About Less Than Half
Let’s play a game. Name five female artists... and one can’t be Georgia O’Keeffe
This is a game I have often played with people, and to my surprise I stump almost everyone. Even harder is the “name five female artists of color” game, which reveals that the suppression of the creative spirit has both a gender and a race problem.
Less Than Half is dedicated to helping women find meaning in art by diving into the lives of the unsung heroines of the art world: the women who worked alone, the women who worked in the shadows of their husbands, the women who were deemed ‘minor’ in movements of majors.
Hall W. Rockefeller
Founder, Less Than Half
The spark of the idea that became Less Than Half arrived when I was studying at the Courtauld in London.
Because it’s an art history program, the library was 100% full of art books.
I wandered the shelves and pulled out a book called something like the Dictionary of American Women Artists—which was exactly what it sounds like.
I flipped to a page about a painter named Romaine Brooks, an amazing symbolist painter who lived most of her life in Paris in a circle of lesbian avant garde thinkers and artists.
Her work was so stunningly different from everything I had seen it almost took my breath away. I was stunned, also, that I didn’t know her already. I felt almost cheated, that I had never seen her work in a museum.
I was also so clear looking at this work that it was so FULL—so fully realized, so confident—that I knew that the system was rigged against women. Because for someone like this painter to not exist in our consciousness was clearly a mistake.
It wasn’t long after that I decided I wouldn’t write about, talk about, or advocate for male artists ever again—there were surely more where Romaine Brooks came from.
And guess what. I haven’t, and there are.
The title ‘Less Than Half’ is derived from a 1989 poster by the art world vigilantes the GueRRilla Girls.
An art world that doesn’t acknowledge the works of female artists and artists of color is not only an inequitable one, but one that ultimately harms art’s higher purpose: to expand our understanding of the world through seeing.
This is my small part in righting that wrong.
Copyright © Guerrilla Girls. Courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.
Hall W. Rockefeller
Founder, speaker, and writer
Hall holds both a BA from Yale and an MA from the Courtauld Institute both in the history of art. She wrote her Master’s dissertation on weaver and textile designer Anni Albers.
Hall has given lectures at the National Arts Club (NY) and Black Mountain College (NC) on the subject of Anni Albers, for the podcast the Dead Ladies Show on Eva Hesse, and has moderated panels at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Art Fair and the Yale Club of New York City, among others.
Hall is available for speaking, tours and interviews at hall@lessthanhalf.org.
Read an interview with Hall for Art Frankly here, and on Fox and Bunny here.
Listen to Hall on the More Than a Muse podcast, the Hyde or Practise podcast, or in conversation with Unladylike!
