SPIRITED is an exhibition in which women continue their struggle to represent themselves. Traditionally excluded form the official histories of art and only recently considered worth half the time of museum and gallery exhibition programmes, art made by women and art made by women on the topics of women’s concerns, is now engendering attention everywhere. Some of the artwork in SPIRITED refers to a revived earth goddess interest. While evidence of worship of the earth goddess has been found around the worked and more and less strong traces are still found scattered about, in recent time the earth goddess has been replaced by male deities. In Europe, earth goddess worship was systematically suppressed by a misogynist clergy. The secular and religious carnivals of today, Christmas, Easter, Mayday, Halloween, and others, have been appropriated by the patriarchy whereas they were formerly celebrations of the earth goddess and featured women. It may be possible to suggest that a contemporary spirituality for women (and not excluding men) involves, among other things, recreating values of peace, ecological awareness, and non-hierarchal non-exploitive cooperative social organization. Not incidentally, many artists who have brought these concerns to art-making are women. SPIRITED was proposed, planned and implemented by the curatorial team of Dawn Dale and Donna Quince, with the assistance of the staff of the gallery. The programming selection process at Gallery 101 is driven by a dynamic of curatorial interest and the exhibition of artwork by women plays an important part of that dynamic. For the past two years it has been an artistic program policy at Gallery 101 to implement a 50/50 male/female representation in gallery exhibitions. Daniel Sharp, G101 Artistic Director