User:Greenemonique7/gap analysis

Gap analysis

 * What is the title of the article in which you identified a gap. If no article exists at all, what should the title be?

Helen Molesworth


 * Document the gap you found, describe how you identified it, and analyze its impact on knowledge.

The gap that I found was on Helen Molesworth. I found this gap when I had signed up for my section presentation on one of the readings in our class’s reading material to cover. I found myself reading the article and wishing I had more background on what she was saying or whom she was. When I began to search her name and found the Wikipedia link, I realized it had nothing about her work besides a brief overview of her life. I had hoped I would run into some material that would better help me understand her piece “How to Install Art as a Feminist”, but my search cut short when I realized this was all Wikipedia had to offer on Helen Molesworth. This significant gap limits the amount of knowledge that Molesworth has provided her readers with her views on the politics of museums as well as vertical and horizontal thinking. Better known as hierarchy and egalitarian ways of thinking. This is so crucial when looking at feminism, intersectionality and the way certain structures, such as museums oppress feminist works of art. Her feminist writing not only speaks to feminist art, but it also gets her audience to think about intersectionality with regard to not only women as artist, but the different sections of art that are seen in the museum. For example instead of someone being praised as an artist, they are being singled out as an Asian of Hispanic artist and placed in a different section with other artist of those ethnicities. That in itself creates an overlapping system of discrimination.


 * Propose a paragraph of new or substantially edited content based on reliable sources. (If you are editing existing content, post the current version along with your edited version, and clearly mark which is which.)

Helen Molesworth is not only the chief curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, she is also a feminist writer who holds philosophical truths about how the institutionalization of feminism in the visual arts, as well as beliefs about intersectionality among institutions with regard to feminist art. In her Paper; “How to Install Art as a Feminist”, Molesworth touches on the politics of museums in particular and how there is a lack of feminist art that is displayed. She brings up the theories of vertical (hierarchy) and horizontal (egalitarian) thinking and how that pertains to art and feminism. The purpose of noting these two ways of thinking in her paper is to start to get readers to think about the artist and the museum and the ways that one triumph over another. In addition to that Helen states that “ feminist artists move laterally, in order to revolutionize the deepest aspects of our lives” versus simply moving vertically giving one person or system more power over another. Her work extends far beyond being a curator, from a feminist writer to a feminist speaker who has gone around to schools and conferences to talk about the institutionalization of Feminism. She is an educator and an enlightener as she talks about feminism.


 * List the reliable sources that could be used to improve this gap. (You can use the Cite tool from the editing toolbar above to input and format your sources.)