Get a Room

I got angry, as I am wont to do when I feel helpless, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a very sad, small museum in Washington, D.C.

The walls are bare, basically, when you enter, save a few effortful paintings sparsely placed. The main exhibition hall felt ripe for a luncheon. (There was plenty of room.)

Upstairs there was an exhibit on the modern female artist that basically was porn. There was vagina everywhere. And it wasn’t even artistic vagina. It was just vagina.

A woman took photos of herself from all angles, naked, tracking herself losing 10 pounds. Lots of pornographic photos in glass cases. A sculpture about childbirth by a German artist of a lance violently piercing through, well, a vagina.

Eh.

If our only way to create as women artists is to respond to the way we are being treated as women, does that merely propagate the struggle? Can't we just be artists?

(They couldn't have put up Julie Taymor's gender-unspecific Lion King puppets?)

I angrily scribbled on a comment sheet on the way out: “How are we to progress when all you show us is porn????” and signed it “a female artist from New York.”

Perhaps I caught the museum on a slow day, but I fear this is not so.

Virgina Woolf says a female writer or artist needs a “Room of One’s Own” and a financial sponsor with unlimited funds if she is to make her mark. The reason this museum is so pathetic, she would argue, is because women have been given the role of having babies and get distracted, naturally, by the patter of feet and the sound of small children running about our homes.

We may have lost a female Picasso to breastfeeding; we may have missed out on another Shakespeare to chamber pot training.

Our artistic history is slim because we have been given a full-time job by nature.

In her essay, Ms. Woolf sites passages where Jane Austen and other female writers who did get on the map actually got interrupted, distracted from their work. It’s quite remarkable. You can see it in their writing.

Therefore, if we are to succeed, we need a Room to Ourselves.

Twyla Tharp had a barn in upstate NY. Susan Stroman built a studio in her apartment. I have the dance studio at Equinox, a gift basically granted to me by my generous parents. But then again, the walls are windowed and I get leered at when I bust a move. So that doesn't really count.

I am guessing that Ms. Woolf's implications are that men don't need this Room because they already have it. We need to overcome our places as the "childbearing ones" and as the "weaker sex." We need an extra boost.

I have left New York for a month to come to the suburbs of Chicago to give myself a Room. I have started a theatre company where I will be creating the theatre of my dreams. And I am fortunate enough to have this Room.

Still working on the endless funds.