Programming Notes- Three Aims for the 2009/10 Season

The programming activities for the 2009 CASV season included some very specific aims. that will be taken forward to the 2010 season. One aim being outreach to other institutions in the city with whom the CASV had yet to collaborate. Another was to expand the diversity of media represented by the Studio Visit programs so that it included artists working not only with 2-d or sculpture, but also with installation and performance. The third, and very important aim, was to move towards gender equity in the artists and lecturers selected for our programming schedule. The global artworld has a poor track record with equal representation of both male and female artists in both commerical galleries and museum and institutional exhibitions and collections. Important discussions have been taking place over the last several years, most notably including New York-based art critic Jerry Saltz.

The following contribution to this global conversation comes from Artnet News (www.artnet.com) and was posted on June 23, 2009

CRITIC CALLS OUT MOMA FOR GENDER BIAS

"New York Magazine (and Artnet Magazine) art critic Jerry Saltz has long crusaded for better representation of women artists in the art world, notably parsing the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, P.S.1’s "Greater New York" and even shows at Chelsea galleries for gender bias. Recently, he has taken the issue to his Facebook page, where a wide-ranging discussion has been launched.

More important, perhaps, are the statistics that Saltz has marshaled to make his case -- stats that show the Museum of Modern Art doing an exceptionally poor job of giving women artists their rightful place in the patriarchal story of modern art. According to Saltz’s numbers, MoMA has 383 works of art hanging on its fourth and fifth floors, where the museum presents its comprehensive history of 20th-century art -- and a pathetic four percent of the works are by women.

Specifically, of the 135 artists with works hung on those two floors, only nine are women: Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay-Tack, Natalia Goncharova, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Marisol, Agnes Martin, Lyubov Popova and Hannah Wilke. The museum has no shortage of women in its collection; they’re just not on the walls. On Facebook, Saltz lists 75 women artists in the MoMA collection whose art could easily be added to the museum’s influential art history lesson.

The list -- and quite an impressive one it is -- includes Anni Albers, Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John, Hannah Hoch, Dora Maar, Joan Mitchell, Grandma Moses, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Florine Stettheimer, Dorothea Tanning and Bridget Riley.

Now, Saltz has sent an open letter to Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, urging that "something has to be done -- soon." Saltz notes that he is well aware that the museum is publishing a book on all the women artists in its collection, that MoMA photo department plans an "all women hang" this year, and that the curators consider the entire museum as "the permanent collection," which presumably brings the numbers up a bit. He also implies that the museum may be waiting for more exhibition space in a new building planned to the west of the current facility, an option that Saltz calls unsatisfactory. Will Temkin find a way to do better by the numbers? Stay tuned."

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/artnetnews/saltz-moma-gender-bias6-23-09.asp