In her work as an art historian, researcher and teacher, she aims to raise the profile of women artists. And she was recently appointed to the Committee on Women in the Arts for the College Arts Association.
This interview and transcript have been edited for length and clarity.
Baumgartner: What does the Committee on Women in the Arts at the College Art Association do?
McCutcheon: So this committee was founded to really promote women’s contributions to art in a broad sense. So art history to museums, to administrative work inside of galleries. And then to artists as well who are doing this work. Not just feminist artists but women artists.
Baumgartner: Why did you want to join this group?
McCutcheon: I was well acquainted with the continued lack of representation of women in the arts. As a young art history student in my undergraduate classes, I was very frustrated by the fact that we weren’t learning a lot about women in the arts, but that I knew that they existed. I’m a researcher, I’m a writer, but I very much really center my identity as a teacher. And I know that a lot of folks that do this kind of work, on underrepresented histories in particular, those that pertain to women in the arts are also doing a lot of really groundbreaking work with their students. And so I really was thinking through how can we, as a committee, think about the ways that we can better advocate, not just for sort of this broad idea of like women in the arts, but in particular for teachers and teachers who are doing a lot of really important advocacy work with their students. It’s a big shift in the field of teaching broadly, but especially in art history to these newer methods that we call engaged art history. So putting students on the ground, putting them in touch with artists, and then sometimes getting them involved in activist projects. And that’s something that I’ve been doing with my students at the University of Rhode Island.
Baumgartner: Can you give me an example of engaged art history, an engaged art history lesson project that you’ve worked on?
McCutcheon: So last year my students and I created a project together as a part of a course that I teach at URI called Women in Art. And that project would qualify as engaged art history because it’s really asking the students to take what they’re learning in the classroom outside and into the world beyond that kind of classroom environment. So we initiated a project that was built off of a campaign that was started in 2016 by the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC and it’s called Five Women Artists, or hashtag Five Women Artists. And it asks this very, very simple question, can you name five women artists? And the outcome of the campaign is that generally most people can’t. We’re in the arts, you know, maybe we can name a few more names, but a lot of times people can come up with three names. The top three are Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Artimesia Gentileschi. But then they get really stumped at, naming more than that. And so that campaign’s been really instrumental in just raising awareness about just that click of awareness of like, oh gosh, I can’t name more than three people, and why is that?
The project that I did with my students was to take this campaign to our local community at the University of Rhode Island. And so the students and I worked together to brainstorm how we could make this campaign function on our campus. And what we ended up coming up with was doing two, what we call days of action. One of them we got really great weather so we could be outside on our quad. and we made t-shirts that said support women artists. And we’re essentially giving a survey to anybody who was on campus that day. Can you name five women artists, but also as a part of the survey, asking them questions about statistics that are true for women’s experience in the art world today. For example, only 14% of living artists represented in galleries in Europe and North America are women. So just 14%. And if we go to acquisitions in museums, only 11% of the 30 major museums in the US. 11% of their acquisitions were by the work of women artists in a span of about 10 years. And if you look in terms of acquisitions of Black women artists’ works, the statistics get even smaller. So there’s 0.5% in comparison to that. So just really kind of asking the question in a in a fun way. And it ended up just being a really, really fun event. And unfortunately, what we found out was that 12% of the folks that we surveyed, we ended up talking to over 350 people who came by, could name five women artists. But part of it was not to shame people for that, but to say that’s the point, you know, this is the point that we need to continue to have these kinds of events.
Baumgartner: How do you see the big institutions in Rhode Island, the RISD Museum, Newport Art Museum? How do you see how they’re doing in terms of that very low percentage that we see across Europe and North America?
McCutcheon: It’s been interesting. I’m a new transplant to Rhode Island. I’ve only been here for two and a half years, but I’ve been really, really impressed. By the RISD Museum. There are so many really amazing women working at the RISD Museum who are in these positions of power and positions where they can make a difference. Recently we had Kajette Solomon come and speak to our students. She is the RISD Museum’s social equity and inclusion specialist, and she was a co-curator of their recent Nancy Elizabeth Prophet exhibition, which was an amazing exhibition and now is touring to the Brooklyn Museum. And I feel like that exhibition was really, I feel like that exhibition really encapsulates the important work that’s happening here in terms of visualizing histories of women in the arts. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, being a local artist working in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, as a Black and Indigenous woman from Rhode Island traveling to Paris. and having such an incredible life and incredible practice and such an incredible, I think, role model for students. But somebody I had not heard of myself until I saw her works on view, in that exhibition.
Baumgartner: Why is this issue important both to you and for the arts world more broadly?
McCutcheon: That’s a good question and I think that this issue is important for me because I feel very strongly that history isn’t just something that happened a long time ago or something that we’ve, you know, gotten past. It’s really something that we participate in today, and it’s something that in that way we can shape every day. And I truly feel that history is much richer, much more exciting, much more enlivened when we center all people’s voices and that includes women’s voices. And so it’s a facet of asking who are we seeing and who aren’t we seeing? and to continue to seek out those stories that we haven’t heard, so that we can tell new and more interesting stories about the history of our world.
