HYPERALLERGIC -- The speakers, including Sugata Ray, an assistant professor of South Asian Art at UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State University art history Professor Whitney Chadwick, talked about recent events in the art world.
In her book Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, Chadwick wrote about being an ambitious woman in a movement defined by men. At the Legion of Honor’s panel, she told the audience that when she’d interviewed English painter Roland Penrose, and asked him about the photographer Lee Miller and poet and collagist Valentine Boué Penrose, both wives of his, he told her not to write about female artists — because in his view, they weren’t artists, but only muses for the men.
We need to change the institutions that define culture and art, Chadwick said, and she thanked the Legion for the panel, saying museums should support dialogue about ways to do that.