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Flying the flag

Historically, major art galleries have overlooked women artists. Things are changing – but it’s a slow process
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“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” asked the Guerrilla Girls, the self-styled “Conscience of the Art World”, in 1989, via a gigantic billboard poster.

Though the poster was quickly banned from public hoardings, the masked activist collective arranged for it to appear on the side of New York buses instead.

Today, copies of the poster are in public collections, including those of Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and recently the Guerrilla Girls have been in residence at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, deploying their wit, as ever, in the service of diversity.

The representation of women in major art galleries in 1989 was, indeed, dire. What’s changed since then?

There are some reasons to be cheerful, as female visibility at the top of the power structures in museums has never been greater. Maria Balshaw, who runs the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries, takes over from Nicholas Serota as the director of all the Tate galleries in June.

This follows Frances Morris replacing Chris Dercon as the director of Tate Modern in early 2016. Also last year, Kathryn Thomson took over from Tim Cooke as the chief executive of National Museums Northern Ireland, which holds a collection of 11,000 artworks. And this month, Jennifer Scott will become the director of London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, replacing Ian Dejardin.

Morris welcomes these developments, seeing the increasing prominence of women as a sign of growing equality.

“Women are slowly becoming more fairly represented in arts institutions at all levels professionally and this is bound to make a difference,” she says.

Lydia Yee, the chief curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, agrees: “Women in leadership roles are, as a matter of course, going to think about how they, as women, are being reflected in the boardroom, the staff, and the artists on display.”

Hard earned

In terms of the big prizes, women are coming out on top, too. In 2016, the British sculptor Helen Marten carried off the first Hepworth Prize for Sculpture and the Turner Prize, while the London-based Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic won the Mac International Ulster Bank Prize. In Florence, the Uffizi Galleries promised to show more women’s work; and last October the Saatchi Gallery in London put on its first all-female group show.

Museums and galleries are making a concerted effort to represent women’s history in their displays and programming, and major retrospective exhibitions in venues across the UK are more frequently devoted to female artists. And while it is still the case that only two female artists are represented among the top 100 most expensive artworks ever sold, progress is being made.

Italian art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the founder and president of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, says that she has seen the status of female artists improve hugely since she started collecting in the early 1990s.

“Talking about female artists is so differ- ent from the 1990s compared with today,” says Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. “At the time, it was not easy for female artists to show their work and to get attention from the public.”

In recent years, women artists have gained a much higher profile in galleries, worldwide, but there’s still a way to go. “I was surprised, but it is true, that work by women artists is still less expen- sive than work by men,” says Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, whose foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. “When you go into a gallery or a museum you don’t see that, but something is still different between the status of male and female artists.”

Yee points out that entrenched curatorial methods in many major institutions have been influenced by their historic collecting practices, which have tended to favour male artists.
“There are improvements [in these practices], in Europe and the US, and there is an effort to redress imbalances,” she says.

She sees the smaller institutions, rather than large national museums, as having more flexibility to do this. But Yee says that the pace of change is slow. Morris points out that while many women have made groundbreaking work, they haven’t been properly represented by galleries, and so haven’t entered the marketplace in the same way as many of their male counterparts.

“Aside from gender discrimination and neglect on the part of museums, the market has been particularly slow to embrace change as there are so many vested interests supporting the status quo,” Morris says. “Part of what we have been doing at Tate Modern is deliberately redressing the balance by drawing attention to some of those who have been overlooked.

“A number of really major artists we are working with have built their careers without dealer support,” Morris continues. “Many have made very innovative work but used unconventional materials and processes that arguably make gallery representation – and sales – more challenging. We are presenting women in over 50% of the solo and dialogue displays at the gallery. Artists such as Phyllida Barlow from the UK, Jane Alexander from South Africa, Ana Lupas from Romania, Magdalena Abakanowicz from Poland and Sheela Gowda from India all deserve far greater prominence.

