‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” asked a 1989 artwork by the Guerrilla Girls, the all-female-identifying activist artist collective. A valid question considering, as the work went on to point out: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” When the Guerrilla Girls went to revisit these statistics in 2012, they found that little had changed: “Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.”
So what about today? In 2023, Marina Abramović made headlines, not for her performance art but, shockingly, as the first female artist to have a solo exhibition in all the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London. The same institution, founded 256 years ago, today opens its first ever solo exhibition dedicated to a female artist working prior to the 19th century: Angelica Kauffman.
While the gender imbalance in museums remains visibly prevalent, improvements are in sight. This is thanks to many factors – from the feminist scholars who have been tirelessly working for decades to pressure from the public – that have no doubt influenced the way museums collect today. Then there’s the number of people – and women, for the first time – who hold powerful positions in institutions, who are conscious about gender representation. Because, if an institution continues to shirk such progressive measures and simply celebrates the history of patriarchy as opposed to the history of art, not only will it become irrelevant, it will also be starving its visitors of great art.
While nothing drastic can happen overnight, what we can do is take action – in whatever we have available to us – to accelerate the steps to equality. To build on the important work museums and its workers have been doing, I have created an audio guide project, Museums Without Men (MWM), which launches today to coincide with the beginning of Women’s History Month.
MWM turns a spotlight on artworks by women and gender nonconforming artists in collections worldwide. The initial guides will be released throughout March, partnering with institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate Britain and the Hepworth Wakefield. They are designed for any level of art enthusiast, and aim to celebrate and highlight important work by names who might be less known to some audiences – as well as explain the extreme lengths some of these artists had to go to just to make their work.
On the Metropolitan Museum of Art trail, I look at Rosa Bonheur and her colossal painting, The Horse Fair, 1852–5. Five metres wide, it towers over its neighbours in a room of mostly female nudes by male artists, and depicts a viscerally lifelike scene of horses and riders charging round a corner. At the time it was made, The Horse Fair was the largest painting devoted to the subject of animals (a genre popular with women because of the strict rules that kept them from the life room) and required Bonheur – at a male-dominated event – to request a permit from the French authorities just to wear trousers, so as not be recognisable as a woman.
At the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, I will guide viewers into a free-of-charge room, full of delicate, looped wire sculptures by the American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2012). Hanging in the air, they are an enrapturing sight. As well as being a great artist – who only had her first UK museum exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2022 – Asawa was also a great educator. She paved the way for affordable arts education in San Francisco and, in 1982, founded the first public arts school in the city – renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010, in her honour.
Art history traces the history of the world in visual form (often) from an individual’s perspective. . My hope is that this is just the beginning of a project that opens people’s eyes to artists they might not have known about, revealing stories that speak to humanity and show us a different perspective. My aim is for MWM to be active around the world, and while I always encourage people to go into museums, I also want them to look that little bit further – hunt for the work by women and gender nonconforming artists, and subsequently realise how much more work there is to be done. Ultimately, the aim is to show people of all backgrounds, genders and ages that they too can be part of this conversation – perhaps the people who will one day see their art hanging on these hallowed walls.
