Nicole Daskas: A Retrospective (2021) is a feminist intervention. According to ArtNet, only 11% of acquisitions at prominent American Museums over the past decade were work by women artists. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, women earn 70% of BFAs and 65-75% of MFAs in the US, but only 46% of working artists are women. At the Art Basel Fairs, women made up less than 25% of the artists on view over the past four years. A recent survey of the permanent collections of 18 prominent art museums in the US found that the represented artists are 87% male and 85% white.

Nicole Daskas: A Retrospective (2021) aims to highlight the underappreciation and marginalization of women artists that occurs in the art world. I am thinking about the ways women artists have been silenced throughout art history: outshined by their husbands, celebrated only in old age, or only after death. I am presenting myself and my work as that of a well-known, successful artist. I also present performance relics as precious art objects, questioning why performance art is non commodifiable. By creating art books and interviewing myself, I lead the conversation around my own practice and work. This piece is not a traditional retrospective. It is questioning the structures and expectations of a patriarchal art world. In a sense, I am looking back over the span of my undergraduate career, reframing the standard expected output of a BFA. In this sense, the term retrospective is fitting. I am also interested in exploring what it means to have a retrospective at the beginning of my career, and questioning the history of male artists’ spectacles and egotistical gestures by essentially creating one of my own.

Nicole Daskas: A Retrospective is an installation and performance work installed in the Guggenheim Gallery the week of senior thesis exhibitions. Upon entering the gallery space, viewers first find a press release and art books filled with my past work and writings about my work. Video screens play documentation of my past video and performance work as well as staged interviews and new works created for the exhibition. My self portrait works, Desert Portrait, Blood Collage, Subverting the Cube, and Spit Collage will fill the back wall of the gallery. Relics from my performances, such as a 4 ft x 4 ft white cube, finger knitted spider webbing, and other objects are displayed throughout the gallery. I want to continue an engagement with art history, inserting myself into a male dominated, sexist history. Nicole Daskas: A Retrospective is an exploration and celebration of my work. This conceptual piece questions why such opportunities are not readily available for women artists.