Hoosier Women in Art Modernity
Garfield Park Arts Center, Indianapolis, IN
March 5 - 26, 2016
Hoosier Women in Art, an annual exhibition, has been revived to coincide with International Women’s Day. The purpose and content of the show is to focus on ways in which women create experimental and innovate artworks. Each artist explores her own process and the experience of current events and how each of these influences self-expression.
Michelle Johnson’s work explores the deeper discussion of race, identity, and how individuals survive social structures. She says “as a bi-racial girl, growing up in St. Louis (Ferguson) MO, with a West Indian father, I used my art to talk about those issues.” The importance of the ability to express ones experiences and ultimately provide visual representations for others going to similar struggles becomes invaluable.
While the Garfield Park Arts Center has never lacked a fair share of female artists, the art world itself still suffers from unequal representation. Art journalist, Maura Reilley, found that discrimination against women happens in every aspect of the art world from gallery representation to solo-exhibition programs. Reilley notes that “a glance at the past few years of special-exhibition schedules at major art institutions in the United States, for instance, especially the presentation of solo shows, reveals the continued prevalence of gender disparity.”
Currently, the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living female artist, a Yayoi Kusama painting, is 7.1 million while the male equivalent stands at 58.4 million, a sculpture by Jeff Koons. The discrepancy is even larger when works by deceased artists are compared. A Georgia O’Keefe painting was sold for 44.4 million in 2014 while a Francis Bacon triptych was sold for 142.4 million in 2013.
There are still many facets in society, the art world included, that many women exist on an unequal standing. Artist Devyn Shively draws parallels between her practice of painting and playing video games. She writes that “video games create spaces where the impossible make sense and there are few rules, much like in painting, where the impossible has the ability to be visualized” and feels that despite her personal investment in video games she has yet to completely take ownership because of the “feeling of not belonging as a woman.”
By examining and showcasing art from unfamiliar contexts and cultural experiences curators and galleries give voice to underrepresented artists. The space to explore identity, representation, and culture through creative expression is at the forefront of moving feminism into the public sphere.
