Chapter 3 examines curatorial strategies within institutions that attempt dialogue with social movements as they occur outside of the gallery. I foreground the place of the structural support in recent exhibitions as producing relational encounters and theorise an imagined, if not actual, form of autonomy within the exhibition space. I consider how these structures evoke land artist Robert Smithson’s non-site—a ‘two dimensional analogy or metaphor’ or ‘logical picture’ of representation of an actual site that does not resemble it, where the non-site of the gallery provides the controlled and yet malleable environment for the discursive exploration of social movements. In thinking through ideas about the subject, the focus is on artists who embody these other othernesses in ways that play out performatively in the imaginatively—sometimes problematically so—autonomous space of the gallery. The question of autonomy revolves around the political and activist aims of the encounters and negotiations enacted in the gallery space, and their transformative potential—or impossibility—beyond the gallery’s walls.
Histories of feminist, queer, and queer feminist art can be traced onto the histories of the institutions, organisations, collectives, and structures that have helped to secure and legitimise feminist and queer art practices. Building histories examines select feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States and the ways by which contemporary queer and feminist practices support and challenge the dominant narratives through which these histories have commonly been understood. Beginning with an exploration of the foundational histories of feminist art, the book examines how queer and feminist institutions have taken divergent paths in subsequent decades, and how they might be read through the spaces, communities and cities that provide the conditions for their cultivation. The book contributes to the development of histories of sites of feminist and queer cultural production and considers the enduringly precarious position of feminist and queer art histories relative to more mainstream art histories. It also examines how present-day queer and feminist artists engage and respond to the histories, spaces, and institutions they have inherited.