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.

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.