Guerrilla Girls 2024 EOY Cumulative Body Count

 For 2024, I've located the results from 12 juried gallery shows held in NYC and CT.

In these shows 551 works by 521 women artists were selected to be exhibited
                         326 works by 302 men were exhibited

37% of all works selected were by men, 63% by women

37% of artists whose work was selected was by men, 63% by women

The galleries were Lyme art annual at the Slater, WAH, ALNB,CT+6 WHAL, 91st annual Hudson Art, Silvermine A- One, CAFA 113th annual, Faber-Biren Color - Stamford Art, 1st Street Annual National, Blue Mountain summer and winter, Stamford Marine

Three Juried Museum shows had the following results:

160 women's art pieces selected, 49 men's pieces - 23% of all selected artists were men, 775 women

The MixMaster at Mattatuck museum, Noreaster at Museum of American Art, and the Danforth Annual are represented in these numbers.


Pollock Krasner grants were distributed as 45 for men and 31 for women or 59% to men 41% to women.

Joan Mitchell Foundation awarded 10 women and 5 men with fellowships. 66% to 33%

Previous EOY Guerrilla Girl totals for comparison and historical tracking.

The Department of Eternal Victimization From No Such Thing

 There is an episode of Arrested Development in which the Bluth family promote a fund raising campaign for TBD. TBD is exactly what you think it is - to be determined.  By the end of the episode an even more absurd but plausible disease is substituted and the crowd riots insisting TBD is far more important.

The Art World has managed to manufacture a factory that mass produces TBD studies, causes and reparational aspirations.

I encountered one that every once in a while makes the rounds and it is the meme that access to art is highly restricted, too expensive, and intellectually damaging for all the poor souls who are denied access. I mean this is a tragedy that escaped even Shakespeare. Oh, my god.  How do we live with ourselves as artists while *this* goes unchecked?

Of course this belongs to the Artistic Justice Warrior's arsenal of no-such-thing urgent existential problems.

Digitally, almost every major museum has its entire collection of works online.  No cost. None.

And most, if not all, museums nationwide and elsewhere offer periodic free admission entry.  It may be first Saturday or by specific date, or by celebratory event but your closest museum certainly can be accessed for FREE!

And if the claim of any social group is that they are - heavens to Mercatroid - marginalized, unrepresented, or otherwise disturbed even, every local art gallery has a door that is open during hours of operation that... opens to let you inside FOR FREE! Furthermore, anyone who represents YOU (and you know who YOU are) can exhibit when the gallery has an open call for art.

Furthermore, and this is secret knowledge, the art community has never practiced discrimination against anyone with rare AND unrepresentational (of the community) exception.  There is zero need for the unnecessary expense of fancy EQUITY, DEI, or other virtue signaling inoculations. 

So why do these cottage industry nonsensical "causes" attract flash mobs, angry identity politic movements, and nothing-better-to-piss-and-moan-about opportunists?

The answer points to a much more difficult problem that involves arithmetic.

Pick a category of art.  I've researched visual art for years so let's use that as an example and your mileage will vary with your own research. The Guerrilla Girls have long claimed that biological women are under represented and marginalized and with every passing decade they claim "little has changed".

Well I've used the best information I could find and Women visual artists represent 40% of all visual artists in the United States. I have logged years of juried art shows in NY and New England and performed the arithmetic.  Women's art is accepted more than 65% of the time year after year and I suspect this has been the case stretching back decades.

Nothing's changed?! Underrepresented? I define these accusations as fraud and abuse.

We suffer from a social disease that is caused by having our sensibilities imprinted with the idea that art is discriminatory and artists are bigots of one kind or another. It isn't true now and it wasn't true then. historical disparities and injustice are eternally redundant and never one-dimensional.

Grifters and opportunists will always find ways to distort and abuse the dissatisfaction of individuals to create ever larger and directed attacks on the other.  The arts community needs to decolonialize our shared intellectual space from these bastards (radical feminists at the forefront of that shitlist).

They over-represent and misrepresent us.

Do your own arithmetic.  What percentage of whichever art category does your favorite identity group of artists represent to the whole? Your concept of fair representation will introduce itself to reality.

