 Good afternoon, and welcome to the extension of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and this is the second day of a weekend of celebrations, really for the second anniversary. It's exactly two years since we opened the Center for Feminist Art, and it has been a wonderful two years. We opened the center not only to be our permanent home for the dinner party by Judy Chicago, which it is, but also to have educational programming, such as this, to have arts programming, to have other exhibitions, history exhibitions, history exhibitions, and the like. And we have had tremendous success over the last two years, and are very much looking forward to our continued growth. There is a quote, which I would like to read to you, which comes from the 1888 notebooks of Nietzsche. It was one of the last, it's a little snippet, it was one of the last pieces that he wrote, and he says, we possess art lest we perish of the truth. And I love that, and I think it's sort of relevant for today's panel. And for those of you who are here, who are artists, who are involved in the art world, in the art market, in museums, and so on, art plays such a deeply important part role in our culture, in our lives, in the lives of our children, our family, our health. And I think that everything that all of us, each of us, can do to support art, to support artists, is certainly in line. It's as important as taking the best of care of our little ones and our next generation. So I welcome you, and I'm delighted today to have the market, women artists from collection, to cultural record here. Last year, Kat Griffin came with a panelist of artists, also co-sponsored by AIR, and we had it in the forum, which is our presentation space in the center, and it was overflowing, and many people didn't get in. And a lot of people were really disgruntled. So it's delightful this year that this auditorium has become available, and that we're able, because I can see looking out that we would not have been able to have seated you all. So this is absolutely terrific. The panel today is going to be looking at why women's art is undervalued in the art market, and how the current art market has evolved to be what it is. And are there strategies for parity? And these are questions that are very important to me. Parity, we look for for men and women in all walks of life, be it professional, be it salaried, be it employment opportunities. And as we know, women artists, feminist artists do not fetch what male artists do, either living nor dead. So it doesn't much matter to look forward and say, oh, well, once I die, my art's really going to be worth something, because if you're a woman, that's no guarantee. And my hope is, of course, not only will the panelists shed some light on this, but maybe even come up with strategies that we can all work towards. I'd be really happy for that. I think a lot of people would. Deborah Harris is joining us. Claire Oliver, Sue Scott, Deepa and Jana Klein, and Ferris Olin is co-moderating with Kat Griffin. And I'd like first to introduce Kat. Kat has been the director of AIR Gallery since 1996, and AIR was founded, as most of you know, and many of you are involved with, I think, in 1972 as the first artist run not-for-profit gallery for women. I think it was really kind of a cooperative in its day. Kat's recent writings have centered on trans men's visual culture, including a published essay entitled The Boy and the Blue Dress in Imago, the drama of self portraiture in recent photography, which was published by Rutgers University. And Rutgers is here, I think, in full form, and Rutgers has been such a great sister, I feel, with the Center, and that hopefully all of our works are paying off and spreading. We have to spawn a lot more Centers and Rutgers and all kinds of things. So Kat, in September of 2007, curated Material Matter, American Abstract Artists at Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn here, and most recently co-curated with Dina and Kerry Lovelace, both women, I'm sure you all know well, a three-part exhibition event series AIR Gallery, The History Works and Archival Material from 1972 to the present. And it opened at AIR, and it's now at the Tracy Barry Gallery at NYU. So if you haven't had a chance to see it, by all means, try to do so. It's very important. It's on view until April 15th, and hopefully spring will be with us by then. I hope you enjoy this panel immensely, and I will be back up here to sort of wrap up and say adieu. But meanwhile, Kat Griffin, wonderful to welcome you, your panelists, and thank you for celebrating the second anniversary of the Center with us here. Again, welcome, and thank you all for joining us for the market, Women Artists from Collection to Cultural Record. This is the second in a two-part panel series on women's art in the marketplace, and it's part of a series, like Elizabeth said, that's organized by AIR Gallery, the Feminist Art Project, and the Institute for Women in Art at Rutgers University. For the second year, we are holding this panel series at the Brooklyn Museum and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The panel series are designed to tackle topics that are critical to the lives and work of women artists as part of our month-long celebration of women in the arts in March. I'd like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Sackler for your wonderful, warm welcome, and also thank Eleanor Whitney for helping us organize this, and the AIR artists who helped as well, and the Brooklyn Museum overall, the staff here. This month events will accumulate with Night Air this Thursday, March 26th at AIR Gallery, which is also now a closer neighbor, located at 111 Front Street in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. And the program for Night Air is going to include food and refreshments from local eateries, and a wonderful short program of video pieces by emerging women artists that was curated by Lily Wei in conjunction with our eighth biennial exhibition, which is currently up at the gallery, through March 29th. Now I'd like to start by introducing our distinguished panelists, and this will be in the order of which they will speak. The longer bios for all of them can also be found in the press releases that I think many people received as they were coming in. In 1993 Claire Oliver founded her gallery in Florida before moving to Philadelphia in 1997 and relocating to New York in 2001. She represents both emerging and mid-career artists. They have a commitment to physical process and intensity of detail, which is common to all of her gallery artists. The gallery is committed to working with established international artists and collaboratives, producing large-scale thematic projects such as the Green Project, which was at Miami Art Week in 2008, and they're also committed to showing multimedia work. Claire Oliver gallery artists are represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, the Smithsonian, and many other museums. Some of the gallery artists include Julie Blackman, Jennifer Poon, Stephanie Lempert, Julius Schechter, Janet Biggs, and Phyllis Branson. In November 2008 Sue Scott opened Sue Scott gallery on the Lower East Side after having been an independent curator, collector, artist, sorry, art advisor, and writer for more than 20 years. Concurrently she served as an adjunct curator for the Orlando Museum of Art for 19 years, where she organized numerous one-person exhibitions for artists including Jane Hammond, Leslie Dill, Alex Katz, and Jennifer Bartlett, as well as numerous group shows. She has also organized exhibitions for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Dorsky, and the Virginia Beach Museum. In 2007 she co-wrote After the Revolution, Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art with Eleanor Hartney, Nancy Prinzenthal, and Helene Posner. Deborah Harris was named the managing director of the Armory Show Modern in August 2008. Harris has over 20 years of experience in magazine publishing. She began her career at art and auction in early years and went on to become advertising manager of art news and advertising director of art in America. Most recently she oversaw all the art related sales for LTB media including art and auction, modern painters, artinfo.com, and gallery guide. Dipanjana Klein is a specialist in the modern and contemporary Indian art department at Christie's. She has been a curator in New York City since 2000 and has many exhibitions to her credit. She has a PhD in Indian art history from DuMontford University in England and has taught art history, theory, and aesthetics at Leicester School of Architecture in England and the KRVI Mumbai. She is currently working on a set of books on sculpture and cave architecture of Ellora. Her publications include contributions to the encyclopedia of sculpture and several published essays on contemporary Indian art. She is the recipient of awards including grant from the Mellon Foundation, the J. N. Tate Endowment for Higher Education of Indians, and the Nehru Trust for Indian Collections at Victorian Alberts Museum. Now I also have the pleasure of introducing our co-moderator, Ferris Olen. She will be speaking a little bit about the topic today before the panel. Let's give their presentations. Ferris Olen is the co-director of the Institute for Women in Art co-curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, founder and co-director of the Feminist Art Project and project co-director for WAND, Women Artist Archive National Directory, all at Rutgers University. Dr. Olen is a noted art historian, curator, women's study scholar, as well as librarian. She received the 2007 annual recognition award from the College Art Association's Committee on Women in Art. In 2008, she was awarded the Art to Life Award from AIR Gallery and Art and Living Magazine, the Alice Paul Equity Award, and the Douglas Medal from Douglas College. She has served in the board of the College Art Association, the Women's Project of New Jersey, and the Neighborhood Narratives Project. Ferris Olen. Thank you, Kat. Good afternoon. On behalf of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, also known as the IWA, I too want to thank you and welcome you to this afternoon's program and thank the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the Brooklyn Museum for hosting this event, and I'm delighted to be here on its second anniversary. I direct the Institute along with my colleague, Judith K. Brodsky. It is the only research center in the United States focusing its activities on women and art. Our vision is to transform values, policies, and institutions, and to ensure that the intellectual and aesthetic contributions of diverse communities of women in the visual arts are included in the cultural mainstream and acknowledged in the historical record. The Institute's mission is to invent, implement, and lead live and virtual education, research, documentation, public programs, and existence focused on women artists and feminist art. The IWA strives to establish equality and visibility for all women artists who are underrepresented and unrecognized in art history, the art market, and the contemporary art world, and to address their professional development needs. We endeavor to serve all women in the visual arts and diverse global, national, regional, and state audiences. This afternoon's program in collaborations with AIR Gallery and the Sackler Center