Special Post: Yes, We Can!

In celebration of International Women’s Day, guest author Kimberley Fyfe considers how the power of women collectors could potentially change the art market through conscientious support of female artists.

Yes, We Can! was written by special guest author, Kimberley Fyfe, SaskGalleries Vice-President, former gallery owner, and avid art collector.

Yes, We Can! was written by special guest author, Kimberley Fyfe, SaskGalleries Vice-President, former gallery owner, and avid art collector.

Women in the Fine Art Market

In March 2020, economist Clare McAndrew found that among the 3,050 galleries listed with the online fine art marketplace, Artsy, women accounted for just 16% of the established artists shown. While most Canadian fine art galleries currently have rosters that are on average 35% female, the actual gender ratio of the population is 48.1% female.  Further, the number of potential practising artists who are female is even higher with fine art graduates in Canada being 60% female. Not a very inspiring metric for any woman currently pursuing a fine art career. However, the UBS Global Art Market Report 2020 contained the interesting insight that female art collectors had a higher-than-average level of spending than men and had larger collections than men on average, with one-third exceeding 100 works.

These facts lead me to consider how the power of women collectors could potentially change the art market through conscientious support of female artists. With female buyers leading the way in spending and collecting alongside the increasing recognition of female artists in museum collections worldwide, the pendulum has already begun swinging toward an expansion of female presence in the fine art world. Female art buyers could push this movement further and faster through making a conscious effort to widen their collections with purposefully purchasing artwork by female artists.

Female art buyers could push this movement further and faster through making a conscious effort to widen their collections with purposefully purchasing artwork by female artists.

Supporting Each Other

Saskatchewan’s female artists selected by SaskGalleries’ members to be highlighted for International Women’s Day 2021. These artists were featured on SaskGalleries’ social media.

Saskatchewan’s female artists selected by SaskGalleries’ members to be highlighted for International Women’s Day 2021. These artists were featured on SaskGalleries’ social media.

Alex Elle, author and host of the podcast “Hey Girl!” recently stated, “…society likes to trick us into thinking that we [women] cannot, or have no interest in, getting along, working together, and standing in support of one another.” She continues, “I have seen with my own eyes the opposite. Now more than ever it feels like we are joining hands and celebrating not only our differences but similarities.” Elle’s statements reflect the genuine effort made by many as we continue to fight against the stereotype of women not supporting women. Her words emphasize how impactful a conscientious attempt to come together can be on the future.

While the current gender discrepancy of 35% female artists found in most gallery rosters and public art collections is not reflecting the equality of representation we need to see in the art world, it is sadly reflecting what most private art collectors see on their walls. Assessing my own art collection for gender representation, six of the sixteen works currently hanging in my living room are by artists who are female: a 36.5% ratio. As the saying goes, “change begins at home,” and to achieve equal gender representation, we must consciously invest more in our female Saskatchewan artists. 

Saskatchewan is fortunate to have numerous practicing female artists who work in a wide variety of media. We also have many female buyers, like myself, who have a great appreciation of the unique quality of prairie essence that exists in Saskatchewan artwork. There is opportunity here for both sides of the art market, the artist and the collector, to join hands not just to celebrate the female artist in Saskatchewan, but to push that pendulum closer toward gender equality. Purposeful pursuit of female Saskatchewan buyers to bring artwork created by female Saskatchewan artists into their collections will increase the visibility and viability of Saskatchewan women in the art world. 

There is opportunity here for both sides of the art market, the artist and the collector, to join hands not just to celebrate the female artist in Saskatchewan, but to push that pendulum closer toward gender equality.

Saskatchewan’s Prairie Female Artists

Our highly collected 20th century female Saskatchewan artists: Agnes Martin, Wynona Mulcaster, Reta Cowley, and Dorothy Knowles, are some of the most intrepid. Their prairie experiences were brought to the world as the subject of land was repeatedly examined and evinced in their art. Today, Saskatchewan’s rolling wide prairie, graceful grassland and dense northern forest continue to influence Saskatchewan artists who are equally as intrepid and, on their way to becoming highly collectible: Gabriela García-Luna, Anne Brochu Lambert, Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, and Michaela Hoppe. These four artists create work that investigates our landscape as only Saskatchewan artists can, they delve into our environmental past and present to remark on our future.

These… artists create work that investigates our landscape as only Saskatchewan artists can, they delve into our environmental past and present to remark on our future.

