Major Pains
Earlier this semester, I walked into my classroom on the second floor of the art school building and came face to face with a situation I had not yet encountered in my two and a half years as an art major: half of the room had been stripped of the paintings that had papered the walls only a day earlier, replaced by a handful of gargantuan canvases with human faces the size of car tires peering out from each frame. It was an uncomfortable space to enter.
I learned later that this was the work of one of my classmates, a first-year boy with a penchant for odd but earnest comments in class. He had rearranged part of the classroom in order to display some pieces for a visiting art dealer.
Upon hearing this, I fumed. Negotiation of space for art majors is crucial: without the space to work, you are unable to produce. Negotiation of space for women in particular is an inevitable part of our existence. Questioning the right to take up space, we are socialized to minimize ourselves in terms of our opinions, our voices, and even our physical body mass. The intersection of these realities then becomes a balance between socialized femininity and the practical need for space, between polite acquiescence and the desire to have the room to make pieces of art.
And thus it is no wonder that this transpired, that one of the youngest (male) members of the class felt it necessary to take up half of the room, if only for a little while, even though the (female) professor had already warned him not to do so.
In a separate instance, a different first-year boy took up an entire wall of the classroom — the working studio spaces of three older, female students. He did so for the sake of a piece he had been commissioned to make, the canvas a whopping 15 feet long by eight feet wide. I should also mention that he had asked the female students’ permission, which he received, but still forced them to disperse around the classroom, relegating them to comparatively smaller areas of the classroom while he worked on his monumental commissioned piece.
I have no ill will against these boys or boys like them, but in the context of art-making, they have a clear entitlement to space and time that the women in the class do not. And this sense of entitlement extends beyond the issue of physical space, infiltrating discussions, class activities, and claims on the professor’s attention. It feels frustrating and stifling to bear witness to the monopolization of the class, especially when the monopolizer hasn’t had to think through the same considerations or experience the same self-doubt before opening his mouth as I have.
I am sure that my frustrations with space and entitlement are not unique to the art major; I imagine that these concerns become magnified enormously in historically male-dominated majors. To be a woman in any of the engineering departments, or the computer science department, or really the majority of the hard science and math majors, must be a wholly different fight–for legitimacy, for intellectual recognition, for respect — that I can only begin to conceive of.
But within the art major, there is a unique type of maleness that persists: the men dispense their opinions freely, firmly, and with little room for argument, as if their word is law. They have Instagram accounts for their artwork and hypebeast-inspired clothing brands. They’re already being paid for their work. They don’t worry whether or not they are encroaching on another person’s studio space. And they have never once questioned whether or not they can call themselves real artists.
There is nothing wrong with the majority of these traits, except for the fact that they seem to belong exclusively to the men of the major. It is my sincere hope that the self-assurance behind these behaviors instead becomes an attribute of all art majors: all of us, regardless of gender, producing interesting pieces while advocating for our opinions, our work, and our own space.
