Women on the Walls: Old Works get New Life at Crocker Art Museum 

By Nicole Cardoza

With the upcoming AWA show at the Booth Museum of Western Art in the fall and AWA’s ongoing commitment to museum-level exhibition for its members, we launch an in-depth look at the state of museum representation for women artists, beginning with an exclusive interview with Dr. Scott Shields, Chief Curator of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.  Shields, a co-curator of the recent, critically-acclaimed show, Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey, is also a major contributor to the book of the same title, released in conjunction with the exhibit.  

 

Crocker Art Museum’s Chief Curator, Scott Shields beside Mary Curtis Richardson’s painting Portrait of Mary Blanche Hubbard

When Scott Shields took over as Chief Curator at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, he recalls that there were significant gaps in collections, notably, that women artists were not well represented. Opened as the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery in 1872, the Crocker is one of the leading arts institutions in California and the longest continuously operating art museum in the Western United States.

Originally from Nebraska, the 45-year-old Chief Curator holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Kansas with an emphasis on California art. Shields has written books on Edgar Payne, Edwin Deakin and an in-depth history of The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony.  In his 15 years with the museum Shields has seen the number of women artists in the collection grow from  dozens to more than a thousand. In fact, Shields estimates that now women artists represent roughly fifteen percent of the collection – a stark contrast to other major museums, where the numbers of women artists represented is bleak, typically less than five percent.

According to The National Museum for Women in the Arts, in Washington D.C., 51 percent of today’s visual artists are women, yet only five percent of the art currently on display in American museums is by women artists.

                Dr. Shields made it a priority to shift the balance. 

“I wanted to tell a broader story,” Shields says. “I think people want to see themselves represented on the walls when they visit.”

 He began by excavating the museum’s long-lost treasures hidden away in crates,  warehouses and the museum’s basement.  His surprising discoveries suggest museums around the country can exhibit more women artists with a critical review of their own holdings.

While showing off a restored seventeenth century floral still life by Maria van Oosterwyck,

Maria van Oosterwyck,  Still life with Flowers

“You couldn’t even see it at first – we thought the frame was worth more than the painting,” Shields recalls.

Popular among European royalty and collected by many during her lifetime – including the Pope – van Oosterwyck’s story is unfortunately, representative of most of the women artists of her era.   As a well-known painter, she commanded large sums for her work but was never allowed to join the painters’ guild and was not considered a professional artist by many in her day because of her gender. She is one of the only woman whose work the Crocker has from that time period. Shields’ explanation for this common phenomenon is sad and simple – woman artists were not taken seriously and their work was not often collected or preserved. Centuries of work by women artists has been lost to time.

While building an extensive collection of California impressionists, Shields made another discovery in the Crocker’s vast body of stored works – a large portrait by Mary Curtis Richardson, the painter known as the “Mary Cassatt of the West.” The 1889 painting, of the one-time Mayor of Sacramento’s wife in a white Grecian-style dress, was so filthy from years of neglect that Shields didn’t know what he had at first.

“It was really a shock to find this huge, dirty thing and then to see this pure, white dress revealed,” Shields says.

Shields goes on to suggest that competition and impersonation as additional reasons why the work of women artists has not always received its due. In the paintings of early 20^th century plein air painter, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel and the craft work of Arthur Frank Mathews (it is believed his wife Lucia contributed to many of his pieces), Shields points out examples of women who chose not to promote their own careers, so as not to compete with their artist husbands. While some women artists stepped out of the limelight, others obscured their sex with a signature like California impressionist E. Charlton Fortune – who used her first initial throughout her career.  These tactics were not uncommon for women artists who were often dismissed because of their gender.

E. Charlton Fortune, Feeding Time

For most of the pieces Shields has discovered in his fifteen years at the museum he can recollect an amusing anecdote about the origin, the artist and how the museum came to display it. Touring the museum with him, the works come alive with his tales of sometimes temperamental artists and collectors, financial roadblocks faced, and unexpected finds in the hundreds of works the museum holds in storage. Whether he is talking about the time now-deceased ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu ordered him to “pick something” for the museum from her New Jersey home or watching British wood sculptor Barbara Spring making art with a chainsaw in her nineties, Shields personal connection to the pieces on display at the museum is vibrant.  His commitment to broaden the ever-expanding Crocker Museum holdings by women artists is a journey that began in the museum’s own backyard, unearthing rare works and bringing lost treasures to light.