Women Take the Floor at MFA Boston

Women Take the Floor (through May 2, 2021)

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Loren MacIver

Georgia O'Keeffe

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has two blockbuster shows that have attracted great notice, the first of which spotlights women. In the age of #MeToo, female outrage and aroused consciousness is a work in progress insofar as transforming the American political landscape goes. There can be little doubt, though, that women have shaken things culturally. We can see the impact in movies, music, and television. Now it’s time for the art world to take notice.

Women Take the Floor begins with an apology. The MFA offers a full confession for its past sins; just 8 percent of the MFA collection of nearly one half million items were fashioned by the hands of women. It hasn’t been much better in the 21^st century; in the past 10 years the MFA has acquired 40,000 new works, but just 10% of the artists were female. On the whole, one could say it’s high time for the MFA to make amends. It tries, but it only partially succeeds.

Doris L. Lewis

Women Take the Floor presents more than 200 works from women arranged in 7 galleries “Women on the Move” presents art and design from the 1920s-30s; “No Man’s Land” takes a look at how women imagined landscape in the 20^th century; and “Beyond the Loom” explores fiber sculpture. “Women Depicting Women” is largely self-explanatory, as is “Women Publish Women,” though the medium is printmaking. The two more ambiguous galleries are “Women of Action,” which looks at talented women who labored in the shadow of their more famous male partners; and “Women and Abstraction,” which is devoted to mid-20^th century women who eschewed representationalism.

Lalla Essaydi

Here’s the rub: most of the works on display come from the MFA’s own collection. Do you see a problem? The museum admits it hasn’t collected or spotlighted women as it should have in the past 150 years. This means that most of what we see has already been well-viewed or was taken from storage and dusted off for this exhibit.  Georgia O’Keeffe is the single most represented artist on the wall, but she was famous in her own lifetime and since. In essence, we don’t need the MFA to remind us that she knew her way around a paintbrush. Nor do we need another contrivance to show off Frida Kahlo’s Dos Mujeres, which the MFA recently purchased. It is not too hard to see through the guise given that the exhibit is largely devoted to American artists. Kahlo (1907-54) was a Mexican citizen who lived in the United States for just 8 unhappy years. There is a similar problem with Converging Territories #30, a work from Lalla Essaydi; she is a Moroccan who works in the US.

Although MFA curators had to choose works from a constricted number of options, there are many gems on view, and they include the O’Keeffes. In my estimation, the “Women of Action” section was the most intriguing. There has long been speculation that many works attributed to men were done in part or entirely by their wives or partners. At the very least, female artists such as Helen Frankenthaler (Robert Motherwell), Lee Krasner (Jackson Pollock), Elaine de Kooning (Willem de Kooning), Grace Hartigan (Harry Jackson), and even O’Keeffe for a time (Alfred Stieglitz), labored in the shadow of powerful men who attracted more notice. 

Lois M. Jones

Also of interest are works from women who, if not exactly unknown, deserve broader attention, such as Alice Neel, Loren MacIver, Löis Mailou Jones, and Doris Lindo Lewis. Speaking entirely for myself, I simply can’t evaluate the fiber arts of individuals such as Lenore Tawney or the performance art of Porsha Olayiwola as I know next to nothing about soft sculpture and most performance art strikes me as more intriguing conceptually than in practice. (I will say that were I choosing a performance artist, someone such as Laurie Anderson is far more accomplished than Ms. Olayiwola.)

Alice Neel

There remain many challenges in the quest for the MFA to give women artists their due. A start might be to celebrate areas where women have been powerful. Photography is glaringly given short shrift in the MFA show. It’s one to include a rising talent such as Essaydi, but let’s not forget that many female shutterbugs paved her way: Bernice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Annie Leibovitz, Cindy Sherman, Doris Ullman…. One can–as I have–make the case that women photographers have often outshone their male counterparts. That’s why so much of their work hangs on museum walls.

In similar fashion, I’m not sure it serves the cause to exacerbate women’s exclusion at the expense of ignoring those who kicked down the barriers. O’Keeffe is certainly among them, but there are other female American artists who have done so and are mostly ignored in this show, think Louise Bourgeois, Cecilia Breaux, Mary Cassatt, Judy Chicago, Louise Nevelson, Florine Stettheimer, and Kara Walker. I am always a big fan of giving credit to pioneers. After all, a thing must be imagined before it can be pursued.  

A third challenge is recognizing what the MFA isn’t: a repository of contemporary art. Let’s face it; although institutions such as the MFA constantly add to their collections, they mostly do so after a particular artist gains acclaim. Fine arts museums are by nature conservative institutions–no matter how hip individual curators might think themselves to be. Contemporary art isn’t the MFA’s strength. “Women Take the Floor” is weighted more heavily to mid-20^th century art because those works were vetted before they were collected. More recent works are something of a gamble, especially when one begins to collect with an eye toward ticking boxes (black, Hispanic, transgender, queer, body image). I wish the MFA would cede contemporary turf to museums that know it better, like the Institute of Contemporary Art and Mass MoCA.  

By all means get yourself to the MFA to see this exhibit. Just don’t buy into the ballyhoo surrounding it. Women Take the Floor is a start, not the definitive word on sexism and museum collecting practices.  

Rob Weir