Anniversary Edition: Anna Ostoya

Two weeks ago She Performs celebrated its first anniversary as an online platform, but the movement behind it dates back to 2017 when three women: Lynn Seraina Battaglia, Holly Daizy Broughton and Nicola Waterman created She Performs to bring women artists and their audiences together, empowering them to freely engage with and exchange ideas around equality and gender representation.

While some may dispute the ongoing need for women-only anything, it’s a fact that women artists remain underrepresented compared to their male counterparts, and we would argue that the art world still operates in large part on rules established by male gallerists and curators that reward certain (stereotypically male) behaviours, while holding women to a different standard - dare to have a messy studio as a woman artist and you run the risk of being thought of as disorganised and therefore hard to work with, while a male artist working in a similarly messy studio is fair more likely to be thought a creative genius!

As we toured the virtual graduate shows over the summer for our series of Graduate Spotlights, it occurred to us that as they launch their careers as practising artists, they would benefit from the advice of women who have forged their careers ahead of them. With this in mind we asked Jocelyn McGregor …

If you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently when you first started out as a practising artist?

If I had known what I know now, I might have better handled a situation at the opening of a group exhibition when I was a young artist. I stood in a group of three men, all of whom thought themselves progressives. One was the curator of the show, another a writer and the third an artist. I asked the curator: “Why are there so few women artists in your exhibition?” He looked away. The writer joked, “She’s such an angry feminist.” The artist said, “Oh dear, let me save you from these brutes.”; He took me by the arm and I, speechless, allowed myself to be escorted away. At times, this memory comes back to haunt me as an allegory, a trinity of insults: being ignored, being ridiculed, being patronized. What should I have done? Now, I know that I should have calmly stood my ground and told these three men exactly what they had just done. I mean this quite literally: “You just ignored me. You just insulted me. And you just patronized me.” And then let them answer for it, or just wait through the silence, maybe leaving them with a nagging memory of their own if they had any kind of conscience. As an artist, this is part of what I strive for to this day: to confront, to question, and to challenge power, be it male power or otherwise.

Anna Ostoya is a Polish artist based in New York City, NY. Our correspondent Caroline Blockus reviewed her exhibition at Bortolami gallery in December 2020 for She Performs. You can read more about it here.