THE ART WORLD: A GENDERED INSTITUTION

long form article written and researched by Emily Blake

Women and Leadership in the Gendered Institution of Fine Art

The Whitney Biennial exhibition is considered a benchmark of artists most relevant to the canon of modern American artists and the “most pressing concerns facing the U.S. at that specific historical moment” (Slatkin, Chap.93, p. 34). However, in 1993 (a year thought to be diverse), 36.4% of artists were white male, 29.5% were white female, 22.7% were males of color, and 11.4% were female of color (Slatkin, Chap. 93, p. 45). These statistics are recorded from a time when the feminist art movement was well underway. Knowing this, we must explore the institutional and cultural barriers to women being accepted and canonized in visual arts.

I seek to explore how women artists like Judy Chicago do and undo gender in order to establish a place for women artists in the formal art world (reputable art institutions/ museums). How does the world/industry of visual [fine] art illustrate how it was historically built for men? To use Joan Acker’s as a theoretical framework, how does art fit within her definition of a gendered institution? In order to answer these questions, I will analyze the niche of being a “woman artist” in terms of how and why art is treated differently institutionally when the producer is a woman, supporting how fine art as a gendered institution has historically centered men. I will analyze Judy Chicago and her work as a major example of a feminist art pioneer to analyze how Chicago does and undoes gender in Deutsch’s terms and the implications of that approach for women artists after her. I will explore the makeup of artists within the Whitney Biennial across time as an institutional measure that shows how the art world now has more women, though is not completely racially or intersectionally diverse and equitable in different ways. I will conclude that as long as the state of women in leadership in art is not addressed, the default fine artist will continue to be male and non-intersectional, bringing my analysis of the state of women and leadership in the gendered institution of the art world back to Joan Acker’s proposal for a equitable, non-gendered institution where women artists do not exist only on the periphery of the canon.

In her groundbreaking 1971 article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” art historian Linda Nochlin quotes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: “professional activities and assures them of “well-rounded” assistance on the homefront, so they can have sex and family in addition to the fulfillment of their own specialized talents at the same time.” Nochlin's influential 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” sparked an intense discussion concerning the obstacles and opportunities for women artists since the Renaissance (Slatkin, Chap.93, Nochlin, 1988). This search for role models culminated in a major traveling exhibition organized by Nochlin and Anne Sutherland Harris, Women Artists: 1550–1950, with its accompanying scholarly catalog in 1976 (Slatkin, Chap.93). Friedan’s slogan “the personal is political” inspired a number of women artists to break away from the art-historical canon boundaries of modernist abstraction and begin to incorporate more autobiographical references to their experiences as women, images of the female body, spiritual icons of a “Great Goddess,” and other new concepts into the visual arts. The feminist art movement of the 1970s broke the hold of modernism and expanded options for all artists and redefined what it meant to be a woman artist by incorporating their gender identity into their approach to fine art (Slatkin, Chap. 93).

Judy Chicago is widely acknowledged as one of the leaders of the feminist art movement of the 1970s that included this aforementioned unapologetic and distinct approach to leadership informed by experiences of womanhood, largely seen in her major 1974 installation The Dinner Party. The work is composed of a large triangular table set on a raised platform, covered with 2,300 tiles on which are written the names of 999 significant women in history. Each side of the equilateral triangle, (“selected as the earliest symbol of female power”), supports 13 place settings dedicated to a major female figure, from the earliest goddesses of prehistory to 20th-century women of achievement such as Margaret Sanger and Georgia O'Keeffe-- women artists who set a precedent in the fine arts field.

Barriers for Women Artists: The Niche of Feminine Art

Fine Art as a Gendered Institution

The issue of women and women in leadership in the art world is multifaceted. Women artists have to be able to express themselves and spread their work at a comparable level of circulation, respect, and seriousness as male artists, which largely comes in the form of being included and canonized in major artistic institutions. Nochlin’s “Why Have Their Been No Great Women Artists,” published in Art News, is a feminist push-back to the institutional obstacles that prevent women from succeeding in the arts— emphasizing the need to question why artistic movements have been defined by the leadership of certain men artists and asserting there are actual institutional barriers to women’s leadership. Nochlin (from an art-historical perspective) aligns with a theoretical perspective expressed by Joan Acker that addresses the art world as a gendered institution. This is an important perspective because it sheds light on how a lack of representation for women in the art is a result of various institutional and cultural barriers and assumptions about art made by women outside of the canon, rather than there being simply a smaller number of women artists producing work throughout history.

