By Jesse Bihlmeyer
Weeks leading up to the weekend of Friday, September 19, 2014 the staff of the UMKC Women’s Center had the privilege of designing, planning, and facilitating a booth at Kansas City’s Plaza Art Fair. From my first day working at the Women’s Center as a Her Art Project intern, it was my job to aid in ideas, and later actions, that would be in place at the booth. The process of organizing this booth was trial and error, astoundingly demanding, but most of all rewarding.
First, we had to develop a theme for the booth. At a brainstorming meeting the idea of “Artists Rock” was put on the table, and stuck. At the Women’s Center, we saw it important to give credit to female artists that hadn’t received as much recognition as male artists. It was essential that we show appreciation for underrepresented female artists of the world. An important mission of the Women’s Center is advocating for gender equality. Research shows that only about 13% of art in US museums was created by women. That is a pretty clear misrepresentation and it is obvious that women are not equally represented in the arts. Therefore, we wanted to bring that observation into light for the community in hopes of furthering support for equality.
We developed booth décor, handouts, and a trivia game based around this idea. It was interesting to see how little people knew about women in the arts. In Fact, one of the trivia question was to name three female visual artists, and most people weren’t able to do that! Still, we were able to inform the community of little tidbits of information of female artist and hopefully further the support of women in the arts. With the help of Arzie Umali, Kacie Otto, De Andrea Jones, and others the booth was a marvelous achievement and a huge success.