From The Guardian:
Museum art collections are very male and very white
A large-scale study found just 12% of the artists in US museums were women – and figures from the UK tell a similar tale
Mona Chalabi
Tue 21 May 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 21 May 2019 01.02 EDT
… The US study looked at race and ethnicity as well as gender. The researchers found that 75% of all the artists in major US museums are white men.
I suspect that understates white male dominance by counting each artist with at least one painting in the collection. But if you counted paintings in the permanent collections that are currently hanging on the walls of major museums, perhaps, say, 95% were painted by white men. For example, if I Google
Metropolitan Museum of art most famous paintings
I see about 100 paintings that are indeed famous, and five are by women (two by Mary Cassatt, and one each by Georgia O’Keeffe, Rosa Bonheur, and Artemisia Gentileschi)
But Asian men were even more overrepresented; they make up 8% of all the artists in US major collections, a proportion more than double their share of the population.
Huh … Really? Who? There’s, like, the Chinese guy and the Japanese guy … and that other Japanese guy…
The worst represented group in the US art world are women of color. We make up just 1% of all of the artists in major collections despite the fact that we account for 20% of the US population.
“We”? … OK, you go, girl!
A Chalabi just can’t get an even break in the U.S.
