Breaking Out of the Art World's Sexism

Call it the year of the woman ... in the visual arts! With symposiums, heavy-hitting shows on the East and West Coast, and a smattering of smaller exhibits around the country all dedicated to feminist art happening now, it's a veritable gender insurgency waged on the hallowed white walls of the art world.

A small fraction of the timing was mere serendipity. That's what curator Connie Butler says anyway about "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," a survey of international feminist art produced during the 1970s, on view now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She conceived of the show over a decade ago, she says, when she noticed emerging artists, like Matthew Barney, referencing the work of that period "with no real understanding of the history."

The rest of this confluence was pure conspiracy. Activist patrons, artists, curators, and scholars organized these events to make a big publicity splash. And the Feminist Art Project (FAP) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, initiated in late 2005 by Judy Chicago and the late feminist art writer Arlene Raven, was its fountainhead. Organizers there are promoting feminist art's reach through 2009 with a series of publications, symposia, and exhibitions.

No wonder then that Chicago's iconic second-wave paean, The Dinner Party, finally found a permanent home this month at the Brooklyn Museum as it just unveiled The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, a founding program partner of the FAP. The Sackler Center -- the first museum space devoted solely to feminist art -- also inaugurates the touring show, "Global Feminisms," an unprecedented compilation of contemporary transnational feminist art, by curators Maura Reilly, on the FAP's national committee, and Linda Nochlin, well-known art historian on the FAP's honorary board.

But this bluestocking barrage is an anomaly. While it is a step in the right direction, this glittering year of feminist art stands in stark contrast to the agglomeration of years past, which reveals an art world deeply in thrall to man-made art.

"Feminist art for complex reasons gets marginalized and doesn't get the central place it deserves, so to overwhelm that is really a brilliant move," said Carey Lovelace, art critic and author of the upcoming book, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail: The Women's Movement in Art, 1968-2006. "Judy Chicago has a sense of history," Lovelace continued, and these shows "get people to really look at feminist art."

Like Chicago, the present informs Butler's sense of history, too. "I think that certainly the cultural climate is so conservative at the moment, that people are nostalgic for a period when real social change was possible," said Butler. "And I think that conservatism in the art world has something to do with it."

Like Life

That art world conservatism is a miniature replica of real world conservatism is not surprising. Feminist writers often point out the relative lack of women's bylines in major national magazines compared to men. And progressive political activists who want more women in public office often see the major Sunday talk shows -- a crucial way to attract voter support -- dominated by male candidates. The litany of complaints by feminist artists, art historians, and curators is strikingly similar. Museums are notoriously conservative. New York galleries show mostly men. Women artists as renowned as Raphael in their time -- have you ever heard of Angelica Kauffmann? -- are all but erased from art history.

Despite this, quite a few people are noticing, including Maura Reilly, and doing something about it. Reilly's catalogue essay for "Global Feminisms" is a testament to taking heed. She marshals all the right dissenting voices. One is Village Voice writer Jerry Saltz, who has written extensively on sexism and art. In 2005, one year after the Museum of Modern Art reopened in New York, Saltz examined the artwork and found gross under-representation of women artists. "Of the approximately 410 works in the fourth-and-fifth-floor galleries, only a paltry 16 are by women," he wrote, a mere 4 percent.