2024 CT+6: Guerrilla Girl Body Count

 Jurors: Eric Aho, artist and Brian Galloway, Owner/Director of the William Scott Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Work by 76 Women and 33 Men accepted

Guerrilla Girls 2023 EOY Cumulative Body Count

 In 2023, in 17 juried or otherwise selected visual art gallery shows in the Northeast;

576 women were chosen to exhibit (65%)

309 men were chosen to exhibit (35%)

2 self-identified Trans were chosen (.2%) 

 

Two Foundations Pollock/Krasner & Joan Mitchell) awarded

55 women and 39 men grants

Collector spending via ArtBasel study: 

2.6 HNW collectors spent less on works by female artists in 2022 and 2023, with a ratio by value of 39% female to 61% male

In other words, galleries are losing money thanks to their imbalances.

Motivations of collectors.

In other words, galleries that don't account for who their patrons are miss the commercial opportunities.

The National Endowment for the Arts reports that 46.1% of visual artists are women.    Few highly reliable, least biased resources exist.

THE NEA report has LOTS of good, interesting, and actionable data that should temper the rhetoric concerning under-representation, "erasure", and other volumes of unsubstantiated discrimination claims.

Two shows include in this count had no previous mention and were researched by their conspicuous absence.

The 2023 Silvermine 'One' juried show:
 
27 women, 3 men accepted

The Hudson Juried Artist show:

 70 women and 60 men accepted

Guerrilla Girls Body Count: EOY 2022 Summary

 Another year has gone by and a summary count of Juried gallery shows and fine art funding sources follows.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants were given to 41 male artists, 45 women artists, and 1 trans artist.

Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT) selected 3 male artists, 2 female artists, and 1 trans artist.

I had to research a number of juried shows that I was not aware of in real-time during the year.

The Silvermine "A-One" juried show, juried by Sharon Butler, resulted in:

15 male artist's work and 32 female artist's work being selected.

 

The Bowery 31st Annual juried by Lance Esplund resulted in:

13 male artist's work and 15 female artist's work being selected.

The Guilford Art League's 74th Annual Juried Show resulted in:

work by 26 male artists and 59 female artists being selected.

These results combined with existing 2022 juried gallery show results sum up to reveal:

552 art works made by 524 women artists were selected in my inventory of 13 juried shows.
334 art works made by 324 male artists were selected.

Women represent 62% of all artists and artwork accepted in these juried art shows.
Men represent 38%.

Factiod # 1: "Matching Facts. Women earn 70% of bachelor of fine arts and 65–75% of master of fine arts degrees in the U.S., though only 46% of working artists (across all arts disciplines) are women."  NMWA National Museum of Women in the Arts

Factoid # 2:

Zippia

"What percentage of visual artists are women?

Visual Artists By Gender

Gender	Percentages
Male	59.5%
Female	40.5%

"

...

Guerrilla Girls 2021 EOY Cumulative Body Count

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 11  12 from CT, 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 come in two categories:

In Juried Art Shows that I have no piece count for, 6 7 shows accepted the work of 78 80 male artists and 145 148 women artists.  That's approximately a 65% acceptance rate for women in those shows.

In 4 Juried Shows in which piece counts are available;

105 pieces by 94 men were accepted
197 pieces by 171 women were accepted

35% of all pieces were by men
65% of all pieces were by women

35% of all accepted artists were men
65% of all accepted artists were female

For 2021, more than 65% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 

Only one of ten eleven gallery shows in 2021 featured a juried show that accepted more men than women.

In 2021, 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.

Guerrilla Girls 2020 EOY Cumulative Body Count

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 come in two categories:

In Juried Art Shows that I have no piece count for, 4 shows accepted the work of 95 male artists and 181 women artists.  That's approximately a 65% acceptance rate for women in those shows.

In 7 Juried Shows in which piece counts are available;

236 pieces by 163 men were accepted
380 pieces by 305 females were accepted

38% of all pieces were by men
62% of all pieces were by women

34% of all accepted artists were men
66% of all accepted artists were female

In all 11 2020 shows represented, 35% of all selected artists were male,

For 2020, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 

Only three of eleven galleries in 2020, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

In 2020, 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.

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 Veracity of Guerrilla Girls Arithmetic

In the following essay, some very interesting number crunching calls into question the claims of the Guerilla Girls.

