The exhibition borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s extended 1929 essay, in which the author famously asserted that in order to be able to write fiction, women need a room of their own and a modest but sufficient yearly stipend. Expanding Woolf’s suggestion to include all creative production, one can think of the MFA program as precisely providing that. Presented here are the outcomes of such a year, the work of a cohort of six women artists who had studio space and support—which came in more forms than one.
Woolf identified the many societal forces that prevent women from “the greatest release of all [...], which is freedom to think of the things in themselves.” She located these obstructions in geopolitical and institutional spaces of the public sphere as well as in the familial and personal spaces of private life. While many of these hindrances prevail today, the artists in this exhibition examine the forces that impact themselves as well as others. They look inquisitively and insistently at histories of colonialism, psycho-social outcomes of movement (for the human and non-human), machinations of power, cost of development, and boundaries—both mental and physical.