Women, art, and the future

I have great business associates — it turns out that most of them are women. On a Tuesday afternoon in October, I had the good fortune to speak with two of them. The conversation was familiar and light. We were coming down from our summer vacation high and now enthused by what we see as an active future. We’re making connections.

There was talk of arts and artists, lovely autumn weather and summer getaways. We spoke about climate change, politics, publishing, and the things women are doing to stop the madness permeating our society. The world needs healing and women have ideas.

The first call I received was from artist, Betsy Silverman. I interviewed Betsy in 2018 for Venü Magazine. Betsy works on commission making personal collages of street scenes in Boston, portraits, and special requests. To say she works with collage is really underselling what she does — her work is composed of hundreds of tiny slips of color and messages cut from recycled art magazines. Her end product is a stunning architectural composition that most people mistake for a photoshopped photograph.

Presently Betsy is working on an eight-foot composition for a new restaurant in Boston, Woods Hill Table, owned by another mover and shaker, Kristin Canty. Canty is a nationally acclaimed filmmaker, farm owner, advocate for small farmers, restaurateur, and an avid proponent of ancestral foods. I love that these two ladies are not only supporting themselves by their passion but also supporting each other. Woods Hill Table features a farm-to-table menu and is slated to open in Boston in November 2019.

My second phone conversation came on the heels of the first. Coincidentally, it was from Tracey Thomas, publisher of Venü. I told Tracey of my ideas for upcoming articles, including a piece on the book, Ninth Street Women, which is a brilliant tome exploring the lives and work of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. My reading of the book happens to coincide with a current exhibition at Boston’s MFA, Women Take The Floor.

After so many political setbacks over the last three years, it’s good to see women getting some recognition for the work they do. After decades, finally these artists are making their way into the annals of art history. But still, there is a lot of work to be done. Why were these brilliant, talented, artists excluded in the first place? We know the answer to that. We’ve been behind a wall of patriarchy.

“That’s why I always try to support emerging women artists,” said Tracey. And indeed she does. Additionally, the articles and profiles included in Venü aren’t predicated by who advertises in the publication’s pages. Selection is made based on talent, hard work, and great stories. I was reminded, and am proud to take part in, a magazine that is a woman-run publication.

Every now and again, I see an article online about how women-of-a-certain-age will run the world. Each article (NBC, NYT, TODAY, WSJ, MIT) sites how women now in their 40s, 50s, and 60s are the drivers of society.

“One of the greatest under-appreciated sources of innovation and new business may, in fact, be women over 50 with new ideas, lots of life ahead of them and with the verve to get it done,” said Joseph F. Coughlin, director of the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during an interview with TODAY.

Despite our education, innovation, and experience; the fact that we control household spending, health care decisions, and start businesses; and our vibrance, intelligence, talent, and longevity advantage, we are usually ghosted because of an age number. Or simply because we are women.

Murray Whyte, of the Boston Globe, writes in a recent article regarding the MFA’s Women Take The Floor exhibition, the MFA presents some 100 “women artists” and includes, “Alice Neel, whose moody, forthright portraiture was largely ignored by the art world until she was well into her 70s; Louise Bourgeois, the French artist now seen as the grand-dame of proto-feminist art, barely acknowledged until she reached senior citizenship; Carmen Herrera, the great abstract painter whose first major museum retrospective came three years ago at the Whitney, shortly after her 101st birthday; Luchita Hurtado, whose lush, playful figurative and abstract works will be the subject of her first international retrospective next year, just as she turns 100; and Georgia O’Keeffe, who’s everywhere all the time and has been almost since the moment she arrived in New York more than a century ago.”

Reading the above quote, one might come to the conclusion that I am wrong and that women are getting recognition, but Whyte continues with a few statistics, “The best strategy for career success for woman artists appears to be to live long enough to see it. Though waiting — and waiting, and waiting — has never been much of a guarantee. One-for-five, in fact, is disproportionately generous.

“Let’s move on to a little more complex math: 96 percent of all art sold at auction is by men. Forty-six percent of American artists are women, but 13 percent of American art museum holdings are by women.

“And the MFA? Notably worse. Women account for only 8 percent of its collection. You might think it’s because of a largely historical collection, weighted toward eras — pretty much all of them — when art was deemed near-exclusively masculine territory. Well, yes, but: Of the almost 40,000 works acquired by the museum in the past decade — right here in the 21st century — more than 90 percent were by men.”

What the fuck?

Gloria Steinem has a new book coming out. The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off is also illustrated by one of my favorite artists, Samantha Dion Baker.  It is a collection of Steinem’s most inspirational quotes, with a new introduction and essays. The book is available now for preorder and is slated for release on October 29, 2019.

I’d like to provide a quote by Steinem via her interview with The Oprah Magazine regarding her new book. It seems to sum up everything I’ve been writing about here.

“If we just stop looking up at leaders, and begin to look at each other, we find our power.”

Yes, let’s do that instead. Because if we wait for male leadership, we’ll be waiting another 100 years.

*Featured image: Lee Krasner, Combat, 1965