From Dayna Evans’ article concerning the Museum of Sex exhibition “NSFW Female Gaze” for The Cut:
Radical feminist artist collective the Guerrilla Girls were the first to popularize a now ubiquitous question: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? From 1989 onward, the collective has been tracking gender representation in some of the world’s most well-renowned art institutions, and the male gaze remains alive and well. Though the statistic is quoted ad nauseam, it is still staggering that as of 2012, less than 4 percent of artists in the modern-art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are women, but 76 percent of the nudes are female.
A new exhibition at the Museum of Sex in New York hopes to address and correct this imbalance. “NSFW: Female Gaze,” co-curated by Creators of Vice Media, opens Tuesday and will bring works by over 20 female artists that tackle sexuality, desire, and the female gaze. “There has long been a conventional approach to exploring sexuality,” Lissa Rivera, an artist and co-curator of the exhibit told the Cut by phone, “and we really wanted to show a wide variety of reflections on self discovery and different types of sexual expression, ones that are maybe unusual or not thought as often.”