exemplifies the partnerships and the programming that we initiate. Currently the Institute is engaged in three programmatic areas. Our exhibitions and sponsored lectures primarily center on the Mary H. Dana women artist series which was founded in 1971 by Joan Snyder and is the oldest continuous running exhibition space dedicated to making visible the work of emerging and established contemporary women artists. Through the Getty funded women artists archive national directory wand and innovative web directory scholars are able to locate primary documents about women artists active in the U.S. since 1945. There are now more than 13,000 women artists listed in wand from among 1200 archival collections found in the directory. The national collaborative feminist art project of which AIR is a program founding program partner is administered by the Institute and celebrates feminist art and women's aesthetic and intellectual impact on our culture. We now have 32 regional coordinators working with institutions and individuals in their geographical areas across the United States to promote our goals through programs, exhibitions and special projects. At this point there are more than 1000 events such as this one that are listed on our website calendar through 2013. We also have been developing a kindergarten to 12th grade feminist art education section on the site that will provide virtual access to model curriculum materials teaching about women artists. I'd like to take this opportunity to plug an event we will hold on May 17th to which you are all invited. We will honor the distinguished artist Faith Ringgold who will receive an honorary degree from Rutgers her 21st and we will open the major exhibition of her 50 year career both with a gala celebration so please do come. This afternoon's program is the second in our March series to examine women and the art market presentations by the panelists during the first program led to a lively conversation which I have no doubt will be continued this afternoon. Once all of today's panelists have spoken we plan to engage in discussion amongst the presenters and then we will take questions from you in the audience. Let me make some introductory comments about women artists, collections and the cultural record. Between 1989 and 1992 I interviewed a selected number of American women art collectors to ascertain how the social upheavals of the 1950s and 60s had impacted their collecting practice. I chose four women then between the ages of 70 and 90 who determined the scope of their collections in that time period and in some cases in reaction to the civil rights, anti-war and feminist movements. Although they resided in Washington, Des Moines near the Nebraska border and Los Angeles and represented various points of view along the political spectrum, they shared some commonalities. Three collected art exclusively by women. One collection focused on art of the avant-garde. One on the artists of 19th and 20th century from Europe and America with an emphasis on the American West. And one chose to amass a collection representing a survey of western art from the Renaissance through modern times. The fourth woman collected art from underrepresented populations, Native American, Chinese and the African diaspora. I can't say for sure if they had seen the 1986 guerrilla girls poster commenting on the activities of art collectors. But clearly this specific group of collectors on whom I focus my attention consciously chose the forge a path not taken by their male counterparts. Among the women artists who could be found in these collectors homes were Kati Calwitz, Betty Sarr, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Natalia Gancherova, Clementine Hunter, Leonora Carrington, Paula Modusen-Becker, Sonia Dilleney, Isabel Bishop, Elizabeth Catlett, Agnes Martin, Suzanne Valadon, Bert Moreso, E.J. Montgomery, Helen Lundberg, Lavinia Fontana, Clara Peters, Hannah Hook, Rosa Banner, Margot Humphrey, and the list could go on. Much of the works were acquired during the same time period when the majority of other collectors sought out works by artists who had already entered the art historical canon. Art works by women artists and artists of color sold at prices much lower than their white male counterparts and were more readily available. In two cases the women began collecting in part to decorate new homes but then began became so engrossed in the historical erasure of women artists that they actively found ways to contribute to the knowledge base of the new art history through publications and institutional support. The two others had political agendas focused on transforming society and this was illustrated by the curatorial and scholarly research and involvement with social activist groups and their leadership in establishing lasting institutional presence for artists of color and women. More than two decades later we are still seeing a pattern of devaluing work by women artists who remain invisible to the majority of collectors such as Eli Broad. In 2008 the Broad Collection at the LA County Museum of Art was comprised of 30 artists. 97% were white, 87 are male. 194 artists are held in the Broad Foundation Collection of whom 96 are white and 83% are male. In a 1985 poster The Grilla Girls noted that only 10% of artists represented by New York City galleries were women while over 20 years later the art collective Brainstormers using data published by Jerry Saltz reported that 34% of Chelsea galleries represented women artists. The 2008 Susby's contemporary art sale included only 17% of works by women. Among the highest selling artists only one was a woman Louise Bourgeois. The art market is often on our minds. Some in the art world like Chuck Close speculate that reputations and market values are influenced by what other artists think. At a Rutgers conference just this past Friday organized by the Institute for Women in Art more than 125 artists registered to learn about planning for their artistic legacy. I mentioned then that sociologists Kurt and Gladys Angolang identified four factors that assure the future recognition of an artist even if they do not receive recognition in their lifetime. The cultural record can be influenced by the artist's own efforts during her lifetime to project and protect her reputation and the availability of others who can preserve and boost the artist's reputation after her death. Her links to artistic literary or political networks and her symbolic associations with emerging cultural and political identities will further facilitate entry into cultural archives and thus the cultural record. In the review of notable events of 2008 a year characterized by Holland Cotter as a year that may go down into history books as the first catastrophic fall but also as the first vital correction for art in the new century. He noted that feminism lives and that the art emerging from the early feminist movement of the 1970s is the source. Thank you. Can you go back one please. Bravery is not a lack of fear. It is proceeding in spite of that. When I was a teenager growing up in Southern California I was offered a full scholarship to come here to New York City to study at Parsons School of Design. I was absolutely thrilled at the prospect of starting my life here in the big city and making a difference and doing something fabulous. But my mother was terrified about me moving away from home and moving to the big city and she told me I'd be mugged and I'd have no friends and I'd be all alone. And all of my friends in Southern California told me it's so mean in New York and everyone will chew you up and spit you out. Well I allowed those friends and my mother to dictate my fate and I never did come and study at Parsons. Instead I allowed their fear of failure to be projected on to me. As a young and impressionable girl I didn't have the experience that I have now so I can tell you feel the fear and do it anyway. I live my life by this. What's the worst that can happen? You will survive it. I've survived it. Nothing that is worth accomplishing is easily won. I began my gallery with just over a thousand square feet and just about as much money in the bank. I did have something that was far more important than money or connections though and that is a real passion for what I do every day and a love for learning about new art. After 15 years of hard work and dedication I'm proud to have built a 5,000 square foot ground floor space on one of the most prestigious blocks in the country for contemporary art. Today I'm going to talk to you about embracing what comes naturally to us as women, what I do personally to help my community and my gallery and how to challenge yourself to create your own bright and successful future. Women are by nature nurturers. We are family and community oriented. By translating our ability to be good listeners and to be compassionate human beings into business terms we are by definition great networkers. Use those skills to push your career ahead. When you find yourself in a crowded room of strangers at a gallery opening what do you do with that exciting opportunity? Good networking is not about papering the room with your cards. It's about finding that one person you have a personal connection with and continuing the conversation on after that event is over. Woody Allen once said 90% of success is just showing up. I'm sure he was joking when he said that but I believe it's true. Keep on trekking. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and you will build your friends and colleagues and you will be able to exchange knowledge and create new ideas together. Times change and we must change with them or we will be left in the historical dust. Try to embrace the new tools that technology makes available to you and use those to further your craft. This is the Russian collaborative AES plus F. I've represented their work for over 10 years now and they embody the ideal. Tatiana is A. She is the leader of the group. She's an inspiration. She's always learning the latest techniques in computer animation. She's always finding out who the hottest new artist is and how they relate to art history. When this cover came out I had many people who commented to me about the age of the gang. Their work is so sophisticated yet it's so young and fresh. We thought they were in their 20s. AES is always anticipating what will come next and this is what keeps them on the forefront and an active body for discussion. Do you have a Facebook page? If you do, you should friend me. If you don't, go home and make one for yourself. This is a wonderful and easy way to spread the word on what you're doing and of course you'll get the word on what everybody else is doing too. It keeps you connected with your community and you can make it as close or as distant a relationship as you would like. My gallery has three artists that are represented in this year's Venice Biennale. That's something we're very proud about and we want everybody who is interested in these works to know about it. I put this up on our website. I sent a mass email to about 5,000 critics, curators, and collectors and I sent a mass mail message to all my Facebook friends. I am a female gallerist. That's a fact. Since I've never been a male gallerist, I really have nothing to judge against in terms of how hard it is to make new clients or to get work placed in public collections. I am successful at what I do because I define myself as a