The disparity between the number of women vs men in art galleries and museums is a complex issue. Obviously, when dealing with art museums that collect art from across the scope of history and cultures you have the fact that even in the West… until the late 19th century, with few exceptions, women were not afforded the right to attend art schools and receive the sort of training needed for success in the arts. If a museum collection is made up of art from across the centuries you are not going to get a high percentage of art in the collection as a whole created by a group of artists only really active for the last 150 years. Then you need to consider what percentage of female artists are we likely to find in other non-Western cultures… and what percentage of art by unknown or anonymous artists… fiber artists, book artists, etc… were possibly by female artists?

Today in the US women account for 60-75% of the students in art schools and art education programs. The percentage drops to 50% when speaking of students earning an MFA. At that percentage one might expect women to account for some 50% of the artists being exhibited in galleries and museums, but the percentage is actually closer to 30%. Of course, success in any endeavor isn’t always aligned with the number of individuals of a given sub-group: women, African Americans, Muslims, Blondes with Blue Eyes, etc… Galleries tend to exhibit the artists whose work they believe they can sell. You can’t force the wealthy collectors to purchase a certain ratio of art by each sub-group according to the percentage of the population or even just the percentage of active artists they represent.

The artist, Marina Abramović, stated that she purposely avoided having children in order to maintain her career. Abramović says, “In my opinion that’s the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children—a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that.” In part this explains the drop from the percentage of women in BFA programs to MFA graduates. A good percentage of women choose family and children over the difficulties of an art career… often electing for more assured careers such as teaching art at the public school level. One such artist who immediately comes to mind is Lee Bontecou. Her early works were every bit as daring and innovative…

as any of her male peers of the 1960s such as Robert Rauschenberg. With the 1970s she withdrew from the art world in order to raise a family. She exhibited rarely and took a job teaching at Brooklyn College.

It has been suggested that many collectors are unwilling to take a chance upon female artists, worried that their work will drop in value when they choose to raise a family and cut back upon their art career efforts.

Personally, I follow the work of literally hundreds of female artists (along with artists from Japan, India, etc…) frequently posting their works here. Perhaps everyone should make a concerted effort to follow and show the work of artists of every gender, culture, religion, etc…

Interestingly enough, two of my former studio mates are an inverted example of the artist surrendering their career to raising a family. Both are male artists who married wealthier women and then abandoned their art careers to stay at home and raise the kids. Perhaps even more unusual is the fact that both are Asian, coming from a highly patriarchal where it is expected the man supports the family financially. Both could easily afford babysitters and daycare in order to spend time in the studio painting… but I got the feeling from both that to do so would be shameful.

For every successful career artist, there are probably a hundred or more living in poverty. A woman would be daft to marry such a man and then think he’s going to support her and the kids.

And all those men who “have it all”? They don’t. If you focus on your career, either you do not have kids, or you have a partner (of whatever gender) who focuses on raising the kids, or (unfortunately more and more often) you have severely neglected kids.

We must not confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. I don’t think anyone of whatever color, sex, sexual orientation or whatever else actually faces severe discrimination in the west anymore. But different people do make different choices. Men, for example, tend to be far more reckless than women, and far more willing to take insane risks. The inevitable outcome of that is that a small number of them have insane success, whereas huge numbers of them end up failing. The bulk of the homeless or prison or alcoholic population of western countries consists of men, but I don’t see anyone complaining about that.

I don’t either, because this situation is an inevitable outcome of the choices people make. I’m a textbook case: while I don’t have kids and never wanted any, I still threw caution to the winds. I gave up money, health insurance, retirement benefits, social status and whatever else for the opportunity to do art full time. I live a precarious existence under conditions which many westerners would describe as poverty.

If I ever do achieve big time success, my work will suddenly be all over the place, and then you can be sure some comfortably off professor of gender studies, who never took a risk in her life, will tell all who want to hear how unfair this is and how I’m part of a conspiracy to suppress her.

In my totally unscientific survey of art classes, I found that commercial art classes are predominately attended by women. My last class, online 100 ‘drawings’ on cheap paper, had 43 students of which myself and one other were male, judging by the forenames the students identified them selves by. I find a similar disparity in photographs of art classes.

As a transgender woman, I wonder what percentage of the art world is comprised of people like me.

the percentage of women in art here in this part of the land is 80+. art is not a real thing, as it is useless for survival. music is infinitely more important, always has been, and traditional folk musicians have a standing in society. pop musicians, not so much.

creativity can be about functionality. it is also a connection, a relationship, with a higher plane of existence. the men experience this through (solitude in) nature; hiking, hunting, fishing, skiing jogging. the women ascend in friendships, in language, in social exchange.

Allison: I don’t get out to the galleries and museums as much as I used to,but I enjoy viewing the fabulous works of current women artists in the better art periodicals. There are a ton of them and always inspiring.
There are quite a few women plein air artists that knock my socks off.