According to Katy Hessel, currently women make up only 1% of artists represented in London's National Gallery of Art collection. My first thought, when I read that was, in order to make any significant change, women need to be in the decision making roles. Later on, Hessel mentions that "for the first time in history, women have taken the helm of the Tate, the Louvre, and The National Gallery of Art, D.C., to name a few". That's a start, but it will take a century of adding only women's work to the collection to begin evening it out in some museums. We have to start somewhere.

While "squirreling out" as I was looking up statistics, I came across an article in Medium by Bryan Defjan titled Jenny Saville's Propped (1992). This piece of artwork fetched the highest price of any artwork made by a woman at auction, selling for the price of 12.4 million dollars. On first glance I was impressed, then Defjan goes on to mention that 12.4 million is only 12% of what the highest selling artwork by a man sold for. Then I rolled my eyes and wanted to throw up all at the same time.

I want to understand the psychology behind why men felt the need to surpress women, and how women let it happen. I know there is the physical aspect of bigger and stronger, but how in the world did women allow themselves to be duped into thinking they were less than. Even after having read The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, it still is astounding to me how we got to where we are today.

I came across the quote in Hessel's book by feminist writer, Luce Irigary that seemed to sum up exactly how I've been feeling about the subject, "if we continue to speak in the sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we fail each other".

Read: Linda Nochlin's essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Ideas: For the installation, what if I made the images of women slightly larger than life and, instead of hanging them on the walls, I create 6' tall bronze sculptures of women's hands and place the finished photographs of the women in the hands, tilted slightly forward. Women uplifting women.