Susanna Coffey`s vaulting, echoing studio in view of Chicago`s Near North Side skyscrapers is a perfect stage for envisioning an artist`s leaps of the imagination.
Coffey paints mural-sized canvases in which Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility, sets the cosmos swirling. The paintings and a series of recent woodcuts often suggest trails of power unleashed by the goddess as the artist explores the realms of life and death through the Demeter myth.
Coffey toured Greece last summer for a series of exhibits of her work in Athens and Eleusis. Her paintings sell to museum and private collectors. Represented in Chicago by Sazama Gallery, Coffey will be featured there in a solo exhibit in May.
Her work was recently featured in a group show in New York and in
”Exposures, Women & Their Art” (New Sage Press, $24.95), a book of photographic portraits of artists across the country.
Coffey`s success in the art world, her income bolstered by a tenured professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, places her among an enviable minority of artists.
The road to recognition in the arts is arduous for both sexes. Artists pay their dues with lots of down time during which the tools of their media are put aside while attention is given to critical aspects of establishing a reputation. This includes applying for grants and fellowships, submitting work to juried exhibitions, sending slides or making appointments to show portfolios to art dealers and curators, being rejected and showing work again elsewhere.
Women routinely juggle family and a job, and artists frequently juggle their art and a job, but women artists often must juggle all three, making theirs a particularly complicated career.
As the experiences of three established artists show, it takes a combination of talent, chance and just plain believing in yourself to make it in the art world.
Though their backgrounds vary widely, each made the choices and took the chances to make a life with art. Coffey`s experience and those of artists Ellen Auerbach, a New York photographer, and Elizabeth Abeyta, a sculptor in New Mexico, show there is no tried-and-true formula.
Auerbach opened photography studios on two continents during the 1930s, free-lanced for Time magazine, collaborated on books with the late landscape photographer Eliot Porter and received public recognition as an artist only in the last 12 years, after a New York gallery owner ”rediscovered” her work. Since then, her modernist photographs have been featured in a shower of exhibits, including a retrospective in her native Germany.
Abeyta`s art reflects her love of Native American traditions, a deep spirituality and tremendous wit. But her multicultural references, spurred by her mother`s interest in archeology and her own cross-cultural background, make her work unique and powerful.
Abeyta sells her sculpture through a loyal following of galleries across the country. She has earned enough to support her family, put her husband through medical school and help pay extensive medical bills for her son, who nearly died after a car ran over him five years ago. She signs her art with her Navajo name Nah-Glee-eh-Bah, which means ”one who goes into battle with force.” It is a name well suited to her profession.
”I turn away a thousand artists a year,” says Bernice Steinbaum, owner of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York City. ”I represent 19 artists.” Though the figures vary widely, large-scale rejection rates are par for the galleries, whether in the SoHo district of New York or River North in Chicago. But, unlike much of the competition, about 50 percent of artists represented by Steinbaum and Sazama are women.
Steinbaum estimates that the figure is closer to 10 percent at many top New York galleries, even though half of the more than 1.6 million working artists in the United States are women.
To an art collector such as David Ruttenberg, a retired Chicago lawyer, it is the subject matter, technique and strength of the work that draws him to it.
”It makes absolutely no difference whether the artist is a man or a woman,” he says. ”The choice transcends everybody and everything. It`s like love.”
Ruttenberg, who owns a drawing by Coffey, says, ”Some of the best work in my collection is by women.” A cross section of his photography collection, which includes women artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Holly Roberts, will be exhibited this fall at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artists, gallery owners, art historians and other experts point to significant strides women have made in the arts over the last generation, including several milestones, as they pushed for entree into careers in all professions.
The 1987 opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., reflected a push throughout the country to represent women artists in exhibits, rediscover them from the past and correct a record that credited art by women to male contemporaries with alarming frequency.
”The Camille Claudel exhibition here brought to the fore an artist who had generally been known as Rodin`s apprentice,” says Susan Fisher Sterling, curator of 20th Century art.
