Survey Finds White Men Dominate Collections of Major Art Museums

[CousinIT]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/survey-finds-majority-artists-represented-major-museums-are-white-men-180971771/

It’s been 30 years since the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist collective dedicated to diversifying the art world, famously asked: “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?” With this provocative question, the group lambasted the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s lack of female representation—discounting, of course, the overwhelming number of women seen in nude paintings adorning the New York institution’s walls.

A landmark study published in the journal PLoS One suggests little progress has been made in the decades since the Guerrilla Girls' bold statement. An analysis of more than 40,000 works of art detailed in 18 major U.S. museums' online catalogues found that 85 percent of artists featured are white, and 87 percent are men.

According to lead author Chad Topaz of Williams College, the new survey marks the first large-scale investigation of cultural institutions’ artistic diversity. Previously, Topaz and his colleagues write in the study, researchers have focused more on demographic diversity—or lack thereof—among museum staff and visitors. (As Brigit Katz reported for Smithsonian.com earlier this year, a 2018 report revealed museums were making “uneven” strides toward equal employment, with curatorial and education departments hiring more people of color even as conservation and leadership roles remained largely dominated by white non-Hispanic individuals.)

For this latest analysis, a group of mathematicians and art historians created lists of some 10,000 artists represented in the permanent collections of museums including the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Next, the team recruited workers via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform and asked them to identify various artists’ gender and ethnicity. Each set of names went through at least five rounds of classification, and responses were cross-checked in order to reach a consensus.