Guerrilla Girls Body Count: 2019 Year End Artistic Participation Arithmetic

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 14 from CT, VT, RI, and New York.  All shows whose counts are used here were previously cited in earlier blog posts most of which provided audit trails.

This year's Juried Art Shows accepted the work of 297 male artists and 520 women artists.

For 2019, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 
Last year, 69% of all accepted juried artists were women. 

Four of the fourteen shows, listed the total number of pieces accepted.  In these four shows, the number of women accepted was 107 and the number of men 75 (55% women on average).

In these four shows, 255 pieces were accepted, 149 by women and 106 by men (58% by women on average).

Only two galleries in 2019, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

I requested data on the Guilford 2019 Juried Show and received none.

Late update: Real Art Ways Artists Chosen: 5 Women, 1 Man


Interestingly, in 2019, the Connecticut Office of the Arts employs 7 women and 0 men.

In 2019, politically obligatory women gender only shows were routinely scheduled at almost all of the galleries studied.  No such male gender specific gallery shows exist to my knowledge.

The Gerrymandering of Art Museums by Gender

Since the election of Conservative governments in the cultural West, there has been a screaming siren about the politics of Museum art.  Using rudimentary arithmetic, activists have counted the number of pieces of art that belong to major museums and have discovered that men are historically (to date) more highly represented than women.

This lonely, unrepresentative of any context save provincial politics, factoid is sufficient to provoke an aesthetic Sherman's March on the collections of major museums.  Numerology and not historical context, quality, nor even a sense of decency is driving one museum after another to make these numbers match population demographics (gender only of course).

The fact that these collections were largely donated by wealthy collectors and connoisseurs whose cultural ecology was ambiently patriarchal is immaterial.  The cult of Numerology in sexual politics is both profitable, politically satisfying, and culturally toxic.  Museum shows now pander to a mass of contemporary female artists whose claim to recognition starts and often ends with genital equipment however installed.

I recognize that I'm - excuse the expression - pissing into the wind by pointing out that a historically accurate museum should be imbalanced prior to the mid-nineteenth century and be correcting its acquisitions to the degree that they can control gifts from then on.

In 2020, the Baltimore museum will only but women's art.  What's the rush?  Why isn't a healthier balance of acquisition just good business every year?

WE ALL KNOW that this will not be followed by a year dedicated to buying only men's art. After all what sin have today's male artists committed to be flogged for years with womens only shows, economic boycott, and  suicidal worthy neglect?  Are there sociological studies that recommend these kinds of remedies?

And although museum collections are mathematically imbalanced, women dominate juried gallery shows  on the order of 70% women acceptance and 30% male artist acceptance.  I've been doing the arithmetic in this blog and it goes back years.

Gender advocates have been distorting art in Western countries for decades.  They can rewrite history but they cannot undo it without ruthless indifference to inescapable cultural heritage.  Museum walls are being wallpapered over with politically motivated aesthetics rather than artistic merits.  It hurts everyone and turning museums into political battlefields is unacceptable political damage.

Yesterday *this* arrived from the New Britain Museum of American Art:

Shameless pandering.