The Baltimore Museum of Art in 2020 will purchase only works by women artists

In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art will purchase only works by women artists to reduce the gender disparity in its collections. This was announced by the Maryland museum’s director, Christopher Bedford, telling The Baltimore Sun newspaper that "it’s a way to spread awareness and change the identity of the institution. You can’t just buy a work by a black female artist and hang it next to a Mark Rothko painting. To fix centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical."

For this reason, next year every new piece entering the museum will be something that was produced by a woman (the only exceptions will be works that come to the museum as donations or bequests). The goal involved an allocation by the museum of two million dollars for purchases. In addition, all the exhibitions that will take place next year at the institute will focus on women’s art. It is an exhibition schedule entitled 2020 Vision, entirely devoted to presenting the achievements of women artists, with thirteen monographic and seven thematic exhibitions. “The initiative,” they let the museum know, “is part of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s vision to work on race and gender inequalities in the museum field, and to more fully and deeply represent the spectrum of individuals who have shaped the trajectory of art.”

The museum estimates that only 4 percent of the pieces in its collection were created by women. That is about 3,800 works (out of a total of 95,000), created by 1,050 women artists and designers. The first painting by a woman to enter the museum’s collections was a portrait of Sarah Miriam Peale (Philadelphia, 1800 - 1885), considered the first American woman to succeed as a professional artist: it came to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1916, two years after the museum was founded. Since that date, the Baltimore Museum of Art has continued to collect works by women artists, albeit to a much lesser extent than their male counterparts, and today the institute has works by artists such as Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Susan Rothenberg, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mary Reid Kelley, Wangechi Mutu, Anne Truitt and many others.

Pictured: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of Princess Anna Alexandrovna Galitzin, detail (c. 1797; oil on canvas, 135.9 x 100.3 cm; Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art)

The Baltimore Museum of Art in 2020 will purchase only works by women artists

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