The Future is Female: The art expressing Fourth-wave feminism

According to Jessica McBride, co-founder of London’s Dellasposa Gallery, "there's a clear inequality and gender disparity between male and female artists." 

She adds: “Art by women has been under-appreciated, under-represented, and undervalued for centuries. Now, time is up.”

McBride is looking to try and change that with the gallery’s new show, The Future is Female, which hopes to “shift awareness to the forces at play, and honour the achievement of female-created art”, she says.

The show takes its title from “The Future Is Female” T-shirt design was made for Labyris Books, the first women's bookstore in New York City, in the 1970s. McBride and her co-founder, Julian Phillimore, chose this, since to her, it “captures the universal female experience as well as individual instances of what it is to be female”; just as she aims to achieve through the work of the four artists in the show—Alicia Paz, Tahnee Lonsdale, Gail Olding and Ehryn Torrel.

The artists included in the exhibition work across sculpture, painting and collage; all exploring ideas of femininity and feminism through the subject of the female form, “investigating received female roles in contemporary life and the expression of personal freedom,” says the gallery. 

“It dawned upon me as I was opening the gallery that I’m acutely aware as a business owner and gallerist that I do have a responsibility,” says McBride. “One must look at the percentages, studies and numbers and see that it is quite evident that the number of women represented in galleries is very small. 

“You can see there are hundreds of women graduating in art history that are unable to move up the career ladder. As women are overlooked at the heights of their careers, so too are they overlooked at the beginnings.”

The Future is Female runs from 19 March – 3 May 2019.