From the Archive (March 18, 1973): Is there sex discrimination in art?

The Journal News, March 18, 1973

Is there sex discrimination in art?

By John Dalmas (Staff Writer)

If women artists are being discriminated against because of their sex, many do not like to admit it openly. In fact, it even may be a taboo subject among some who feel they have achieved status in the profession.

Studies have shown that groups feeling themselves the target of dscrimination – women among them – nevertheless tend to accept the attitude of the dominant majority, and it appears it may be quietly the same in the art world. In a field where standards are nebulous and what is “good” is determined by the imposition of personal taste, perhaps such behavior is inevitable, whoever may dominate it.

But whether women want to admit it or not, they are dependent largely upon male gallery operators, museum curators, educators, and critics for any kind of initial (and sometimes continuing) recognition. Generally approaching the art marketplace with an oblique, “que sera, sera” push, quite a few women will actually consider themselves lucky – even grateful for what crumbs are thrown them by the men who control the business.

A good index of how things stand with women artists may be found in an examination of the current annual (now to be a biennial) exhibition of contemporary American art at New York Citys’ Whitney Museum which opened last month and closes today. While this exhibition seems to lack any real thrust as its stated aim of “selecting works contributing significantly to the development of contemporary art” would lead one to anticipate, it does show the work of many younger innovators – at least those who have managed to get the attention of the museum’s curators.

Though up from previous years, the number of women artists represented in the show is still small – less than one out of four. Given the number of younger artists represented in the show and the number of young women seriously into art these days, the disparity at the Whitney would seem to make the question of discrimination a fair one to ask, and I talked about it with five young women artists who have works in the show.

“It’s so complex,” posed Joanna Pousette-Dart, 25, of Suffern, who maintains a studio near the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. “It’s so hard for people to know. A collector buys in this country because it is an investment, and the person who has told him what to buy is usually a gallery person – and a man, to be sure. But it goes beyond that.”

Ms. Pousette-Dart, who is the only woman artist from Rockland to make the Whitney show, teaches painting at Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., where she was hired first on a part-time basis last year. Her entry in the show, entitled, “Anashuya” (after a poem by Yeats, she says), is an execution of sand mixed with acrylic painted on a three-dimensional canvas construction.

“I’ve always hated to compete,” she continued. “Even as a child. I hated games for that reason. The people that do best in getting their paintings in galleries are aggressive and competitive; I’m not that way. I don’t think that there is any male art or female art. I just think there is good and bad. I certainly think that women are going to bring insight into what they do, but I don’t think there is any separate esthetic.

“It’s very hard to pinpoint the fact that discrimination against women has been very obvious. There was a time when some women artists would use men’s first names or names that sounded masculine, like Lee Krasner, but we’ve gotten to the point now, I think, when a gallery person doesn’t look at the fact that you are a woman. Hopefully it will equal out in time. It’s not something that has tremendously upset me – in my own career,” she remarked.

Barbara Kruger, 28, who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Newark, N.J., and now lives in the city below SoHo, feels that discrimination exists in the profession but blames it on more than male domination.

“The art scene is about money,” she said. “Men usually control money. It’s a speculative business, too, and speculation doesn’t necessarily have to do with good art. The whole business of discrimination has to do with the non-humanism broken into the fabric of our society. Women get it, blacks get it. There are so many women controlled by men in this country that it’s hard to be clear about the issue of sexism.”

A graduate of Syracuse University, Ms. Kruger went on from there to Parsons but dropped out about halfway through.

“I was bored,” she shrugged. “School is bogus. What it does is give women artists, once they’re out, a chance to make money by teaching, but I really don’t think that it’s terribly important.”

Ms. Kruger’s work in the show, a large, circular (54-inch in diameter) mixed media construction entitled “2 A.M. Cookie (Big)”, teases the imagination into believing in cushioned rose windows from Byzantium.

