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What is the Matrilineage Symposium?

Mission: The Committee on Women and Art is a progressive feminist group, working to promote women in the arts. We aim to educate ourselves, our peers, and our community about women of all races, classes, sexual identities, and backgrounds. With the support of various Syracuse University departments and organizations, we are able to put on an annual symposium which brings extraordinary writers, visual artists and activists to campus to celebrate and collaborate.

History: The Matrilineage Symposium is an annual two-to-three-week event which seeks to provide a stage for women artists and activists who do not receive the spotlight in mainstream culture. Two painting students, Jennifer Gillespie and Joanna Spitzner, first conceived of the idea and planned the first Matrilineage Symposium in 1991 as part of their Honors Thesis Project. The goal was bring female visual artists to Syracuse campus and thus balance the marginalization of women artists discussed and studied in their classes. In 1992, the Committee on Women and Art was formed to ensure this event continued to be an annual tradition. 15 years later, a committed and passionate group of students continue to plan this gathering of women artists at Syracuse University to give women who may be marginalized in U.S. society a stage for their work. Today, the symposium is not limited to visual artists and instead, the two-to-three-week event now seeks to expose all interested students and community members to a diverse group of women artists and activists. Currently, events may include concerts, lectures, film screenings, art shows, workshops, and discussions by writers, musicians, activists, visual and performing artists.

From Joanna Spitzner's thesis: All the artists participating in Matrilineage have had to deal with and fight an art establishment in which they were marginalized. You can deal with this oppression in your art work, but the very system that you're critiquing can prevent your work from being seen or discussed. You can either work outside of the system, or within it, and there are advantages to both. Writing, curating, programming, etc., are important to art-making not only in a supportive role, but also as part of the process of working, of having a dialogue that begins with yourself and moves into other spheres. So taking on these roles is a way of supporting other artists, and of changing conditions that you find oppressive so that your work can really initiate discussion and really have the impact you want it to have. (Vol IX of 1991-92 Senior Theses, "Creating Conscious," p. 5, available in the Honors Library, 306 Bowne Hall.)