gallerist, not as a female gallerist. Which of these works were created by a female artist? Do you know? Is it hard for you to tell? They're all female artists. When I'm looking at a new work of art or a portfolio of an artist's work, I do not judge that work by its gender, but rather by what I'll call the three C's. That is content, craft, and continuity. A great work of art must embody all three. This doesn't mean that you need to like all these works, but you can respect it for its validity. Content. What is the artist trying to tell us? Good art is both personal and universal. The artist puts something of themselves into their work, and yet the viewer is not overwhelmed by that. The viewer is able to see, taste, touch, hear, smell the work in such a way that they can internalize it and bring their own experiences to that work of art. This creates the interaction with that work of art. One of my best compliments I ever received was very early in my career from an elderly and charming collector who was the founder of Village Voice. After spending a great deal of time studying the work in the gallery, she plopped down in a chair across the desk from me and proclaimed, congratulations, my dear. I hate it. I can't remember my response. I'm sure I mumbled something, but Miss Hutchinson replied, as everything you do, Claire, I either love it or hate it, but I can't ignore it. The second thing is craft. This should be a given with a visual artist, yet sloppy workmanship and inattention to detail are not uncommon. The difference between a great idea and a great work of art is often how it is crafted. A fine attention to detail can be seen in the works here of Kate Clark. Each small dressmaker's pin is painstakingly pushed into the clay. Kate leaves visible the seams in her work, however, reminding the viewer that the exotic and wild has just been undone, hinting at an underlying violence that she is just beneath her beautiful portraiture. My third criteria in judging an excellent work of art is continuity. This not only means the artists themselves have personal traits of professionalism and ethics, but also they have a long-term career agenda in which there is a logical progression of ideas and exploration for each new body of work. I want to see an artist embrace the possibilities and continue to explore without fear of failure. Janet Biggs wanted to get ground-up shots of the fastest woman in the world for her latest video, so she built this chair that hung her off the back of the pace car, just inches above the ground. She s crazy, but it was very effective. An excellent example of these three Cs is Judith Schechter s work. When Judith sets out to make a new piece of art, it begins just as a doodle when she s sitting in front of the television set. These doodles are little split-second commentaries on what s going on in pop culture or mass media, but for Schechter, it s not important to create a full narrative for each work. The viewer will bring to that work his or her own emotional baggage, and we ll see in that work what they want to see. It can be as shallow as the beautiful color and patterning or as deep as Schechter s commentary on the war in Iraq. Working to get my artist into the public record is in large part what I do as a gallerist. I m in contact with public institutions for which my artists will be of interest. I send press releases to media. I coordinate traveling exhibitions of my artist s work. The gallery hosts approximately eight solo shows a year in our Chelsea exhibition space, and they re planned about a year and a half in advance. The work you re looking at here is Judith Schechter s spectacular 12-foot seeing is believing, a permanent installation at the Museum of Arts and Design at Two Columbus Circle. This work was two years in the planning and development between myself, the curator, the director, their chief fundraiser, and the architect of their new building. Only by investing in taking a long-term approach and by relationship building were we able to make such a significant contribution to both the artist s career and the collection of the Museum of Art and Design. For me, a blanket approach is ineffective. It s all about specific relationships. By listening to those who have an interest and showing them only those artists or works that I feel fulfill their specific needs, I become a valuable asset to them, and they become one for me. My challenge to you all for the future is to set high goals for yourself. Be positive that you can make a difference in your community. Every one of you here today has already expressed a personal commitment by spending your Sunday afternoon with us, discussing a topic that you feel strongly about. There is no magic bullet answer for writing women into the historical record. History itself will tell future generations how we did it. We are too close now to know the correct answer, but let s start moving forward today. Looking back and comparing your career path with others will not make your path smoother or straighter. Focus on your own victories and use them as small stepping stones for larger victories for yourself and those you care about. Be upbeat, be positive. People are attracted to those, and so you will become your own self-fulfilling prophecy. Love and believe in what you do and you will be successful at it. Thank you. In the book I wrote with Eleanor Nancy and Helene, one of the things we wanted to look at was women in the gallery scene and museum scene. What interested me about that was the idea of women in the marketplace translating also as the notion of women and power. What we first looked at is the book looked at women in the art world post mid-1970s, the feminist revolution. We looked over 30 years of galleries, solo galleries between men and women, and you can see here in the chart the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000, and then the total. What we came up with, I m going to move over these quickly and we could talk about them later if you d like to, is that though it did come up from the 70s into the 90s and 2000, you can see women roughly showed about just short of 20% of the time solo shows to men's solo shows. The percentage is about the same, a little bit better in museums, and museums have gotten better in this century with about 24% women showing to male solo shows. A question that we didn t put into the book but we want to put into our second book is how does this compare, and this came out of questions from panel discussions that we did, how does this compare with people coming out of MFA programs across the country? Well, we re still gathering that data, but Yale happens to have all of the information together and they were able to give it to us, and if you look at Yale maybe as symbolic of other major MFA programs across the country, you can see that in the 70s there were about 12 women to let s say about 26 men, the men are in the blue, the women are in the pink. Women attending major schools and graduated with MFA s has gone up considerably. The male, the blue you can see is somewhere between 25 and 30 almost all the way across. There was a spike in the 90s of women, which is interesting if you think about the 90s especially the early 90s as a downward spike in the art market, which is a time when women actually do better in the art market, and then it ends with the men in 2006 at about 25 and then the women at 32. So what we can garner by this is the fact that more women are coming out of the MFA programs and yet they re going into the gallery and museum system with about 20% of the representation. I just sort of throw this in because for points of discussion, how does this compare with the rest of the world? Well, this was in the New York Times magazine last year. Look at the number of women, I don t think this takes into account the fall election, but look at the number of women who are in the Senate, 16%. House of Representatives, 16%. Governors, 16%. State Legislatures is higher, 24%. So really it s about the same. And when I ve had these conversations with people who say scientists who talk about the number of women getting their PhDs and then going into the workforce and getting tenured positions, it s about the percentages about the same. It s about 20%. So we know that. I think, I mean, Ferris pointed out those statistics. We all know those and we sort of, you know, rang around about those for many years, but I wanted to just sort of use those to set the stage. How does that translate into money and the marketplace and how much a woman can garner for her artwork? This is sort of a favorite person of mine to talk about in the marketplace because I think really she represents the most unfair place. And this is Elizabeth Murray who died a year and a half ago in her early sixties and was really one, I think, of the most important artists to come out of the late seventies into the eighties, breaking down the whole strictures of minimalism and forging her own sort of own place in the world, embracing figuration, I think, and opening up the whole world for people like Eric Fishel, for instance, to come into. This work is from 1984 and it came up at auction a year and a half ago. And auction, her, at that time her gallery prices were about $250,000 to $300,000. It was extremely low if you compare those with, let's say, Chuck Close, maybe $2 million coming out of the studio and same age, same sort of colleagues as important in the whole sort of dialectic of art history, if you ask me. This was up at auction for between $75,000 and $95,000. You might have gathered from my introduction that I've done a number of things and I'm from Oklahoma, but that I've done a number of things in my life, curating, writing, collecting art now with my husband and I have just opened a gallery at the prime time of last November. More about that later. But anyway, so we bid on this because we already had one of those with Murray and I was just like, this is absolutely ridiculous. It can't go for, I know it won't go for that price. And then I got the phone call that we were the proud owner of this painting, which at the time I think had set her auction record with a hammer price and then 20% on top at $91,000. I think she's now has sold for $130,000, which I'm going to show you some auction prices, but let's just compare her with someone like Dana Schutz, who is 30 years old, who also works large scale, I think is a terrific painter, and whose auction prices primary market are low six figures. Auction prices are two and $300,000. So you're looking at somebody who's 30 and somebody who died when they were 62 would be probably 64 years old today, the comparisons in the market. I had another slide in here that somehow it didn't transfer. It was one of Pat Steer, and I'm going to show another one of hers because she is another one, I think is a very good slash poor example of what happens in women in the marketplace. And I have sold her work to clients and to when I was at the Orlando Museum, we bought a large scale piece, and I took her to lunch one day to celebrate the sale of something, and we were talking, and she was excited because she had in her purse a check for $100,000, which is a lot of money, and it was very exciting. It shows that she's selling, was very excited. So we walked around and looked at some exhibitions, and we went into the Bryce Martin show, which I think is a great comparison between the two because they do large abstractions, they