Where are all the Women (in the Frame)

The Met Gala made it obvious: female contemporary artists are completely left out of the picture.

The spectacle was art-adjacent in every way, except for one: it didn’t seem to include any actual female artists.

Not the muses. Not the performers. Not the designers or the subjects. The actual visual artists—the ones shaping cultural language in real time. Missing.

The Met Gala is supposed to be about fashion in conversation with art. But in that conversation, women are still rarely cited as the ones holding the brush. They're referenced, adorned, positioned as inspiration—but almost never as the originators of the idea. As if being looked at is still the primary form of participation.

Try naming five living male contemporary artists. Easy. Now try naming five women with the same global recognition, collector support, or institutional weight. It gets quiet. Not because they don’t exist—because the spotlight doesn’t know how to find them. Or worse, doesn’t care to.

There’s a strange dynamic at play where women are hyper-visible in the image economy—front and center in every campaign, moodboard, and editorial—but nearly invisible in the canon. And I’m not talking about the past. I’m talking about now.

It’s especially glaring at a cultural event like the Met Gala, where every frame is styled, captioned, and archived. There’s no shortage of art references. Just a shortage of credit given to women actually making contemporary work. Female artists are either footnotes or Instagram slideshows titled “10 Women You Should Know,” which somehow get posted every year like it's breaking news.

As a working artist, I notice. I’m not just tuned into the looks—I’m tuned into what gets left out. And the absence of female contemporary artists in these conversations isn’t accidental. It’s systemic.

So I make space for it in my work. I don’t want to be the image. I want to be the origin. And I’m not waiting to be discovered by the same system that’s been pretending not to see female authorship for decades. I’m building around it. Loudly.

Because the real art world doesn’t always show up at the Met Gala. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t watching.