The Numbers

Published Nov 4, 2022, 9:00 AM

In the wake of the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements, art museums began publicly touting their dedication to diversity. In this episode, we hear from two arts journalists about whether there are actually more artworks by women and people of color on the walls.

Pushkin, I'm Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist. In our first six episodes, we talked a lot about the art world, because there's no way to talk about what happened to Anna without also talking about the art world. And there's no way to talk about the art world without talking about how commercial art galleries and museums have a history of what feels like overwhelming racism and sexism. But surely now in the twenty first century, things would be different, especially in the wake of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, when museums began publicly touting their dedication to diversity. Right in the art world overall believes in progress and believes in itself as a pioneer of progress. The consensus and the armal tends to be that we are heading in the right direction, and we just weren't sure if that was true. We wanted to apply some effects to that to see if it were in fact the case. This is Charlotte Burns, an arts writer turned data minor. She and her colleague Julia Halpron wanted to quantify how big the disparities in the art world really were and see if those disparities were actually shrinking. They started by gathering information from museums about artworks made by African American artists. The first data study we did in twenty eighteen. There was enormous media attention at that point looking at the work of Black American artists, and I remember one particular headline reading It's a great time to be an African American artist. And I just thought that was so interesting because this is twenty eighteen, this is knee deep in the Trump presidency. It didn't seem like a great time overall. And so if the art world was so fantastic, how was that the case. If that were the case, maybe we could analyze that to understand it, and if it weren't the case, perhaps we should all stop writing it. Even though many museum websites provide information about the works in their collections, no one in museums has been doing any data analysis. So Julia and Charlotte began asking art museums to voluntarily provide the numbers about how many works by African American artists were in their collections. Here's Julia. We pitched it to museums. As you know, we want to show how progress happens, just assuming that there had been progress, and so we started by asking around thirty museums in the US, a mix of the most attended and then smaller regional and university museums, about their acquisitions of work by Black American artists and exhibitions of work by Black American artists from two thousand and eight until twenty eighteen. So let me break some of this down. When Julia and Charlotte talk about acquisitions, they are using the word that museum folks use to describe the process of how a museum adds works to its collection. Before I get into how that works, let me just sketch the powermap. There are curators. They are experts on art and their job is to know the collection and make recommendations about what the collection needs. The curator's boss is the director. The director's job is to raise funds to keep the museum afloat and to set the tone in direction of the organization. The director's boss at the very top are the trustees. These folks are fiscally responsible for the museum and they make large annual donations of cash that support every aspect of the museum's function. Okay, so acquisitions happen in two ways. They can either be purchased or they can be gifts. Purchases have their own extremely complicated set of politics since they almost always require fundraising, and fundraising means donors. Then there are gifts. Gifts typically come from three kinds of folks, donors, trustees, or artists. Now the museum can decide to accept or not accept a gift. All of that might sound straightforward enough, except that there are serious power dynamics at work. There's often a difference between what a curator might want to purchase or ask for and what a donor or trustee wants to give or provide money to buy. That misalignment can happen at every level, between curator and director, between the museum's staff and the donors, between the trustees themselves, and between the trustees and the curators. All of these political vectors are probably grist for a from podcast. Suffices to say that museum acquisitions are at the very heart of the matter, because what a museum acquires says this is worth saving in perpetuity. Anyway, back to Julia and Charlotte, who started out looking at acquisitions, all those purchases and gifts together. They also looked at exhibitions, both show you which artists the museum things are important. We found the acquisitions that were being made were about a fifth of the population or representation level of African Americans in the US. Yeah, two point four percent of all acquisitions against seven point six percent of all exhibitions. And that year we looked at the thirty American museums, so it was around a fifth of what it ought based on the demographics of the country. Their data contradicted the myth of the art world as being an inclusive and diverse place. So Charlotte and Julia decided they needed to expand their investigation to look at another underrepresented group. Women. When we started, we thought, you know, women are more than half the population. We're going to need a database. It's going to be so complicated to process all of this information because it's going to be so much of it. And it turned out Google Sheets was fine because there wasn't very much. The title of their report sums up what they found. They called it quote Women's Place in the Art World. Why recent advancements for female artists are largely an illusion we found in that case. Similarly, it was a fifth of what it should have been. Demographically, women represented about eleven percent of acquisitions at around twenty five US museums. It was disheartening to see that the numbers were so low, and it was positively gutting for me personally to see that they were actually on the decline for almost a decade by the time the report came out. Changes discussed in