Michaela Hoppe fills those cumuli skies familiar to all prairie people with high intensity colours in her collection of oil on canvas work, Big Skies. The emotional, fleshy clouds full of movement and moods simultaneously highlight the beauty and the threat of cloud formations. In our agricultural economy of Saskatchewan, as we apply technology and devise methods to mitigate loss and facilitate profit, Hoppe’s work reminds us there still is a need to consider the uncontrollable ever-changing environment. Nature, our planet's physical and biological processes, continues regardless of, or perhaps despite, man’s intrusive developments. The opulence of these natural interactions and the underlying terror that nature contains are omnipresent and inseparable in Hoppe’s work.

Michaela Hoppe, “Prairie Watchtower”, oil on canvas, 36.5x70”, SOLD

Michaela Hoppe, “Prairie Watchtower”, oil on canvas, 36.5x70”, SOLD

Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, “Forest Edge”, 24x36”, acrylic on canvas, framed, $2,295, available at Assiniboia Gallery

Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, “Forest Edge”, 24x36”, acrylic on canvas, framed, $2,295, available at Assiniboia Gallery

Changes in our agricultural system have fated numerous family farms and left abandoned buildings across our province. Artist Debbie Wozniak-Bonk sees the former homes, barns, and granaries as “both ambiguous and ambivalent as they are becoming part of the prairie landscape.” The majestic portraits of prairie buildings that are part of Wozniak-Bonk’s Dreamland exhibition and Lost Dream series are rendered with a softness of colour and texture in acrylic on canvas that replicates the fogginess of dreams and memories. These works recall the former importance of architecture and agriculture to the immigration experience on the Prairies and remind us that the small farms and towns which once populated our province are returning to the earth on which they were built. As Wozniak-Bonk states, these structures “speak of our own personal relationship that we have with nature.”

Anne Brochu Lambert, who finds her “inspiration is anchored into the landscape,” created her group of works, Home-Land / Territoires, in 2009. As an addition to this series, she released Metaphor in 2017/18. In these encaustic works, we see the repeated appearance of a lone house in a stark landscape. Such purposeful placement of “a central symbolic shape that encompasses the human affect and presence on that land” allows Brochu-Lambert’s exploration of the effect of settlement on the prairie environment. It evokes the face of the Canadian landscape as it was forcefully altered from one dotted with First Nations settlements, seasonal and otherwise, to one which purposefully removed the existing inhabitants of the prairies to favour the incoming growth of European immigrants. The tall stalwart farmhouse became ubiquitous in the west as the Plains tipi had been before it. 

Anne Brochu Lambert, “Open Series: Homeland - Red Earth by Blue Waters”, 2016/17, encaustic, aluminium, 23k gold leaf on wood panel, 14x11”, $585, available at Nouveau Gallery

Anne Brochu Lambert, “Open Series: Homeland - Red Earth by Blue Waters”, 2016/17, encaustic, aluminium, 23k gold leaf on wood panel, 14x11”, $585, available at Nouveau Gallery

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Gabriela García-Luna, “Spring Will Come 3”, 2021, photograph, archival ink on rag paper, 24x24”, edition of 3, available at Slate Fine Art

The highly sophisticated photographic works of Gabriela García-Luna which centre on landscape as subject contain “a constant enquiry regarding the nature of perception, concepts of reality and sense of place.” In 2018, García-Luna explored the winding and wild water landscape of the Saskatchewan and South Saskatchewan Rivers. Her resulting body of work combines landscape and waterscape via multiple photographic images to create new vistas that play with scale and our perceived reality. The impact of viewing small-scale humans nestled in among magnified beach rocks and moss forces us to recall the power of nature over man.

García-Luna’s exploration of her environment and the unique application of her chosen medium is a continuous learning experience for the artist and results in some wonderful and expressive observations of our landscape.

The artists reviewed above, and many more female Saskatchewan artists, demand further investigation and exploration as they produce some the best landscape work being created in our Province today. 

Contact their galleries, review their work, learn their names. If we can consciously commit to informed art buying and to supporting all our female Saskatchewan artists, we will continue to see a correction in gender ratios in the art market. We will see the impact of art consumers on the market and the transformation of art collections, both public and private, to be reflective of our population.

The artists reviewed above, and many more female Saskatchewan artists, demand further investigation and exploration as they produce some the best landscape work being created in our Province today.

Kristin Wagman