A Brief History of the First Women Artists With Solo Shows in the US

Having always been a painter at heart, Ipcar actually attended Oberlin College briefly, before leaving due to her frustrations with the restrictions the school put on her artistic expression. Regardless, she continued to paint, even while working full-time as a subsistence farmer alongside her husband, Adolph Ipcar. On top of painting, Ipcar was a writer and illustrator for a myriad of children’s books, and also constructed 3D sculptures out of cloth. She lived to be 99. 

Although neither the Met nor the MoMA were the first museums to present such an exhibition— the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art are noted to have preceded both— they still contributed to the breaking of the glass ceiling. 

However, there is a ways to go for women in the arts, even today. A study done by artnet Analytics and Maastricht University found that only 13.7 percent of living artists exhibited by galleries in Europe and North America are female. Forbes also reported that women only accounted for 2 percent of sales out of the $196.6 billion spent at art auctions between 2008 and 2019.