these very timid terms, and I remember a big museum director saying this to us, we're getting there, we are getting I said, well, we're not, because it's stored in two thousand and nine. And they said, you know, changes coming. And I just remember saying, but when do you think we'll get there to parity, because at this rate it's going to take literal eons. And it's not like we haven't known about women. It's not some new fangled concept like, you know, the people who make up more than half the populations. I think it was a bit rude of me actually in a way, because I said, one did give birth to you, actually, you know, and me, and so it's our first concept of humanity was formed by the female body. And so they just started laughing. Charlotte and Julia are about to release their third report, one that looks at an even broader set of data. More on that after a quick break to recap arts writers Charlotte Burns and Julia Halpern have released two reports, one on African American artists and the other on women artists, and both showed that these groups were radically underrepresented among the museums that provided data. And now Charlotte and Julia are about to release their third report. So our data set is larger and more comprehensive than it's ever been. We're looking at over thirty museums and a much more representative swath of the country, so not just clustered on the coasts, but looking really at institutions that are across the US. And we're looking at updating the program and looking at exhibitions and acquisitions of Black American and female artists at this group of museums between two thousand and eight and the end of twenty twenty. Is the anticipation killing you? Do you think the upward tick that so many of us have been working for has arrived From the initial data that we've gathered, there has been no progress I'm going to be honest. When my producer Luisa suggested we interview Charlotte and Julia, I didn't have the heart to do it. I already knew all these facts, both from reading their reports and from well decades of working at museums, so I let Luisa interview them herself. I knew it would just make me feel that all too familiar mix of angry and sad. And it did, and it does. Women peak in two thousand and nine, and acquisitions slowly trend downward from there. In terms of the share of the overall acquisitions and museums for Black American artists, it is a very moderate incline, extremely low on the chart. You're talking about to three percent, increasing so slightly over the years between twenty eight and twenty twenty that it almost locks flat. I remember just looking at these spreadsheets and we were both it was like a summer tropical rainstorm. It was really oppressive, and we both felt very depressed looking at the data, just thinking, oh my god, this is so much worse than we imagined. And we were like, oh, you know, we're going to talk to museums and everyone's you know, we felt so galvanized, we imagined other people would. The reaction, at least among much of the art world was not what they'd hoped for. And then there was a pretty clear breakdown. This is a bit simplistic, but essentially people in power. We would take the data to them and it was like their brains couldn't quite They had to unscramble it and come up with a reason why it wasn't the reality that chimed with this. Despite how clear the findings were, despite the fact that the museums themselves had provided the data, Charlotte and Julia found a lot of resistance. It's amazing how quickly the institutions just start finger pointing. You often hear, oh, well, you know, you're not counting all of the African artists or other parts of the African diaspora that we're focusing on, and so you hear just a lot of discomfort with the reality. You know. Part of the reason that we did the women's survey after the African American surveys, because one of the museum directors said, you know, we've really been focusing on women, we haven't really had time to pay attention to African American artists. You should look at women, And then we did, as we already know, the women's numbers weren't any better in comparison to the general public, one fifth of what they should be. So what's the excuse with women? You'll hear, Oh, well, they're just fewer women poor artists, And then you know, we point to the graduation rates, and that conversation kind of sputters into silence. They actually cited a study that showed that about an equal number of men and women graduated from art school at Yale since the early nineteen eighties. So the question remains, why, if the art world is full of people who imagine themselves as progressive and inclusive, why aren't the actual numbers bearing that out. To answer that question, it helps to look a little closer at where there is some movement. Exhibitions tend to show more progress than acquisitions, which I think shows the influence of curators, and also that segment of how museums interact with their publics can change a little bit more quickly. Even exhibitions are planned two to three years in advance, whereas acquisitions, which is really the long tail of what museums do. It's what will stand the test of time that has proven to be so much stickier in terms of changing because the people who make those decisions, the curators can suggest what museums might want to acquire, but the ultimate decision is made by the people who told the purse strings, so the board and the people who are a bit more entrenched in the systems of power. And so that's I think one reason why you see change being a lot slower. It's important to know the curators have more control over exhibitions, and exhibitions cost less money and they are temporary, but what goes into the permanent collection via acquisitions has more impact because the permanent collection is basically a reflection, consciously or unconsciously of what the museum really stands for. So in a world where men are still paid more than women, a world in which the law of the land favors men over women, where the dominant histories are written by men about men, and to compound matters, this world we're talking about is also a world that continually favors whiteness. Well, all of this starts to add up. This is why we talk about racism and sexism as being structural and systemic, not just being about personal biases held by individuals. Racism and sexism are literally built