A woman’s place is in the museum
No one calls Pablo Picasso or Mark Rothko “men artists.” So why classify Louise Nevelson and Dorothy Hood as “women artists”?
The same goes for Elsa Gramcko, Mercedes Pardo, Gego, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Leslie Hewitt, Suzan Frecon, Niki de Saint Phalle and more than a dozen other artists whose work is hanging this season in shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston or the Menil Collection.
Not that this signifies some “year of the woman,” but they do need to be celebrated.
At a number of museums across the U.S., art by women has a stronger presence this season, part of a concerted effort by curators to build a more true, complete and inclusive narrative of art history than the version dominated by white men that has persisted for centuries. There’s been a flurry of retrospectives featuring women in their 60s or older as well as historical figures.
“Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson and Dorothy Hood” at the MFAH is not that; it’s more narrowly
After years of second-tier status, works by female artists are muscling in with the big guys’
focused on affinities between two powerhouses — one a sculptor, the other a painter — who struggled to be recognized. Although Nevelson was 20 years older, she got a later start, so their careers dovetailed.
Both were interested in the spiritual values of art, delving into concepts about shadowy voids. Both adapted Surrealist and Cubist influences into high Modernism. Both spent time in Mexico and knew Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Hood will never have a retrospective on the scale of 2016’s “The Color of Being” in her hometown of Houston. That show filled almost every gallery of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi.
But “Kindred Spirits” illuminates her work in other ways, and the show is dominated by her large canvases, if you don’t count Nevelson’s monumental “Mirror Image I,” which the museum commissioned in 1969 when it gave a 70-something Nevelson one of her first retrospectives. The ambitious Hood was teaching then at the museum’s school and likely studied “Mirror Image I” closely.
“I wish I could find a snapshot of Hood standing next to it. That would make my day,” curator Alison De Lima Greene said.
In the show’s wall text, Greene describes Hood and Nevelson together as “independent women, ardently committed to assuming leading roles at the forefront of the American vanguard.”
Greene said she wanted to juxtapose Hood with another artist to place her work in a larger and more elevated context. Hood, the queen of Houston’s art scene from the 1960s to the 1980s, could never get the traction she wanted nationally, but Greene said she didn’t want to present her as a frustrated woman. “She did voice her frustrations often. She wanted to know why she didn’t have a solo show at MoMA that she deserved. But she accomplished so much, and I wanted that to be the story.”
Hood once complained that she’d “never get out of the basement” at the MFAH, where the school was then located. Some of her fans have sniped that “Kindred Spirits” keeps her there; the show resides downstairs in the Beck building, across from the MFAH Café. “Oh, please,” Greene said. “The video show in here had 90,000 visitors. We can count on a minimum of 30,000-40,000 with every show we put in here.”
Greene has maintained a balanced viewpoint throughout her long career at the MFAH, championing women somewhat quietly, inserting them where she could without making a fuss. She points to recent acquisitions of major works by Wangechi Mutu, Julie Mehretu, Kara Walker and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Greene said when she’s weighing additions to the museum’s collection, “A lot of times I first think ‘artist’ and then look at the second level of questions.”
But one could count Greene among the nation’s first curators schooled in feminist art history. She was a student at Vassar College in the early 1970s when professor Linda Nochlin, whom she calls her greatest mentor, wrote the seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” That essay illuminated a plethora of institutional barriers women faced from the 16th to 19th centuries — they were not allowed to take nude-figure-drawing classes at academies, for example, which cut them out of the most basic schooling — and it remains a foundation of discourse in art history.
“That fired up the conversation, and there’ve been waves of it ever since,” Greene said. “It’s that kind of moment now, with the shifting political landscape.”
Upstairs at street level in the Beck building, curator Mari Carmen Ramírez proudly pointed out that the list of 40 artists in her show “Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 19551975” includes a number of women that’s “extraordinary by any standard of the period.”
I counted eight, which is less than a fourth of the show’s artists. But their works make up about a third of a show that’s groundbreaking for multiple reasons. “Contesting Modernity” is devoted to the richly expressive Informalist art movement that has been virtually unknown outside Venezuela. They worked during a tumultuous time of social repression and violence, when oil-rich Venezuela was transitioning from a dictatorship to democracy that dovetailed with a period of post-war “existentialist angst” across the international art world, Ramírez said. This new generation was rebelling against rationality and order, “trying to redefine the mediums of painting, drawing and other forms into something else. … The surface of the work became the battleground.”