”We serve as a prod to other museums to look at who they are showing and when. We make plain the vast inequities. Many women had to wait into their 70s or their 90s for a retrospective, but that`s changing.”
At the academic level, art departments at major colleges and universities now have tenured women professors.
”That is really a change,” says Patricia Mainardi, an art history professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. ”When I first was coming into the arts world in the 1960s, there were virtually no women with professorial appointments.”
Smashing stereotypes
The stereotype of a feminine art of pastels, miniatures and childlike scenes has collapsed, and women artists helped pioneer postmodernism as a challenge to traditional ideas about creativity.
Artists such as Miriam Schapiro have borrowed from traditions such as quilting to reflect women`s lives in their art. Schapiro already was an established artist in New York when she emerged as a feminist voice in the 1970s. Her ”femmages” combine fabric collage and painting in huge works that bring a familiar quiltlike texture to bold contemporary assemblages that are allegories about women.
Most important, women are free to pursue their art as a profession rather than as a hobby, validating their identity as artists.
”There were many dealers in the early years of my gallery who felt art wasn`t a serious activity for women,” says Marianne Deson, an art adviser and lecturer who opened the Marianne Deson Gallery in Chicago in 1965 and sold it in 1989.
”They felt they were too emotional, too difficult to deal with,” she says. ”The women`s movement fueled acceptance.”
In the 1970s women artists picketed museums for excluding their work when they saw collections and professorial positions begin to open. But the ”glass ceiling” continues to exist, many artists say.
Among the new activists, the Guerrilla Girls of New York have eschewed picket lines for slick, sardonic posters that publicize the hard statistics. One poster listed several major New York museum exhibitions with as little as 5 percent participation by women artists. Media interest has triggered a blitz of interviews for which the anonymous artists don gorilla masks.
”The further you go up, the more you see women drop out in terms of prices, amount of exposure and seriousness with which collectors view their work,” Coffey says.
In a nutshell, it all makes the work of women artists harder to sell and less expensive to buy.
The work of a recognized artist such as Schapiro may sell for one-third the price of the work of a male counterpart, Steinbaum says. She notes that savvy collectors have been buying up work by women artists as bargains not likely to last.
But clearly equal pay for equal creativity is only part of the answer.
”One key to bringing parity to women in the arts is expanding the categories, recognizing that women have dealt with materials other than paint and stone,” Steinbaum says.
Her recent show, ”The Definitive Contemporary American Quilt,” is on tour across the country. ”Quilts are art that warms the soul,” she says.
Quilts have reflected the fabric of women`s lives down the ages. Women could pour their creativity into making them, wrap their families in them and earn money selling them.
But utilitarian folk arts such as quilting, textiles and ceramics continue to be relegated to the category of crafts. Such categories can draw in work from any medium, however. When buyers refer to one of her sculpted figures as a ”doll,” Abeyta says she wants to tell them, ”Oh, give it back.”
Stuck on the sidelines
The art establishment always has supported the notion that good art-the true masterpiece-would filter to the top of the heap regardless of the sex or race of the artist. But the new art historians argue that such a notion assumes some intrinsic measure of quality when the measuring stick is really calibrated by social norms and cultural assumptions.
Art by women became sidelined as a ”female school” in the 19th Century, says Whitney Chadwick, art professor at San Francisco State University and author of the new book, ”Women, Art and Society” (Thames and Hudson, $24.95).
”The wholesale writing of the history of art as separate and distinct lineages for men and women laid the groundwork for 20th Century accounts, in which, once separated, women and their art could easily be omitted
altogether,” she writes in her book.
Thus she begins her challenge of the edifice of artistic quality, arguing that it has served to exclude women by defining their work as an aesthetic subcategory.
Photography offers an exception to the rule as an art and a profession, although few collectors took the medium seriously until recent years. It generated a niche producing women masters right along with the men throughout the 150-year history of the medium. And it offered women a profession as studio and editorial photographers in a day when few professions welcomed them.
