His story of art

The conscience of the art world and why there just don't seem to be any great women artists represented in museums.

History of wealth and power /// Guerrilla Girls (c)

If you have ever seen posters depicting part-human, part-gorilla creatures advocating women's and POC's rights in the art world - you know them, or at least know of them. They call themselves the conscience of the art world: the Guerrilla Girls. Their members hold pseudonyms of immensely talented but underappreciated female artists of the past (like Alma Thomas, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel) and wear gorilla masks to most public outings-all for the sake of staying anonymous. They explain this decision by stating that "Our anonymity keeps the focus on the issues, and away from who we might be: we could be anyone and we are everywhere."

There not being any distinct, recognizable faces behind the group creates a certain sense of surveillance within the art world that has the purpose of constant accountability. "We could be working at the MoMA or even at Leo Castelli's gallery. We wanted to create this idea that the art world was being watched, surveilled and scrutinized" Käthe Kollwitz said in an interview.

Masked avengers of the art world

Their most recognizable pieces are posters that have been plastered across advertisement spaces, billboards, and buses worldwide. One of their most notorious posters depicts a reclining nude female body with a gorilla head on a yellow background, seemingly accentuating the message that asks, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."

Another 1985 street poster raises the question "How many women had one-person exhibitions at NYC museums last year?" and gives the unsurprising but not less disappointing answer "Guggenheim-0, Metropolitan-0, Modern-1, Whitney-0".

How the girls became guerrillas 

The year was 1984, and the MOMA in New York City had just opened the exhibition of the year: the so-called International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. Shockingly (not really), this exhibit supposedly giving an even broader platform to the world's most outstanding artists barely included any women artists, and even fewer women artists of color (none, actually). The show's curator at the time added to the outrage by stating that "..any artists who weren't in the show should rethink his career". Reactionary to this lack of representation, a demonstration called WAVE (The Women's Artists Visibility Event) was held. But after there was an unfortunate but predictable lack of success of the protest, several participants felt a particular overbearing desire for change, and so "The Guerilla Girls" were born.  

Of course, the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture was more of a trigger point for the indignation these women felt rather than the actual basis of it. Women artists have always been devalued in art history, one of the reasons for that being the role women held in the last centuries. The present social structures prevented women from joining art academies and having the possibility of creating significant artworks. Just imagine a 19th century woman being confronted with a male nude. How unseemly!

Guerrilla Girls (c)

In fact, women were discouraged from pursuing any kind of career or education in the first place. The evolving but ever-present social standards regarding a women's role in society have been (and still are) a big hurdle for female artists of any kind. 

Seemingly, the only way to get out of the shadows in the art world as a woman was to be related to or have a close connection to a prominent male artist. This includes most well-known female artists of the past like Marietta Robusti (daughter of Tintoretto), Mary Cassatt (close friend of Degas), Artemisia Gentileschi (Orazio Gentileschis daughter), and Berthe Morisot (Manet's sister-in-law). 

Nevertheless, when we speak of 18th/19th century (and earlier) art, it’s unlikely that museums are simply hiding away great paintings created by women in their basements, refusing to showcase them. The fact of the matter is, there really aren't any female equivalents to Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or even to Vincent Van Gogh or Claude Monet. But it would be naive to say that the cause of this is that women just weren't capable of creating great art. The few examples of prominent women artists we do have quickly disprove that, and when you dive deeper than just the tip of the iceberg that this article covers, it becomes even more evident.

Stale, pale, male perspective 

The complexity of this issue is obvious, but while the reasoning behind the absent female representation of artists of the past few centuries has a fairly comprehensible, while not less angering history behind it, there does not seem to be any reasonable cause for the current lack of women in the art world other than deeply-rooted sexist social structures and paradigms. Even in the current era of accountability and diversity (oftentimes performative and strictly for commercial purposes), things aren't looking much better than when the Guerilla Girls first started advocating for these issues 40 years ago. As a recent study shows, only 13.7% of living artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America are women. The modern art world still has a long way to go until it reaches parity, and substantial change is long overdue. For Art History to accurately depict the past, it must include the voices of significant groups other than white men. As the Guerilla Girls have once accurately stated, "You're seeing less than half the picture without the vision of women artists and artists of color."