“We are beginning to explore a much big- ger history of art, foregrounding the contribution made by the many women who have been overlooked. It’s about being committed to recognising the achievements of women in the arts and about bringing these artists out of the shadows.”

Yee also identifies the art market as the biggest brake on the careers of female artists, with mid-career women being hardest hit. “There are a few exceptions,” she says, “but because the value of their work still tends to be lower, the commercial galleries are less likely to promote them.”

Grants, such as the Jerwood Makers Open and Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries (both for early-career artists) provide a partial remedy in as much as they raise the profiles of emerging artists early in their careers, but the mid-career artists often need commercial support. Above all, Yee says, institutions and private collections need to be encouraged to collect women’s art. It would help change the shape of the market.

The media plays a role as well – often focusing on the big names at the expense of less well-known artists. Yee points to the Whitechapel’s current exhibitions as a good example of programming that goes against this trend.

Terrains of the Body: Photographs from the National Museum of Women in the Arts (until 16 April) includes works by big-name female artists such as Marina Abramovic, Nan Goldin and Shirin Neshat, drawn from the museum in Washington DC.

Running alongside that is Medium Median, a commission from the emerging Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade, which delves into the complex subject of space and time (until 25 June). The Guerrilla Girls show, Is It Even Worse In Europe?, ended last month. The main exhibition space, however, is devoted to a male artist, Eduardo Paolozzi.

Hot topic

The rapidly changing political environment in the UK and the US has given impetus to a new wave of protest, including the many women’s marches held earlier this year. Will this unleash a new wave of creativity, as happened in the 1980s when social conservatism stimulated responses from activist artists such as Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer and David Wojnarowicz?

“It’s important that this [1980s work] is seen again and that it serves as a model for younger generations,” Yee says. She was heartened by the number of students who, after visiting the Whitechapel Gallery recently, have begun to view their own institutions and arts courses through the critical lenses offered by the Guerrilla Girls.

Art has always had the potential to be radical and socially engaged, notes Morris, and museums such as Tate Modern have the potential to encourage reflection and debate through art.

“Artists and audiences alike are responding to our present crisis in many forceful ways,” she says. “One of Tate’s most ambitious projects this year – Tate Exchange – manifestly embraces this uncertainty and desire to respond. We are working with more than 50 institutions, and the public, to look at the value of art to society.

“Through the prism of art, and working with artists themselves, the Tate Exchange project is examining some of the most challenging and topical issues of the day such as migration, homelessness and identity,” Morris continues. “I hope we are doing this in a way that speaks outside the echo-chamber of the museum, inviting participation from broad and diverse audiences.”

Street smart

So are global political events helping to reinvigorate women’s art? The recent women’s marches across the world suggest that this wave of protest is gathering energy, though any art produced in response to this movement has often been seen on the street rather than in galleries. But museums have been responding. In the US, the Smithsonian’s National

Museum of American History in Washington DC, and the Newberry Library in Chicago are just two of the many cultural organisations collecting banners, placards and badges from the first women’s march, held in the UK and US on 21 January, to ensure that these items survive for posterity.

In the UK, curators have also recognised the historical importance of these protest marches and the immediacy of its representation. Stef Dickers, the special collections and archives manager at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, has been gathering posters and digital photos from the January march, an activity in line with the institute’s policy of collecting protest material.

Dickers didn’t march himself (he was giving a lecture that day), but his colleague Nicky Hill, Bishopsgate’s digital archives manager, did. “She was tweeting from the march and asking for people to donate signs and photos,” Dickers says.

“There were some really wonderful placards there – some of the best I have ever seen in terms of wit and imagery. The focus was to demonstrate opposition to Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated as president of the US the day before, but the protest took in many other concerns, including climate change and LGBTQ issues. We need to make sure that this history survives.”

So far, the institute has taken delivery of some 50 placards and a few hundred digital photos of the London march: these have joined an archive that includes material going back to the suffragettes, but also takes in more recent protests such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Unite Against Fascism and, from last year, the Focus E15 campaign for social housing in east London. Dickers hopes that the Bishopsgate Institute will be able to organise an exhibition about the women’s march later this year.

