Old Women

The best way to succeed as a woman artist is to be old. Not necessarily dead yet, but with the specter of death hanging over you. You’ve got to be past seventy, at least. Preferably you’ve been making art for a long time, and it’s either been gathering dust in your home, rarely if ever shown, or is exhibited mostly in alternative and educational spaces. This way, you arrive with a body of work intact: you’ve already found your voice and honed your craft. Your art is visionary—which means valuable—and you’ve resisted the odds, outlasted the forces of sexism, racism, and any other exclusionary isms that apply. You’re a safe bet at the same time as you’re a discovery.

The artist Pat Steir explains this dynamic in Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s documentary about her life and work, Pat Steir: Artist, which came out in 2020, the year she turned eighty. She’s now “an honorary man,” she says, because of her age. “The art world, it’s easier on older women because they feel like, you have the artwork they’ve never seen—because they’ve ignored it,” Steir said. The camera takes in the opening of her solo show at an Upper East Side gallery, a who’s who of the New York art scene. “So it’s like finding hidden treasure and then also bargain prices… they can get high-quality for less money than if you were a guy and had been famous for thirty years.”

The list of artists who’ve been subject to this dynamic is long. I started making one when I received a grant to write about the phenomenon last year. Carmen Herrera. Cecilia Vicuña. Lorraine O’Grady. Agnes Denes. Howardena Pindell. Luchita Hurtado. Diane Simpson. Gladys Nilsson. Betye Saar. Zilia Sánchez. These women come from vastly different backgrounds and have made widely disparate types of work, but they’ve often been treated the same way: as an archetype, like the wise crone in fairy tales. And though the old-woman artist has spent her whole life building her own agency, when she finally makes it to the mainstream, she gets presented primarily as an object of fascination.

“All too often the stories of women’s lives are forced into the age-old paradigm of the Genius Male Artist,” writes the critic and curator Ashton Cooper in a 2015 essay for Hyperallergic. “The ‘genius’ artist has toiled away for years until she is finally found...