do variations on a very similar theme. And she said, how much of these works? And I'd already been in an investigation. I said they're a million dollars, and her work at the time was selling for $100,000. Again, it's that sort of one to 10 ratio, which I think is, if women show 20% of the time in galleries, I think their market value is one-tenth. I was giving this presentation to my husband, he said you better be able to back that up. I don't know that I can just like back it up. I mean, if somebody can give me better statistics, I think that would be great, but my sense is that women, I'm talking about historically important in museums, blue chip, women artists suffer about one-tenth of their male colleagues in the same galleries, they're the same generation. One of the things I did and still do is I worked with this one collector who has worked for about the last 10 years building a collection, which, as she looked at me a couple years ago, she said, do you realize that most of the people in my collection are women? I said, yeah. And it's not by design, it's not like let's go out and only collect feminist art or only collect women artists of the 80s or do particular things. What it was is she had worked with me at the museum and she knew that she wanted to collect artists at the very highest level. Again, as I said, historically important blue chip desires. She had a limited budget. Now when I say limited budget, I mean let's say a million dollars, as opposed to 10 million or 100 million dollars that we've seen thrown around the last eight years. So you want to do that, what do you buy? Well the answer is you buy women. Why do you buy women? Because they're not priced. Did I miss somebody before this? No, I guess not. Okay. They're not priced as high as their male counterparts. I'm going to go, we only have five minutes, so I'm going to move quickly through these just to show you some of the things that she was able to buy or that we bought together. Jane Hammond, Marilyn Minter, Judy Faff. This is from, it's a piece called Yongell from 1992. It's one of the very few domestic scale sculptures that Judy did. A more recent drawing by Judy Faff, Pat Steer, Kiki Smith, Betty Woodman, two Betty Woodmans. Actually this was a challenge that we had for a house which was, there was a long hallway and this is in Florida with a glass coming through and Betty had done these, had had her show at the Metropolitan and had done these canvas pieces with pottery on them but the paint's done in slip which won't fade in the light. April Gornick, I'm sorry this picture somehow didn't translate. Lori Simmons. I'm assuming most of you are very familiar with the artwork so you see that we're, we're sort of moving across medium sculpture, photography, painting and then Kristen Baker, a younger artist. This is one of those stories I have about being a sort of shameless art consultant. I was in the, down in Miami in the, in the Jeffrey Dyche booth and being totally ignored and shoved aside and my client wanted this painting. They said well somebody's kept, has it on hold and I said well I'll wait here till they come back and I waited like 25 minutes and there were other people lining up behind me and I was like no you're not getting it. I was like elbowing them out of the way but my client ended up getting this which again you know represents her able to buy something of a younger generation that has a whole continuity to, she is in Elizabeth Murray as well to some of the older artists. Now this is not to say that she doesn't have people in her collection like Brian Hunt, James Rosenquist, Chamberlain, Sarah, that I'm just not showing you so it's a whole mix which I actually really like the idea because it's a, it's a slice of the art historical pie and not just of women. I threw a Mary Hyleman in because if we're going to talk about the market later, Mary had her first retrospective in New York. It just closed a couple months ago at the New Museum at the age of 68 and what's interesting and is that if you look at the work and some of the work of the younger artists that I'll show you in a minute, it's this sort of riff or take on minimalism and it's not as hard, I mean it's not as easy in a way to understand as some of these, the figurative work of the younger artists are doing that have been embraced by the market. I just throw that out as maybe a discussion point for later, you know the difference between abstraction and figuration in the market. Dana Schutz, so now I'm going to talk about some younger artists, women artists in their 30s who have made a big splash in the marketplace. Dana Schutz, this is from a show up that is up right now at Zach Foyer. I happen to think it's her strongest show, it's a fantastic show and a really fantastic piece. It's figurative but it also is sort of playing on what she's done in the past instead of the huge build-up of the paint on front, she stained this from the back. I think you can see it at the top, a lot of those like the striped shirt, this is called a speech so it's, I think it's a, you know from revolutionary times somebody's given a speech in the middle and people are gathered around and listening and then the stripes are actually painted heavily in past on the surface. It's totally brilliant painting. Marlene Dumont holds the record I think, we were talking about this earlier, right now as a female artist who had sold for the most money her work $6,336,000. What I'd like to point out about this are a couple things. One is it's the use of, it's called The Visitor, it is five prostitutes lined up watching who's going to come in the door and presumably choose one of them. She sort of flipped the tables and put us in the role of The Visitor too, like I'm not The Visitor but one of the girls that's going to be looked at by The Visitor. It's a figurative work, it deals with taboo. Elizabeth Payton, I don't know if this sets her record but it's a very high record for considering this piece is probably the size of a piece of paper, sold for $741,000 a year ago. Again popular subject matter, representation. I happen to love all these artists by the way. Cecily Brand, The Pyjama Game, sold for $1.6 million. Two years ago you can see the figure in the middle, a lot of abstraction, draws as her source, pornography. Again we have taboo, subject, pornography, women, probably nude women. And then Lisa Yuscavich, whose show is up right now at David Zwerner in Chelsea. And what was interesting about Marlene Dumar, again I want to just throw this out maybe as a point of discussion, is that Roberta Smith in The New York Times, I think basically crucified the show. She said some people think it's hot or really cold and I was just left lukewarm. Interesting, I have in the back of my mind, is she coming down on her because she has a strong place in the marketplace? Is it sort of this backhanded thing that people do to women, the women that do succeed, somehow when they have their chance at criticism they try to cut them off at the knees. This is a show that I have up currently at the my gallery at Suzanne McClellan, who was the Dana Schutz of her time in her 20s, is an absolutely exceptional painter and really in a very odd and interesting way sort of sat out the art boom of the last eight years. That didn't mean she didn't show, she did projects and drawing projects and installation projects that were very well critically received. But what I find interesting, I kind of book into those, the figurative works by Mary Harmon and Suzanne McClellan, because if you see this, there is a figurative, a reclining figure of the sort of an animal and it was done as a blind contour painting, meaning it was done, she looked at a book like this and at first drew it like this and then painted over. It's very rich, it's very much, conceptually it has a lot of ideas in it, one of which is the idea of the artist's performer. But it is not a one tank thing, just like Mary Harmon's is and just like Elizabeth Murray is and I wonder, I kind of throw this out for discussion later, is that again possibly a detriment in the market if the work is slow work in a way or something that sort of takes a lot of work on the part of the viewer. I just want to end with this quote by Marlene Dumas, because here you are the woman artist who holds the record of six million dollars, I don't know that that would be met today, but what she says about it is it doesn't change my attitude to the problems of the work, I still have the same problem, how to make a painting that will stand up to time. And I think when we talk about cultural record, that's what we're talking about is the way that, you know, where these women stand now, where they're thought of, and where they're eventually, you know, my biases make their way into museums where they'll be preserved forever, unless they're at the Rose Art Museum. Anyway, thank you. Satellite fair is also being held during Armory Arts Week, including Pulse on Pier 40, Scope in a tent on Lincoln Center, and the Volta Show at 7 West 34th Street across from the Empire State Building. 243 galleries participated from 22 countries, and despite the uncertainty and challenges of the art market, there were more than 56,000 visitors to the fair over five days, up from 52,000 last year. The fair was started by four young New York art dealers in 1994. Keep skipping. Can I go back? And this is at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was called the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair, and it was conceived in response to a period of recession, not unlike what we have today, and a severe downturn in the art market. There was no business going on in the galleries, so the founders, Pat Hearn, Colin DeLand, Matthew Marks, and Paul Morris, realized they had to do something that, in difficult times, the best solution was to ban together, pool their resources. So that year, 30 dealers exhibited in the rooms of the Gramercy Hotel, and here's a few of them. 5,000 people jammed the elevators and halls. There was artwork everywhere, on the beds, in the bathrooms, in the hallways. And for the next four years, the Gramercy International Art Fair was held in hotels in Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont in Miami, as well as the New York location. It was such a great success and quickly outgrew its initial form as a hotel fair. The fair was reintroduced in 1999 as the Armory Show, the International Fair of New Art, moving to the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington in the 20s, which was the site of the legendary Armory Show of 1913 that introduced Modern Art to America, and it was there that Marcel Duchamp's new descending the staircase caused quite a stir in the art world. In 2007, the Armory Show became part of the merchandise smart properties art fair group, which includes Volta, Volta Basel, Art Chicago, Next, and Art Toronto. This year we expanded the fair and to include a new section called the Armory Show Modern. 