Muskegon, Michigan, appears to be a little island in a sea of blue. There is also the Muskegon Museum of Art, which sits on the riverside. It’s a medium-sized organization that was established in 1912 and has a collection of about 5,000 works of art.
Kirk Hallman, the museum’s director, avoids using grandiose language when discussing the museum’s goals. MMA, on the other hand, is in the midst of some major changes. A large contribution from Elaine Melotti Schmidt and Steven Alan Bennett, collectors located in San Antonio, will make it one of the country’s few permanent museum display spaces exclusively for female-identifying artists.
Gifts totaling $12 million comprise 150 artworks from 115 artists plus a cash portion of $1.5 million for the construction of an entirely new museum wing dedicated to the work of female artists.
Elaine de Kooning paintings, as well as Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassett, are included in the collection of works that have been given to the museum. The Gentileschi, for example, will be on display year-round, as will other works from the collection, according to Hallman. Additionally, the gallery will hold unique exhibitions by female artists of all disciplines.
The gift comes at a time when the museum is undergoing a 26,000-square-foot expansion project, more than doubling its current size. In early 2024, the project is projected to be completed.
It appears that the awareness of females in the realm of art is increasing. This year’s Venice Biennale has made the initial feature of the majority of female artists, and there has been a wave of corrective retrospectives for both current and deceased women artists. In some cases, these are encouraging new research, identifying institutional knowledge gaps, and in others, boosting confidence in the commercial market possibilities.
Despite this, the art industry as a whole and museums in particular have a long way to go in achieving gender parity and equality. Since Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking piece “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was published in ARTnews in 1971, art historian Maura Reilley has documented how little progress has been made in the museum representation of female artists over the decades.
Studies conducted in the last few years have yielded relatively modest results. In the archives of 18 major American museums, 87% of the artists were men.
Bennett and Schmidt claimed that this was the motivation behind their collection. Their collection of “figurative realism” artworks began in 2009. The masterpieces in their collection show that the couple’s concept of the genre is flexible, as some fragments, such as the de Kooning, simply suggest the female form.
Bennett Prize, an open-call, jury-judged competition for female painters of any age or skill level who are working in relative obscurity and whose artwork has auctioned for $25,000 or more but are not qualified, was launched by the Bennett Prize collectors in 2018. The victor gets $50,000 to put on a solo show, making it the greatest sum of money given to female artists in the history of the competition.
To begin, the winning show is presented at the MMA before being toured across the country. However, the museum is left to rely only on the integrity of its archive after each special display concludes and the people disperse.
It wasn’t until the initial covid-19 spike in 2020 that Bennett and Schmidt began to seriously consider giving any of their collection.
‘Morality was on my mind,'” Schmidt recalled afterwards. It became clear to us that the works needed a permanent home as we got older.”
Collectors are concerned about securing the collection they’ve worked so hard to build, according to Bennett.” Museums don’t aim to collect the idea of a single collector; they want to gather specific works. A lot of the modern works we had acquired addressed the gaps in Muskegon’s female artists when we began chatting with the city.
There were no “fussy” directors at the MMA and the Bennett Prize had been well-cared-for by the organization, according to Schmidt’s description of the MMA’s board of trustees.
