Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/518559
184 CULTURED "There are so many hats I can wear—I don't want to be limited by one. I don't want to just work in a commercial gallery. And I don't want to be just an academic." —Piper Marshall young woman with serious art world aspirations would do well not to become an artist. Sorry, but statistically it's the truth. When it comes to gender equality, the art world lags far behind the real world, where earning 78 cents on the dollar suddenly looks not so bad by comparison. By now, nobody would dispute that male artists command higher prices for their work and occupy more space in galleries, museums, the media and—we might as well say it—popular consciousness than women artists do. "It's never a bad time to be a process-based abstract painter who is male, right?" says Piper Marshall over coffee on a sunny spring morning in New York's Flatiron District. "It's really amazing to me. It's wild!" she adds, her eyes widening behind her horn-rimmed glasses as if to underscore her disbelief. "It's about real estate. So why not endeavor to offer this amount of real estate, and to take up space, and to be voluminous and encourage women artists to be voluminous?" Marshall, who cut her curatorial teeth working for the Swiss Institute and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia, recently found herself in the position to do just that, when power dealer Mary Boone invited her to put together a series of shows for both her space in Chelsea and her gallery uptown. Of the six, which kicked off in January and will continue through the end of June, four are dedicated to women. This ratio was intentional, certainly, but was not necessarily the product of affirmative action. "Each show downtown has a kind of trajectory thinking about systems, games, image making, circuits," says Marshall, explaining that she spent a lot of time considering Boone's legacy in the art world, particularly with regard to Neo- expressionism and the image making of the Pictures Generation. Her academic brain kicked in as she delved into Boone's archives and started to connect the dots. "You have John Miller, who deals with the game show, and from there it moves into the game as a structure, and probability versus self-determination in the work of Erika Beckman. And then the visual strategies Beckman uses are carried over into the Angela Bulloch show, but also this idea of probability and chance versus self-determination. They make a very nice trajectory because they all speak to each other." Uptown, however, the agenda is decidedly more in-your-face. The program includes the work of Caitlin Keogh, a painter who often draws on imagery from women's magazines, and Judith Bernstein, who is known for her startlingly graphic, erotic drawings. "I don't think I had ever written the word 'cunt' in a press release before," Marshall laughs. "There are so many puns to be made!" Like Bernstein, whose work pokes fun at machismo, Marshall, who is a self-declared feminist, is armed with beauty, intelligence, and also a sense of humor. The portrait that has become her de facto official press photo shows her looking serious in a black blazer, her hair parted down the middle, exuding what she calls "executive realness." At one point in our conversation she suggests that someone out there really needs to set up a Help-a-Sister-Out Hotline. "Some people rationalize that women have chosen to occupy a different role in the art world," she says. "Think of all the amazing, really iconic female gallerists— Mary, Paula Cooper, Marian Goodman, Barbara Gladstone. So you could make the argument that they have chosen a different life path. But at the same time…" She trails off before continuing. "The covers of Art Forum in the past year: 18 percent women. It's 2015!" The painter Charline von Heyl, who was not among that 18 percent, once told Marshall that she couldn't declare herself a feminist until she had made some space for herself. "She first had to claim her own territory," Marshall recalls. "I think it's different for someone in their thirties now." And yet, Marshall knows better than to assume that anything will simply be handed to her. "To be a woman, to be attractive, to be intelligent— and god forbid you're ambitious… It's something I'm in the process of figuring out," she says. "There are so many hats I can wear. And I don't want to be limited by one. I don't want to just work in a commercial gallery. And I don't want to be just an academic. I want to be this and this and this. And I think that is a way to counter that traditional way of thinking. There is something to be said for negotiating a space where you can do all of those things. The importance of AND: It's a conjunction. It's a good one. Maybe the methodology of being a feminist is to accumulate. And to use accumulation in a positive sense rather than to limit yourself." A