67 international galleries and dealers specializing in modern and contemporary masters, really blue-shipped works, provided an expansion that gave us a historical perspective, and you could move between the two piers, Pier 94 for contemporary art and Pier 92 for modern art, and be able to see access and see works from the 20th and the 21st centuries. This is a picture actually of Pier 92 this year. During the press conference on opening day, Kate Levin, Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, gave the opening remarks to 50 members of the international press. She emphasized the importance of the visual arts to the vibrancy of the city, and recognized that the art fairs during Armory Arts Week contribute to the status and prestige of New York as an international arts capital and helps boost the city's economy. We worked closely with her office this year to expand the public programs during Armory Arts Week. We partnered with museums and arts organizations, as well as galleries and artists for studio visits and tours, and each night during the Armory Fair a different neighborhood art scene was highlighted, including Williamsburg, the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Long Island City. I put just a few slides together just to give you sort of an overview of the fair and a selection of works by different artists, particularly women artists. This is a view of Rona Hoffman's gallery spoof, and this is a picture of a painting by Mickalene Thomas, which was featured actually in the New York Times review of the show. This is a picture of the installation and performance piece called Apothecary by Christine Hill. This is just a picture. This is a Rachel White Reed piece that was offered by Lorke and O'Neill from Rome, and this is just a picture of some of the visitors walking through the fair. As you can see there were a lot of women collectors and advisors and curators. Every year we ask for submissions of large-scale works and special installations from the participating galleries for the public areas of the fair. This ten-foot-high work by Louise Nevelson was chosen for the entrance to Pier 92, the modern section. It was such a spectacular piece, and we felt the embodiment of modernism. It was the first thing you encounter upon entering the fair. There's a work, a later work actually, by Elizabeth Murray that was offered by Locke's Gallery, and here is a wall installation by Jennifer Bartlett. Among some of the other women artists that were represented on the modern Pier this year were Merritt Oppenheim, Alice Neal, Gago, Judy Pfaff, Kusama, Nell Blaine, Deanne Arbus, Yvonne Jaquette, et cetera, et cetera. Here's a picture of a Joan Mitchell that was offered. In our efforts to expand the educational component of the fair we introduced a docent program this year, and we invited art advisors, independent curators, and educators to give visitors and groups guided tours. We even published a children's guide to the fair and offered children's tours during the weekend hours. As a special project each year since 2002, the Armory Show has commissioned an artist to create the visual identity for the fair, and since 2006, in addition, they've been asked to produce special limited edition prints to benefit the Pat Hearn and Collinda Land Cancer Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide medical expenses to those members of the visual arts community who are suffering from cancer. This year, Ewan Gibbs was the recipient of the commission. Here I've highlighted a few of the women who have received the award. The Armory Show introduced the annual artist commission with, as you can see on the upper left, Karen Kalimnik in 2002. She was followed by Barnaby Furnace in 2003. Lisa Reuter is represented on the upper right-hand corner, and she was the artist commission in 2004. Jakob Nordstrom was in 2005. We began publishing a series of editions with John Wesley in 2006, followed by Pipilotti Rist, and she's on the left, the bottom left-hand corner. And then last year, Mary Heilman and John Waters shared the award and each created a print. So I think this year we'll probably have another woman, although it's not really something that we discuss, but it is something that we do consider. We've already begun to work on the next edition of the fair and are planning several new initiatives, including an expansion of our public programming and education activities. Thank you. Good afternoon. When Kat approached me about this panel, being from Christie's, I dabbled with the idea of either talking about women at auction or the art that we represent at auction from South Asia, and I decided probably many of you who are already familiar with South Asian art, but it doesn't hurt to show women artists from South Asia and where we began and where we are today in a very small period of time, and it didn't happen accidentally. I think we all put our efforts together for where we are today. So I'm starting with actually a billboard, a film poster from Madras from the 1980s, where it speaks of how women in India were represented. And even today, if you see a Bollywood poster, we are not very far from there, but this particular poster I chose because it has three parts. On extreme left, you have the seductress. The center speaks of the Indian beauty as voluptuous women also represented in sculptures of Indian temple. And on the right, it's the goddess. There is nothing in between either you're a seductress or you're a goddess, and of course you are beautiful. So I thought it would be interesting to start with that. However, going back in time, in the 1880s, women were allowed to participate in exhibitions, but not until 1920 were they allowed to go to art schools. And one of the earliest professional women artists from India was Sunaini Devi, who was tutored at home also because she came from the Tagore family, which many of you are familiar with. She, Rabindranath Tagore, was her uncle. So it was only in the affluent families or cultured families that women were allowed to take classes in art. Amrita Shergill, an artist of Hungarian and Indian descent, her mother was Hungarian and father an Indian scholar, grew up in Budapest and India and studied in Paris, but only lived till 28 years of age, but made significant contribution to contemporary Indian art. She moved from Paris to live in India in the 1930s and began to paint Indian women and represent the cause of Indian women at that very young age when she was in her 20s. She died in 1941. However, her contribution to contemporary Indian artists, who are women, has been extremely significant. She's been an inspiration and we cannot talk about feminism or women artists from this region without making a note of her. Most of the Indian artists, women artists paint women, interestingly, and most of them actually paint themselves. And I've picked some of the most well-known Indian artists and I've just, I'm going to show a few examples of each of these women and their works. This is B. Prabha from 1960s painting women and the daily chores that you see in India with her family, a caregiver. Arpita Singh, inspired by Amrita Shergill, began painting in the 50s and continues to paint and those of you follow auction, I'm sure are familiar, she has been selling very well. She again paints herself as the woman and the body and most, this particular work is called, of course, security check and it's interesting how she shows the inside and the outside and also her whole idea of how a woman is being at all times scrutinized in Indian culture as what is inside and outside, how she represents herself inside in the house and outside to the people. A lot of her works also speak of different ideas of what a woman should be doing in an Indian culture. Nalini Malani, contemporary of Arpita Singh, has been shown extensively in various museums all over the world including the new museum here in New York. This particular work is called Remembering Toba Takesing. It's a village in Pakistan now and this speaks of immigration. A lot of these artists began work pre-independence when Pakistan and India was one and a lot of their works relate to how people migrated and this particular work speaks of the role of women also in migration and there were tin trunks laid out all over the installation with monitors inside the trunks speaking of the dilemmas and the pains and the anxieties of people moving back and forth from India to Pakistan and vice versa but it is interesting she's one of the earliest artists from India to have started using video installations and performance so again has shown and opened up a path for a lot of younger artists which I'll show a few of today. Again this is Nalini Malani also was shown at the Asia Society here and the Queen's Museum. She makes these large scale installations. Again most of her subjects are either myths related to women and how it's mostly the fallen women, the rich or the vamp in every story. This is one more of Nalini Malani's work. Rekha Radwitya is again known as one of a very outspoken feminist artist from India. This is one of her works called Sharing Secrets and the Kauri Shell. She uses a lot of symbols in her works and again the Kauri Shell represents the woman. Coming to the 1960s artists, much younger artists Anju Dodia is one of the leading women artists of India today and again most of these artists like I said represent themselves in their paintings including Anju Dodia herself here shown on the throne and it's called the Throne of Frost. This was a installation she did at the Palace of Baroda and I'll show you some of the pictures of this installation. It is situated in the palace and the reason I brought this up is because not just the artists but also galleries and dealers and collectors in India have made the effort to promote women artists and have made space for them and encouraged them in every way possible to give these large shows to these artists. Bharti Kheer, a British artist now based in India of Indian extract, left London to settle in India in 1990s. Again works with women bodies and this is called Ariane. She made this in 2004 and it has a sister sculpture. This is called Ariane's Sister in 2006 which is like the Venus of the Mall where a shopper went berserk. So it's interesting how the subjects vary. On the one hand these women artists are talking about feminism on the other hand. They're also making fun of this idea of the woman shopper who cannot control herself. Again Bharti Kheer working off of this is called Mrs. Hera Moon a model seated on a chair and having if we take a closer look at her she has the same designs on the chair actually engraved into her skin around her neck and a tarantula on her hand. Shilpa Gupta. I've put them sequentially even in terms of how young these artists are. Shilpa Gupta is in her early 30s. Works with video installations and site specific installations. Again working with her own images. This particular one is an interactive video installation where you get a sense that you're in control of these women because you as a viewer gets to come and play around with the mouse and make the women do different things. But what is said on the screen is what she thinks women are said at all times shut up and eat. Hey hey and so her entire video is all about how women are being told to do certain things. They are in these camouflage uniforms. They're expected certain things to do certain things in India and follow the norm and there is someone with a mouse trying to dictate what they should be doing. Site specific sculpture installation of Shilpa Gupta. This is called the blame where she has a whole room in red with bottles labeled as blame and she went around all over Mumbai trains trying to hawk these little bottles and selling them and trying to tell people I like to blame you. I like to blame you for what you're not responsible. Your nationality your religion your color and