“War is central to history. History has been written (and painted) by men. This exhibition provides a platform for women narrators of history and also examines gendered perspectives of war,” said art curator Monika Fabijanska, referring to the exhibit “Women at War” she recently put together, which was on display at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery from January through March 2023.

The exhibit, which featured the work of twelve Ukrainian women artists, originated at the Fridman Gallery in New York City. It included drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, and sculptures that present views of the conflict unlike those that prevail in mainstream media. Many of the pieces vividly depict the current experience of women in wartime Ukraine, while others were created soon after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, the gallery presented a conversation, “Women and Art in a Time of War,” to reflect on meanings of this unique exhibit. Three speakers offered distinctive perspectives. Blair Ruble, a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center who has long studied Russia and Ukraine, placed the work within the context of other contemporary Ukrainian arts, including music, dance, and theatre. He regards culture as one of the major sites of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The war itself, he said, “reflects the deep rejection of Ukrainian cultural identity on the part of Putin, many Russian leaders and many Russian citizens.”

Marta Perez Garcia, a Puerto Rican native who is herself an artist, addressed the war’s violence against women by demonstrating how she has confronted this issue more generally in her own practice. Showing images of an installation she had at the Phillips Collection last year which consisted of a number of headless, unnamed female torsos, she noted that she had left them nameless not to “erase their stories,” but because she “wanted each viewer to make this story their own.”

Art historian Aneta Georgievska-Shine located the exhibit’s creators within the broader tradition of women in the visual arts, noting that they often work out of (and under) protest. She quoted feminist innovator Louise Bourgeois, who once said that “women’s art is an attempt to speak about the unspeakable—what everyone is afraid of looking at, afraid of articulating…”

Throughout history, chroniclers of war assume that women usually remain “behind the lines” and are therefore affected only indirectly by what is occurring on the battlefield. With the Russians bombing cities and invading villages, in today’s Ukraine there is no “behind the lines”—no home front or safety zone for civilians. At the same time, many women choose to join the military, currently constituting some 25 percent of Ukraine’s troops. Whether they have taken up arms or are struggling to survive and protect their families from one day to the next, Ukrainian women are fully involved in this war. The exhibit showed that despite the dire conditions, the artists among them still had the freedom to produce work, and in so doing, were bearing witness to the values their country is fighting for.