Despite advances made in gender equity for many professions, women in the art world are under-represented in museums --- both on the walls and in the executive suites. But, ideastream’s David C. Barnett reports that this long-established glass ceiling is starting to crack.
“The art market is not sexist. There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness”.
That provocative quote by English art critic Brian Sewell introduces viewers to the “Women to Watch - Ohio” exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Assistant curator Jen Rokoski says she was startled by Sewell’s words.
JEN ROKOSKI: I think what primarily struck me was the date, 2008, being within the last decade, that there are still people out there --- reputable critics --- that believe that women don’t have the ‘aesthetic greatness’ as men.
And there are concerns that such attitudes are shared by a wider audience, says art expert Susan Sterling.
SUSAN STERLING: I can tell you that in the London sales, this past Spring in modern and contemporary art, not a single woman artist was in the top 100.
Sterling directs the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a Washington institution that opened in 1987, dedicated to providing some balance in an art world that has been male-dominated for centuries. The museum cites statistics that 51% of visual artists today are women, but only 5% of work in American museums is by women.
SUSAN STERLING: In the first ten years, I actually believed that we would solve this problem. And that my museum would somehow be folded in to the Smithsonian, the job would be done and I could brush off the dust from my hands and go home. And, I can tell you, that when ten years came around, what I started to look at this museum as was this beacon of light and reason in the world of art.
Last year, the Association of Art Museum Directors released a report that examined a gender imbalance in the leadership of major art museums, using the benchmark of institutions with budgets above 15 million dollars. Among those museums --- whose choice of exhibitions influence the aesthetic taste of the country -- women hold only 24% of director positions, and earn 71cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. Kate Markert was at the meeting when the report came out.
KATE MARKERT: What you had was a lot of women nodding their heads; it just rang very true. I think that people think it’s inevitable that it will change over time, but again, you’ve got entrenched ways of operating that are slow to change.
Markert was deputy director at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the 1990s and became acting director after the sudden death of Robert Bergman in 1999. She now heads the Hillwood Estate Museum in Washington, and she thinks one reason change has been slow is because women of her generation had different priorities.
KATE MARKERT: I think that women who have been in the field for a long time, maybe just weren’t focused on that, because they were focused on their own careers and trying to make their own way. But, I did notice that it was truly the younger women who were pushing for the study, and were more engaged with trying to make change.
After working on the “Women to Watch – Ohio” exhibition, Jen Rokoski says she’s seeing another change --- a change in the way female artists portray their world.
JEN ROKOSKI: None of the artists are really dealing directly with femininity, or being a woman. They’re just doing their thing. They’re making art about what they want to. I think it’s getting out of that first wave feminist idea that women have to celebrate being a woman, and only discuss female issues.
She’s also had a peek at a potential future, from her perspective as a graduate student in art history and museum studies at Case Western Reserve University. Out of the 20 students in her class, only two are men.
--- ideastream is a media sponsor of the “Women to Watch-Ohio” exhibition ---
