“How did museums get away with celebrating the his- tory of patriarchy instead of the history of art?” asks the curator and art historian Katy Hessel. It’s a question worthy of the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, who plagued New York’s art institutions in the 1980s with posters attacking the woeful way that the art world treated women: fewer “than 5 per cent of the artists” in the Met were women, “but 85 per cent of the nudes are female,” read one poster.
Over 30 years later you might think that things have changed: for the first time ever, Great Britain is represented by a black woman— Sonia Boyce—at the Venice Biennale, and female artists from Paula Rego to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye have recently been the subjects of major institutional exhibitions.