into the very structure of how institutions operate. It's all very depressing into spiriting. And I say that as a white woman with a lot of power in this world, so I have to ask, can we find some hope here? Some museums will say that point is to their data and say, look, if you look at what we're buying, it's a totally different picture than our overall picture, because we're really trying to buy more diversely and therefore break the data down that way. And a lot of that change is dependent upon a new generation of women in leadership and increasing demands by curators and arts professionals of color. But according to Julia and Charlotte, that still doesn't budge the needle because museums are given a lot more artwork than they are able to buy. So what museums can buy remains quite small compared to what they're given. And they've been set up that way from the very beginning. They are set up to court patrons. Gifts come often from people who are on the board, from people who have been involved with the museum, from old school patrons essentially, and those old school patrons tend to have collected art that reflects in the antiquated picture of art history and the picture of art history that museums have told for decades. It all comes back to structure. The patrons system that museums rely on is inhibiting progress. Museums too often bend to the taste and desires of their donors, because the donors are the folks who pay the salaries. The only thing I keep thinking about is this one moment when MoMA reopened its new galleries. It was a much more egalitarian look at art history. It was trying to tell a really different story from the ones that had been told before. And I was on a tour with a couple of board members and a curator, and one of the board members looked at two works. One was by Helma off clim To, whose female medium slash artist who's just started to get more recognition as an early pioneer in abstraction. And the board member said, you know, wouldn't that look so much better over there in this other part of the room. And the curator said, oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that, Like, maybe you will look into it. I'm sure the curator had thought about it. They've been more on this prehan for over five years. But to me, it was just this encapsulation of how the patron model works. You know, the patron says something and you have to take it really seriously because they are the ones putting gas in the tank of the institution. Now we're back to the question I've been asking all along, can you separate the art from the artist. The findings of this new report seem to indicate that we're almost incapable of separating the art from the artist. I think it's like one of these moot propositions, the idea that the artist is ever separate from the art, which just doesn't work that way. I mean, as someone who studied art history, you learn all about the person and the context and the time, and nothing exists in a vacuum. And so I think any conversations about what a person did or didn't do, if they were a good person, you know, whether they paid their taxes, whether they murdered someone, all of that is just part of the evolving context about history and how we understand value and what we venerate, and those things shift, and that's the point of it the cannons meant to expand and contract. Often you hear people say, well, what if the guy who discovered this really important scientific element was a huge sexist in his private life. We can't discount this important work that has shaped our world and our culture because of who people are. My response to that would be, we're not talking about science. We're talking about art, and art is informed by who you are. It's something that you create based on your identity and your worldview and your beliefs, and so it seems absurd to separate the two because they were never separated in the first place. You know, Picasso was terribly abusive to many of the women in his life, and he also spent a lot of his career painting images of women. So it seems crazy to pretend like those two things have nothing to do with each other. It's ironic to me that we keep ending up with this question, and it seems clear that the institutional insistence on separating the art and the artist is a structural problem, one that leads to many ills, like still showing Carl Andre's work without telling the story of what happened to Anna Mendieta, and this incredible lack of diversity in museum collections. I feel pretty certain that if we can course correct on this front, we will actually help clear the path for change. But let's not stop there. Let's connect the museum trustee to the museum. Let's connect the past to the present. What we're arguing about is now. We're arguing about the past in order to discuss the present and ideally shape a better future. So of course we might want to kill some darlings, create new monuments, and move forwards, because that's the point, and every generation overthrows the last to some extent, and otherwise you just get buried in nostalgia. So let's have conversations about what we want to be going forward. There has to be some radical step about goal setting, which the art world hates too. But if we want to have better representation, and we're here right now, then can we at least have a serious conversation about what that might require on the whole the art world, in addition to being this amazing place filled with art and ideas, is also a place suffused with power and money, and hence it is very resistant to change. In order for progress to happen, the trustees, the folks impositions of power need to recognize the reality of these glaring disparities that Julia and Charlotte's data have made so painfully clear. They also have to understand their active role in creating and maintaining these power relations, because the truth is, if we don't change the power dynamics and museums, these numbers will basically stay the same. Death of an Artist is a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom Kanegg, lital Malade, Jacob Weisberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton, Engineered by Sam Baar. Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. The

Death of an Artist

You’ve heard of Jackson Pollock but you may have never heard of Lee Krasner. Krasner was an artist,  
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