Temporary exhibitions dedicated to women to open a museum’s annual program with pomp. New guidelines for purchasing works that require parity. Changes in cartridges to make patrons visible and remove sexist references. Appointment of directors at the top of museums. In the last five years, art has not resisted the pressures of the new feminist wave. But when you look at the fine print, the question arises: do each of these initiatives represent real progress toward equality, or are they just patches that make it seem so?
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One of the most recurring examples of real progress in the industry is that of the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC) in Seville, with its decision a decade ago to include a gender perspective in its purchasing policy and exhibition program. At the moment they have not yet reached parity: of the 611 artists in the collection, 494 are men and 117 are women. “We estimate that in 2010 there were no more than 40 women, and the generations of artists that emerged between the 1950s and 1980s are predominantly male. There has been more balance since the 1990s, but we still have a long way to go,” says its director, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, acknowledging the work that began even earlier, in 1997, with the merger between the CAAC and the Museo de Contemporary Art of Seville .
Works by Concha Jerez at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC) in Seville.PACO PUENTES
At that time there were no women’s names from the 1950s to 1970s in his collection. In other words, the absence of Teresa Duclós and Carmen Laffón from Seville, the greatest exponents of the 20th-century Andalusian school of realism, was embarrassing; the Granada-based artist Soledad Sevilla, a great exponent of geometric abstraction; and Concha Jerez from the Canary Islands, Velázquez Prize for Fine Arts and pioneer of conceptual art in Spain, among many others. These gaps in art history have been filled with purchases and donations from the artists themselves, now included in the most important contemporary art collection in the region, and will continue this year with major purchases in Seville, Jerez, Pepa Caballero and most importantly perhaps negotiating the acquisition of a large part of Laffón’s work.
Estrella de Diego, art historian, patron saint of the Prado and columnist for EL PAÍS, “has been thinking about these issues for 40 years”, not because she is a feminist, which she also admits, but because “artists are part of history”. For this reason, he celebrates every step, but at the same time believes that “these changes are somewhat due to fashion”. That’s why he asks: “When fashion goes away, do we go back to where we were?”. The term “fashion” is also used in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, remembering that before there was talk of a trend, the art gallery organized the Heroínas exhibition in 2011, before the Me Too movement. Guillermo Solana, artistic director, assures this newspaper that it has always been his mission to celebrate “at least two temporary events for women” a year. Alongside the recently closed Picasso/Chanel, it will deliver on its promise in Fall 2023 with Ancient and Modern Masters, covering history from Artemisia Gentileschi to the avant-garde.
Tania Pardo, deputy director of the CA2M Museum of Contemporary Art in Móstoles (Madrid) and adviser on visual arts for the Autonomous Community of Madrid, admits that she would like to see things progress more quickly: “I also believe that these are processes that must permeate , They have to be sustainable over time, and at the same time I believe that there has been a greater awareness of the need for this.” This awareness that Pardo speaks of carries over not only to the women’s program but also to his more detailed study . “Many numbers are reexamined that art history has not placed in their rightful place. In some cases there are even new readings, which is extremely interesting,” says Lucía Agirre, curator of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Exhibition of the American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.EFE
In the institution where Agirre works, a private contemporary art museum, there are 16 works by women out of a total of 75, representing just over 21% of the works, a percentage that makes this art center one of the most equal in Spain if still far from 50%. In recent years, the Guggenheim has dedicated a large part of its program to female artists. Agirre sets the example of the success of the Alice Neel exhibition in 2021. He recalls several anecdotes in which visitors told him that they repeatedly discovered an artist who had been ignored for several decades, but for several years as one of the artists recognized as the best portrait painter of the last century in the United States.
A similar case was the Amalia Avia exhibition in Madrid, curated by Pardo. “It’s the most visited exhibition in the last ten years in the Alcalá 31 room (Madrid) and it’s a woman who hasn’t had an exhibition dedicated to her since ’97,” specifies the expert.
Two women visit the Amalia Avia exhibition in Madrid.
