Making Their Mark Forum Presses Museums and Collectors to Back Women Artists With Visibility, Gifts, and Data
In Washington, D.C., a recurring question threaded through the Making Their Mark Forum: what does support for women artists look like when it is built to last — and when it is accountable?
Speakers argued that the answer goes well beyond mounting a timely exhibition. Changing the narrative, they said, requires changing what gets circulated, interpreted, and remembered, as well as who has the power to shape collections and institutional priorities.
Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier used a personal milestone to make that point concrete. Recently inducted into the Daughters of Pennsylvania Society, Frazier described redirecting attention from the honor itself to photographer Sandra Gould Ford, whose work documented the collapse of Pittsburgh’s steel industry. Ford also preserved Black workers’ grievance records, Frazier noted, taking personal risks to safeguard histories that might otherwise have disappeared. “It’s not about me,” Frazier said. “It’s about using this platform to direct it back towards a woman like Sandra, who has been overlooked, erased from history.”
The forum’s emphasis on narrative repair also extended to collecting — and to the often under-acknowledged role donors play in determining what museums can show.
“Collect like museums are watching,” one panel urged, a line that landed with particular force as museum leaders described how dependent institutions are on gifts. Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, put a number to it: “At least 80% of our collections come through gifts, not from purchase.” The implication was straightforward. If collectors and board members buy narrowly, museums inherit those limits.
Feldman and others stressed that institutions have a responsibility to educate patrons to collect with a museum’s long horizon in mind, not only private taste or short-term market signals. That conversation widened to the next generation of collectors and the shifting demographics of wealth.
Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan pointed to the coming Great Wealth Transfer — the large-scale intergenerational shift of baby boomer assets — as a potential inflection point, with women expected to control a greater share of that wealth and, with it, greater influence in the market. Brennan suggested that this could translate into more institution-minded collecting. “I think women are also more civic-minded,” she said. “They’re not just putting things on the walls — they’re thinking about the institutions they support, what they want to see in those institutions, and having those conversations with galleries.”
Mary Sabbatino, a partner at Galerie Lelong, framed the challenge as both practical and cultural: cultivating collectors who see stewardship as part of collecting itself. “We’re all looking for that next generation,” she said, describing conversations with peers about how to help new patrons build serious collections that also “contribute civically to the preservation of culture.”
But the forum also underscored a hard truth: acquisition is not the same as visibility. Works can be “saved” into storage and still be absent from public memory.
Christophe Cherix warned against the quiet erasure that can follow when institutions acquire works and then leave them unseen for decades. “What good does it do to acquire works and put them in storage for 20 or 30 years?” he asked. The remark sharpened the forum’s broader argument: collecting, without exhibition and interpretation, can reproduce the very exclusions museums claim to correct.
If visibility is one pillar of change, measurement is another. Several speakers cautioned that the art world’s periodic bursts of attention can be mistaken for structural progress.
“Progress isn’t linear,” Halperin said. “It comes in waves, and it often reverses.” To guard against backsliding, panelists called for long-term tracking — not only of acquisitions and exhibitions, but also of staffing, leadership, and governance.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont, a museum leader and educator, emphasized that topline numbers can flatter institutions while concealing deeper inequities. A percentage of women artists, she noted, becomes far more revealing when broken down further: “We can say this is however many percentages of women artists. But if you break that down and say, well, how many of them are Black? How many of them are differently abled?”
Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, echoed the need for institutional self-scrutiny, quoting Michael Bloomberg: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” For Pasternak, that means tracking representation across the full ecosystem — collections, exhibitions, staff, leadership, and board composition — as a way of “keeping us honest.”
Taken together, the forum’s message was less a checklist than a mandate: support for women artists must be built into how museums collect, what they choose to show, and how rigorously they account for who is still missing from the story.