In 1988, feminist art group The Guerilla Girls produced a sort of feminist artist manifesto titled “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.” The list of “advantages” included “working without the pressure of success, not having to be in shows with men, knowing your career might pick up when you’re eighty, having the opportunity to choose between work and motherhood, not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius, being included in revised versions of art history.” This artifact of the art-historical moment when feminist artists began to address institutional barriers illustrates the harsh realities of what it was like to be a woman artist as recent as the late 1980s, and addresses the precedent (or lack thereof) of women’s presence as leaders in art history and respected fine art institutions. The Guerilla Girls’ list of satirical “advantages” gets at the crux of how women artists have been and continue to produce prolific works, but are not viewed as leaders in the fine art world. Notions such as having to choose between work and motherhood, Linda Nochlin’s use of The Feminine Mystique, and other evidence all emphasize how the art world has historically worked and been built for men as a gendered institution.

The Persistence of a Masculine Art World

Analyzing fine art as a gendered institution in Acker’s terms allows for an exploration of women’s barriers to leadership in visual art, as well as the need for an entire overhaul of the norms of the art-historical canon in order to prevent the barriers described by the Guerilla Girls which persisted for them, artists like Judy Chicago, and others well into the 21st century. Not only is the art world a gendered institution, but societal barriers to women’s leadership persist and are visible in the dynamic of which artists are able to gain institutional leadership and publicly recognized success. One specific facet of societal barriers to women’s leadership is the notion of a work-life balance— navigating work and motherhood/family life.

In a 2019 interview published on Artspace, Chicago stated “The biggest compliment a woman artist could get was to be told that she 'painted like a man… a woman artist is still paid only 47 1/2 cents of what a male artist gets when a work is sold… This reflects the larger social fact that around the world, what women do—in or out of the arts—is either not valued at all or valued less.” This quotation illustrates the barriers to women artists due to the perceived mutual exclusivity between a demanding career as a serious artist and womanhood. Hochschild’s chapter in The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home about married couple Nancy and Evan Holt addresses some of these societal expectations for women that manifest into barriers to career leadership. Hochschild details how Evan Holt was fine with his wife having a career as long as it did not interfere with them starting a family, her running the house, and eventually taking most of the childcare responsibilities. This introduces a “choice gap,” to use a term coined by Stone. In “The rhetoric and reality of “opting out”, Stone defines this barrier to navigating the work-life balance as “the difference between the decisions women could have made about their careers if they were not mothers or caregivers and the decisions they had to make in their circumstances as mothers married to high-octane husbands in ultimately unyielding professions” (p.18). Thinking through the art world as a gendered institution, factoring in the lack of respect for women’s work described by Judy Chicago and the Guerilla Girls, as well as the overall lack of women artists being taken seriously (described by Nochlin), women artists are put into a niche in a myriad of ways. As was emphasized by the Guerilla Girls and by Linda Nochlin’s chosen excerpt from The Feminine Mystique in her Art News essay, many women artists’ families, womanhood, and overall identity are viewed as barriers to being a serious, career artist. Judy Chicago and the feminist artists of the late 1970s-80s later serve as a model for how womanhood and complexity of identity can be utilized and redefined to enhance not only the work they are producing, but their leadership within an institution that historically was built for men artists.

Judy Chicago’s Leadership: Doing and Undoing Gender in Art

The concept of doing gender, as cited by Francine Deutsch, has been referred to broadly in terms of individuals’ awareness that their actions will be perceived in relation to femininity and masculinity. Deutsch takes this definition one step further by emphasizing how gender is an “ongoing emergent aspect of social interaction” (107). Deutsch presents a useful framework for unpacking the state of women’s leadership in fine art, a gendered institution, since her definition of the “doing gender approach” includes that these institutions can be changed by deconstructing the social dynamics that uphold and maintain conventions around gender in the first place. In the context of the gendered institution(s) of fine art, Deutsch’s notion of doing and undoing gender provides a model for redefining leadership. Understanding that individuals are generally aware of a binary assignment of masculinity and femininity to different traits, behaviors, works, etc., gender can be done and undone in different ways to redefine what it means to be a woman artist, providing a new model for leadership.

Judy Chicago Redefining Leadership and “Feminine Art”

Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party is a fundamental artwork and cultural moment that illustrates Chicago’s approach to doing and undoing gender. Dinner Party is a work on a monumental scale, composed of a large triangular table set on a raised platform in a dedicated room of the Brooklyn Museum, covered with 2,300 tiles on which are written the names of 999 significant women in history as well as the 13 literal seats at the table for women— place settings dedicated to major women historical figures as well as women artists who set the precedent for Judy Chicago’s feminist approach.

