Who gets to decide what goes on the walls of our museums? That quiet but revolutionary question has nagged at Sonia Boyce ever since she first visited London galleries in her teens. Her 40-year inquiry into it, as an artist and academic, culminated in outraged tabloid headlines in 2018 when, as part of an exhibition of her work at Manchester Art Gallery, she temporarily removed a painting from the gallery’s “permanent” collection – JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs – and replaced it with an empty space in which visitors could leave Post-it notes recording their thoughts about the depiction of women in the gallery.
For some male commentators, this was a blood-pressure elevating act of cancel-culture vandalism on a level with toppling statues of slave traders into the drink. Boyce had a point, though. While only 8.5% of the paintings then chosen to be on display in Manchester were by female artists, there were 44 paintings by men, including Waterhouse’s Victorian Greek fantasy of a bathing pool full of virginal, flame-haired girls, depicting women naked or semi-clothed. Why?