"The research, titled “The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850,” was published in February by Karol Jan Borowiecki, a professor of economics at the University of Southern Denmark. Borowiecki, who previously studied careers of famous composers and visual artists as an economic historian, used American census data collected between 1850-2010 to identify trends in social mobility and racial and gender inequality crossed with data on the geographical location and socio-economic background of people in creative fields (visual arts, literature, performing arts, and music). The findings are tested against parallel metrics in the census group of “non-creatives,” meaning people who are not professionally involved in the arts.

The US census data permits the identification of occupations that fall within the creative professions (i.e. artist, musician, author, actor) and provides detailed records on the socio-economic background of each individual, including the geographic location.

Women’s Visibility

With all the professional and societal hindrances in their way, the study interestingly observes that American women’s share in creative occupations —relative to men — has typically been higher than in non-creative fields. That trend starts around 1890 when women’s involvement in creative occupations increases and remains clearly higher than in other fields.

“These results challenge the conventional wisdom that the arts are predominantly a male domain,” Borowiecki told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.

According to the study, females are more likely to engage in a creative occupation than males. Being a woman increases the probability of having a creative occupation by 18% if isolated from other variables (including race, location, and family income.) The highest female presence is among musicians. Authors, visual artists, and actors follow in that order."

Guerrilla Girl Body Count: 2018 Summary

For over six months, I've tracked the metrics on as many juried shows as my feeds expose me to. The data is limited. I don't know how many total men and women submit work . Its important because, artists of both genders *pay* to submit work in the good faith that it will be judged on its artistic merit and nothing else.

I did the arithmetic on 9 juried shows - all that Provide sufficient data - no cherry picking.

In those 9 shows, 69% of the accepted work was by women artists representing 68% of the pieces shown.

432 women

198 men

Six curated shows had similar results. Forty-one women and eighteen men were represented. That is 69% of artists represented were women.

Throughout the year numerous women-only shows were exhibited [presumably because of their under-representation in galleries and museums].

Men had no such shows.

Juried shows included here were exhibited at Guilford; Clinton; Lyme; Stamford Art Assn; Mystic; West Hartford Art League; Bowery Gallery, NYC;  and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

How to Submit Art to a Show in the Era of Identity Politics and Curatorial Scorecards

The cost of showing work as an artist consists of many things

• the cost of the materials to make the artwork with
• the time to make it
• the cost of entering art shows both open and juried
• joining the gallery usually discounts the entry fee for shows
• not joining the gallery usually adds $5 to $10 per entry piece for the show
• the cost of transporting/shipping the piece to and from the show
• satisfying the show obligations
• gallery sitting or a $5-ish buyout
• Show opening contribution in helping to set up or food contribution
• manufacture or distribution of show/personal marketing artifacts
• repair of damaged work/frames (its all on you)

As if all of this wasn't enough, all galleries require a commission fee on anything sold.  This can range usually not more than 50%.  Thirty percent is more common. So, the artist must factor in that discount to their final remuneration.

A common complaint about the commission structure is that frames (an expensive cosmetic value add) are included in the commission even though the artist's final take is less AND in order to even out that double-jeopardy these pieces must be adjusted cost even more thus making them less likely affordable.

So far so good.  But the subliminal message here is that art is not cheap to make nor show.

Okay. So the next consideration has to be what shows are worth submitting work to.

Here we have to triangulate the cost of showing as calculated from the show-based costs identified previously against show duration, anticipated show attendance, and opportunity cost.

IMO, shows that last fewer than a full month must be inexpensive to submit to or incredibly attractive in terms of sales potential or prestige.  And every show ties up the works involved for the duration of the show. That can be an opportunity cost in certain situations.  The other opportunity cost is limited arts funds being dedicated to *this* opportunity.

As far as all of this is concerned, there is nothing discriminatory in terms of identity politics.  You, the artist, whoever you are or think you are or have been told who you are play by these rules.

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Things that are out of our control as artists are the conventions and practices of the gallery owners/organizers. Somebody ALWAYS has an upper hand in what they deem acceptable.
Raging on about that is a different blog entry.

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Generally speaking, open gallery shows will accept as much work as they can show within wall/floor space constraints.

And in deciding whether or not to enter a show all candidate entrants need to study the aesthetic bias of the juror involved.  Representationally opinionated jurors are generally less likely to select abstract or contemporary work and vice versa.  You want to pick a juror at least sympathetic to your practice.

