If all the artists in major US museums were represented by 100 people, 88 of them would be men. A large-scale study has looked at major US museum collections and found that just 12% of the artists in their collections are women.
Data from the Tate galleries suggests that UK institutions don’t do much better. Just 15% of the artists in the Tate’s permanent collection were women when they shared this data in 2014. To be generous to the Tate, things have improved. Looking at the year of the artist’s birth, a slow change appears in the collection.
To show this slow progress, I created a drip painting. The ratio of the painting is 5.5 to 1 to reflect the fact that the Tate still has 5.5 men for every 1 woman in their collection. The colors chosen here (orange for men, blue for women) are based on the work of Martin Bellander, who analysed thousands of paintings and noticed that they used to be dominated by oranges but blues are slowly growing in use.
The US study looked at race and ethnicity as well as gender. The researchers found that 75% of all the artists in major US museums are white men. But Asian men were even more overrepresented; they make up 8% of all the artists in US major collections, a proportion more than double their share of the population.
The worst represented group in the US art world are women of color. We make up just 1% of all of the artists in major collections despite the fact that we account for 20% of the US population.
The study, published by Chad Topaz, a professor of mathematics, and his colleagues looked at 18 major US museum collections to reach their conclusions. They were:
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Art Institute of Chicago
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Dallas Museum of Art
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Denver Art Museum
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Detroit Institute of Arts
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High Museum of Art
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Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Museum of Contemporary Art
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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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Museum of Modern Art
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National Gallery of Art
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Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
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Philadelphia Museum of Art
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Rhode Island School of Design Museum
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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Whitney Museum of American Art
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Yale University Art Gallery.
This work was originally created as part of the exhibition Who Are You Here to See? on display at Zari Gallery, London until 23 May. Yuri Avila provided additional factchecking.