Alice Neel wasn’t interested in portraits. She wanted, instead, to make “pictures of people”. Rather than imaginary selves to idealise, she showed us how bodies are inextricable from their material and social conditions. How individuals are bound by their everyday lives. The renowned New York painter grew up in small-town Pennsylvania, part of a family that didn’t have enough money. In the 1930s, she was employed by the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era, government-funded program that paid artists a living wage.

Neel would go on to make paintings of mothers in Spanish Harlem; female migrants newly arrived in the country. She captured workers, activists and educators such as in Marxist Girl, a 1972 painting of Irene Peslikis, the feminist organiser who Neel portrays sprawled across a chair, her arm raised, gaze defiant. Over the last few years, Neel, who worked in obscurity until her seventies, has become part of the cultural conversation that appears to have reshaped the art world. It’s one in which celebrating women artists is seen as a necessary corrective to art history. But, I think, there’s a reading of her work that’s both knottier and less convenient. That the artist wasn’t so much representing subjects that were overlooked as she was revealing the structures that stopped us from truly seeing them.

Women, of course, are more visible than ever in the art world. This year, Mamon, Louise Bourgeois’s dark ode to maternal bonds flanked the entrance of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Emily Kam Kngwarray’s otherworldly canvases were the subject of a much-deserved retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia. You can listen to the podcast Death of an Artist, curator Helen Molesworth’s powerful attempt to reconcile the murder of Ana Mendieta with the legacy of Carl Andre, the minimalist sculptor accused of killing her. Or admire dreamlike drawings by Leonora Carrington on Great Women Artists, the much-loved Instagram account by the British art historian Katy Hessel. There’s a growing disparity, however, between this deepening appreciation of women artists and the factors that allow women artists to make their art

In May, Artists as Workers, a landmark study carried out by David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya, supported by Creative Australia, found that, for the first time, women outnumber men two-to-one across all artistic occupations, yet continue to earn 19% less than them on average. In the same month, the 2024 Countess Report revealed that gender representation across galleries had actually stagnated or declined since the previous report, published four years ago. It also discovered that more men were acquired by state galleries in 2022, and that although women won more than half of the major art prizes, men were awarded a higher amount of prize money.

If female-identifying artists are increasingly dominating our cultural imagination and women are driving the country’s artistic production, then what would it take to translate visibility to equality? And can we find the language to articulate it?

“There’s a growing disparity, however, between this deepening appreciation of women artists and the factors that allow women artists to make their art.”

Penelope Benton isn’t surprised by the mismatch between the narrative around gender representation in the art world and the reality of this material circumstance. For the executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), herself a working artist, the findings from the recent Countess Report—that women accounted for just 39 per cent of solo shows at state galleries and were more likely to feature in group shows—can set male and female artists up for different trajectories. This fact—propelled, at least in part, by the tired notion of the male artist as individual genius that has shaped Western art history—can make structural inequities worse.

“When we are seeing a lot of male artists recognised at that level, it just propels their careers further,” she says. “Solo exhibitions in state institutions bring recognition and critical attention and lead to further opportunities for the recognition and sales of an artist’s work.”

The art world, of course, likes to perceive itself as progressive. But for women artists without financial support, the ability to sustain an artistic practice alongside the need to make a living is being increasingly threatened by brutal economics.

“It’s a lot of privileging artists with money or people whose partners have money,” she says. “It’s a very difficult field to get into unless you have someone backing you.”

Among the findings that most concern her, she says, is the fact that artists’ incomes have remained low and stagnant while basic expenses—food, housing, studio rent—have escalated. “There is also a big shift to freelance and casual work, and this has disproportionately affected women,” she says.

The erosion of fields such as academia, once a source of steady income for artists, has also been compounded by the costs of childcare and the burden of caregiving, which is still largely shouldered by women. In the last few years, art has been increasingly interested in motherhood. For example, Acts of Creation, a 2023 exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery, which featured works by 100 female artists including Marlene Dumas, Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems, explored experiences of maternity—from love to exhaustion to ambivalence—in visual culture. Yet, the art world, with its masculine focus on individual achievement, is still ruled by structures that are hostile to the fact of caregiving. Exhibition openings unfold in the evenings. Residencies often don’t permit families. The myth that art making exists in isolation and that real artists must retreat from the world is so pervasive, it still shapes what it means to participate: what counts as an opportunity, what the very definitions of progress can look like.