Not only does the work try not to conceal that the artist is a woman, but women artists, femininity, and domestic objects are actually the subject of the work. The work has also been canonized through being part of the permanent collection at a major art institution, the Brooklyn Museum. This work serves as a model for redefining women artist’s leadership through the way Chicago does gender, leaning into expressing her identity as a woman artist while being successfully included in a traditional fine art institution. By centering womanhood and women artists’ unique narratives and capabilities, Chicago, by ‘doing’ gender, undoes gendered notions of popular art, what can be considered fine art, and overall what can be shown and canonized in an institution.

The State of Women and Leadership in Art: Looking Forward

The issue of women artists not being taken seriously, canonized, or viewed as leaders within the art world is not confined to Judy Chicago or the cohort of feminist artists, such as the Guerilla girls, who first started to dispute fine arts institutions in the late 1970s through the 1980s. Though artists like Judy Chicago slowly gained traction, and were provided with comparable accolades to male artists, such as a public installation of Dinner Party at the world-renowned Brooklyn Museum, visual art as a gendered institution continues to lack full gender equity and intersectional representation due to historically centering men. Based on the diversity of artists recognized in the Whitney Biennial, Judy Chicago’s personal description of her life as, “despite being a feminist art pioneer in the 1970s,” being only more recently “sought-after”(Artspace, 2019), and an overall attention to having to redefine artwork made by women (do and undo gender), one can see that although women artists have been given more seat at the hypothetical table, the institution of fine art has not been completely redefined or deconstructed (to use Acker’s terms).

The Whitney Biennial: A Case Study for Representation in the Art World

When discussing representation and the state of women and leadership in art, it is important to recognize the nuances of intersectionality, and recognize how the group including Judy Chicago, Linda Nochlin, and the overall 1980s feminist art movement is made up of largely white women. As explored in her personal achievements and interviews, as well as the impact of Dinner Party, Chicago redefined leadership for women in fine art. However, these achievements are not to conceal the persistent lack of representation from an intersectional perspective regarding identities of artists whose work is canonized in an institutional way to this day. 2007 research by Nochlin and Reilly regarding the aforementioned 1993 Whitney Biennial selections reveal a lack of Women of Color-- making up on 11.4% of the exhibition, with only 29.5% of the Biennial artists identifying as women in the first place (Slatkin, Chapter 93). The 2019 Whitney Biennial makeup includes 35% women with all but three of the artists identifying as a racial or ethnic minority (The Whitney Museum, 2021). To juxtapose the quantitative difference between the percentage of marginalized identities within that almost thirty year period illustrates progress has been made, but is still not exhibiting an attention to intersectional identities nor complete gender equity. Representation within the Whitney Biennial is helpful in exploring the state of women’s leadership in the institution of art at large because it is accepted as one of the premier American Modern Art institutions. Without recognition in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, women artists cannot be canonized as leaders and innovators in art, even if their work and perspectives deserve that title.

The Need to Address the State of Women and Leadership: Rethinking a Male-Dominated Art World

Acker’s analysis of gendered institutions is not only relevant in understanding the institutional barriers for women artists, but also in exploring what can be done to combat this historically default-masculine state of the art world. Acker asserts the need for non-hierarchical organizations to limit gender-based barriers to women’s recognition and leadership. As long as the state of women in leadership in art is not addressed, the default image of a fine artist will continue to be male, and the institution of fine arts will continue to be non-intersectional. As is seen in the makeup of artists canonized in the Whitney Biennial, which is one institutional measure of representation, women are slowly receiving more accolades. However, this representation is not equal to men. Recognizing that fine art is a gendered institution communicates there are institutional, rather than talent or work-based barriers to women’s leadership and lack of art-historical canonization. These institutional barriers emphasize the need for an entire overhaul of the norms of fine art in order to finally eliminate the barriers described by the Guerilla Girls that persisted for them, Judy Chicago, and all women stuck outside the fine art canon well past the feminist art movement of the 1970s-80s into today.

Works Cited

Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender &

Society, 4(2), 139-158.

Artspace.(2019). Interview with Judy Chicago, Retrieved 15 April 2021.

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/an-interview-with-judy-chicago-feminist-art-pioneer-56182

Deutsch, F. M. (2007). Undoing gender. Gender & society, 21(1), 106-127.

Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at

home. Penguin. Chap. 2 and Chap. 4

Nochlin, Linda (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews.

Slatkin, W. (2010). Women's leadership in the fine arts. In K. O'Connor Gender and women's

leadership: A reference handbook (Vol. 2, pp. 898-905). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://www-doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.4135/9781412979344.n93

Stone, P. (2007). The rhetoric and reality of “opting out”. Contexts, 6(4), 14-19.

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-the-advantages-of-being-a-woman-artist-p78796

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2019-biennial

Emily BlakeApril 26, 2021