Chelsea Clinton, Marilyn Minter Call for Greater Representation of Women in the Art World at Making Their Mark Forum
The inaugural three-day event held in Washington D.C. coincided with the arrival of a traveling exhibition of works from the Shah Garg collection
When art collector Komal Shah and her husband, Gaurav Garg, founded the Making Their Mark Foundation in 2023, the goal was to push for greater recognition for women artists. The foundation’s first forum, held in Washington D.C. this weekend, is one result of that goal. The three-day event brought artists, museum directors, curators, and collectors together with gallery and auction house directors, and featured keynotes from Chelsea Clinton, Ava Duvernay, and Jodie Foster.
The forum coincided with the arrival of a traveling exhibition of works from the Shah Garg collection at D.C’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, on view until July 26, which examines how women artists have challenged the traditional boundaries and hierarchies of abstract art over seven decades.
Shah wanted the forum to tackle the underrepresentation of women in museum collections, the art market, academic research, and art history by inspiring collaboration and collective action. “The issue is not talent,” she said on the forum’s opening night. “The issue is the systems that decide what becomes visible, what is preserved, what is taught, what is acquired, and ultimately, what is written into history.”
Shah said the art canon is a construct, which can be reconstructed, and mentioned a young boy, who after seeing the traveling exhibition in New York in March 2024, said that he didn’t realize women artists could be so great. “What structures do we have to change,” she said, “so that a child’s baseline understanding of artistic greatness automatically includes women?”
The exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, juxtaposes earlier artists with their successors. Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (1992), one of her final diptychs featuring two swirling golden orbs, hangs across from Mary Weatherford’s the Tempest (2015), another monumental, kinetic painting, divided vertically by a neon tube. Jenny Holzer’s Top Secret Endgame (2019), appears together with Uman’s Amapiano Dance (2022-2023). The exhibition also highlights artists who have defied art-making conventions, using everything from beadwork and textiles to digital tools.
Many of the artists exhibited also spoke during the forum. Marilyn Minter, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Dyani White Hawk spoke about advocacy for women in their own practices. Minter said that shame is a key focus in her work, and that it “does not treat shame as something to avoid. I aim to drag it into the light. I zoom in so you can’t look away.” Frazier explained her work honoring labor leader Dolores Huerta and photographer Sandra Gould Ford, who documented discrimination faced by Pittsburgh’s black steel workers. Both collaborations became parts of Frazier’s 2024 MoMA survey, “Monuments of Solidarity,” but neither has entered a permanent collection. “I truly wish to partner with anyone in this room who cares about what these two women have done to risk their lives,” she said.
The following day, Tschabalala Self, Ambera Wellmann, and Joan Semmel, who, at 93, currently has her first New York museum show after over 70 years of artistic practice, all spoke about the female body as an expression of identity and resistance. Semmel’s luminous nude paintings invite people not just to look, but to really see, and to think of themselves differently. “Nobody ever wanted to know what I saw. Nobody wanted to know what I had to say,” she said. “All they wanted to know was how I looked.”
Despite efforts in recent years by museums and private galleries to exhibit more women artists, their representation still lags far behind men. Forum attendees heard from Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, founders of the Burns Halperin report, that art by women made up just 11 percent of museum acquisitions between 2008 and 2020, with acquisitions peaking in 2009. Women are also penalized in the art market. Renée B. Adams, professor of finance at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, discussed her research, which found that paintings by women sell for around 40 percent less than those by men in both the primary and auction markets.
Forum sessions also tackled how museums can better represent women artists though acquisitions, exhibitions, and research. A discussion about feminist curating covered the impact of exhibiting women artists who had never been shown or researched before. MoMA PS1 director Connie Butler said that “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which she curated at MOCA in 2007, and other similar shows around that time, prompted the release of so much material for the first time that it was explosive. That eventually persuaded commercial galleries to take an interest, she said, and finally, other museums.
Many speakers argued that advances made by and for women artists must be protected at a time when Smithsonian institutions are under pressure to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, said that all museums must resist those efforts. “I’m petrified by what’s happening to women throughout our country, and certainly within our field,” she said. Chelsea Clinton spoke of the importance of telling and centering women’s stories to counter “the volume and velocity of vile” of the political climate. For Shah, the foundation’s inaugural forum had to be held in D.C., and during Women’s History Month, to reinforce its call to action. “Facing the stark reality of the moment we’re in, we absolutely have to step up,” she said.