“There is discrimination against women, but I can’t pinpoint it,” she went on. “Any validation I’ve gotten about art here in New York is from women. Men artists don’t take women seriously. But it’s changing. I think it’s changing. I think both men and women are victims of a deadening in our society. It will be two or three generations before there is really a change.”

One woman artists among the five I talked to, Joan Snyder, 32, has reached a greater measure of success than the others but at the same time is not too happy about it.

“I’m a special case,” Ms. Snyder said. “I completely support the movement, (women’s liberation) but the only kind of discrimination I feel now is of a positive type. People are almost using me because I am a woman. They need a token woman artist – a strong artist. I know my work is good, but I also know it’s selling because I am a woman. For most women, I don't think it’s the situation.”

Selling as many paintings as she can paint, Ms. Snyder, who lives in the city,  but is originally from New Brunswick, N.J., feels she is painting just to sell.

“I’m convinced that the museums and the galleries destroy the artist today. They sort of eat you up alive before you can grow and mature. I refuse to be killed by them,” she rapped out with abandon. “I’m planning to take some and go off and think about where I’m headed.”

Holding an MFA from Rutgers, Ms. Snyder has done some teaching and feels that discrimination definitely exists in the schools, commenting that some art departments are still not hiring women. Currently working in an au courant abstract style, her entry in the show is a large nine by six mixed media painting entitled, “Womanchild.”

Arlene Slavin, 30, a native New Yorker with an MFA from Pratt, commented that the Whitney show has been a playday for critics, many of whom regard the annual exhibition as a “women’s” show anyway.

“I personally haven’t had much experience with discrimination,” Ms. Slavin commented, “mainly because I haven’t tried to get my work out. I felt because I was a woman I had to be really good. I wanted it to really be terrific before I tried. I sort of thought I didn’t want to be too vulnerable.”

Ms. Slavin, like several of the other women, feels that a special area of discrimination against women exists in the teaching profession.

“In six years of art school, I never had a successful woman teacher to model myself after,” she regretted. “Some art departments are run with a lot of part-time people. In those cases they will hire women – I was teaching part-time myself at Hofstra last year – but in cases where the departments are solidly established, they are usually run by men.”

Working with acrylic on canvas, Ms. Slavin takes at least a month to do a painting, doing a lot of preparatory drawings, then working very slowly, using a lot of overlap and very thin amounts of paint. Her painting in the Whitney is an illusory pattern of geomatics entitled “Saba-Almas.”

According to Pennsylvania-born Paula Barr, 27, who lives in her own SoHo studio, the situation of women in art is very ambiguous.

“I don’t really subscribe to the women’s liberation movement because I don’t feel I have been discriminated against as a woman,” she remarked.

Working with five women artists recently in an attempt to understand the problems of being a woman, Ms. Barr found that all the women in the group had no problems as far as their art was concerned.

“The real problem was pulling their regular lives together,” she disclosed. “A woman would go out to work to help support her family, but it’s always the woman alone who has to support her own art. She doesn’t get any help. It’s because a woman isn’t taken seriously. It’s just accepted that the man comes first.”

Commenting on the background of today’s artist, Ms. Barr feels that unlike popular notions, all of them are very middle-class.

“If they don’t have an MFA, they have at least a BA. It’s where the artist now fits into society. In fact, most artists today actually come from a higher middle-class background. It is only after they become successful that they become classless.”

Ms. Barr, who has a BFA from Boston University, has been able to support herself by selling her paintings. Studying Chinese calligraphy in some detail, she has developed a “whole new language” in her work, she says, painting doorway-like canvases (one, “Moss Toss,” is in the Whitney) that seem to bring into the room a view of white skies touched with falling leaves and waving strands of weeping willow.

“It has to do with the Western brush with an attitude toward the Eastern brush,” she explained.

Shunning all-women’s art shows as well as women’s liberation, Ms. Barr declined to align herself with a recent women’s show in New York called “Women Choose Women.”

“When you do that, you have lent yourself to a sexist arrangement,” she said. “Women artists are doing well without that.”

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