Where Are The Women?
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under Arts/Culture, Women | Comments Off on Where Are The Women?
The collective Guerrilla Girls was founded in 1985 with a mission to bring attention to issues of gender and race within the art world. Through posters and public actions, hard facts and a bit of humor they have confronted inequality in major museums and Hollywood.
In 1985 they picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At that time MoMa was running a show that purported to be the definitive survey of contemporary painting and sculpture, and only 13 of the 169 artists featured were women. Nobody really paid any attention to the Guerilla Girls so, why they put on their masks – and they haven’t taken them off since.
The Guerrilla Girls have publicized that only 3% of artworks exhibited in the Met’s Modern Art galleries are made by women. Conversely, 90% of the Met’s solo exhibitions consisted of work by white male artists. The Brooklyn Museum weighs in at 23%, which is less than the Whitney’s 30% but more than both the Tate Modern and the L.A. County Museum at 2% each.
New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz laments that as recent as 2005, only 16 out of 410 works on display (that’s less than 0.04%) at the 4th and 5th floors of MoMA were made by women artists. Furthermore, only 17% of the artists shown in New York galleries, according to Saltz’s count, are women. The perception that things have gotten better for women artists is false. It’s even worse for non-white artists. The numbers in some cases have actually gotten worse since the ’70s.
Women make up more than 50% of the population in the U.S. and 60% of students in art schools are now women. So, it’s logical that 50-60% of the artists showing in galleries, art magazines, and museums ought to be women. Museums and institutions are supported by our tax dollars. We deserve to be fairly represented!
