The Sexism of Art
BY ANNA APPLEBAUM
On Friday, February 22nd, the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts held a panel presentation in Wilson 214. In the lecture hall sat students enrolled in a required freshman course: “Practices in Architecture + Art + Design”. The day’s lecture contributed to the course’s overall theme – examining modern intersections among art, design, architecture and urban studies – by showcasing the work of one student from each Fine Art major. Yet in this presentation of the fine art disciplines (Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture and Painting) for freshmen soon choosing their majors, every student presenter but one was male.
On a panel of five students, four were men. A gender ratio like this feels odd at Washington University, when U.S. News & World Report reports the school-wide ratio of men to women as 48% to 52%. In Sam Fox, however, the disparity between the students on the panel and those who make up the student body is even more immediately apparent. Inside the school, there is a general appreciation (and joking recognition) of a student gender ratio that skews heavily female. Indeed, out of the 36 seniors graduating with a fine art major in 2013, only seven are male.
How could a panel of mainly male students come about in the first place? Was there some virulently misogynistic dean who intentionally chose four men to represent the school, cackling about women all the while? 
Not exactly. After being approached by administrative staff organizing the freshman curriculum, faculty in each department individually chose students as representatives. It was a decision entirely left up to professors in the majors – those who theoretically know students best. Each set of professors chose a student they thought would represent the department well – who presumably had a strong portfolio, was intelligent and was articulate – and they were nearly all men.
That is part of what makes this case so complicated. Professors chose students separately, and they happened to be male. It is unhelpful and frankly irrelevant to question the capabilities of the men chosen. Yet it also seems highly unlikely that in an environment that is statistically dominated by women, all the best candidates would be men. Matt Callahan, the senior Sculpture major who spoke on the panel, noted this contradiction several weeks after the presentation to the freshmen: “It’s impossible to make a panel of students that is representative of the school as a whole, but it was very obvious that this one was not.” Reflecting on the event, he continued, “The school is filled with eloquent, hard-working artists capable of representing their departments. You have to question what other sort of qualities are being prized.”
Sam Fox is filled not only with female artists, but also strong women leaders. Kelsey Brod, a senior printmaking major, has served as Art School Senator in the Student Union Senate for the past four years. Brod and Kelsey Eng co-founded RARA, a well-known campus group dedicated to increasing the visibility of art on campus, now run by Morgan Dowty and Hannah Waldman. Indeed, the gender make-up of the panel seems especially unusual not only because Sam Fox has so many women leaders, but also because the school’s culture focuses so overtly on promoting awareness of the diversity of creative expression. So does Sam Fox get a free pass on a male-heavy panel? Was it merely an unfortunate mistake?
Perhaps it was. Yet structural inequality runs deep, and sexism is not always intentional. Brod, a senior Printmaking major, remarked on the historical tensions of gender and art: “There’s a big difference between the presence of so many women [in the art school] and the history of art, where there were so few women.” Sam Fox does well admitting women through its doors, but administrative staff neglected to actively curate this panel as it would for any official gallery exhibit. Sam Fox failed in a key responsibility of its mission as an educational institution – to combat the ugly realities of art’s sexist past with intentional, instructive messages to freshmen about the values it upholds today.
As a result of student complaints about the panel, the administration is working to change some of its policies. A resolution pending in SU Senate reflects the change that students wish to see in their curriculum, such as no longer only setting aside one day for the history of women in art, and to critically engage with both historical and contemporary issues of gender and racial discrimination in the art world.
These changes are important. Yet it is easy to instruct about appreciating diversity, harder to act. The make-up of this panel should have set off alarm bells, but it did not. As a cultural and educational institution, Sam Fox must seriously reconsider how it wants to be represented as well as what values and aesthetics it cherishes. The school has a responsibility to its many strong female leaders, established and aspiring, for support and recognition. It has a responsibility to all students for an increased critical awareness in administrative and curatorial decisions.