Why Women Artists (and Their History) Matter

Bridget Quinn, author of Broad Strokes, on women artists, art history, elitism and consumerism in the art world, process over product, and a life filled with art and writing.

From my Women’s Wisdom Project series, 2018

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Back in January of 2018 (you know, a lifetime ago), I picked up a copy of Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in that Order) by Bridget Quinn. It was bright pink and promised to reveal to me a world of women artists. And illustrated by Lisa Congdon. Yes please!

It was the beginning of a new year, and I had challenged myself to be more intentional about my reading in order to have a better understanding of women’s history. Because I felt like my traditional education had been incredibly lacking in that department.

I kept a notebook on hand when I was reading to write down quotes or ideas that came to mind. I remember reading Louise Bourgeois’ chapter in Broad Strokes, which began with her quote: “Art is a guaranty of sanity.” I scribbled it down.

I wish I could find that notebook now, because that was all part of what spurred me to start my Women’s Wisdom Project (Bourgeois was #3). As Bridget writes in the introduction, “Great lives are inspiring. Great art is inspiring.”

When you engage with a piece of art—whether it’s a painting, a book, a film, a song—you never know what seeds of ideas are being planted and what they will grow into. Which is why we need more art, from all kinds of artists, in our lives.

One of my favorite spreads in Broad Strokes, the art of the late Susan O’Malley

Bridget and I eventually connected in person and we learned that we have some crossover between us: stints in Scandinavia in our formative years, as well as a love for Hilma af Klint, Cora Sandel, French, and bicycles.

Since it’s Women’s History Month, I wanted to connect with Bridget for an interview. After all, thinking about, talking about, and supporting women artists (or rather, women in GENERAL) is essential this month and every month. That’s what this conversation is for, hopefully challenging us to learn about some new women artists but also more critically consider the societal burdens and baggage that have held women back for so long, and in general, rethink the role that art plays in all of our lives.  

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anna Brones: In Broad Strokes, you write about pursuing a graduate degree in art history but eventually leaving because you remember thinking, “I want to be an artist, not study them.” Can you talk about that?

Bridget Quinn: I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I was scared to do it, and I didn't know how I would do it. I was an exchange student in Norway and I lived there for a year. I just had time to be quiet, not be bombarded by American pop culture, and discovered 19th or 20th century painting. So that's what I wanted to study in college. Then I became obsessed with artists—what was an artist, what made somebody an artist? Because I wanted to be an artist.

I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, I loved art history, and went to graduate school in New York City at a school that's right across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was going to the Met and actually seeing this one massive self portrait by an 18th century artist that made me go, “I just want to do this, I'm in New York City I don't want to spend nine years on an art history PhD, I want to do something myself.”

I love that you were inspired to be a writer through the visual arts. Have you met other writers who came into their practice via visual art?

No I haven't, which I think is kind of amazing. Although, I feel like there are people, like the Bloomsbury group, where art was more of a spur to them. But I often think about that when I read about doctors who become writers, or scientists who become writers. A lot of the art writers that I really like are “writer” writers. 

You know, there's a lot of really bad art writing. It's deliberately bad because it's deliberately obfuscating. It's deliberately elitist. It's deliberately off-putting, it's deliberately trying to create this teeny tiny, little niche.

But I think art writing is getting away from that. That's why I love writing for Hyperallergic. I love that they're in the world, but still take art really seriously and want to write about it seriously without feeling like they have to use reception theory or something to tell the story. 

When I started writing 20 some years ago, my writing life and my art history life were completely separate. I never realized I could write about art because I felt like, “who would take me seriously? I don't have a PhD.” 

I got my agent for a book that was a memoir. And it was about me and my family. I'm one of nine kids, and it was really about sports. The memoir didn't sell. And my agent said, “I feel like it will sell once you write another book. Do you have any ideas for other books?” I'm like, “no, I just spent three years writing this book. I don't have any other ideas!”

She said, “there's nothing you have an idea for?” I said, “well, I've always thought it would be nice to have Vasari for women artists.” And she goes, “why would you write about artists?” 

