Abstract

Feminist theorists have used the literal and symbolic meanings of public and private spaces as a framework for understanding the marginalization of women within social structures. Interpreting mural paintings by Canadian women as incursions into a space that is commonly seen and understood as having a limited availability allows for the explication of those works as confounding simplistic understandings of the relationships between women and space. Stringent definitions of the public necessarily cast women as victims of a system within which their experiences are, in fact, marginalized, but that also may be reread to acknowledge their contributions. Like women themselves, mural paintings hover uneasily on the boundaries of the mainstream--neither completely integrated into the art history canon, nor absolutely excluded. In addition, women have often chosen as their subjects the epic topics to which murals are customarily dedicated and which symbolize the social discourses wherein women's contributions are habitually disregarded. By choosing to participate in the construction of those discourses, women have insisted on the incorporation of their experiences. At the intersection of women/murals/public I will seek a more inclusive Canadian art history with the structure of exclusion dismantled, reexamined and reconstructed to acknowledge the contributions of women artists.