Museums offer “mea culpa” and showcase multimedia women artists

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts dedicates a floor to women’s art. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, a yearlong program of exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions by female-identified artists is being mounted for 2020. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) mounts an exhibit showcasing the work of printmaker and found artist Betye Saar focused on her 1969 autobiographical work Black Girl’s Window.

These are only a few of the museums in the U.S. committed to correcting the omissions of the past with regard to acquiring, exhibiting, and honoring women artists. They are joined by other institutions, galleries, and university-based arts venues across the country working collaboratively with the Feminist Art Coalition, a grassroots organization, to present a series of concurrent events including exhibitions, performances, and lectures in the fall to ensure women are recognized at the museum level at election time.

Internationally, museums including Madrid’s Prado, featuring two overlooked 16th-century female painters in celebration of the museum’s 200th anniversary, are also recognizing the historical inequality pervasive in the male-dominated art world. Elsewhere in Europe, 2019 saw major exhibits of women’s art. Austrian painter Maria Lassnig posthumously received her first retrospective at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Louise Bourgeois’ 1969 sculpture, ”Harmless Woman” was featured at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Barbican Art Gallery in London gave artist Lee Krasner and photographer Dora Maar their due.

This represents progress, but there are still issues to be addressed. In 2018, 96% of artwork sold at auction was by male artists, and 30% of artists represented by commercial galleries in the U.S. were women. A recent survey of permanent collections in 18 major art museums in the United States found that out of over 10,000 artists, 87% were male and 85% were white. And only 27 women out of 318 artists are represented in the 9th edition of Janson’s Basic History of Western Art, up from zero in the 1980s.

Against that backdrop, the work of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in recognizing women’s overlooked place in art, and its public mea culpa, is significant. Its extensive third-floor exhibition of women’s art, Women Take the Floor, is a stellar showcase that “seeks to acknowledge and remedy the systemic gender discrimination found in museums, galleries, the academy and the marketplace, including the MFA’s inconsistent history in supporting women’s art.” The various exhibit spaces include paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, jewelry, textiles, ceramics, and furniture, all created by women artists, some recognized and others whose work has been obscured. Among the gallery displays are exhibits with themes like Women Depicting Women, Women on the Move: Art and Design, Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture, Women Publish Women: The Print Boom, and Women of Action. On view until May 3, 2021, the artwork is augmented by educational programs including a video of Boston’s poet laureate, Porsha Olauiwola, performing one of her poems, a set of artist demonstrations, and a program of musical works by Ottoman-Turkish women composers.

“Our goals are to celebrate the strength and diversity of work by women artists while also shining a light on the ongoing struggle that many continue to face today. This is a first step to redress the systemic discrimination against women at the MFA and within the art world,” says Nonie Gadsden, a senior curator who led a cross-departmental team of curators in organizing Women Take the Floor.

The entrance wall to Women Take the Floor is filled with quotes by and about women artists, for example:

“Indeed so often just talking about sexism as well as racism is heard as damaging the institution. If talking about sexism and racism is heard as damaging institutions, we need to damage institutions,” from author and scholar Sara Ahmed.

Also noteworthy is the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions by female-identifying artists taking place throughout 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Launched in the fall of 2019, 2020 Vision encompasses 16 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows. Highlights include a large-scale commission, a major monographic survey of Joan Mitchell’s career, and an exploration of recent video works. Several galleries will be reinstalled to emphasize the depth and diversity of women’s artistry through time.

BMA points out that 2020 Vision is part of the museum’s broader ongoing mission to address race and gender diversity gaps within the museum field, and to represent more fully and deeply the spectrum of individuals that have shaped the trajectory of art. The initiative augments the museum’s ongoing efforts to expand its presentations of female-identifying artists and artists of color, while the acquisition strategy serves to further acknowledge that women have yet to attain equal representation at major museums.

“2020 Vision serves to recognize the voices, narratives, and creative innovations of a range of extraordinarily talented women artists,” says Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “While the BMA has been actively collecting the work of women for many years, thanks in part to the many female leaders that have shaped this museum, we are redressing centuries of imbalance to ensure that women-identified artists and artists of color are better represented in our collection and in our understanding of art history.”

The recognition of women artists didn’t happen in a vacuum. Advocates, activists, and feminist art critics have worked for decades to make it happen. None is more respected than the late Linda Nochlin, whose pioneering essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?” published in 1971, was groundbreaking. As Nochlin collaborator Maura Reilly has pointed out, “This canonical essay precipitated a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history.” Reilly described the work as “a dramatic feminist rally cry.”

Then there are the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminist activist artists founded in 1985, who wear gorilla masks and remain anonymous as they work internationally mounting street projects, postering and stickering wherever they find discrimination, gender and ethnic bias, and corruption. Recently, with help from Art in Ad Places, they placed a poster on a phone booth in front of MoMA in New York calling out the museum for its ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and other big donors. They’ve also reframed Linda Nochlin’s critical question: “Why haven’t more women been considered great artists throughout western history?”

Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., founded more than 30 years ago, offers an answer. “Museums, in general, mirror the power structures in our society, structures that in the arts privilege the history of white men’s accomplishments.” NMWA is the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. It honors women artists of the past, promotes women artists in the present, and assures the place of women artists in the future. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, located within the Brooklyn Museum, also deserves attention as an institution that has been devoted for over a decade solely to feminist art. These two institutions have long recognized and honored the work of women artists. Now, hopefully, larger institutions are promising to do the same.