Local Stats on Art and Gender Bias (as of October 20, 2006 in Portland, Oregon)
There are no regular contributing art critics who are female at the Oregonian, the Mercury, the Tribune or the Willamette Week. Not one.
A small sampling of adding up art representation in Portland, via the breakdown of 23 galleries in all four sectors of PDX revealed that 294 female artists were represented VS 407 male artists. These are not the miserable stats that Jerry Saltz talks about in Chelsea, but it does lead me to the next question.
Various Profs tell me that their art classes are dominated by females. What happens to them? This is a question for the panel: do women drop out and why?
Locally we can discuss market values: why a 50 year old female might not have the price-tag of a 33 year old male. I have not done a lot of research on this because I kept running into names I knew and wished to refrain from discussing particular careers on the radio.. But maybe it is time to name some names. I keep hearing ‘it’s a market’ as though this is an explanation. It is not but maybe we can come up with one.
Why Target the A & E Section of the Oregonian?
What I looked into deepest was coverage on art in the paper, especially the main paper, the Oregonian. There are many reasons behind it, but the main one was that no one ever walked into my gallery with a crumpled review as some kind of guide – save one from the O, and it has happened many times.
Yes, there is art coverage elsewhere in the O, but never so consistently as the A & E. As it has a listing - the most thorough art listing in town - it functions similarly to Willamette Week, something people pick up every week to see what is going on. In the art world, people look into it when they might not pick up any other issue throughout the week. So I looked into what they were doing very specifically with the A & E section:
Facts derived from 33 past issues:
Initial names mentioned in one way or another: 145 women, 278 men
(My process via counting names: each article, one count of a name. Other artists mentioned in the article, via comparison, etc., they count too.)
One phenomenon I discovered was the way the paper dealt with getting women on the radar and this was by lists. Example: Portland Modern has a new show; 8 artists are mentioned and 6 are women. I began to see this as a pattern. So what I decided to do was just look at those lists, as they were a sort of reportage - but no critical response and certainly nothing to up the ante of an artist’s value - but perhaps a way to ‘take care of the women.’ And I looked at both female and male names in these lists.
If you take out names merely listed in lists, we have:
66 women and 232 men written about in the A & E sections of the Oregonian since the beginning of March 2006.
I think it is only fair to mention that one way men got so many mentions is that they were the main vehicle for comparison. Many reviews of a woman artist held no comparisons at all, or perhaps to another woman artist. Whereas a male artist might be compared to six different male artists within one article. And yes, all those names counted and that is what drove their figures up. Hey, I would have counted the names in a woman's review, but it very rarely happened. Wonder why that is?
And here’s how it all came down:
2 issues had NO women artists in there at all.
2 issues had ONE female artist named.
3 issues had women artists in there because of lists alone. Without the curation of people like Gately or P Modern and various other shows announced via a list, there would be no female names mentioned at all.
4 issues had all women artists in lists again, but one. One review, out of sometimes 9 names mentioned.
...In the past 2 issues at the cut-off date of this enquiry, a turnaround seemed to be happening at the O. They got a female writer up there. And the numbers were much more squared away. I MUST note that this was AFTER the conversation at PORT.