a very very serious work by this very young artist. Hema Upadhyay again an artist based in Mumbai works with her own body and her own photographs and she situates herself in every painting with these little photographs of herself cut out. She looks at herself as an immigrant in Mumbai and talks about all the immigrants in the slums of Bombay which are actually producing most of our designer wear clothes and basically the patterns are from in her painting are from those designer wear items. Chitra Ganesh is more closer to home. She's from the Indian diaspora based in Brooklyn who works off on the comic strips of Indian myths called Amar Chitra Katha where all women are represented all have fair skin and they always garbed in these extremely sensuous clothing and Chitra Ganesh takes a stance and says I will show what you want to show but you don't show. So most of her women are with exposed breasts and her works are pretty direct and sometimes can be quite difficult to live with on the walls. Anyway these were a few things I put together just to give an idea of where Indian art has moved from the 1920s to where we are today and interestingly in India or even South Asia including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka most of the dealers and collectors are women and even more interesting even at auction houses most of the specialists are women. So we all are making every effort possible to make sure we put our strengths and forces together to stand up for all these women artists who are very seriously being artists, mothers, ancestors and everything it takes to be a full person. And also I would like to still say that even though in the primary market where the galleries and dealers are concerned the prices might be same but at auction which is the public price of an artwork there is still a huge gap and we are all very aware of it for example Parthikir is probably one of the highest selling artists at auction from South Asia selling for about 500,000 whereas her husband Subod Gupta sells for over millions of dollars and her works are definitely at par if not even stronger and better. So it is a concern and we are all putting our efforts together to see where we how we can bridge the gap and hopefully you all will have some questions which I can answer. Okay we are going to start with some questions for myself and Ferris and then we definitely will open it up to the audience if you have questions just hold on to this. When we get to that portion if you could just proceed to one of the microphones on either side and so that everybody can hear your questions. So I am just going to start with something really basic which is I think Sue mentioned a little bit about and talked about some reasons. Why how do we see how do you see collecting practices changing now in time of economic downturn especially in the different areas that you are working in and how do you see this affecting the prices for work by women artists. Anybody who would like to start really? I just read this review by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine where he said the art market may be dying but now maybe art can live again and I think that is something that all of us are looking forward to. I sort of frame it in the last eight years I don't know why I say eight years because I look at the rise of the art fairs and prosperity of global prosperity where a lot of people invaded the art world and the art market taking advantage of the possibility of art had become an asset class and was also openly spoken about that. I taught a class about that time I think 2002 called art as an investment taboo topic or smart strategy. I mean as little as eight or ten years ago you shouldn't have really even spoken about the art market and then that's all sort of been blown away. So what I think will happen is I showed the works by the women artists because I think we as everybody especially women should celebrate that women are broken through certain ceilings and are fetching a certain amount of money. I think what will happen now there will be a complete reevaluation and it's very difficult I think in the gallery scene when you know there's there's not that much money out there do you lower an artist price you know what do you do what does somebody you know like Cecily Brown who sold at 1.7 million dollars and sells in the high six figures what do you do you have to relook at those prices. I think those people are a tough spot. I think otherwise I hope that what happens is it becomes a time when people really get back to the galleries and the museums and even I love the fact that you guys are expanding the the educational part of the art fairs because it is a chance to see a lot of art from around the world and that people will get back and start really looking at the art and slowing down in a way and I think it is going to be a very difficult transition back because we have forgotten how to talk about the art as the work on the wall we've gotten so excited about this show sold out this piece sold for that we don't even know how to speak I think in terms of art you know critically speaking and so I don't know if this is really answering your question but what I what I think will happen is that we'll get back people will get back looking in the galleries looking at the art and talking about it and and getting back a community that was here prior to the rise of the of the art market and and I feel I hope we'll come back. Anybody else like to comment? I'd actually like to speak to that because I think I'm on the opposite or the other side of the the gallery scene than Sue is in that I represent young and emerging artists so I have always talked about my art in terms of loving the art and it's never been a commodity and if we have a sold out show we have a sold out show because it's great work and people are excited about it and our work is not expensive to begin with so I do think for a gallery who is showing emerging talents it's a great time I'm actually doing better and I hesitate to say that when people are having such a bad time but I'm doing better than I ever have done because a lot of collectors that were perhaps spending $500,000 on the work no longer even if they have the money they no longer feel comfortable spending that because they're not certain what is going to happen in the market however they still are Jonesing to to buy something so they do come and look at at artists who are having their first gallery show we just had a show of Kate Clark's work in October was her first gallery show ever and it sold out opening night having said that the prices are much much lower than you would you would have for an artist who has a long you know and storied career so those people who were maybe spending 500,000 now they can spend 10,000 or 20,000 and get their art fix and have something really fabulous and maybe buy it for the right reasons and not buy it as speculation well what are the right reasons I asked that question because we're assuming it's a great question we're we're making universal assumption that people buy art as an investment solely and certainly the women with whom I spoke and and research their motivation was not about the bottom of the bottom line and I told the story at our last program and I'll say it again one of the collectors who was one of the top 100 collectors in 1992 had a beautiful Frida Kahlo which she only paid ten thousand dollars for only ten thousand dollars in the 70s and she divested herself of it in the late 80s because by that point it was worth a million six and every time she looked at it all she could see was a dollar sign because anyone who came to visit her and many curators did come to visit her said oh how valuable it is they didn't look at the art they only saw it in terms of consumption yeah I think that's a great point I do think that there's a lot of different reasons uh that people buy art and I think the right reasons or anything that is that is fulfilling to them it can be because uh they have an emotional attachment it's food for their soul they feel happy or glad or content when they look at the work it can it could be that they're buying it as as a status symbol because they feel that it's a prestigious thing to have um they can't they could be buying it because it makes other people in their life happy uh or they can they could be buying it I have a lot of clients that are very philanthropic and they buy things to donate them so there's there is absolutely a lot of reasons I don't I'm not saying that there's there's an incorrect reason I do think however if people think of it as a purely business um one of one of my favorite stories uh is I had a collector who came in this is years ago and they were looking at a very early aes plus f work and they said well what will it be what will it be worth next year will it double in price by next year and I looked at them and I said well if it was going to double in price by next year why would I sell it to you this year so I think that people they have to look at it if they if they really love the work they should buy it and if they don't love the work they should pass can I thought I'm gonna I'll just just say something because um you know we just came out of a week of sort of um a lot of art activity and this year at the fair um there definitely was not the frenzy that we had in the past um years um and it started uh you know really in the fall because I also attended frieze and uh fiac and then most recently the art show so clearly there wasn't that frenzy of buying but the fact that we have you know over 50,000 people at the fair I think the dealer's expectations were already lowered but they were so pleasantly surprised by how um people were genuinely interested in work and talking about it and considering it it was clearly a much slower process to sell work but that there was definitely interest and a lot of collectors who may have been kind of shut out um by the frenzy I'll call it because there were so many other people lined up for work um some of those people and you would consider them serious collectors are now you know feeling taken care of they feel like people are paying attention to them it's it's a completely different world it's kind of reverted back to where it was even eight ten let's say eight years ago and um it's just I think it's just a friendlier art world even people said to us at the fair gee everyone is so friendly and helpful I don't know what it was I had never done an art fair before so I have no idea what it was like before but um it was clearly was a different feeling so and I'm sure it feels it's the same way in in the galleries you know there's just time to talk to people about the work instead of how much is it my friend has it I want one too and what about the situation at the auction houses well we came out of a sale last week and it is very clear um our last sale of Asia week was in September uh the night after Lehman Brothers fell and uh but we it didn't give us an idea we couldn't gauge how far the market had gone because the sale did really well still so we survived um however this last week sale gave us a very good indication of all the speculators have moved away it's all the um collectors who were collecting in 2004 2005 and were priced out are back and these are the serious collectors who are actually looking at auctions to fill the holes in their collection and this is the time they can actually collect so my