Centers and peripheries of gender professional trajectories of Portuguese visual artists

Abstract

The present article is based on the preliminary findings of my doctoral research. This project aims to understand how gender impacts the Portuguese visual art world in terms of its composition (who is in and who is out) and in terms of the artists’ professional trajectories (possibilities and limitations). The first part presents the dynamics of the art world and how they may affect professional careers. This section adds historical background on the Portuguese artistic field and describes the professional status of women artists and the reasons behind female invisibility in the visual arts. Secondly, I will partly present a quantitative analysis of the visual arts field regarding the artists’ participation and representativeness on some of Portugal’s most relevant commercial galleries and art institutions, between 2012 and 2019. Findings portray an accentuated under-representation of women in all exhibition spaces. This analysis motivated me to understand how the disparities found translate into concrete trajectories. I have interviewed 43 women artists to comprehend the ways they live their profession and what does or does not happen on their trajectories that may motivate such invisibility and how much of it they attribute to their gender. Finally, I gather and present some brief reflections on the issues of gender balance in the Portuguese art world, based in these exploratory findings.