#5WomenArtists: Lisa Diane Wedgeworth

Can you name five women artists?

Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts  has been asking this question on social media each March during Women’s History Month using the hashtag #5WomenArtists. The campaign calls attention to the fact that women have not been treated equally in the art world, and today they remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in museums, galleries, and auction houses.

Black women are doubly underrepresented in this context, often absent from in America’s museums and erased from the art world’s consciousness. With an eye towards changing that, CAAM will be sharing images and biographies of five women artists from CAAM’s permanent collection.

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
No Amount of Scrubbing Can Make Me Forget The Time I’ve Wasted on You (Shower Vignette), 2012–2013
Single-channel video, color, sound
7:00 min.
Collection of the California African American Museum. Gift of the artist

This work is one of five vignettes in which a bathroom sink, fingernails, shower tile, dishes, and a kitchen sink are scrubbed in an attempt to obtain enlightenment while also confronting ideas of domesticity, memories of love and lust, and feelings of anxiety and obsession. Recollections and personal narratives that exist at varying levels of the artist’s consciousness, as well as those she collects from observing others in public spaces, inform Wedgeworth’s multimedia work, which variously takes form as painting, video, performance, and collected oral histories.

Other 2019 #5WomenArtists selections:

<em>

• Sadie Barnette
• Ronda Brown
• April Bey
• Dominique Moody</em>