I had been writing about sports for her, and I was like “oh, yeah, I have this whole other side thing in my life.” I had the Broad Strokes contract within six weeks of that conversation.

Do you remember how many books were out there about women’s art history at that time?

Broad Strokes just weirdly caught the wave. There had been academic books like Whitney Chadwick’s Women and Art and of course Linda Nochlin had written essay collections. Germaine Greer had this book called The Obstacle Race from the late 70s. But there hadn't really been just casual books to learn about women artists. It was this movement right around the time that Broad Strokes came out, it was just luck. And something that I had been thinking about for almost 30 years.

It was published in 2017. That’s not that long ago!

No, it's not. But here's the crazy thing: I had the contract in like 2014 or 2015, and I turned it in in 2016. So the writing is that much older, but since the book came out there have been several Artemisia Gentileschi shows, there has been a giant Alice Neel show, there's been big Ruth Asawa shows. They were not big museum names [at the time of writing] and I really had to weigh, “is this someone so obscure that I'm doing a disservice to this story?”

In fact one of the people I didn't write about…

Was Hilma af Klint! I remember us talking about this.

Yes, that's the saddest story ever. I thought, “Hilma af Klint is just my crazy obsession, too niche in every way,” and then it’s the biggest show in Guggenheim history. So, it's the moment.

If you can think back to your first art history class, how hard was it to research women artists, how hard was it to learn about them?

There were none. I mean, I had H.W. Janson’s The History of Art, which is 800 pages. It was a class textbook and it was the brand new edition. In that edition, there were 16 women artists that had been included. And the book begins with like Australopithecus. The dawn of humanity to the 1980s… with 16 women!

They were pretty begrudgingly inserted after strong pushes from feminist art historians, including Linda Nochlin, who had been a student at the Institute of Fine Arts, which is where I went to school and where Janson was an instructor. The reason I chose Artemisia Gentileschi for the book was that she was the first woman mentioned in Janson, and she's from the 1620s. I mean, you've already had all of ancient art, all of medieval art and most of Renaissance art, it's the Baroque and you finally have a woman. 

Now sometimes I see on Twitter or on Instagram, people will say, “Stop already. These aren't underknown women…” I get it, but you don't get what it was like there [at that time]. Frida Kahlo wasn't in Janson. Frida Kahlo wasn't taught. She was “the wife of Diego Rivera,” that's only 30 years ago.

With that in mind, how do you see things now in terms of where we’re at with women in the arts, and where we go moving forward?

Where we go is the marketplace. Until the marketplace meets the desire or the voices insisting on seeing more diversity—that includes artists of color, women, nonbinary artists, everything—until we see that, it doesn't really mean much because the art world runs as an economic model. Because if collectors aren't collecting women artists, then museums aren't showing or getting those works. A lot of it runs on economics, and so until women have the same amount of representation and galleries, the same amount of acquisition and museums, the same amount of collectors buying their work, it's not going to change. 

Are there any galleries or curators, examples of people doing it well? Anything that feels different and promising?

Right now at Stanford University they have started an Asian American Art Initiative, co-founded by curator Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander and professor Marci Kwon. It is unbelievable to see what they have done in just a short period of time, recovering all these incredibly important modernist artists who've just been completely overlooked because they were Asian American, or Asian, but working in United States.

They're basically recreating a timeline, showing how much was happening in a place like the Bay Area and the west coast in general. They're literally changing the narrative. They're changing the past by changing the present.

There's definitely a push to make change. The thing is, what of it is truly structural and systemic and what is “people want to come to shows like this” or “this makes a nice way of talking about something”?

The cynical part of me thinks of the popularity of Frida Kahlo, which has created a lot of value and money in socks and t-shirts and not in driving a larger market or interest in women artists in general. 

Yes. Women artists, Latina artists, Latina X artists, South American artists, I mean, Mesoamerican artists… Whatever field, it doesn't drive it that direction, it drives it to consumerism. And some of that is okay, but it is discouraging when you don't see any change in terms of the marketplace.