The Identity Politic Tax kicks in for juried and blatantly discriminatory shows that sell themselves as oppressed, special interest group promotional vehicles.

In recent years the number of woman only gallery shows has become a floodwater.  In browsing open calls for artists its rare that a month goes by without at least one of these advertised close by.

This is the first erosion of art shows evolving from being quality-of-object specific to identity politic specific. Its unclear who this truly benefits.  Its anti-democratic nature removes a degree of prestige from the work involved and the self-imposed autonomy of the enterprise is as likely to generate animosity as promotion of anything more than hate politics.

Maybe the intended by-product of these tactics is to simply reduce the exposure of anyone who doesn't qualify and hope the public's taste is socially-engineered to believe the quality of art has an artistic identity preference.

The more pernicious effects of juried shows comes into play when the juror or the gallery put their thumb on the scale so that, as previously mentioned the show is no longer about the quality of the art being juried and instead some kind of socially engineered conclusion. The rationalizations are endless to justify this stuff so let the recriminations make their way into the comments section.

But to be more specific, in recent years,  juried art shows increasingly reflect disproportionate female representation.  Furthermore the remaining entries often favor tightly-coupled gallery members, supporters, or associated figures.  Some of this is to be expected.  But that leaves but a small fraction of eligible entry spots.

For men, there's an economic consequence.  Their work is less likely to be selected, they are more likely to be subsidizing an unspecified and unwelcome discriminatory practice, and contributing to the deterioration of the community's artistic reputation.

The sober reality is that the Identity Politic war has deeply polluted the art community worldwide amounting to nothing less than cultural appropriation not only of the present but the past.  This is an unregulated affirmative action program - aesthetic vigilante-ism in the professional ranks.  Its by-product is an archaeology of myopic mediocrity elevated to a seat of importance not even the village idiot artist can salute.

The most obvious personal solution is for male artists to simply be far more awoke about who the jurors are, what their agenda is, and what the track record of the galleries are.

To the degree a more general solution must be a scorecard for jurors that includes the Political Identity arithmetic involved  in their jury practice. This must include all the politically motivated algorithms being used to bludgeon the artistic community into yet another polarized political institution.

It shouldn't be long before, on a scale of one to five vaginas, any gallery or museum ranks or how genital friendly any gallery call for art will be.

The 48th Nor'Easter Juried Exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art

Out of curiosity I went to see and review the show.  I was in town early for an open drawing session at the Art League of New Britain so... what the hell?

I don't always submit my work to this show.  Sometimes finances get in the way.  But this year I saw who the juror was going to be - Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the  Norman Rockwell Museum - and decided right then and there that submitting my work was a fool's errand.  My work is light years away from Norman Rockwell and in choosing such a juror my gut instinct was that the result would be predictable.

My other concern in not submitting was whether or not this was yet another of the parade of identity politic shows I've observed in recent years in which female jurors favor (justly or unjustly) female work.

I know the Guerrilla Girls are holding their breath so here is the math.

Seventy pieces are being shown.  Nineteen are by men, Fifty-one are by fifty-three women.

And although there are plenty of differences in the work here are some dollar figures.

I averaged the prices of the work for both men and women strictly on the number of pieces that were for sale.  NFS were excluded as was a piece with a $1,000,000 price tag by a male artist because it absurdly skewed the more typical price ranges.

The total asking price for fifteen pieces by men came out to $91,650, an average of $6,110 per piece.
The asking price for forty-eight pieces by women came out to $185,896, an average of $3,872.83.
Make of it what you will.

Now that we know who has what in their pants, let me review the show.

My worst fears were realized  after walking the show carefully to ensure I wasn't just rushing  through.  What struck me most was the obvious volume of representational work. A handful of something other than representational work was scattered her and there and of that lot, mostly derivative pieces.

Curatorially, this stream content is typical of local gallery shows that are curated by landscape and portrait painters who have yet to understand or acquire an understanding of Modernism let alone Contemporary Art.   Shows such as these are to Art what Trump's administration is to America - dross served up as aesthetic caviar.

There is nothing to think about here.  The stuff on pedestals and on the walls is a simulacra of an imagined aesthetic in which the patron is expected to only use their eyes and their familiarity with nostalgic memories.  The work as Art is breathlessly empty.

