How Do You Make Space?

Quotes by Gillian Ayres, Helen Frankenthaler, Zadie Xa, and other creatives highlight how they make space for a marketing campaign celebrating the Spring 2023 season of programming at the Whitechapel Gallery.

It is not easy to forge your own space in the creative sector. Whether it’s finding opportunities to learn, acquiring studio space, or getting your work published or displayed in a publication or gallery, it can sometimes feel like the odds are stacked against you.

Historically, this feat has been even harder for female-identifying and gender-non-conforming creatives. The now infamous story of 20th-century critic Clement Greenberg dismissing Janet Sobel’s abstract expressionist drip paintings as ‘primitive’, that of a ‘housewife’ paints a picture of exclusion in the arts. It is one of many such stories.

Inspired by the historically overlooked generation of international artists included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940 – 70, which reaches beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and the practice of 2023 Art Icon Award recipient Jenny Holzer, this campaign asks – #HowDoYouMakeSpace?