I know this has nothing to do with art and museums, but it's exactly the same in the theatre world. Female playwrights are WAY LESS produced than male playwrights, which is such a bloody outrage. And yet the fact is-- plays written by female playwrights are just as popular (if not more popular) than plays written by males!!! ENRON, for instance, is currently a megahit in London's West End-- and it's written by a woman.

Marsha Norman (the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright) wrote a fantastic article attacking the theatre world for its sexism.

Please have a read.

http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/nov09/women.cfm

But I love those groovy Guerrilla Girls!

The Guerilla Girls came to my school and I have to agree on their effectiveness. The speech they gave was basically stuff I could have found out on the internet about them and much less about the topic.

I love their posters, but I've seen better speakers.

"wonder if their antics entertain the choir more than challenging the power brokers" (whistles, averts eyes)

Aw they were my inspiration when I was 13 and discovering both art and feminism! I agree it can be a bit frustrating when institutions just don't change no matter how clever the protestations. Still, one thing I remember that puts it into perspective that I learned in a class on American photography was that photography is one of the few artistic mediums, because of it's newness, that women are represented among "the greats" in roughly equal numbers to men. And generally I do see women in greater numbers in more contemporary exhibits, so maybe all is not hopeless?

Some of the big forces ensuring the limited role of women in contemporary art are simply structural and education (one that may sound like an extreme version of the 2nd wave-3rd wave issue):

Feminist art was pigeonholed by art historians as a 1970s movement. Therefore, it was avant garde 40 years ago and therefore noteworthy, but in contemporary art, everything has a shelf-life. There, however inappropriately, attempts to make feminist art today are seen as dated because "feminist art" has supposedely run its course like minimalism or earth art or the other 70s movements. This is of course absurd. Analogizing a social consciousness art movement to say, abstract expressionism, which was about specific artistic theories, is fundamentally flawed--but it makes catagorization of art history much easier. And art history educates curators, museum goers, art collectors and art critics and helps create this viscious cycle.

Pardon your resident grammar maven here, but I must point out that "Gorilla Girls in Canada" and "Gorilla Girls are at it again" require no apostrophe. Apostrophes signify possession. The only time they should be used in a plural is when using a number or acronym (the 70's, CD's) and even in those cases many style manuals are phasing out the apostrophe.

I am still steaming after I found out there was a female Teenage Ninja Turtle named VENUS DE MILO. Note that the other Ninja turtles are named after Renassance artists, why couldn't they name her after Artemisia Gentileschi? She painted a picture of the Biblical hero Judith slaying Holofernes. Even before I learned this, I learned from the cartoon as child: women are art subjects not the artist. Support women in the arts!!!

Oooh I went to Acadia! Fun to see a shout-out. Wish I could've been there to see the Girls.

They were recently at West Virginia State University, and I really have to say that it was quite enlightening to some people in the audience. I love my state, but even the nice guys in the art dept. were be a little slow to realize just how underrepresented their fellow female artists really are.

While they didn't really 'challenge the power brokers' with their slides and talk, they really opened the eyes of some of my classmates and that is worth a lot to me and the other women in the art department at WVSU and Marshall University that night!

They're coming to Montreal during the against violence against women week in early December

I wonder what the statistics would be if just contemporary art museums were taken into account. I feel lucky here in San Diego where the Museum of Contemporary Art regularly shows women artists. Right now there's a solo Tara Donovan show, for example, and there was also recently a trilogy of exhibitions that only showed art by women (and not for that specific gender intent, but based on themes of the art.) Not to mention all of the curators are women.

Also related, I just read this interview with artist Tracy Emin, who talks about the necessity of feminism in the art world: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/33201/tracey-emin/

And, to second Toongrrl, Artemisia Gentilleschi was seriously bad-ass!

Easy fix, female artists just claim their work was created while they were naked? Loophole, amirite?

Jokes aside. Is the MET collection composed of more "classical" artists? This is pulling from MySpoonIsTooBig's statement about contemporary artists recieving representation.

I don't suppose the fact that the Met holds a lot of classical art, which due to sexism in various cultures over the ages, tends to have been made by males, would have anything to do with that < 3% figure?

Are they supposed to pretend that history has been fair to women?

here's more local coverage of the event, from yours truly: http://herenb.canadaeast.com/news/article/809537