recommendation would be from what we saw last week is put out the best works you have that are at mid-level prices not the highest level and I think we have phenomenal women artists and this is our chance actually to promote them and uh bring them into really serious collections because people are willing to look at them people are willing to buy them and they also want to not invest the entire amount of money in one work but spread it out so it's our best opportunity we have I just want to say one thing about um why people collect I um when I was a curator I organized a number of shows from collections and um this was in Orlando and it was a couple years ago and I had two two collectors who had moved from um more sort of blue chip older artists to younger emerging artists and the reason that they did it is they they love the idea of getting involved in the artist's lives and knowing them and helping them and knowing that by buying something this artist could live for three more months or call them up and and say you know I've got your uh I've got your painting on my screensaver and so I think there's a couple of very you know excited younger collectors that really want to connect uh with the creative process and be a part of it um you and all of you actually brought up the difference in different types of collectors and the fact that the people are purchasing work whether it's at Christie's or at the gallery are different now um obviously the life of an artwork and the life of an artist whether they end up in the cultural record has some relationship to who's purchasing their work um what do I relate to comment on that um sorry no I was just going to say that I do I do take into consideration obviously we want to to have the work in the best collection possible that doesn't necessarily mean the largest name it can mean the most generous person I do have a lot of collectors that aren't maybe world famous collectors but they're incredibly generous with loading the work they can buy it pay the artist for it and then not see it for two years and be perfectly happy to have it go around on a museum tour and I do find that depending on the work I will tap specific people that I know perhaps don't have a big name but are incredibly generous of heart and soul um as an auction house we don't have the liberty or the choice of who we want to sell the works to unfortunately however um we do um we do make sure that when they're all works that are that have been selected for museums uh for different exhibitions we alert every interested party that this work is being sold based that based on the fact that they would allow um it to travel so we do help in making it happen but since it's a bidding situation we cannot really choose our collectors I'd like to ask all of you as women professionals individual arts I know Sue has said that she is a collector um if you yourselves collect art and how you come to choose the art that you collect because that might also provide some um information for the people in the audience I think at last count we had about 300 artworks my husband and I have bought um we're passionate collectors if we love it we buy it it's I don't I don't put my head in it at all it all comes from my heart um and I've learned um from those that I let get away that if I if I have a real visceral reaction to it and I need to possess it I'll find a way I think um it's sort of the same thing for me it's just um I for so long collected for a museum and not for myself I would get things because somebody couldn't afford to uh pay someone to write their catalog so I would get a piece um in exchange and most of us by were by women artists but um my husband I've been collecting actively for about the last two or three years and um I think one of my favorite times as a consultant was when I was with this collector that I showed you and um we were at pace and it was during art Basel in Europe so nobody was around and we went there and they just happened and gotten these Kiki Smiths and and it was one of those things and I just I just died and I could see that she was hesitating a little bit and I was like if you don't buy it I'm buying it and um we ended up you know each sort of buying one and I think that's kind of a um a thing of as a consultant and a you know art dealer putting your money where your mouth is and really showing somebody that you're buying something that you that you believe in and and you particularly collect art exclusively by women is that correct me yes no I don't okay I collect um if I just say had any bias it would be towards painting I love painting so I have um you know Elizabeth Murray and Suzanne McClellan but I also have Tom McGrath and Christopher Benedict and um you know Amy Solman some really sort of terrific painters Deborah are you a collector um yes I collect things I've been collecting one piece a year for the last 30 years ever since I started working and publishing and it's usually it's either I become friendly with an artist and and I just fall in love with their work or um kind of like Claire you know you just have a visceral response to something and you say oh I have to have it and then you put down a hundred dollars and you pay it off the rest of your life but um I bought lots of different things I happened the oldest piece I have um it's an Isabelle Bishop drawing and it's so odd because it's the only piece like it in my whole collection it's a drawing I have drawings but most of them are younger artists and I just fell in love with it so it's sort of like the that's the highlight of my collection and I had I had a little Eva Hess but I actually just gave that to my daughter so if I looked at my collection and I'm thinking about it now it's probably more women artists than male artists it's but it was never they're none they were never chosen that way um I started collecting uh at a very shoestring budget as a student and the best outlet used to be at school art fairs where you could buy um art from your faculty members who were all established reasonably established artists you could barter and exchange uh with your fellow colleagues who were artists and art historians and then I went on to become a curator and my husband who's in the audience here would always joke and say you end up buying everything that you try to sell so so my collection pretty much began uh from a very emotional response of artists um that I like I show and I end up buying so I think I'm gonna get one more question then we'll open up to the audience um the last panel Mimi Smith was on the panel and she was speaking about um the WAC exhibition and actually this would apply to many other larger exhibitions that were exclusively women artists um and said you know that she was kind of shocked walking through that some of these works that were considered so important almost all of them or the vast majority of them were noted that they were still the collection of the artist um she was suggesting also that of course if this was an exhibition about a movement say minimalism that might not be the case so with that in mind and kind of with the future in mind um can you suggest strategies or new ways that galleries and auction houses and other outlets might approach their practices differently to um to work towards a level of parity I don't know that you can consciously do something different I have to say that I think it's coming and the reason I say that is I mean if you think about politically where we are two years ago um the pundits and everyone said we would never elect an African-American president and that we could never elect a woman president and we have an African-American president and we had a woman who made a very viable run and what what I say is a lot of the art that I showed um are women in their in their 30s but I think they've broken through and I just I think as time goes on I don't think it's going to make a difference as much and I also think there is a difference in um feeling of expectation of women in their in their 20s and in their early 30s they you know if you're sort of of my generation I was happy to get a job in a museum it's like yay I get to work and um but their generation they they expect it and I think that along with that expectation will come change and I think um actually they say women always do better in the down market so I think I think the change will come faster than we think you know I just went to a breakfast the other morning and Susan Rothenberg spoke and it was really interesting to talk to her because she was an artist that really was painting kind of in a in with a group of other painters um but getting a lot of recognition and um she said at one point she was in a show and she was the only woman in the show and from that point on she made it she she vowed that she would never be in a show again where she was the only woman artist and I think things like that and I think people's just general awareness um I mean for example you know I showed those four of artists who um the four women who were chosen for this artist award for the Armory show we've already started thinking about who's the next one and one of the considerations right away is you know maybe we should look you know maybe we should be looking at a woman you know the woman artist or young female artist um I don't know if people would have thought that a few years ago when I worked in magazines and um we were always trying to figure out the next cover who you know it's kind of like insider trading who's going to be on the next cover of the magazine um I was on the business side so I wasn't always privy to all the conversations but there was all you know it always came up oh you know we had a woman last month maybe we you know we should wait or this person's having a big show at the LA county or that's traveling um I don't think we can wait let's just do two women in a row so it was a consideration was it something that was quantifiable I don't think so it was always a question of quality and value and what the you know what the work was what was the worth of the work but um you know if you go back and you quantify it you know you probably would see that many more than 20 percent of the covers of the art magazines have been women artists in the last few years so that's an interesting I don't know I would love to look right and when I I went through here's the catalog for the Armory show so I kind of figured uh oh you're gonna ask me some questions about it but I went through the list of artists and this is not all of the artists that were actually represented at the show but the list of artists that were listed by every single gallery so there were like I said 243 galleries there's probably over 3000 artists that are represented in the stables of those galleries but it's approximately 20 25 percent are women in here so do you want to um I would I would just like to add and say that I think every effort we make is important how small however small it is and I'll give you an example um since most of us specialists in our department are women um we were shown the Shilpa Gupta's work the blame uh someone wanted to consign and we were totally shot down because um it's a installation piece no one sells it at auction especially in the salvation market and all the women got together and put their foot down and said we will do everything to make it you know make it possible that this work is included because a lot of works get rejected even as