If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many
If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.Since the 1970s, Dotty Attie has created works with feminist content and frequently engages with historical works of art to demonstrate the inequality within the art world itself. In Barred from the Studio, she quotes two famous works by the American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) – Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871) and The Gross Clinic (1875). Her text documents the uproar caused when Eakins, a professor at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, allowed female students to attend life classes with nude male models. Attie points out the hypocrisy of Victorian society, which took offense at not only the frank representation of a surgeon’s bloodied hands, but the idea of women observing and understanding male anatomy.Posted by Allie RickardDotty Attie (American, born 1938). Barred from the Studio, 1987. Oil on canvas. Contemporary Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Welt, 88.165a-f. -- source link
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