Patty Libby Art Museum visit

My museum of choice was the St Louis Art Museum. I had visited a lot as a kid with a nanny that desperately wanted me to be cultured, or at least look really cultured in all of the photos that we took at the museum. I chose it really for that reason, it was very in my comfort zone so I figured that I would know my way around pretty well. But just in case, I tried to do a little googling to figure out if I could make a plan on where I would visit first. I wanted to explore an exhibit on women, but I quickly discovered that there wasn’t one. So when I got there, I asked around after discerning which patrons were art students (they stare, and step back, and stare, and tilt their heads, and never looks at the plaque to decide what they are seeing). I asked them if they had a favorite female artists that was being displayed. In a group of three, they all had favorites, but none of those were being displayed. They couldn’t direct me to a piece that was being shown either so I had to go it alone.

I tried but I got tired. It was the worst game of eye spy that I have ever had to play. Eventually I just settled on looking at the way that females are portrayed because there was a lot of portrayal in several pieces.  I took a lot of time looking at religious art. Most of the art featured men and was made by men. If a woman was there, she was typically naked and usually depicted as an angel or cherub. It really speaks to the idea that in Christianity there is a very strong idea that women are not the center and cannot be a leading force in faith. Even when Mary was shown it seemed like there was the same idea that she was not human. She seemed almost divine which again fits with the idea that ordinary women cannot play a large and defining role in art or religion.

In the biggest sense of the trip I felt that female art and artists are not being displayed equitably. Maybe this is just a problem of the field itself (after Fiona’s presentation I feel like that is a safe assumption but again I am out of my depth on this one).

One final thing that I did notice was that women alone or those in groups with younger children seemed to gravitate towards certain sections and avoided others. I felt like they were almost absent when I visited the upper levels with the modern art. They spent more time in my estimation looking at works that featured nature more than figures. Finally it was packed to the gills down stairs with the antique furniture and other artifact like objects. Perhaps this means that while women are not represented they are certainly being catered to. I’m not sure that if I had found a section on the figures of women that there would have been an interest from any of the groups that I people watched (stalked) during my visit.