Two In The Pink

Two In The Pink pairs Pink Tax research and auction house results to acknowledge gender biased discrimination and consumption.  

After learning that my home state of Illinois had previously taxed tampons as luxury goods, I started thinking about female representation in the art market.  Using ArtNet data from auction house sales from about a ten year period, between 2008 and May 2019, revealed that female artists represent only 2% of the art market, which is less than the total sales of Picasso alone.  The data shows there was $196.6 billion dollars worth of total art sales,  $4.8 billion of that were works by Picasso.  And only $4 billion of that total were sales of works by female artists, which includes about 6,000 women.  Of those 6,000+ women, there are five top performers.    

For this series, the artworks are separated by male and female top performing auction artists, and feature text used in their auction catalog entries to describe the artist and their output, inspired by an Allan Schwartzmann quote on how the women artists of the 60s and 70s “changed the language of art,”  making it acceptable to use words like delicate, vulnerable, fragile, tender, personal, diaristic, among others to describe the artwork.  The artwork titles correlate with their numbered ranking on that sales data list, inspired by the ranking system born from toxic playground culture.  The handcut letters puncture a slice of an artwork that the referenced artists sold at auction, breaking down the artist palette by pixelating the work like a patchwork quilt.