Fair enough

The Auckland Art Fair has announced the dealer galleries that will be participating in the 2016 fair opening on 25 May. The dealers have also named the artists they'll show. As you'd expect, it’s mainly an Auckland affair with nearly seventy percent of the galleries based there. Fifteen galleries are coming in from overseas of which 10 are from Australia and three from the South Island.

The male female ratio varies greatly between dealers with overall 63 percent being male. Just three galleries are exhibiting only women artists and they are all one person presentations. Eight galleries have only male artists on show.

This year you can also take advantage of My Art to grow your collection. The offer is that with a $2,500 deposit you can get a loan to buy up to $25,000 worth of art. Of course you have to pay it back at $2,500 per month over nine months. Nothing's perfect, but the payments are interest free. You can see the full list of galleries and artists here.

Male call

 David Kiehl, the Whitney’s curator for prints, has described them as 'art world royalty' and added their 88 posters to the museum's collection. The Guerrilla Girls have just celebrated their 30 year anniversary, 30 years of getting up the art world’s nose (the male section of it anyway) using statistics and humour to highlight the massive disparity between representation of female and male artists in institutions and dealer galleries. At its height the Guerrilla Girls had around 30 members but numbers have slowly dwindled as members got older and people's priorities shifted. One told the NY Times,  'Some of us wanted a piece of the pie, and some of us wanted to blow the whole pie up.'

To honour the Guerrilla Girls' work a new group called Pussy Galore has checked out the male/female ratios for the current dealer gallery rosters in NY. You can see it here. Pussy Galore uses the GG’s 1986 list as its baseline. We've done a similar count in the past for NZ (2012 and 2015) and now six months later in the spirit of the GGs, let's see how it looks (a bit better you have to say).

You can enlarge the chart by clicking on the image. See individual gallery percentages here.

Wonder woman

"The art world is an old boys’ club. People tend to promote people who are like themselves. The barriers to financial success persist for women artists as well. Even for the women who have broken records at auction, their prices are still only one-third the value of the top male artists at auction—on a good day."

Barbara Lee, a Boston based philanthropist who only collects art by female artists

Male call

You may think that holding the world record for women art directors per number of art institutions doesn’t make much difference to the chance of women getting solo shows (a random look at five institutions today shows that at the moment you could see solo exhibitions by 13 men and 3 women) but at least here in NZ there is at least some motivation to make this change.

In Australia the top job record is not so positive. In fact only two Australian State art museums have ever had a woman in the top job - once for the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and once for the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. Did we mention it was the same woman, Betty Churcher? Well it was. Ex-Auckland director Chris Saines helped maintain the status quo when he replaced the female acting director of the Queensland Art Gallery and a guy has just been announced as the next director of the Australian National Gallery. In the 40 regional galleries under 20 percent are run by women. Australians in the know tend to blame the male-heavy boards of trustees that select all these guys but there is some sign that change is in the air. But still… message to Australian women, don’t hold your breath.

Image: the key to the Executive urinal. 
Source: ArtsHub and RPGNSW (and thanks lol for pointing the way)

Skin condition

As you wander round the Getty Museum in LA you start to feel there is a theme to the contemporary sculpture collection. What could it be? Got it. Naked women.

Boy oh boy

All the publicly funded art museums in the Wellington region are now run by women, but if you think that’s going to give women artists a break, think again. The 2014 New Zealand Festival programme has just been announced in Wellington and if you love what one man can do in a gallery space, you’re going to be like a pig in visual arts muck at this Festival (also directed by a woman).

City Gallery: a Noel McKenna show and a Laurence Aberhart show and William Eggleston show and a Simon Starling show

The Engine Room: a Paul Cullen show

Pataka: a Jens Parkitny show

The Adam is doing a group show but don’t hold your breath on the representation thing: 10 of the 12 artists are male. The Dowse is only down for Shapeshifter which it claims is “One of summer’s most keenly anticipated arts events. “ Although this outdoor sculpture display hasn’t exactly been a female fest in the past, you never know your luck.

So is there any chance of seeing the art of the fifty percent? There is, but apart from a commissioned work from Yuk King Tan at Te Papa, it’s out on the geographic edges that another bunch of women directors have brought a little balance to the overall programme:
 
Pataka, Porirua: Tiffany Singh

Expressions, Upper Hutt: Tracey Moffat

Mahara, Kapiti: Frances Hodgkins