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DDP Talks To

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

Examining other art forms with historic issues in hiring women: theater, symphonic/classical music, opera. Also including more contemporary fields: lack of women in country music, hip hop, contemporary pop music, and other genres.

The Conversation: A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo

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By Vivien G. Fryd

19 March 2019

The #MeToo movement has had a sweeping effect on politics, organized religion, educational institutions, Hollywood, sports and the military.

The cultural prominence of rape and sexual assault might be new. Efforts to bring attention to the issue, however, are not.

Beginning in the 1970s, a group of female artists in the U.S. started confronting rape, incest and sexual assault through performances, videos, quilts and other nontraditional media.

By tackling a taboo subject, they were at the forefront of raising public awareness of these issues. In my new book “Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970,” I detail how their relentless efforts to end the silence surrounding sexual violence against women reverberates in the #MeToo movement today.

The ‘heroic’ rapes of the Renaissance

When these feminist artists emerged, they sought to counter what art historians call “the heroic rape tradition of Western art.”

Beginning in the Renaissance, this tradition involved artists’ rendering assault, rape and murder against women with a patina of beauty and heroism that masked the reality of the violence.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Florentine Opera’s new leader says every group should be thinking about #MeToo issues

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By Jim Higgins

19 March 2019

As the new general director and CEO of the Florentine Opera, Maggey Oplinger leads a local performing arts organization with a long history, but one that’s also recovering from a #MeToo disruption. 

Her plan for the future includes “creating a culture where there is zero tolerance for that kind of behavior and where there is a safe buffer zone” for staff and performers to report any allegations, Oplinger said. 

Oplinger, who began work March 1, succeeds William Florescu, who resigned abruptly in May 2018. The Florentine board later disclosed that Florescu’s departure was related to “violation of the Florentine Opera’s policies and prohibitions concerning sexual misconduct.” A Washington Post report on sexual harassment in the classical music world included a 2008 incident involving Florescu.

In that incident, the Post reported, the singer felt she had no one she could complain to about the leader of the company. 

Drawing on her experience working for Johnson Controls, Oplinger said she will ensure people have multiple channels for reporting transgressions. For example, Johnson Controls made it possible for an employee to report inappropriate contact to any superior staff member the employee felt comfortable with, she said.

The Florentine’s board of directors has a new human resources committee; a leader of that committee will visit with staff regularly, providing another safe outlet for reporting. That committee is also updating the Florentine’s HR policies.

“I think the logistics of how to handle #MeToo are almost more complex than the policies in some way,” Oplinger said, noting that she wouldn’t want to send a person who has just come forward with an allegation back into rehearsal with a person they’ve accused.

Read the full article in the Journal Sentinel.

BBC News: Sir David Hare: Society shifting women’s role in film and theatre

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18 March 2019

Women are seeing better representation in film and theatre, Sir David Hare has said, but the change is due to societal pressure rather than the industry.

The acclaimed playwright and director said there were more stories being told about women but the number of women behind the camera was “still tiny”.

The industry was “running along behind” society, he said.

Sir David, known for creating leading roles for women, wrote screenplays for The Hours, The Reader and Collateral.

“I’ve been going on about women’s lives and about the importance of portraying women’s lives for 45 years now and nobody listened for the first 45 years,” he said.

“And at last, people are listening.

“Now I don’t think that’s a change in the industry, I think that’s a change in society.”

The US campaign group, Time’s Up, says only 4% of Hollywood’s biggest earning films from the past decade were directed by women.

Speaking in February, British director Georgia Parris said it was a “pretty depressing figure” and part of the “age-old problem that women are hired on experience and men are hired on potential”.

A movement, known as the #4percentchallenge, is now trying to inspire confidence in future movie-makers and Time’s Up is asking actors to commit to working with a female director in the next 12 months.

In the UK, the percentage of women being cast in UK films (around 25%) has barely changed in more than 100 years, data released by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 2017 showed.

However, the percentage of female crew members went up from 3% to 33% over the same period of time.

Read the full article on BBC News.

If Theater Can Change, So Can Ballet: New York Times – ‘Doors Swing Open for Women and People of Color at Top Ranks of American Theater’

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By Michael Paulson

19 March 2019

To understand the striking transformation taking place in the American theater, consider Nataki Garrett.

Ms. Garrett, a stage director who has held leadership posts in California and Colorado, is an African-American woman with a track record of championing new work. On Tuesday, she is being named the sixth artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a Tony-winning nonprofit with a $44 million budget and an annual audience of 400,000.

Across the country, scores of artistic directors, most of them white men who have served as community tastemakers for years, are leaving their jobs via retirements, ousters, and an industrywide round of musical chairs. As their successors are appointed, a shift is underway: according to a national survey conducted by two Bay Area directors, women have been named to 41 percent of the 85 jobs filled since 2015, and people of color have been named to 26 percent.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Broadway World: Ergo Arts Theatre Announces 2nd Annual ERGO PINK FEST

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18 March 2019

Ergo Pink Fest is a 4-day theatre festival in Toronto (March 28-31, 2019), conceived and hosted by Ergo Arts Theatre (EAT) that gives voice to female and non-binary identified playwrights, providing them a unique platform to develop and showcase their work. The festival, being held at the Small World Music Centre, 180 Shaw Street, brings together award-winning playwrights and dramaturges Beverley Cooper, Marcia Johnson, Anita La Selva, Paula Wing and Elyne Quan to nurture the development of eight new plays.