Curators at Museums Sheffield were similarly inspired by the march, including Louisa Briggs, the project curator of Sheffield: Protest & Activism, a two-year initia- tive that began in August 2016. So far the scheme has collected pussyhats (the pink hats with cat ears worn by women’s rights protesters, in reference to Donald Trump’s remarks about grabbing women’s crotches), T-shirts and placards, as a way of linking Sheffield with wider historical events.

“Although Sheffield has a rich history of activism, it isn’t really reflected in the col- lections here and we want to address that,” Briggs says. “As well as looking at historical protests, the project is also about collecting what’s happening now. Protests such as the women’s march and the marches against Trump’s state visit, which both connect the city to national and international concerns, are a really important part of documenting what’s happening now and saving it for future generations.”

The material will feature in two major exhibitions next year, at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery and Weston Park Museum, marking the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which gave women the vote for the first time.

Representation is always preceded by activism, which means that a feminist- informed collecting and curatorial practice is surely about more than loading a gallery with female-authored art. If feminism is a dialogue about structural power, then a gallery operating on feminist principles should work to ensure the representation of artists from all kinds of communities.

Rachel Anderson and Cis O’Boyle, the instigators of the Idle Women project (see box) think that many all-women shows are tokenistic and don’t lead to lasting change. The problem, they argue, lies in old structures that entrench privilege and preserve the status quo: “Idle Women is committed to working with only women, 50% of whom are BME,” says a statement from Anderson and O’Boyle.

“We prioritise women of working-class backgrounds and those most marginalised by the patriarchy. It may be a difficult commitment to navigate at first, but it is incredibly rewarding, energising and expansive. If all arts institutions made this commitment, things would change immediately. But it has to be a real commitment.”

Part of that commitment involves not just considering what’s exhibited and by whom, but putting in place a constructive and progressive employment policy. This might lead to real, long-lasting change.


Idle Women take to the water

In 2014, Rachel Anderson and Cis O’Boyle met while working for the arts commissioning organisation Artangel, Anderson as a producer, O’Boyle as a collaborative performance maker and lighting designer. Both worked on a house-based installation by the artist Saskia Olde Wolbers. It just so happened that the on-site creative team was all female and the experience was galvanising for them.

“There was genuine collaboration without hierarchy,” says a statement from Anderson and O’Boyle. “We had a great time, but it left us with a feeling of bereavement that told us that this was a very rare set of circumstances.”

Thinking about how they might work to redistribute the power of arts production, the two founded Idle Women, an arts-commissioning organisation committed to working with only women, with priority given to those in marginal communities.

Its first initiative, Idle Women (On the Water), is a two-year, canal- based project housed on a 55-foot refurbished narrowboat named after the suffragette and trade unionist Selina Cooper. It was launched on 8 March 2016, International Women’s Day. The scheme is funded by Arts Council England’s strategic touring programme, with support from the Canal & River Trust and Super Slow Way, an arts commissioning project based in Lancashire.

The boat was refurbished with the help of Humraaz, a Blackburn-based organisation that provides refuge from domestic violence for black and mixed ethnic women, and the art and design practice Muf Architecture/Art in east London. The narrowboat is now a gallery and living space for artists in residence, starting with Martina Mullaney.

So far, Idle Women (On the Water) has visited Burnley, Accrington and Nelson, leaving a number of community events and projects in its wake. The boat will be in Mirfield, just outside Dewsbury in Yorkshire, until May 2017. This grassroots form of arts activism is intended to empower the communities it visits. An Anderson and O’Boyle statement says: “It’s our creative response to the frustrations, to the shrinking lack of opportunities, safety and support. It’s also our commitment to our conviction and belief in women who we see thrive in spite of violence against them.”

Louise Gray is a freelance writer. The Bishopsgate Institute’s call for placards and photos from the Women’s March in London is still open. Email: library@bishopsgate.org.uk


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