The appropriation of female visual artists

Female visual artists are having a #culturalmoment right now. Last month The New York Times ran a piece on artists over 70 finally being recognized for their work, ArtNet recently opined on the (continued) lack of representation of women in major museums and shows, meanwhile Yoko Ono is having her first solo MoMA show. This is all great. Women have long been under represented (at best) in the formal art world. Even underground and outsider art scenes rarely due justice to female-identifying artists. There’s a reason it’s called a masterpiece.

There’s a game I like to play – can you name 10 major female visual artists of any medium or era? What about 10 male painters? 10 male impressionists? 10 male photographers? etc Women are vastly unrecognized for their work, often completely ignored. Sometimes, their work is stolen.

Recently, the New Yorker ran a profile on the Yale MFA photography students, one of the pieces, “Cheeks” is attributed to Zak Arctander. However, Arctander used a photograph taken by female-identifying artists Arabelle Sicardi and Tayler Smith. Arctander did add to the photo – thus making his use legal, but the fact of the matter remains that Smith and Sicardi were not credited for the role in the work. In fact, the caption used by the New Yorker remains “Photograph by Zak Arctander.”

Why does this matter? Yes it’s unfair and yes it’s frustrating, but it goes beyond that. Art is what we leave behind for future generations to show them who we were as a culture and a people in this moment. It’s transcendent. Erasing women’s names from their work erases them from history.

Sicardi and Smith are however, fighting back.  They contacted the author of the New Yorker piece, Hilton Als (a favorite of Sicardi’s) who, to his credit, apologized and offered to help. They also contacted the gallery curator and Arctander himself, to no avail. Sicardi wrote a fantastic piece for Jezebel outlining just what this sort of thing feels like.  They are not taking this quietly. They are not being passive. If the New Yorker won’t give their piece the credit they deserve then they’ll take it for themselves.

We have to celebrate female visual artists. As well as artists who fall somewhere else on the gender continuum, queer artists, artists of color and artists with disabilities. These artists must be better represented in galleries and museums, so in 100 years when we’re all gone, our story isn’t told exclusively by a privileged few.

Header image credit: Jezebel