The plays take us around the world – China, Poland, Italy and America – and talk of the experience of female, non-binary identifying and transgender characters.

“The original idea behind the festival came when we read the 2015 Equity in Theatre study by the Playwrights Guild of Canada,” says EAT Artistic Director, Anna Pappas. “It said that the greatest disparity in gender equity happens in the playwright category. So that seemed to be the place to start, providing a space for these playwrights to create that work and tell those stories. The experience last year was so powerful and made such a positive impact, that a second year was inevitable. To know that 8 new plays will be brought into the Canadian theatre scene as a result of this work is very exciting.”

Read the full article on Broadway World.

Wall Street Journal: What Women Artists Knew About Work

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By Mason Currey

14 March 2019

In December 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law with a complaint that will sound familiar to anyone who has struggled to carve out time for a creative project. “Since I began this note,” Stowe wrote, “I have been called off at least a dozen times—once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish—once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples…

Read the full article with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Women’s Team Sues Soccer Federation, Alleging Gender Discrimination

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Soccer’s U.S. Women’s National Team alleged gender discrimination in a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, a dramatic step just months from the kickoff of a Women’s World Cup in which the American squad is the defending champion and favored to repeat.

Read the full article with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

New York Times: Even Google Can No Longer Hide Its Gender Pay Gap

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By Bryce Covert

7 March 2019

On Monday, Google announced something unusual: After its annual pay equity analysis, it gave most of the raises to adjust for unequal practices to men.

The company says that it was about to make changes this year that would have compensated many men less than women in a certain job category, so it headed off that inequity. But the analysis appears to leave out many of the factors that women at the company say have led them to be paid less. The company’s annual reviews only compare people in the same job categories, yet women say the problem is that they are hired into lower-tier and lower-pay positions while men start in higher-level jobs with higher pay brackets.

It’s hard to know for sure what’s going on with Google’s wage gap, because the company won’t release all of its data publicly. In prior years it claimed that it had no gap in pay between men and women, while arguing that it shouldn’t have to hand over detailed data to the Department of Labor, which analyzes pay practices at government contractors. Yet in 2016 the Labor Department found that Google had “systemic” disparities, which an official called “quite extreme.”

A new rule could help make sense of what’s going on. 

Read the full article in the New York Times.

Columbia Daily Spectator: Athena Film Festival panels on gender equity unite leading voices in fight for film industry representation

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By Sophie Smyke and Isabela Espadas Barros Leal

5 March 2019

The Time’s Up movement launched on Jan 1, 2018 as a response to sexual harassment and assault allegations made against former movie producer Harvey Weinstein. On Friday night, at Barnard’s ninth annual Athena Film Festival, one of the movement’s founders, Nina Shaw, BC ’76, Law ’79, was honored with the Athena Award for her excellence in leadership within the film industry while wearing a Time’s Up pin on her dress.

A year after the movement’s launch, Barnard fostered conversation on the movement’s impact, as well as the work still left to be done, through a series of panels featuring members of the film industry. At the Time’s Up X2 panel on Saturday and the Programming for Parity panel on Sunday, activists, producers, programmers, and directors came together to discuss how to prioritize representation and systemic change in Hollywood.

Leading members of the Time’s Up movement spoke on a panel last Saturday at the Athena Film Festival. The panel, moderated by CNN Entertainment Reporter Chloe Melas, included Shaw and the Time’s Up Entertainment executive director, Nithya Ramen, as well as actresses Amber Tamblyn and Alysia Reiner.

Although originally focused on the entertainment industry, the Time’s Up movement has since come to expand its reach with initiatives such as Time’s Up Healthcare and Time’s Up Tech. As it broadened its influence, the Time’s Up movement has continued to challenge the way industries operate on a fundamental level.

“It’s about seeing this not as a moment in time, but as a real structural retooling,” Tamblyn said, “to not be afraid, truly, from using the word ‘revolution.’ We have to think in that big language. We have to know that this is much bigger than a momentary shake-up.”

Read the full article in the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Forbes: Where Are All The Women Artists? NMWA’s Latest Campaign Aims To Find The Answer

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By Erin Spencer

1 March 2019

Sometime in the 1970s an art collector and patron by the name of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay began asking people in her circles: “Where are all all the women artists?” Some thirty years later she would indirectly get the answer most weren’t willing to say out loud from a man who spoke to a reporter at Art Basel in 2014:  “I just curate what I like, and I like art by men better.”

Fortunately, Holladay didn’t wait that long to get her answer and in 1981 founded The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)—the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women in the arts. Since its doors first opened, Holladay, alongside the museum’s staff, have worked tirelessly to find those women artists—those that history forgot and those still working that are deserving of a platform. By putting in advocacy work, by hosting a lectures and panels or simply by lending some state-of-the-art wall space, they hope to ensure women artists of the past and the present can hold a place in the future. Though many in the industry will sing praises to the work the museum has accomplished, it’s clear that they still have their work cut out for them.

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 51% of living visual artists in the US today are women and, on average, those women earn 81 cents for every dollar made by their male contemporaries. A recent study by the Public Library of Science found that of the permanent collections of 18 prominent art museums in the US, 87% of the represented works were completed by men. Most recently, a joint study conducted in 2017, by artnet Analytics and Maastricht University in 2017 found that just 13.7% of living artists represented in galleries in Europe and North America are women.

Read the full article in Forbes.