“The art world is set up for the single, white male,” says the acclaimed Gunditjmara artist Hayley Millar Baker. “They want you to work on solo practices, they want you to be at all these schmoozing events. Our bodies need different things. We keep churning and churning and churning which is not sustainable for women, even outside the art world.”

For Millar Baker, residencies which might claim to be inclusive in theory but make it difficult for women with families in practice are an example of the way female-identifying artists—especially those from First Nations or non-white backgrounds—are excluded before they begin.

“It’s not discriminating in the first instance, but the artist is thinking ‘Oh I’m not eligible,’” she says. “Residencies can be offered to groups or duos and collectives—but they will not support family structures. We don’t work in a vacuum.”

To participate in the art world, Millar Baker, who has two children, rarely platforms her personal life. “I’ve become strictly professional, which kind of sucks,” she says. “Indigenous art is so about community, about collective experience. If we look at art history, different eras of art making are all groups that feed off each other. I don’t know where we’ve gone wrong in Australia—on our isolated little island—[with] our need to focus on single people to push greatness.”

“…For the first time, women outnumber men two-to-one across all artistic occupations, yet continue to earn 19% less than them on average.”

A few years ago, I read an interview in The Creative Independent with Ocean Vuong in which the renowned Vietnamese poet warned against the phenomenon that Millar Baker is talking about. “Competition, prizes and awards are part of a patriarchal construct that destroys love and creativity,” he says.

But when economic and political instability accelerate, it can be easy to default to survival mode, cling to what’s familiar. The case of Mona’s Ladies Lounge, for example, which saw a man successfully sue the museum when he was barred from entering the artist Kirsha Kaechele’s women’s-only space, turned the tables on gendered exclusion—if symbolically. The case is now going to appeals, and in the meantime Kaechele created another new, women-only alternative: the female bathroom. It’s easy to be galvanised by these moments, especially in a culture in which women are faced with the threat of violence simply for existing in public. But the attention these events garner can, to my mind, act as a smokescreen for the ways in which structures that exclude women operate not just by intent but by design.

Certain moments can make some stories gain more currency over others. “I think narratives are often driven by economic, material and political conditions,” says Miranda Samuels, an artist and Fulbright Scholar who, along with Shevaun Wright, co-edited the 2024 Countess Report. “[The Countess report] showed a stagnation or a slide backwards. I think there’s an issue with focusing on representation too much, even discursively.”

Our neoliberal present focuses on the individual—on female artists who are the exception, not the rule, or those that have defied great odds, like Neel, to carve out a place in art history. This focus is largely rewarded by the art market, which even as it recognises the achievements of female artists on the surface, fails them in ways that would make a tangible difference to their working realities.

“Collaborative work doesn’t do so well on the market, it sells for much less,” says Samuels. “It’s also difficult for museums to grapple with, and there are less collaborative groups represented by commercial galleries. Our research also found that women were significantly underrepresented in collections and acquisitions, where there is going to be a longer-lasting impact in terms of legitimation and sustainability.”

For Samuels, it is important to recognise that the structures that determine the art world are inherently inhospitable. “An artistic career can look different from going to art school, showing at ARIs, then commercial galleries, then [gaining] representation under the age of 35,” she says. “A more realistic understanding takes into account the difficulty of childrearing. Or [the value] of community or family mentorship.”

For now, Benton has put her own art making on hold. “I haven’t been able to make any work for a few years, which is not a great place,” she says. “But we take our daughter to as many openings as we can—we get there at six and have to leave around the speeches.”

Structural change for women, of course, is intertwined with age-old problems. Talking about the wage gap can feel like a fallacy when women’s work—communal, familial or otherwise—is, at its root, undervalued. Or when art making is compensated differently depending on your proximity to power. What does equity look like when whiteness and maleness are still markers of cultural capital, driving the economic forces that women are forced to negotiate?

“Women are so strategic—we are resourceful, and we take on what we can take on, and if we can’t—we fix our timeline,” says Millar Baker. “Doesn’t it say so much that I can’t afford to buy my own artwork? I’ve always been open about the fact that art is for the privileged and shouldn’t be.” This points, I think, to a failure of imagination—that upholding a system, rooted in colonial logic, that prioritises the individual at the expense of the communities that support them can obscure possibilities.

For Samuels, Aboriginal-owned arts centres, already showing the highest amount of women participation, offer a model that not only reveres female artistry—but acknowledges the ways it unfolds in relationship with others and the world around it. “These arts centres started as womens’ spaces and provide community benefits beyond just art making,” she says. “It’s less about propping up an individual and more about a shift in practices.”