal labor, and survival, reinforcing the argument that value emerges from labor, memory, and relational presence.

Pemanagpo: networked creation and ecological temporality

Pemanagpo’s multimedia installations, combining ceramics, plants, performance, and generative AI, foreground networked authorship. By creating a cycle in which plants inform ceramics, ceramics feed AI-generated forms, and AI influences new ceramics, the artist collapses boundaries between human, non-human, material, and digital agents.

This approach reframes creative labor as communal, ecological, and temporal, resisting the traditional model of individual genius and property. Within THE HOUSE WE CARRY, Pemanagpo’s installation occupies spaces analogous to kitchens or workshops, sites of growth, transformation, and care. The works emphasize that home is not static, but emergent, relational, and collaborative, aligning material strategy with critique of structural hierarchies.

Giulia Seri: trauma, domesticity, and uncanny objects

Seri transforms ordinary domestic objects—lamps, slippers, furniture—into poetic, disquieting artifacts. The Abat-jour lamps, for example, are domestic and familiar yet imbued with subtle threat, vulnerability, and trauma. Objects of comfort become sites of resistance and reflection, highlighting the interplay of domestic labor, care, and emotional labor in women’s lives.

By situating trauma within the domestic, Seri demonstrates that private spaces are inherently political. Her interventions in THE HOUSE WE CARRY occupy bedrooms and corners of memory, revealing how personal experience and structural inequality converge in everyday life.

Rojin Shafiei: migration, memory, and performative traces

Shafiei’s work interrogates displacement, belonging, and the fluidity of home. In I Had to Trust My Fall, a blindfolded performer navigates paint-strewn surfaces, turning movement into both performance and material mark. Every misstep becomes evidence of labor, risk, and memory.

Her Polaroid series Khoonegi captures mundane domestic objects, emphasizing fragile, migratory, and diasporic conceptions of home. Within the exhibition, these works inhabit transitional spaces: corridors, thresholds, and luggage, sites of passage, waiting, and adaptation, underscoring that home is portable, emotional, and constructed through memory and care.

Fanie Simon: structural geometry and cosmic domesticity

Simon’s geometric wood mosaics and mixed-media works draw from cosmological frameworks, Aztec sun and earth motifs, to transform domestic materials into mythic, symbolic structures. Wood, traditionally a domestic material, becomes architecture, altar, and map, grounding ephemeral labor in ritual and universality.

In THE HOUSE WE CARRY, Simon’s works occupy the structural heart of the house, signaling the ways domestic labor and craft can sustain both material and symbolic architecture. Scale, symmetry, and geometry fuse personal labor with collective mythologies, emphasizing care, endurance, and transcendence.

Nika Timashkova: language, power, and material protest

Timashkova’s installations use textiles to reclaim words historically weaponized against women, transforming insult into material presence. Her project D…Anger embodies resistance: patriarchal structures encoded in language are reinterpreted, woven, and displayed.

Textile, a historically feminine medium, becomes both material and conceptual critique, demonstrating how structural oppression can be translated into visible, actionable protest. In the exhibition, these works confront viewers directly, occupying living room, space of both domestic labor and social negotiation.

Sylwia Zawiślak: art history rewritten from the domestic

Zawiślak’s linocuts and prints subvert canonical art history by relocating grandeur into domestic labor. In After Rembrandt, before Dinner or Last Supper of Sisters, classical narratives are recast: male figures replaced by women, monumental spaces replaced by kitchens and bedrooms.

These works highlight invisibility, repetition, and care as central to artistic and social labor. They assert that domestic practices—cleaning, caregiving, cooking—are vital cultural and historical forces, deserving critical attention and institutional recognition.

The House as archive, memory, and critical intervention

Together, the seven artists construct a house without walls, one defined by labor, memory, care, and resilience rather than architecture. The exhibition functions as both archive and intervention, linking historical invisibility to contemporary strategies and offering a lived demonstration of how art can carry memory, critique, and care across space and time.

Rojin Shafiei video, THE HOUSE WE CARRY

CHAPTER V: REFLECTION, SYNTHESIS, AND PATHWAYS FOR EQUITY

The history of women in art is neither linear nor uniform. From prehistoric handprints to contemporary multimedia interventions, women have consistently created, preserved, and transformed culture, even when structural barriers threatened to render their labor invisible. From historical exclusion and marginalization to the strategies artists employ to navigate inequality, to contemporary exhibitions such as THE HOUSE WE CARRY, domestic labor, care, and memory are now recognized as critical, aesthetic, and conceptual contributions.

Despite progress in representation, recognition, and market visibility, the architecture of inequality persists. Women artists continue to face material biases, economic disparities, institutional gatekeeping, and constraints imposed by domestic and emotional labor. Visibility alone does not guarantee equity; structural reform is required alongside recognition, valuation, and access to institutions and networks.

Women’s artistic strategies often respond directly to these inequities. By working with textiles, ceramics, and domestic media, they transform materials historically coded as “feminine” into vehicles of memory, care, and resistance. Repetition, endurance, and relational practices reflect the temporal and labor-intensive realities of women’s lives, while scale, embodiment, and gesture challenge hierarchies of monumentalism. Language, silence, and trace assert presence where history has erased it. Through these strategies, women reclaim space in art history, transforming marginalization into expressive potential.

THE HOUSE WE CARRY exemplifies these dynamics. By foregrounding ephemeral gestures, relational labor, and domestic media, the exhibition functions as both archive and home, making care, memory, and labor legible to audiences. Its fragmented structure, invisible rooms, and collective authorship challenge traditional exhibition formats and highlight the relational, networked nature of women’s creative labor. Textiles, ceramics, wood, and found objects acquire aesthetic, conceptual, and political weight, asserting equivalence with media historically privileged as “monumental.”

Lasting change requires systemic intervention. Museums, galleries, and educational institutions must actively redress historical exclusion through acquisitions, curation, and education, while markets must recognize the technical and conceptual value of works by women and in media historically coded as domestic or craft. Recognizing both domestic and emotional labor, documenting ephemeral and relational practices, and supporting alternative networks are essential steps toward structural equity. Aligning visibility with reform ensures that women’s labor, materials, and experiences are treated as central rather than peripheral to artistic production.

Ultimately, women’s art carries memory, care, and cultural continuity. Domestic labor, relational networks, and affective practice transmit knowledge across generations, preserving histories excluded from canonical narratives, articulating resistance to inequality, and reframing value beyond market metrics. Exhibitions such as THE HOUSE WE CARRY render this labor visible, allowing audiences to inhabit spaces of intimacy, memory, and care, and challenging conventional measures of monumentalism, fame, and object-based value.

The history of women in art is more than a narrative of recovery; it is an ongoing intervention into systems of recognition, valuation, and memory. Women have always shaped culture, through visible masterpieces, domestic craft, or relational acts, but systemic inequality has consistently determined which works and gestures are remembered. Today, representation, market visibility, and curatorial attention are improving, yet structural inequities endure.

THE HOUSE WE CARRY demonstrates how women’s art can carry memory, resist erasure, and assert enduring value. It asks audiences, curators, and collectors to reconsider which histories are preserved, which labor is valued, and how exhibitions, collections, and markets might be reimagined to reflect care, equity, and relationality. In carrying this house forward—through archives, exhibitions, scholarship, and practice—artists and audiences participate in a living architecture of memory, care, and justice. It is a house without walls, portable across space and time, yet foundational to the ongoing story of women in art.