they start getting offered to the specialists so I think it does make a difference it does make a statement when you have uh young woman artists being represented for works that she's chosen um a different medium she's chosen to take a path which is uh not very common and I think we need to encourage that and I think that's one way of doing it I think we're going to go right ahead and open it up to the audience now I think there's a question on the side no a little bit less I'm not sure the mic is on just yet wait a second Linda okay go ahead I'm Linda Stein this is um this is wonderful I'd like to ask your response speaking of parity and strategies it seems that the women's liberation in the 70s scared the powers that be to a certain extent because they're not going to move without being a little bit scared um and now we have an opening with the Obama administration we really have a big opening I think and I'm wondering if we could go back to a thought I had and moderated some panel discussions on just around 2000 where any institution that receives government money a museum or any nonprofit gallery has to have or move toward parity they're getting taxpayer money shouldn't couldn't we do something uh to demand this and we like to respond that's a really interesting idea um I mean my first thought is there's then there's a lot of like red tape and bureaucracy and I wish that it could come from a different place of maybe even professionals demanding it like can't we demand it of the curator of the Guggenheim that she shows more women artists you know we have curators or members of our table or whatever I mean that it could come from a different way but so if there are any lawyers in the audience who would like to take part in this I mean I could think of a couple of sex and race discrimination lawyers I know but we need a team and if you want to be part of it you can definitely talk to Linda I'd love to be a part of anybody else like to respond to that question I'd like to make a comment about that I guess coming from and what Sue said earlier about the next generation expecting it and coming being being sort of myself being in between maybe the next and and the past and I actually had pretty good friends with Judy Chicago who she and I go round and round because she's so militant and I God bless her for it but I always say the next generation does not need to be so militant we need we need to realize that they do expect it women who are in their 20s and 30s who are artists expect to be treated in the same in the same way as as men artists do and perhaps it's that expectation that will garter them the support and and the museum shows and and and so forth and I guess that's why I always work and work my gallery not not in a way that will offend or or ostracize any particular group but just in a way that if it's good it should be shown and I do think that women are is as good if not better than a lot of men's art we talked about that and so I do think that if we continue on in the path of just um working with that expectation that we will get equality it will it will come thank you yes um I'm part of the the women artists in the 80s but there are so many that very much felt they were very strong they were moving after the the 70s feminism that net did not seem to be the issue what I found is there's probably a lost generation of women artists that are from this period that did not they were either in the gallery seen shortly they never even went into it they went into their own lot they continued to create art over the last 20 30 years what happened what what I see is as these women are dying and think some of their estates are getting lost they're brilliant artists almost like outsider artists never discovered and what what can be done for the collectors are people to discover these women because I it's happening people continue to create they don't want to go into a gallery scene today at a certain age or something they just continue to create necessity and they have incredible art that has not been seen at all it's completely invisible and I'd say there's hundreds and thousands of these women artists they've not given up but they have not been discovered how can that happen I I can respond to that a little bit since on Friday the Institute for Women in Art ran this conference just for this purpose to talk to present to artists planning ahead even if they have not yet been recognized you have to be an advocate for yourself you have to keep good records you have to plan for where those records those archives will be deposited for future generations to see if you can you should make sure that you assign an executor who's particular as when you pass on who's particularly interested in keeping your name out there and putting your work in places where it might be seen down the road there are many different ways to handle this this is after I'm talking about after the fact but it's your responsibility as an artist to take care of your own career and presenting yourself even if you haven't done it to date to make the plans for the future I speak as someone who is an art historian who has spent the last 40 years mining archives trying to find information about artists lost to history who were not many of them like many of the 19th century women authors were top authors at the time in the 19th century but they've disappeared from our our our forefront of our knowledge at this point and you have to go back and look and see are there records about them where their reviews where can you find the information where are where are there where's their artwork now located and so forth and really you must be your own advocate and I strongly suggest to many of the artists out there I know your position believe me every day I talk to artists who want to know what to do with their body of work and what to do with their papers if they're even organized you really have to be your own advocate and be proactive anybody else like to respond to this and I think we'll take one more question okay Elizabeth yeah Claire I was curious to know and I'm assuming that because of your approach in terms of the art that you are selling whether or not you price male and female art equally absolutely so then my next question is aside from saying brava is how can you then influence other gallery owners to appreciate what they are holding and showing and selling as you do Elizabeth my work is selling that should be well you you could sell that to other other gallery absolutely and I and and again as as I said in my talk I do get I get the word out there I'm not shy about that we've we've had three women shows this year two of the three have sold out the other one we have a very high hope will will end up in a public yeah the question we have more has more to do with with the value of the artwork the bag the monetary value if you place the same monetary the same exact the same exact thank you okay please yeah I'd like to adjust my comment to something that you had said earlier and with all due respect I I'm not really concerned about what will happen to my art after I die off I'm really concerned about what's going to happen here now and I look around the room here and I don't know how many are artists you want to raise your hand a lot of you look in my age group and I know it's very sexy and marketable to talk about 30 something but what a better and I'd like all of you to address this that's an excellent question would anybody like to respond I'm not really sure what you're asking when you say what about us if that will I think the question is there was definitely a lot of people talked about emerging women artists but I don't think we talked I think we're talking about the question of ageism is there in addition to sexism is there which there really is ageism and how do as a woman artists who's maybe not an emerging artist not somebody who's just coming out of MFA program go about representing themselves and showing their work and so forth well I think I mean the reason that I brought up Elizabeth Murray and Pat Steer is that I that I see their their prices in the market I mean I see them in the group of like what about us too because they don't they don't have the the market presence that these younger artists do what I was trying to show is that there is a there is a progression towards equality hopefully and I think it's it's moving slowly um the what about us I think it's a constant daily fight in in a way I mean I have many many female artist friends um and I think it's just you know you get up and do your your art and you try to get it shown and and you know I don't I don't know the answer I mean the thing is it is it it is unfair out there and it's people like us I hope we're trying to to work our hardest to to make it um equal let me also say that um I recognize exactly what you're saying and for that reason AIR has as far as I know the only program like this in the in the United States um we have a program called the AIR fellowship program um it involves a solo show um a membership and involvement in the gallery for 18 months 18 months of professional development studio visits with art professionals and a mentorship from an from one of our gallery artists this program has a very unique criteria it's open to all women artists living in around New York City who have not yet had a solo show at a commercial space or have not had one in 10 years so actually this year um we do have one artist in her 20s and I think she's the only of the six in the program that is in her 20s different years it's been people of different ages but I just would encourage and I said this at another panel I did it recently the other not for profit organizations out there who often can start to um can create programs that um have a system and have a goal towards them that in a different way than I think a commercial gallery can necessarily um to open up some of these emerging artist programs to um underrepresented women artists as well and I'd like to put in my two cents because I served on the fellowship panel this year for AIR fellows um and I found it particularly disturbing the number of artists who submitted materials for review which were impossible to read please if you're going to go to the effort of applying for fellowships or working with gallerists make an effort to to make your images large enough to read that they're focused um and they're presented in a professional manner I could not believe the numbers of of applicants who may either made no effort didn't know how to use technology but I think um I think work with others to for those of you who may not be as comfortable to to get your materials to the point where they're much more professional and find the resources because we offer consultation as do most not for profits um if you didn't learn this in school because they didn't give it when you're in school we have those resources for you so I think we have time for one more question am I correct we have time for one more question yes okay my name is Siona Benjamin I'm I'm represented by Flomenhof Gallery in Chelsea um I have first thing I wanted to say that it was a wonderful panel and um it's so informative as have been the other panels I also wanted to especially thank Claire Oliver because um my I I I persuaded my 13 year old daughter to come on the sunny day come and sit and hear the panel and she said you know and she's and what the way what you said couldn't have been better