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Newsletter 12/23
Dear readers
Did you know that the gender pay gap amongst self-employed creative artists is at 24 per cent still far higher than the national average across all sectors of the economy? Indeed, in the fashion industry female designers only earn half as much as their male colleagues.
The figures are alarming, but hardly surprising. After all, discrimination and gender inequality in the arts have a long and tenacious tradition. Even in the progressive Bauhaus movement, which served as a model for the weissensee school of art and design berlin when it was founded in 1946, the lecturers blatantly reinforced gender stereotypes. Johannes Itten, for example, is said to have claimed with male arrogance that women could only think two-dimensionally, while men are able to think three-dimensionally. Paul Klee was convinced that genius is male. And Oskar Schlemmer, after weaving was introduced as a course for women, composed the lines: “Where there is wool, there is also a woman that weaves, and does her boredom thus relieve.” Of course, it speaks for itself that, of all disciplines, it was weaving – the course for women – that became one of the artistically most productive and commercially most successful workshops.
Thanks to bold and unremitting female pioneers, a heightened awareness of diversity and gender has been created – and not only in academies and art schools. Indeed, we are proud of the fact that we are actually amongst the highest ranked art schools in respect of equal opportunities and that, in its own external evaluation, the weissensee school of art and design was credited with having a particular awareness of these issues.
One of the people who has contributed to this success is our women’s and equal opportunities officer Dr Rena Onat, who was unanimously reaffirmed in her post on 6 November. She explains her vision as follows: “Whilst it is true that the majority of students aiming for careers in the arts today are women, I would wish that these women also become empowered as feminists, that they do not experience sexualised discrimination and violence and that they find good working conditions and future prospects after their studies as well.”
Discrimination has many faces. People with disabilities too often experience systemic disadvantage in the fields of education and the arts. For this reason, the weissensee school of art and design berlin is using the pilot project ARTplus to explore new ways of enabling creative people with disabilities to gain access to art studies. In this newsletter we report on the initial successes of this project. And we also tell you which events you should plan some time for despite the hectic run-up to Christmas. We look forward to seeing you.
Your weissensee school of art and design berlin
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