The Contemporary Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The Baltimore Museum of Art made headlines Monday when its leadership director Christopher Bedford announced that the museum will only acquire art by women in 2020. This isn’t the first time that Bedford has taken a strong stance to diversify the collection: the museum sold works by Andy Warhol and other white male artists at Sotheby’s in 2018 and used the proceeds to acquire pieces by women and minorities.
“You don’t just purchase one painting by a female artist of color and hang it on the wall next to a painting by Mark Rothko,” Bedford told The Baltimore Sun. “To rectify centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical.”
What the art world calls deaccessioning — when a museum sells art to refine a collection or purchase new art — is controversial. Some argue that museums are obligated to make art accessible to the public and that selling it is a public disservice. Others think that it makes sense for museums to review and edit their collections to better serve the community. Deaccessioning work by male artists to purchase art by women and minorities has ignited its own share of disapproval, and the Baltimore Museum of Art isn’t the only one to employ the strategy.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts increased its acquisition of works by women from 21 pieces in 2008 to 288 in 2018, mostly from the proceeds of deaccessioning just one Edward Hopper painting for $36 million at a Christie's auction in 2013. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sold a Mark Rothko painting for $50.1 million at Sotheby’s and used the funds from the sale to buy 11 works by 10 artists, including women and minorities.
Museum directors are claiming to make an effort to increase diversity in collections and exhibits, according to the authors of a joint investigation by the publications Artnet News and In Other Words. But the authors, Julia Halperin of Artnet News and Charlotte Burns of In Other Words, found that the statistics paint a different picture.
They found that from 2008 to 2018, just 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 major American museums were by female artists. Just 11% of the works added to these museums’ permanent collections were by women. In another investigation, Halperin and Burns found that since 2008, just 2.37% of all acquisitions and gifts and 7.6% of all exhibitions at 30 leading American museums have been by African American artists.
It’s likely that one of the reasons for the lack of representation on the walls of America’s art museums is tied to the decision-makers. Although Halperin and Burns found that 23 of the chief curators at the 26 museums they looked at were women, the director is usually a man. Sixteen of the museums had male directors and, of the country’s top 10 institutions by budget, only one has a female director. (Kaywin Feldman of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC).
Baltimore Art Museum’s decision to only acquire work from female artists is part of its “2020 Vision” program, which marks the centennial passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women in the U.S. the right to vote. There will be a yearlong program of exhibits featuring female-identifying artists, including “Adorned: African Women & the Art of Identity” and “Women Behaving Badly,” which examines representations of female power and protest in American and European art. These exhibits mark an overdue shift of the spotlight to art by women: ArtNews reported that currently just 3,800 of the 95,000 pieces in the museum’s permanent collection are made by female artists.
“The museum sees this as an opportunity to extend that commitment while also working to shift the scales within its collections, acknowledging that women artists are still underrepresented in the museum field and within museum collections,” a spokesperson for the Baltimore Museum of Art told Forbes via email. “We hope this will serve as a model and a first step towards better representation within our field.”
