Its 2019 report showed that, while there was a 10%-20% increase of women’s work being exhibited across all publicly available venues, there was a decrease of 36.9% to 33.9% in state run art museums from 2016-2019. In 2008, Elvis Richardson founded the Countess Report, a running statistical record of how Australian institutions treat women artists - and a tool in calling them to account. In 2016, the Ken Family Collaborative, five sisters from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, were awarded the Wynne Prize, a signal that great art is sometimes a group enterprise. AAP Image/Private CollectionĪustralia’s Indigenous artists are now very much in the public eye. The Italian painter, Orazio Gentileschi, actively supported the career of his daughter Artemisia Gentileschi, so she became known as an artist.Įmily Kame Kngwarreye’s Untitled (Yam) 1995. Some women worked in their fathers’ studios. As with other trades, skills were passed down through generations. Women weren’t artists for the same reason we weren’t carpenters. Until the 19th century gave us the romantic cult of the individual, art came from studios with masters, apprentices and assistants. Instead of falling into the popular trap of claiming that minor women artists in the canon of art history should simply be reclassified as major, Nochlin deftly gave an account of the circumstances under which art was made, and artists taught.

… the question of women’s equality - in art as in any other realm - devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them.

Linda nochlin why are there no great