Four years ago, when Komal Shah conceived a forum to celebrate female artists and address enduring gender inequities in the art world, she thought she’d be convening attendees in Washington, D.C., in the glow of Kamala Harris’s White House. Instead, the forum took place against a political backdrop openly hostile toward diversity in the arts. The long shadow of Congress’s recent questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her husband’s association with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was impossible to ignore. As fate would have it, Chelsea Clinton was the first panelist in the forum’s jam-packed schedule on Friday. Her reference to the “volume and velocity of vile” directed at her mother during the hearings became something of a clarion call for the rest of the event.
The 350 attendees across the three-day Making Their Mark forum were overwhelmingly female but diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, as well as their roles in the art world, from artists and curators to dealers, advisors, and collectors. The gathering was a call to action to address the gender disparity in “recognition, valuation, and perception” across the art world, as Shah said in her opening remarks.
The event kicked off Thursday night at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the latest stop on the nationally touring exhibition of the same name, featuring 80 works by 69 female artists from the Shah Garg Collection, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The exhibition represents about one-fifth of their holdings, assembled over the past dozen years by Shah and her husband, venture capitalist Gaurav Garg. Their collecting inspired the formation of the Making Their Mark Foundation in 2023 to champion women artists through exhibitions, scholarships, and, now, the forum.
As Shah looked out over the crowd of formidable women she had gathered from across the country, she tasked them with recoding “the systems that decide what becomes visible, what is preserved, what is taught, what is acquired, and, ultimately, what is written into history,” telling them, “the canon is a construct.” This was the guiding premise of the event’s programming, intended to inspire action among attendees. Clinton charged artists with “help[ing] us imagine a way out of this moment.” Film director Ava DuVernay talked about the importance of challenging the status quo—in her case, the Hollywood studio system—and embracing the current moment as a “time to incubate.” Actress Jodie Foster advised that the biggest obstacle to creativity is fear. Artists Marilyn Minter, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Dyani White Hawk discussed how art can participate in public life. Christa Blatchford, CEO of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, talked about who gets to be remembered in the art world—and how. Curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Connie Butler, and Katy Siegel discussed the challenges and opportunities around mounting shows of all-female artists. Educators Kymberly Pinder, Karen Rosner, and Sandra Jackson-Dumont pointed out that systemic change begins at the start of the pipeline. One important topic left off the agenda was the representation of female artists in the press, especially as the art media landscape shrinks.
Underpinning all these conversations was data on the underrepresentation and undervaluation of women across the art world, presented at the outset of the forum by journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin. According to their research, only 11 percent of museum acquisitions between 2008 and 2022 were works by women—and this doesn’t account for works that enter museum collections as gifts, which are overwhelmingly by male artists.
This inequity is just as stark in the market. A 2021 study by Oxford professor Renée Adams found that works made by women in the sub-$1 million price bracket sell at an average discount of 19 percent compared with works by men—a number that rises to 42 percent across all price bands. Sotheby’s 2025 Insight Report found that three times as many male artists appeared at auction in 2024 as female artists. The crowd collectively sighed when Burns and Halperin shared that all auction sales for works by women artists have totaled $6.2 billion, compared to $6.24 billion for all works at auction by just Pablo Picasso—or, as they said, “one dead man.”
A Heated Conversation About Inequities in the Market
Amy Cappellazzo, founder of Art Intelligence Global (L), moderates “The System Reimagined-Women in the Art Market: Visibility, Value and Access” with Mary Sabbatino, vice president/partner, Galerie Lelong, Renee B. Adams, professor of finance, Said Business School, University of Oxford, and Bonnie Brennan, chief executive officer, Chrisitie’s on Day 3 of Making Their Mark Forum.
Stephen Voss / CKA
The panel on the art market was unsurprisingly the most heated of the forum. Amy Cappellazzo, founding partner of Art Intelligence Global and a former auction house executive, moderated a discussion between Adams, longtime Galerie Lelong partner Mary Sabbatino, and Christie’s CEO (and her former colleague) Bonnie Brennan.