I’ve actually wondered about that with Hilma af Klint’s popularity, because some of those pieces are in the public domain and I see people reprinting things and selling them. It’s cool to see the art that you like out and about but it does make me wonder what that commercialization aspect does.

What always depresses me is, why buy a Hilma af Klint t-shirt when you could buy a t-shirt from a woman artist who's alive right now? Or an abstract artist who is alive right now? Part of this is advertising, an advertising of the self: “this is what I love, this is what I identify with.”

I used to feel cool saying she was on the list of artists that I like. I still do! That is the element of the self where we identify ourselves in artists or in pieces. I don’t think there’s a right answer to that but it’s something I think about a lot. 

I will say that Christie's did an auction of all women artists, in 2021 in Paris. I think they were very surprised at how much over-asking many bids went. The Getty acquired one of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s pastels and it went for six times over the asking price. 

I think for these older artists—by “older” I mean established in the canon of art history—there's definitely this feeling [for a buyer] of, “I can get in on this narrative, this thread that my collection can then help tell and help reveal.” That is very good for artists of the past. But how good is it for contemporary women artists? It hasn’t been shown to be very trickle down.

That’s a good segue into the book you just finished, all about artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. You wrote about her in Broad Strokes, but she only got a few pages and you needed more. In being so deeply steeped in this artist of the past, what is your hope for what that does for learning about her but also the larger ramifications?

There is this part of me where you think, isn't it amazing that you can actually change the course of history by recovering history? That's an exciting idea, to bring her work to more awareness, to bring her story to more awareness. Over the years, I've realized why I was obsessed with her when I first encountered her: it's a painting called Self Portrait with Two Pupils.

She's in front of this very large canvas painting, and she has two students standing behind her. It’s this incredible depiction that you rarely, rarely see of women in solidarity with each other, helping each other. An older artist nourishing the next generation, and them, appraising and appreciating her work. During the French Revolution, to great danger to herself, she spoke out for other women. She was one of four women who were part of the Académie Royale who said, “There has to stop being a cap on women artists. If the revolution is about égalité, how can there be restrictions based on sex?”

She was this fierce advocate for other women and that is a big part of why I have never gotten tired of finding out more about her story. That is the kernel of the story that I hope will carry into our future. Yes, she was a great painter of the past, there's no reason to have overlooked or forgotten her. Her work matters. But also, what she did and how she lived in the world is an incredible example for us all.

I like that, the idea that we can change the course of history by uncovering history.

It changed my life, right? I encountered a painting she had made over 200 years ago, and changed the course of my life because of what she did. I just heard that there is a student at Fordham University who wrote a play about her because she saw the painting. And so I'm not the only person. She's not the only person. That's heartening as an artist.

So what does it mean to be an artist?

I mean, I think it's very simple: it's deciding you are one.

I'm not kidding. I think once you decide, “I make art in the world, I am a person who engages in the world as an artist,” that makes you an artist. It means that you're slowing down, you're looking, you're thinking, you're taking time with your life, with other people's lives, with the natural world, with your psychological world, the phenomenological world, the theological world… If you engage with that in a meaningful way, that makes you an artist.

Along those lines, you are steeped in art professionally and you are in worlds where people love and have an appreciation for art. I think a lot of people probably don’t put themselves in that category, because like you said earlier, the language around art can be very exclusive, very off-putting. I even feel that way a lot. You feel like you aren’t smart enough to engage with a certain show or piece. Why do we all need art, and how can we be more inclusive so that we can open up art to all of us?

That's the saddest thing, right? That we feel so intimidated by art spaces that we feel uncomfortable in museums or going into galleries. I just think everyone is allowed to like what they like. One of the things I always tell my students is that we say, “I don't know much about art, but I know what I like.” But what you really like is what you know. And the more you know about something, the more you like. 

Ask somebody, “What do you love? What do you really love? What engages you?” I love music. Music is an art. I love to read. Literature as an art. I love television. Television is an art. I love movies. Most things that most people are passionate about are in the world of human creation.

