Museums Without Men: my project to end their shocking gender imbalance

From the Tate Britain to New York’s Met, some of the world’s mightiest galleries have signed up for my audio guides, which shift the spotlight onto female artists like Rosa Bonheur – who required a permit to wear trousers

‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” asked a 1989 artwork by the Guerrilla Girls, the all-female-identifying activist artist collective. A valid question considering, as the work went on to point out: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” When the Guerrilla Girls went to revisit these statistics in 2012, they found that little had changed: “Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.”

So what about today? In 2023, Marina Abramović made headlines, not for her performance art but, shockingly, as the first female artist to have a solo exhibition in all the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London. The same institution, founded 256 years ago, today opens its first ever solo exhibition dedicated to a female artist working prior to the 19th century: Angelica Kauffman.