Though the show is arranged thematically, one of the five sections is devoted to the rediscovery of a single, largely self-taught artist — Elsa Gramcko, whose timeless and evocative work with found materials such as car parts puts her in a class of her own. Gramcko, who died in 1994, clearly deserves a place among the Nevelsons and O’Keeffes.
Next spring, the MFAH celebrates a great living female artist with a solo show for photographer Sally Mann.
A mile or so away at the Menil Collection, which unveiled its newly redone galleries in September, senior curator Michelle White has significantly equalized the displays, aiming to put works by powerhouse women on equal footing with the giants of the male canon.
Though the Menil’s curators respect founder Dominique de Menil’s ethos, for about five years now they have been intent on correcting for her prejudice against collecting works by women. When they conducted an internal assessment of the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection in 2013, they found that the museum owned only 74 works by women. Propelled by recent acquisitions, that number now stands at 233 objects. Granted, that’s still less than a tenth of the collection’s objects by men, but it’s progress — and the disparities don’t look so obvious in the galleries.
Leslie Hewitt gets a room to herself as the first solo artist featured in the Menil’s “Contemporary Focus” room, where Mineko Grimmer will also be featured soon. Dorothea Tanning will soon have the solo spotlight of the “Collection Close-Up” room, which opened with a show of Claes Oldenburg’s “Maus” projects. Roni Horn will have the second show at the new Menil Drawing Institute gallery, which opened with Jasper Johns. And four of the six major exhibitions coming between next fall and 2022 include or are singularly focused on work by women.
Locally, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has been the most inclusive since its inception about 70 years ago, also highlighting many artists of color and queer artists. In January, the CAMH presents a survey of works by contemporary multimedia artist Cheryl Donegan. And earlier this year, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art gave a major posthumous show to underknown Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayon.
With all of this brewing, last week I posed the question, “Are museums doing enough for women artists?” on Facebook. About a dozen members of Houston’s art community responded, pretty fervently, “No.”
Sculptor Cindee Klement was among them. Her final project this fall for the two-year Block program at the Glassell School of Art was the large-scale piece “It’s a Movement,” which consists of about a dozen overlapping figures — headless, modern ballerinas rendered in wire designed to cast shadows so that they appear to be multiplying and “marching off the wall.”
As a sort of performative gesture, she also distributed an infographic published by the National Museum of Women in the Arts — a page of disturbing statistics from various sources. They haven’t been updated in a while, but one of the most telling is this nugget from the Art Newspaper: “Of 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the U.S. from 2007–2013, only 27% were devoted to women artists.”
“It’s a Movement” is the third piece Klement has created about women’s marches since she happened upon some worn leather side-saddle parts at a Houston antiques shop several years ago and cast them in bronze. She never intended to make political art, she said, “but at 61, I’m just trying to go with what comes to me.”
On the plus side locally, a majority of Houston art leaders are women, including Menil director Rebecca Rabinow, DiverseWorks’ Xandra Eden, Lawndale Art Center’s Stephanie Mitchell, Art League Houston’s Jennifer Ash, the Moody Center’s Alison Weaver and Mitchell Center’s Karen Farber. (The CAMH and Blaffer Art Museum are currently searching for new directors.)
Eden, speaking in general terms, said some museums are doing a much better job than others. “It amazes me that we haven’t moved the needle forward much in my lifetime,” she said, “despite all that I and my colleagues have done to encourage change.”
Museum shows take years to materialize. But Greene suggested that at least today’s artists don’t have the time-consuming burden of becoming “fascinating figures” on top of producing great art. Hood, Nevelson, Kahlo and even Georgia O’Keeffe cultivated largerthan-life personalities out of necessity, she said.
And that’s still part of their mystique. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2017 show “Living Modern” illustrated how O’Keeffe used her lifestyle to craft her public persona. Greene sounded indignant, remembering it. “Can you imagine a show of clothes worn by Arthur Dove or Al Stieglitz?”