Women Reclaim the Art World

2008, according to ArtNews, was a notable year for women in the art world. For the first time ever, the Centre Pompidou, the highest grossing, most looked at modern art museum in Paris, turned over its permanent galleries entirely to women artists. Connie Butler, now chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, points out that MoMA is buying more and more work by women. “I think it is on the institutional agenda in a way that it wasn't a few years ago. Things have changed. Obama is president," she said. Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, also reports drastic changes at her museum: "When I started here 20 years ago, the discourse about gender issues was not even present in the museum. Now our contemporary collections are just filled with women artists. We buy what we think is the best work, and it is very often by women." Alongside these notable institutions, the Whitney Museum of American Art has also mounted quite a few retrospectives of women artists in recent years. Art critic Jerry Saltz, writer for New York magazine, created quite a stir on Facebook last May: he counted the pieces by women in MoMA's painting and sculpture galleries and proceeded to accuse the museum of practicing "a form of gender-based apartheid. Of the 383 works currently installed on the 4th and 5th floors of the permanent collection, only 19 are by women; that's 4%. There are 135 different artists installed on these floors; only nine of them are women; that's 6%. MoMA is telling a story of modernism that only it believes." Informal studies like these, done especially by social media outlets, have raised awareness of gender imbalances in the art world. “According to the Brainstormers, there are at least half a dozen New York galleries that are now close to 50-50, including Galerie Lelong, D'Amelio Terras, 303, and PPOW. Lombard-Freid's September show, ‘The Girl Effect,’ featured work by seven international women artists” says ARTnews.

Various female artists mentioned in the ARTnews article:

Louise Bourgeois

Atsuko Tanaka

Artists mentioned in the ARTnews article whom we also exhibit at the GMOA:

Georgia O'Keeffe

Alice Neel