Art is meditative. It begins to close out the world in a way that is extremely nourishing, healthy, and life giving, and puts you in this flow state, all the things that meditation does. Art also brings joy. Making something brings joy. And that pleasure? We don't trust it.

I've been taking an online class with Natalie Goldberg, who wrote Writing Down the Bones. I'm an author, like, why do I need to do that? Because I want to just practice writing. It’s so interesting to me how many people in the course are saying, “I want to write a novel, and that's why I'm doing this.” I totally get that, but there's something so beautiful about just writing for yourself. I've kept a journal now for almost 35 years. I hardly ever reread them, but that ritual that I do every day percolates up into my life and into my work. But I don't do it for that reason.

That also makes me think about creativity in general. Think about how many books are out there about creativity serving productivity. Like, “here’s how to be creative so that you can be more productive.” Yes that can be helpful, but it’s not always the point.

It's so American. I feel like it's so ingrained in me, this Calvinist thinking, “I have to work and I have to show up at my desk every day.” I was in a biographers international seminar and this famous biographer said, “You know, when I wake up in the morning, I think, what would I like to write about today?” I was like, mind blown. No wonder you can still be writing giant books when you're 90, because he wakes up and thinks, “what do I want to do today?”

I'm 55 years old, I'm an art critic. I have had no art training. Zero. None. You told me to get watercolor paints during the pandemic. It is so pleasurable to me to see color. I have no training, I don't expect it to become anything, or do anything. But it brings me pleasure, and that's huge. 

That’s one of the things I think about sports and art. No one says to me, “you're training for a triathlon, but you're not going to win. Do you think you'll win?” No, I'm barely going to finish on time, but nobody says it's not worth doing. It's not about winning. It's about the pleasure of being with my girlfriends and going into a different state and doing a cool thing and being out in nature, and the pleasure of training.

People often asked me about me being a sports and art writer. They'll say, “well, what's the connection?” Both exist as far back as we can see in human history. They're ubiquitous across cultures. There is no culture that does not have both of those things. And they're both “useless.” They serve no function. We do them anyway. Because our human purpose is to be art-making and sports-doing beings.

I asked what it means to be an artist, but what does it mean to be creative?

That's harder for me to answer. I think both are actually really simple, and we make them hard. I think to be creative is to make something, even if it's a thought. From out of nothing comes something, that's a creative act.

Along those lines, you have spent a lot of time steeped in the stories of women artists… what creative lessons have you learned from these women?

I think the biggest creative lesson is to just keep making art. That's what they all have in common, across all of time. No one was telling them to make art. No one wanted them to make art. No one wanted their art. And they just kept doing it anyway. 

I published my first book when I was 47, and I've been writing my entire adult life. I had three unpublished books before that. I'm glad I didn't stop and sit down. That’s not a sad story. It was fucking fun. I had a life in art.

I met amazing people, I read deeply, I looked at art, I wrote about things I was excited about. I engaged with the world in a way that was amazing. Yes, I am glad I got the chance to write books, because that's something I really wanted. But I might never have done that, and the other things would still have been nice.

There is something about bringing your attention to things that are beautiful, things that are meaningful. What matters is not selling a million books, or if I get a million likes. All these things that I never cared about when I was young. I cared about the best indie band I could find, and the most weird thing that nobody else knew about.

I want to get back to that person who was an enthusiast, recapture that breathless love of things.

You can support Bridget by ordering Broad Strokes, keeping an eye out for her upcoming book on Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, or reading her work on Hyperallergic.

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RESOURCES + INSPIRATION

Here’s what’s on Bridget’s radar right now:

• Sadie Barnett and her new show at San Jose Museum of Art/UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences

• Nicki Green and the moving complexity of her ceramics. Here is an article that Bridget wrote that includes Green’s work, during the New Time exhibit at BAMPFA.

• Lava Thomas, Bridget recommends this article on her work

• Tabitha Soren, a photographer whose work includes Motherload and Surface Tension

• Michele Pred, who as Bridget puts it, “is always killing it in the feminist arena. Her work about equal pay is important and fun, and her handbag sculptures slay.” (Honestly, who doesn’t want this kind of praise!?)

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