New art fair for women opens in DC with all sales going to artists
FEMME features more than 100 artists, including the Guerrilla Girls, over four days.
Market and Money
FEMME, a new art fair devoted to women artists, opens Thursday in downtown Washington, D.C., with its organizers promising that all artwork sales go directly to the artists.
The fair runs through August 30 at The Square at International Square, 1850 K Street NW, and features more than 100 artists, including the feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls, according to its website.
FEMME was created by the Washington arts organization USAN USAN and the nonprofit Our Daughters’ Futures Fund, with support from Women Moving Millions and Women Connect4Good.
The fair frames itself around women’s place in the art market. It calls itself “Not a movement. A market correction.”
Women make up half the country’s working artists and earn more than 70% of art degrees but account for only 3.3% of major art sales, the fair said in a May 22 Instagram post, citing data from a 2022 report by Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin.
“That is not a talent problem. That is an infrastructure problem,” the post reads.
The Guerrilla Girls, anonymous since the 1980s for their gorilla masks and their pseudonyms drawn from dead women artists, are scheduled to unveil a mural in the Union Market District on Thursday and to appear in conversation with Dorothy Kosinski, director emerita of the Phillips Collection, on Friday.
The Friday talk promises a candid exchange about institutional power and the fight over “who gets seen, collected, and remembered,” the schedule says.
One of the group’s founders stepped out of anonymity last month. Joyce Kozloff, a painter and a founder of the Pattern and Decoration movement, revealed in an interview published July 22 in Art Journal Open that she was a founding Guerrilla Girl who worked under the pseudonym Liubov Popova.
Programming across the four days is free with a fair ticket, the schedule shows.
It includes a fireside chat and screening with filmmaker Tiffany Shlain; a number of workshops and panel discussions, such as one titled “The Market Correction: Closing the Capital Gap for Women"; a live taping of the Cool Moms podcast; and evening DJ sets from the all-women collective Nü Androids.
The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities hosts two Sunday panels, and Girl Scouts Nation’s Capital joins a Saturday activity for Our Daughters’ Futures Fund. The fair closes August 30 with a ticketed “2nd Annual Forever Fearless Fundraiser” for the fund.
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