However, what fails as Art succeeds as Fine Craft.  Everything here is meticulously crafted and well made.  Everything here is functional like all good craft.  This work is antiseptic enough to display anywhere.  And, thankfully, it is devoid of the identity politics that the show itself cannot shed.

If you like pleasing, stylized landscapes, portraits, linen, and fruit or colorful pseudo-abstractions, this show is for you.  The warmth of familiar subject matter divorced from any of the messy PostModern, Modern, and Contemporary influences will either totally relax you or put you into a coma.

And, as one of those cosmic coincidences, I need to leave you with one final anomaly. Of the twenty or so artists who attended the nude drawing session only one was a woman.  Go figure.

The Danforth "Juried" Art Show Problem

I haven't submitted any work to the Danforth Museum in Massachusetts for a number of years now. They have an annual "juried" show that is local enough that it caught my interest and so, a few years ago, I submitted a piece and waited for the selection sheet.  My work wasn't chosen - fair enough.

But what caught my attention was the incredible volume disparity of women's work to men's work. The difference was staggering - something like 2 to 1 in favor of women's pieces.  And to put that number in perspective, at around that time I was doing a contract in Pittsfield, MA and had attended an artist talk at the Leslie Ferrin Gallery.  The artist was a woman who taught Fine Art at one of the local Universities and was represented in a New York gallery.

The talk involved women's representation in galleries.  The speaker said she had had few problems in her career with outright discrimination and really had little trouble finding gallery representation. Leslie Ferrin added that while she made every effort to promote women's work, two factors affected the proportion of exhibited women's work in her experience.

First, most of the artists walking through the door were men.

Second, women's art, despite the quality, simply didn't sell as well. Selling is what keeps the doors open.

That talk provided a much needed context a few years later in reading The Gorilla Girls criticism of women's representation in "the Art World".  The implicit reasoning might be that a 50 - 50 representation would be fair based on population estimates.

But would galleries be unfair if 70% (an arbitrary guesstimate) of the artists walking through the door were men and they dedicated 50% of their space to women?  Maybe not.  But it would be equally understandable if the split was, in fact 70% men over time - all things being equal.  And yes, there would be exceptions in all kinds of ways for any given event... but over time who walks through the door and who sells would likely be representative of the cohort.

Arithmetic and not statistics (per se) is all that's required to make sense of these things.

This then brings us back to the astonishing disproportion of women's art being "juried" into a museum show in 2016.  That's right, 2016.  While I didn't submit work to Danforth, I do get their emails and they wisely advertise who got into the juried show - great advertising. So who got in?

Yet again, two thirds of the accepted work was by women (70% to be more precise).  So I looked up a few more catalogs.  In 2011, almost exactly 67% were women.  In 2013, approximately 65%. In these cases I just grouped obvious men an women's names and put dubious gender under men.  The number is close enough for scrutiny.  My guess is that the arithmetic will hold throughout the run of shows.

Going back to an earlier point, that percentage would legitimize itself if 70% of the Danforth entries every year were consistently from women.  But that is hard to imagine.


Furthermore you may be thinking there's a feminist purity principle involved.  Of the men's work juried into the show, many ran galleries or had prestigious local credentials.  No one obviously important had their toes stepped on.

So the net effect is that of the 33% men's representation, far less than that was representative of new, young, or unknown men.

It's not unfair to say that this subverts the intent of juried exhibitions in aesthetic, political, legal, and social ways - none of the consequences good.

Every artist has a tight budget so submitting work to shows costs money, time, and alternative opportunity cost. The (maybe worse than) reverse discriminatory empirical evidence means that artists who apply in goodwill with an assumption that their work will be judged fairly wasn't and isn't. Any artist can tell you that they can live with rejection but not with suspicion of a rigged system.

As for the definition of "juried" show, I don't think anyone imagines a situation where every year men's art and women's art is separated into two unequal groups - cherry picked for influence on the men's side and another criteria applied to the women's group.


As I look at this, I wonder how widespread this practice is and will become - it's not healthy at all.
IMO, such shows should provide some easy numbers; how many applied and how many of each gender. It's not an absolute metric and all art shows will have wild deviations.  But over time these deviations will balance themselves far differently than those at the Danforth.