Artist and art professor Anne Walsh has raised the issue of better representation for women artists in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and she’s doing it right in the museum’s back yard, which is to say on SFMoMA’s blog, Open Space, where she is a columnist.
In one post, on April 13, she took senior curator Gary Garrels to task about SFMoMA‘s fourth floor, Focus on Artists, a permanent collection installation.
15 male artists own the majority of linear and cubic gallery-feet, 3 female artists have the rest. And of those three women, at least two could be called twofers: they’re the only artists of color in the entire installation, and they’re women! (Here I am referring to Doris Salcedo and Kara Walker. If, in ignorance, I’ve overlooked someone, please correct me.)
Garrels didn’t blow Walsh off, but he didn’t provide a satisfying response either — he noted that many decisions on this had been made before he became curator and that SFMoMA’s collection is not a “comprehensive” one and therefore lacks work by women.
Yet asked whose work by women he’d like to show in this installation, he answered only one — Joan Mitchell.
Walsh also notes:
Early in our conversation, Garrels averred that there are so many strong women artists working today, that he can tend to forget that the stakes are still uneven for male and female artists.
Then why answer with just one choice when pressed? Makes no sense — it’s one way or the other, not both.
To help Garrels out, Walsh has a made a little list, of dozens of women artists whose names she’d like to see on SFMoMA’s shopping list “so that at SFMoMA’s 100 year anniversary, things might look a little different for women, and for us all.” (This is its 75th anniversary.) Too bad Walsh herself labeled it a “fantasy.”
Here’s the link to her post, with the list. It’s ID’d as Part 1, and I’m looking forward to the next one, which hasn’t appeared yet.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of SFMoMA