100WOMEN100YEARS Art Archive
Liz Rae Dalton and Kathy Piercy – 2020
100WOMEN100YEARS is a female contemporary art platform initiated by artists Liz Rae Dalton and Kathy Piercy to honour women from all walks of life who have contributed to various families, cultures and societies. This project is an opportunity for women artists to create and exhibit artwork to remember and honour female achievement of the past and present.
The project began in July 2019, when a stack of historic newspapers arrived in Liz Dalton’s studio. Soon afterwards, Dalton shared this ephemera with artist Kathy Piercy, and the duo began to examine the faces and lives of women captured in the weekly ‘pictorial inserts’ of the New York Times and Montreal Standard. The 100 year old archive revealed the lack of female equality, representation and diversity presented in these male-led publications.
In response to their findings, Dalton and Piercy created 100WOMEN100YEARS (a two-part series). Phase one consists of ARCHIVE, a public participatory drawing and text-based exhibition that pairs over 100 drawings of women with their life stories. Dalton and Piercy see this exhibit as a direct response to past female erasure, as it presents the lives and achievements of women to a contemporary audience. ARCHIVE is an act of retrieval, honour and remembrance.
In order to include a diverse group of women in ARCHIVE nominations from the public will be accepted until December 31, 2020 (a nod to 100 years of time since some women in Canada earned the right to vote).
Nominations can be done by submitting a name, photo, memory or piece of writing to www.100women100yearsart.com. Among those who have been submitted are career women, scientists, doctors, inventors, athletes, artists, teachers, actresses, nurses, writers, activists, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts, and friends spread across diverse cultures and experiences. Dalton and Piercy have personally nominated women to ARCHIVE from their own lives and research. For the artists, it has been an incredible process of discovery.The two hope for an even wider response to the theme of female honour and remembrance during the second phase of 100WOMEN100YEARS – Looking Forward.
Watch our Artist Talk with Liz Rae Dalton and Kathy Piercy.
100WOMEN100YEARS was on display in the State of Flux Gallery from September 12, 2020 to October 31, 2020.
About the Artists
Kathy Piercy, Liz Rae Dalton100WOMEN100YEARS ARCHIVE, in collaboration with Liz Rae Dalton, began as a process of reading and preserving found newspapers from the 1920’s. As Dalton and Piercy reflected upon the struggles of women in the past, the influences these struggles posed, and how they were overcome, or not — they noticed how empowerment was often concealed, or if revealed at all, encoded. Historically powerful women are not openly declared as such and often, remain today unnamed. They also note that not all women progressed with the same degree of legal rights, civic agency, and personal empowerment and ask why women with diverse backgrounds were often excluded from this narrative. With ARCHIVE, they ask how these narratives have changed today in the current climate of redress and what has remained the same. The pair feels that the question “how far have we come?” is not for them to answer, but to put forth for women of today so that further perspective on the subject can be added.
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Kathy Piercy is a multidisciplinary artist (H.BFA and B.Ed. from Queen’s University) with a practice that includes painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Her themes and areas of exploration relate to grief as a transformative agent and the complexity of touch as society grapples with the ever-changing human/nonhuman entanglements with technology. Piercy’s background as a radioisotope technician, fashion designer, Chinese brushwork painter and visual arts educator has informed her technique and openness to a range of media.
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Liz Rae Dalton (BFA (Hons.) B Ed.) maintains a studio on an island near Kingston, Ontario, Canada with an art practice developed through teaching, creating and exhibiting. Her environmental concerns, paired with her interest in female equality and women’s stories provide impetus for her current work. Life on the water surrounded by nature makes her a direct witness to climate change. High water, disappearing winter ice, escalating temperatures, algae booms, and species survival are explored in mixed media 2d and 3d installations. Tools and materials poetically suggest themes to the viewer….torches, charring, carving, hot molten beeswax encaustic paint, found materials and shoreline wood become her vocabulary to speak to the viewer about our warming earth. Liz Rae Dalton’s art has been appreciated, collected and exhibited in Canada and the USA.