The making of the Burns Halperin report
Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin discuss their latest report looking at diversity and representation in the US art world.
In December 2022, a new data-driven report was published looking at the representation of Black American and female-identifying artists in US museums and the art market. It was the third edition of the report, and the most extensive to date, finding that between 2008 and 2020 just 11% of acquisitions at US museums were works by female-identifying artists, and only 2.2% were by Black American artists.
The report’s authors – Charlotte Burns, independent editor and founder of Studio Burns, and Julia Halperin, former executive editor of Artnet News – are the first interviewees in our new series speaking to innovative thinkers in the art world.
Can you tell us how and why you started these reports?
Julia Halperin: Our first report was published in September 2018. The idea for it came after Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition ‘Mastry’ had arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Basquiat’s skull painting sold for $110m at Sotheby’s, and there were all these headlines at the time saying what a great time it was to be a Black American artist. Charlotte and I were sitting together in a bar thinking, ‘Is that actually true?’ If it was, then the art world was running counter to the rest of America, in the middle of Trump’s presidency, and if it wasn’t, then we should stop saying that. So we thought we would use data to investigate that question.
We reached out to a variety of museums and asked them for information on exhibitions and acquisitions. They, like us, thought it would be easy information to pull, but we were all quite naïve at the time.
You have mentioned previously that museums were sometimes highly defensive when presented with your findings.
Charlotte Burns: It’s not just the museums, it's the entire art world. There are people in positions of authority and power who very much believe in progress, and they usually believe that they are part of it, but when we say ‘no, look at the numbers’, it just clashes so much with their sense of reality and identity, and the language that the art world uses to talk about itself and sell itself. The usual reaction is, ‘Wait, there must be something you've missed’.
Another problem in the art world is that it's not an industry that’s really able to see data as a language it understands, or how to embrace it.
In your latest report, some of your worst-performing museums included the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Do you think that these museums are ‘held back by history’, being forced to collect, and accept donations, from before the 20th century?
JH: In some ways I do. Encyclopaedic institutions have a different mandate than modern and contemporary institutions, so we see modern and contemporary institutions moving much closer to parity.
But also, no. I think one of the most profound things that we found was that you don’t actually have to be a big museum or have a big budget in order to make changes in your collecting. You just need to care about it, focus on it and make a real effort. The National Gallery of Art had dismal numbers, but in the past few years has really made an effort and seen a real shift.
It’s difficult for museums if they don’t prioritise this issue and have saddled themselves with legacy gifts that have been pledged years before. I was thinking recently about the Fisher Collection gift at SFMOMA and the Edlis/Neeson Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. These are collection decisions that are going to affect people coming into that museum for generations – and these decisions were made in the past 10 years. So I’ve become less and less sympathetic.
(Editor’s note: The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA has 7.6% of artworks by women artists and 1.9% by Black American artists. The Edlis/Neeson Collection at the the Art Institute of Chicago has 17% of artworks by women artists and no Black American artists. Neither collection includes Black American women artists.)
CB: Everyone keeps saying there weren’t any women or Black artists, but they may just not have made it to our systems. So you may have to work really, really hard to get it. Art existed. Women were making art, Black Americans were making art. It’s just it wasn’t visible or valuable to this system. But that’s the system’s problem, not the artists.
Your report also looked at the art market and found that galleries are doing a better job at selling works by women than the auctions are. Why do you think this is?
CB: I think the galleries are just closer to the art than auctions. The A to Z of artists at auction is not very big. They want you to understand that the sales are where you go for a very limited pool of greatness. That’s the business model. Lisa Dennison, chairman at Sotheby’s, told me once that she thinks of a family tree when auction houses are guiding buyers. If the buyer wants a Warhol but can’t get one, they might send them to Christopher Wool, if they can’t get a Wool they’ll send them to Wade Guyton, etc. So when women do appear in the sales, it’s not that the auction market has evolved or that tastes have progressed. It’s just that they couldn't find a Pollock anymore so they needed to bring in a Joan Mitchell to be able to satisfy that demand.
The gallery lexicon is just much, much faster. The level of art-historical knowledge needed to work directly with artists is totally different.
Individual patrons and collectors have tremendous influence within the US museum system. To what extent do you think these collection figures are guided by what these collectors want and don’t want in their own collections?
JH: We were speaking to Michael Darling of [the art donation digital platform] Museum Exchange and he was saying that he sees a mismatch over and over with the donors wanting to offer works by white men and the museums wanting something that’s going to diversify their collections.
But I don’t get the sense that these same donors were refusing to let got of their incredible Elizabeth Catlett. Those works move in different ecosystems, so it’s a lot harder for institutions to find them. The people who collected Black American artists, Latinx artists and Indigenous artists did so outside of the museum ecosystem. The museums don’t know them and they don't know the museums. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier for museums to find the people who have the art that they already have in their collection.
Both of your reports have focused on the US, which makes sense as the US is seemingly where the debate and movement around representation in culture is the most active. Can you tell us about this decision? What do you think about running a report like this for other countries, e.g. China, UK, India, Italy?
CB: I think there are complexities around representation that vary from country to country. Looking at women would be easily done because the women in our study are international. But with race it is more difficult to be universally specific. So for the UK would we look at Black American artists or would it make sense to do Black British artists? But the US market is so dominant, could we ignore American artists? America is America, it’s the centre of the art world and art market.
JH: But even something like looking at Brazilian national collections, and looking at Black and Indigenous artists in Brazil, I think would be super interesting.
What would you say are the most significant or surprising findings in your latest report? Was there anything you didn’t expect, knowing the art world as well as you both do?
JH: This is sort of a niche one, but for me, a really illuminating piece of data was that for Black women artist acquisitions, purchases outpaced gifts. For our total data set, gifts were around 60% of what museums acquire, so with the Black women artists we can really see museums using their own money to push against the tide.
And then the thing that, initially, I thought was really encouraging but now I find depressing, is that you can really see an individual’s impact on institutions. You can see the year that Jessica Morgan came to the Dia Art Foundation and you can see when the National Gallery made the decision to acquire the work by the Corcoran Collection. You can see the effects of individual people making decisions and it’s exciting that one person can make a difference. But on the other hand, it also shows that there are only a few people operating at the highest level in this world and the systems are still not changing.
(Editor’s Note: The National Gallery of Art added 6,430 works from the former Corcoran Gallery of Art to its collection in 2015. The collection was particularly rich with works by women and African Americans.)
CB: My answer is more about the process of the study itself. It started off as a journalistic essay and now it’s become this massive part of our lives. It gives me hope that there are so many people we’ve spoken to who want to create change, discuss change. There’s Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven initiative to drive change in museums as workplaces, which has been so enriching; the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums; SMU DataArts. It feels like a lid is opening on something and I just don't want the lid to get screwed back on.
But at the same time it feels like we’re still at the stage where we're trying to convince people that the numbers aren't that great and we're not at the stage where we can move things in a more dramatic way. If the art world as a whole doesn’t get on board with these kinds of conversations, there probably will just be a schism between certain kinds of museums and certain kinds of publics. Because the public is growing, so you can’t keep showing the same stuff forever.