The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Author:Katy Hessel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989

Guerrilla Girls, How Many Women Artists Had One-Person Exhibitions In NYC Art Museums Last Year?, 1985

Disruptive from the get-go, telling me, ‘Women artists were excited and empowered, and everyone else was really pissed off!’, the group targeted both individuals and institutions. And they were right to, considering the statistics in their 1985 poster How Many Women Artists Had One-Person Exhibitions In NYC Art Museums Last Year? states the Guggenheim had zero, the Met had zero, the Whitney had zero and The Modern (now MoMA) had one. That same year they asked, What Do These Artists Have In Common? Listing the names of forty-two male artists, the Guerrilla Girls added: ‘They allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10 per cent women artists or none at all.’ The facts were real, and the Guerrilla Girls continued to make noise.

Making fun of the lack of support and opportunity given to women artists, in 1988 they created a poster aptly titled, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist – revealing the disadvantages of being a woman artist – and in 1989 began questioning the abundance of nude female bodies versus the women artists on view at the Met. The results? ‘Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.’ Revisiting the statistics in 2012, they found that little had improved: ‘Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76 % of the nudes are female.’ Let’s just say they’re still fighting inequalities to this day.

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