Frances Morris, director of the Tate Modern: "Feminism in art is a bubble compared to politics and business"

• The Time of Women Women, power and art: the pending revolution

• Art The Prado Museum becomes feminist, 201 years later

In 2016 Frances Morris (London, 1958) became the director of the

the most visited contemporary art museum in the world.

She is the first woman to run the iconic London art center that occupies a former power station on the banks of the Thames, converted into a museum by architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Morris studied at Cambridge University at a time when no women were featured in Art History curricula.

A fact that is worth remembering because among the greatest achievements of Morris, a declared feminist, is having curated the major exhibitions that consecrated

on a global scale in 2007 and

in 2012. Morris was also the first to break the chronological order in the collection, a revolutionary idea that has since been replicated by many other museums.

Do you consider yourself a "disruptive" personality? Yes, I've always liked being disruptive in a positive sense, not a negative one, and that's why I like having disruptive people who question me on my team.

When you work inside a museum you realize how self-enclosed the institutions are and how tied they are to their own agenda, to politics, to history.

It was very evident to me when I started working as a curator at the Tate.

My role is to continue as director. How were your beginnings in the art world? I studied Art History at Cambridge and in all my years there no one talked about a single female artist in class, it was a terribly conservative system.

I came to university as a young feminist and also went to King's College, which was also a feminist.

I remember how contradictory what I studied in class seemed to me compared to the artists I admired in real life.

Reading Linda Nochlin, the first historian to wonder why there have been no great female artists in history, was revealing.

It also opened my mind to read John Berger and his

.

Our gaze affects how we interpret what we see.

The world in which we live has been entirely built from the patriarchal and it is important to be aware of this, that we are all influenced by that vision.

Do you remember your first day as director? I arrived on a tandem bicycle, pedaling with my husband, who has always been very supportive of my career.

I received many flowers and congratulations.

I remember it was April 1st, April Fool's Day (the English equivalent to Holy Innocents' Day), and I thought: was it all a joke?

[Laughs] Has the art world changed a lot since you started working as a curator in the '80s

they were very important because they managed to get their message to the masses.

I remember that we invited them to the Tate years later and we bought their work.

They criticized that only 16% of the artists in the collection were women, a figure that was a little better than the one reported by the Met, 5%, but equally shameful.

A journalist asked me about it later and I didn't know what to answer.

It was an embarrassing moment for me, one of those that makes you react and rethink everything. Last year, the Louvre appointed its first director in more than 200 years. they are enough.

It's great to have women running the Louvre or Macba, but when you're inside the system you realize how incredibly masculinized all institutions are.

I believe that Europe is making progress and that the next five years are going to be decisive in the United States, where there will be many changes in important positions.

The change is progressive, but it is slow because most of these positions are held for a long time by the same people.

This is happening in the public sector, the private art sector is still very far from equality.

And from the experiences I've had, I would say that feminism in the art world is a bubble compared to the corporate environment or the world of politics, which are still men's worlds. How do you feminize a museum? I think one of the changes that are already noticeable is that women collaborate more.

Until recently, museums competed with each other for everything: for the public, to get the best sponsorships or loans of works, etc.

And that makes no sense in a world like the current one because we are all part of the same ecosystem.

When I came to Tate Modern, art was at the center of everything, and I think now we've included the public in that equation.

The changes are very slow.

Since they occur in people at a personal or intellectual level until they reach the system, a long time passes.

But we move on.

A few years ago we programmed "great women artists" who had been ignored by history like Dora Maar or Anni Albers.

Today we no longer call them that, we refer to them as "artists".

In the next course we tend to Magdalena Abakanowicz, Barbara Hepworth and Cézanne. Are we at the beginning of a great feminist counteroffensive? They call feminist waves waves for a reason, because they come and go.

I think that 2022 will mark a before and after and that now we are seeing the reflection of something that had been cooking for a long time, I hope that what comes now is a tsunami.

You only have to look at the work of artists like Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer from the 80s to realize that the fight for women's rights has always existed.

In the United States, art depends a lot on philanthropy, many museums live off their donors.

And what we are seeing is that very few have shown their rejection of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade compared to what happened after the murder of George Floyd, when many have taken a position. How has the war affected from Ukraine to the museum you run? We are with Ukraine and we are supporting Ukrainian artists.

The guideline now is not to program Russian artists,

which is tragic for them and for all my Russian colleagues.

What is happening with Russia, one of the world's great cultural powers, is unprecedented and will mark the next generations of artists in the country.

It's a shame.

I remember being young and being absolutely dazzled by the Russian avant-garde and artists like Malevich, who is actually Ukrainian.

Everything that is happening is very sad.

Fortunately, the Tate Modern did not have too many ties to oligarchs.

Everything that is happening is very sad.

Fortunately, the Tate Modern did not have too many ties to oligarchs.

Everything that is happening is very sad.

Fortunately, the Tate Modern did not have too many ties to oligarchs.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more