Art For All By All

Hi, I’m Anita and I’m the founder of Art for All by All, which is a campaign which aims to persuade government to require the art galleries it funds to address inequality in their collections. At the moment, galleries are required to work towards diversity in their boards, their staff and attenders, but decisions about collections are ‘in the hands of the galleries’.

What prompted you to start the campaign?

I’ve been going to art galleries since the mid-seventies and yet it wasn’t until 2013, when a friend a friend asked me if I’d like to go to a Laura Knight exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, that something dawned on me that had never dawned on me before. I walked around that exhibition and I said to my friend, ‘These paintings are amazing, why haven’t I seen them before? Why haven’t I heard of Laura Knight before?’ It was then that I started to think about the art I’d been seeing over the years and slowly I began to realise that….. it had all been by men. Once I’d had that insight, of course, I started to see it everywhere!

Three years later the Royal Academy put on their exhibition ‘Painting the Garden: from Monet to Matisse.’ I thought great, there is surely no shortage of paintings of gardens by women. So I went along with great optimism. I walked round and round and I found not a single painting by a woman. I found one painting by an artist of colour. I wrote to the Director of the RA asking him if, as a member, I did not have the same right to see paintings by people like me as the male members had? A female curator replied and said there had actually been one painting by a woman but that they hadn’t been able to find any more that ‘fit into the theme’. I asked if it had occurred to them to fit the theme around diversity, rather than expect diversity to fit the theme?

At that point I was angry. I think anger underlies most campaigns, It’s such a compelling force. And by now, of course, I was super-aware. Every time I went to a gallery and looked for paintings by women and found hardly any, I fumed. Every time I saw another new exhibition advertised, for Picasso, for Matisse, Freud, Renoir, Seurat, Leonardo etc etc, I fumed. It was starting to spoil my enjoyment of art. I’d enjoyed art by men enormously over the years and now I was angry all the time. So I decided to do something about it, to channel those feelings into action.

What have the key moments in the campaign’s life been so far?

Ah, that’s a great question. Well, those two exhibitions I’ve just mentioned were clearly the first key moments for me personally. After that, I did a lot of research into public galleries, who funded them, who ran them, what their objectives were and so on. I also did a number of Freedom of Information requests to galleries, asking how many paintings they had by women, their acquisitions, special exhibitions, diversity policies and so on. Getting the data from the National Gallery was definitely a key moment. Of 1056 paintings on show in 2019, eight were by women. Eight! I knew things were bad but seeing the figures written down in black and white, that was a real shock. Less than one percent. Having worked in the public sector all my adult life I couldn’t understand how the gallery could get away with this. Every public body has to have diversity on their agenda, has to train their staff in diversity and so on. I was perplexed and so I went in search of the contracts between government and galleries to see if they could shed any light.

That led me to another key moment, which was when I read the funding agreement between the Department of Culture, Digital, Media and sport and the National Gallery, an agreement which is replicated for all galleries. I knew there had to be a diversity section, and indeed there was. It requires the galleries to work towards diversity in their staff and audiences. In keeping with this, the board of the National Gallery is fifty percent female and has several people of colour. The gallery clearly takes these requirements seriously. There is no requirement, though, to work towards diversity in their collection. That is when I realised what my campaign had to be about. It needed to persuade government to expand that policy so that the diversity requirements included art collections.

Since then I’ve drawn together a group of fabulous women to help me run the campaign, and we have started to build a presence online. We have managed to get the support of my local MP, Janet Daby, who arranged for us to have an event in Parliament in November 2022, which was wonderful, and in 2023 we’re hoping to start work with an All Party Parliamentary Group on the arts to move this forward.

What’s next for AFABA?

In 2023 we are focussing on two main areas – first, to work with interested peers and MPs to get this on the parliamentary agenda, and second, to continue raising awareness among the public. We are in the planning stages at the moment.

What is the ultimate goal of Art for All?

The aim of the campaign is to get the policy changed so that galleries are required to address inequality in their collections. Obviously, that aim serves another, bigger aim. The new policy will affect not just women, but people of colour, LGBTQ people, people from different social classes, basically all underrepresented groups. Many galleries are already working on this, but there is a long way to go. Also, equality is not just about numbers. It will take years to significantly increase the proportions of paintings by women in our public galleries, but there are special exhibitions that can be planned around diversity, there are curatorial notes to be reviewed, there is signposting in galleries to be thought about, the context that is set, and there is the content of the paintings themselves.

I ask myself, if a child goes into one of our most revered galleries today, what will they learn about the world they live in? They will learn that only white men can paint; that men are very important and that it is ok for men to subjugate women, to leer at them, and to attack them. They’ll learn that women are passive, that they only have names if they are married to an important man, that their main purpose in life is to look nice, have children, and take their clothes off. If I had one ultimate goal for all this, it would be that we don’t have to watch yet another generation of children walking through our galleries being given those messages, that the next generation will see and learn something different.

I recently went to the Making Modernism exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was an extraordinary experience to see all those paintings by women. As I looked at them, especially the self-portraits, where I saw women who were not worried about how they looked, or how nice they were being, or how fertile they were, but were just concerned with being themselves, I wondered how differently we women would feel about ourselves if we had been fed images like this throughout our lives, rather than the ones we have been fed. I would like to see exhibitions like that become the norm, not the exception.

What are the stand-out statistics for you?

The number of paintings by women at the National Gallery, the fact that of 11 acquisitions in the five years up till 2019, only one was by a woman, and there have been none since, that the Artemesia exhibition was the first full size exhibition by a woman in the gallery’s 200 year history, and that there are no more planned. That there are more paintings of women being raped in the NG than there are paintings by women. The fact that in 2023 women’s art is still valued less than men’s art, both in terms of the proportion of exhibitions and the selling prices. Another stand out statistic is that it took the Royal Academy one hundred and fifty years after its founding to elect a woman academician. It was Laura Knight in 1936. Some people see sexism as an issue of the past, and that there simply were more male artists than female in the past and that’s what explains the lack of representation.

What would you say to those people?

I would say that I used to think the same. Obviously, it is true that women artists were discriminated against and there were many more male artists who had the opportunity to paint, but what I have found over the course of what has been a steep learning curve, is that there are many, many female artists in our history. They have simply been airbrushed out. The Advancing Women Artists project in Florence looked for paintings by women in the archives of dozens of museums and churches in Florence and restored many that they found. There are now 128 paintings by women on public show in Florence. There is a huge amount of art by women, but because of hundreds of years of exclusion, we’re not going to find it on show, we need to look for it.

What steps can readers of this interview take to support the cause?

There are lots of ways people can help. Please do follow us on Instagram and Twitter, and check out our website www.artforallbyall.org. There’s a ‘get involved’ page there. Go to your local galleries and see what you find. Ask the attendants where you can find artworks by women. Look at the paintings of women and notice how they make you feel. How do the ways they are depicted compare with men? Do your own Freedom of Information requests, write to your MP saying you think it’s time government acted to address inequality in our galleries, talk to your friends and send them the links!