BY KON AWET

CAN YOU NAME FIVE WOMEN ARTISTS?

Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) 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.

Each year, hundreds of cultural organizations and thousands of individuals take to social media to answer the challenge, sparking a global conversation about gender equity in the arts. This year, MOCA has chosen 5 women artists we are currently working with to join the conversation and highlight the amazing projects on view in the museum. 

As a cultural institute of UNF, MOCA frequently works with the university galleries and art department. One of our most prolific collaborators is Sheila Goloborotko, UNF Associate Professor in printmaking, multidisciplinary artist, innovative printmaker, curator, and studio owner. Her work explores social and environmental issues through the use of poetic and resistance activism. Throughout her 40-year career, has been included in more than 200 exhibitions and galleries worldwide. Goloborotko's works act as a link between personal mastery and community activism, studying the shifting barriers in the information era as it connects to society.   

Born and raised in Sao Paul, Brazil, Gotoborokto began studying art at an early age, practicing domestic handicrafts, paintings, literature, theater, and written narratives. In 1981, she earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de Santos in São Paulo, whilst focusing on utopian architecture. Moving to New York in the 1980s, she worked as a printmaker for Keith Haring and Andy Warhol's Pop Shops. In 1989, she opened her own shop and hosted open studio time where people could come and print.   

Goloborotko has received multiple grants and awards, such as the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2020, the UNF Best Creative Work Award in 2019, and the Presidential Faculty Leader Award in 2018.    

Goloborotko curated the exhibition Print+: Sameness and Otherness in Contemporary Printmedia, which is on view now at MOCA Jacksonville and highlights a diverse group of printmakers and the methods they are using to expand the printmaking process. In the past, Goloborotko has curated exhibitions for MOCA such as The Other: Nurturing a New Ecology in Printmaking in 2015, Iterations in 2017, and Multiple Ones: Contemporary Perspectives in Printmedia in 2020-21.

With Print+, Goloborotko continues her exploration of how artists of today are expanding the printmaking process. The exhibition focuses on the importance of showcasing artwork where diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion create an essential and fertile ecology.  

The diverse group of artists in this exhibition use one or more printing elements; the inks, the matrixes, the paper, the equipment, or the print, but the resulting artwork can range from two-dimensional and three-dimensional to videos; from hospital gowns to quilts, from handkerchiefs to cotton; from folded paper to photographs. Each work tells a unique story as varied as the lives of the participating artists. In the curator's words: “Each with their own unique experiences and intersectionalities would much rather we focus on how they see the world and the risks they take to show it to us so honestly.”