US National Gallery of Art gifted $10m to purchase works by women
The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., made significant steps towards having a more gender-balanced collection earlier this year when it acquired two pieces of work by a pair of celebrated female artists, Italian Mannerist Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) and Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652-1706).
Now, thanks to a new $10 million gift to specifically fund works by women, the museum will be able to continue to add more additions such as these to their collection. The donation comes from the family of Victoria P. Sant, the gallery’s first female president, who passed away in 2018. It will now help the gallery purchase important works by female artists from across the spectrum of time and increase gender parity.
“It is exciting that we now have an endowment fund to help us acquire masterpieces by women artists, and one that will carry the name of such an exemplary advocate and leader,” said Kaywin Feldman, the gallery’s first female director of the tremendous donation.
The purchases of Roldán and Fontana were approved by the NGA’s board in May this year. Between May 2020 and May 2022, pieces by women accounted for 35.5% of all the works the gallery had purchased, which was a rise of the 20.3% from the previous two-year period; a three-quarter increase in total. However, it’s still not enough for equal representation.
The work by Fontana that the NGA has acquired is a finely detailed portrait of musician Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni, where the subject is seated in an extravagantly decorated chair with a fittingly elegant dress accompanied by a stringed instrument and sheet music. Notably, Fontana was trained by her father, Prospero, and was one of the most successful artists of her day, which was enough to support her 11 children.
Elsewhere, other works the NGA have recently come into ownership of are Faith Ringgold’s 1967 painting The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding and Betye Saar’s mixed-media sculpture The Trickster.
