Teaching as a Career-Building Strategy for American Women Artists in the 20th-Century
This session examines the strategic uses of teaching for US women artists of the modern period. With few exceptions, the academy/dealer/collector/museum model of artistic legitimization, which was the norm for male artists, was not as readily accessible to women until the later 1900s, when this model slowly began opening to women with the rise of second-wave feminism. As an alternative, American women artists often chose teaching—including short term and itinerant jobs, and many beyond urban, coastal centers—as a way to demonstrate their seriousness and independence as artists. Our session investigates the nuances and implications of this gendered phenomenon in art history. Such teaching allowed many women to thrive beyond the contexts of marriage and family, and to carve out careers not supported through studio work alone. Our focus on teaching as an significant mode of artistic success, particularly for women, recognizes the root problem in art history-making apparatuses: patriarchy, financial value, and power have long shaped the art market and museum collections, and to this day, women artists are significantly undervalued compared to their male colleagues. The highest selling painting by a woman artist—O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed—went for $44.4 million in 2014, a mere fraction of the $100+ million that male modernists have made for decades. As museums struggle today to diversify their holdings, this session seeks to explore the implications of a different approach to recognizing legitimacy in building collections—one that redefines success based on public impact and cross-continental outreach, rather than on market values in major art centers alone.
Field of Study:
North America
United States of America
Twentieth Century
Gender and Sexualities
Feminisms
Chair:
Amy M. Von Lintel,West Texas A&M University - avonlintel@wtamu.edu
Discussant:
Sara Brynn Wessen Chang,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - sarabrynnwc@gmail.com