‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” asked a 1989 artwork by the Guerrilla Girls, the all-female-identifying activist artist collective. A valid question considering, as the work went on to point out: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” When the Guerrilla Girls went to revisit these statistics in 2012, they found that little had changed: “Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.”
So what about today? In 2023, Marina Abramović made headlines, not for her performance art but, shockingly, as the first female artist to have a solo exhibition in all the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London. The same institution, founded 256 years ago, today opens its first ever solo exhibition dedicated to a female artist working prior to the 19th century: Angelica Kauffman.