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Box office doesn’t seem to be a problem for women artists’ programming, although according to the Association of Women in Visual Arts (MAV), temporary exhibitions dedicated to women still don’t reach 40%. “In the last 20 years we have seen remarkable progress, the presence of women at art fairs has even increased and the price of some …” they defend to MAV, which has almost 700 members, to remember that “Since The Presence of works by women in public collections has hardly improved, both in museums of contemporary art and those of a historical or thematic character”.
This seems to be the big pending problem of public museum policy. Above all, because with this question the division of tasks begins with the interviewees. The focus is on the collections of contemporary art museums and their purchasing policies. Respondents agree that these centers have a greater capacity to repay these debts and try to achieve parity. “The Prado didn’t hide great works by women in its stores,” De Diego defends. “It is not so easy that many Artemisias appear [en referencia a Artemisia Gentileschi, la pintora italiana] on the market,” he continues.
“Female Nude” by Aurelia Navarro in the “Guests” exhibition at the Prado Museum.Samuel Sánchez
The Prado Museum – which took 197 years to dedicate its first exhibition to an artist – says it has 5,485 male and 93 female authors. In the case of painting, there are 55 women’s works and 6,561 men’s works, 1,491 cannot be assigned to a gender based on their inventory. Of these, 13 women’s pictures are exhibited in the rooms of the Kunsthalle. This data means a presence of 0.8% women. What might be its counterpart in London, the National Gallery, has a collection with only 1% female authorship.
“Our case is perhaps simpler than that of a classic museum, as our collection starts in the 1950s and continues to this day. In the early decades there was a major deficit of female artists, but from the 1960s and 1970s the familiarization with the new artistic languages took place,” confirms Álvarez Reyes of the CAAC.
The Reina Sofía Museum, the largest contemporary art center in Spain, displays the work of 40 women and 44 men in rooms dedicated to art from the 1990s to the present day. It is the outstanding example to defend that the percentage of female presence in the permanent collection has increased by 8%, achieving “practically parity in the part of the collection dedicated to the most current”. Of the 14 temporary exhibitions organized in 2012, seven were dedicated to men, four to women and three to collective exhibitions. “Ten years later, in 2022, five women were dedicated: Leonor Serrano Rivas, Alejandra Riera, Margarita Azurdia, Pauline Boudry and Renata Lorenz, four men and three collectives,” they point out.
“Angel”, by Margarita Azurdia, 1992. Courtesy of Milagros del Amor, artist’s legacy.
Doubts arise about his purchasing policy. Reina Sofía assures this newspaper that “there was a balance between male and female names, with practically 50% of the works being acquired in 2022”. The latest activity report published by the museum on its website states that in 2021 it spent 189,821 euros on works by women and almost 300,000 euros on works by men.
“The big problem ahead is still the market”, specifies Álvarez Reyes, “so that the artists can sell their works and the prices correspond to those of the artists. It’s not the same, why are we deluding ourselves what a work by Soledad Sevilla is worth than that of Luis Gordillo”.
As this real equality is achieved, the conversation turns to compliance with Article 26 of the Equality Act, which calls on public organizations to take “the necessary positive action to correct situations of inequality in women’s production and intellectual, artistic and cultural creation”. It is one of the prerequisites that the MAV Association takes into account to issue a type of award called MAV Drop, which analyzes a museum or art venue’s commitment to equality. From the site they assure that the Culture x Equality tool recently announced by the Ministry of Culture is inspired by its self-diagnosis tool to help promote equality in museums as well as other cultural institutions.
Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of MACBA MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI
Agirre acknowledges that the work done at the Guggenheim has gained parity over the decades (in terms of art’s evolution), but recalls that the work of museums is “the tip of the iceberg.” “We can do an important job in showing and reclaiming those artists who have the space that is theirs, that hasn’t been given away and denied them for years. But at the same time you have to embark on a journey that has to start with education.”
When Elvira Dyangani Ose took over the management of MACBA in 2021 as the first woman in this position, she summarized such a groundhog day in which artistic institutions live in relation to equality in an interview in EL PAÍS: “The problem is that museums address this topic by introducing a special exhibition on the subject, but the structure of the institution itself does not change. You have to change the equipment and the internal workings. The museum has the advantage of functioning as a laboratory where solutions can be tested. You can talk about more in a museum than in Parliament.”
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