The Art Minute Now Is An Equal Opportunity Blog

The June 2015 issue of ARTnews is dedicated to women in the art world over 40 years after the same magazine published Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The lead article by Maura Reilly reports some quite sobering statistics that reveal that women have made very little progress over the decades. Gender disparity exists in gallery representation, auction prices, press coverage, solo exhibitions, and permanent museum exhibitions. And while there has been modest improvement – for example, in the year 2000 the Guggenheim in New York had zero solo shows by women artists, but in 2014 that number increased to 14 percent – nothing faintly resembling equality exists in the art world today.

The problem is complex, having many sources, but the solution is rather straightforward: people in the art world must be held accountable for the part they play in contributing to the disparity among the genders. As an educator and blogger, I have not given women in the arts equal time and that will change today. As I teach and write about art from all cultures throughout time, I will not always be able to discuss women artists because either there were not many of them or their names are lost to us. In these cases, I will concentrate on images of women, women as viewers, or women as patrons.

I regret that I did not do this much sooner.

Sally Whitman Coleman, Author and Co-Creator of The Art Minute