“The market is like the weather,” started Cappellazzo. “No point complaining about it, no point trying to control it. Just take an umbrella, get a good coat, be prepared for it. That’s the only way to survive it.”
The conversation was a rare pitting of gallery and auction house perspectives on the art market, even beyond just female artists. Brennan acknowledged the negative effect that auctions can have on living artists’ reputations and prices. “In my career, I’ve seen that sometimes not handled with the delicacy that it should,” she said, pointing to advisors who ask for too-high estimates. To quantify the gender inequity in the auction market, she compared Frida Kahlo’s $55 million auction record, the highest for a female artist, to Leonardo da Vinci’s $450 million record. Sabbatino interjected, “If the price of auction is the only determinant for a woman artist to achieve success, it is ignoring the majority of other indicators.” The room broke out in applause. She cited the importance of academic, institutional, and collector support, and acknowledged all the hardworking dealers who put their passion and finances behind their artists. Brennan added, “We’re all interconnected. We’re not enemies. We’re all supporting the market in different ways.”
The conversation then shifted to the growing divide in the current art market between the supply side (too high) and the demand side (too low). Brennan pointed to the wealth transfer underway that is putting more money in female collectors’ pockets, which she predicts will help female artists.
“We can help make sure that works by female artists are front and center for that incredible buying power,” Brennan said, adding, “Women, by nature, are more civic-minded. They’re not just putting things on their walls; they’re thinking about the institutions they support and what they want to see in those institutions.”
Of course, the reason female artists are looking to female collectors to buoy them is because of the societal bias that undervalues their work in the first place.
After their panel, artist Andrea Bowers joined Glenstone Museum director Emily Wei Rales onstage to talk about how patrons can support artists, but began by weighing in on the previous conversation.
“I just want to say, there weren’t any artists on that last panel,” Bowers said, to resounding applause and cheers. “I felt a little infantilized at times, because we don’t always make art just for the market.”
‘Measurement’ As A Fundamental Step Towards Change
Cecilia Alemani (L), chief curator, High Line Art New York, Rhea Combs, senior curatorial fellow in contemporary and global art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, Christophe Cherix, director of the Museum of Modern Art, curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Komal Shah, founder of Making Their Mark Foundation.
Stephen Voss / CKA
The other panel at the forum that got somewhat heated was the one on rethinking museum practices, with leading museum directors Christophe Cherix of MoMA; Kaywin Feldman of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Anne Pasternak of the Brooklyn Museum; and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, a Getty President’s Scholar and former director of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, moderated by Rhea Combs, a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Cherix’s board president, Sarah Arison, was in the audience, along with a couple dozen other museum leaders from across the country.
As the only male panelist in the entire forum, Cherix took an exemplary stance, saying, “Museum leadership needs to be there to create a safe space where [curators] have the right to take risks and also the right to fail.”
Combs asked each panelist how progress can become structural rather than just symbolic. As a starting point, Pasternak, who leads what she calls a “feminist institution,” cited measurement as fundamental to change; for example, counting the representation of women in the collection, exhibitions, staff, board, and even contractors on a renovation project. “We’re a model for the field,” she said. Cherix talked about the purposeful steps MoMA took to be more inclusive across gender, geographies, and ethnicities in the expanded galleries that opened in 2019. As Jackson-Dumont summarized, “How we actually do what we say we’re doing is to do it.” But, she admitted, that sometimes means having to turn down money and gifts from funders whose values are not aligned with yours. “Funders drive a lot of these conversations,” she said. Feldman shared that 80 percent of the additions to her museum’s collection come from gifts, and, added Jackson-Dumont, “The implications of saying no are serious.”
The primary takeaway from these two panels on the art market and museum practices is that, unsurprisingly, money drives much of the “recognition, valuation, and perception” in the art world, as Shah had put it. With the Making Their Mark Foundation, she is providing critical support to drive these important conversations forward and inspire change.
“Stewardship requires action,” she said, “and action requires community.”
