Iran has opened its first museum dedicated to a solo female artist – Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who has received widespread international attention during decades of exile. The nonagenarian doyenne of Iranian art and friend of Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, had her first US solo museum exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 2015.

In one survey, 1,000 people were asked to guess the gender of the artist and rate an anonymous piece on a scale of 1 to 10. Women were consistently given a lower mark. In a second survey, 2,000 participants were asked to rate paintings that were computer-generated and randomly assigned fictitious names of male and female artists. Here, too, works of women were rated lower.

The messages are part of Mexican artist Mónica Mayer's piece "El Tendedero/The Clothesline Project." "El tendedero" is Spanish for "the clothesline," and the entire exhibit is in English and Spanish. Mayer has done more than 30 variations of the piece. The goal: to visualize harassment of and violence against women.

“What I am trying to do now is tell more subtle stories about what it means to have ghosts and traces of crimes coursing through every day and to show it is somehow possible to make a decent life nonetheless.”

Dealers rarely, if ever, cite gender (or ethnicity, or nationality, or any other marker of identity) as a factor in deciding to represent an artist. That notion is almost universally rejected; it’s always and inevitably about “the strength of the work.” But the findings of this analysis lend some credence to the aphorism, sometimes attributed to female leadership expert Laura Liswood, that “There’s no such thing as a glass ceiling, just a thick layer of men.”

Showing exquisitely detailed images of the plants, insects, spiders, butterflies and amphibians of Suriname at the turn of the 18th century, Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium caused a sensation when it was published in 1705, with George III acquiring her work for the royal collection. Sotheby’s said it was “one of the most important natural history books of the period”, with very few studies of insects having been done previously, and Merian one of the first naturalists to observe them directly, as well as one of the first female scientific explorers.

This idea of assessing an artist’s work in light of his biography is, to some critics, blasphemous. Roman Polanski’s 2009 arrest inspired a New York Times round table on whether we ought to “separate the work of artists from the artists themselves, despite evidence of reprehensible or even criminal behavior.” It stands as a useful artifact of the prevailing attitude on the question in the early 21st century. The screenwriter and critic Jay Parini wrote, “Being an artist has absolutely nothing — nothing — to do with one’s personal behavior.” Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies scholar at Duke University, put it this way: “Let the art stand for itself, and these men stand in judgment, and never the twain shall meet.”

The letter, which 2,000 more people have put their names to and which will be shared on social media platforms using the hashtag #notsurprised, says that “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and that the request of sexual favours in exchange for career advancement was commonplace. The letter continues continues: “The resignation of one publisher from one high-profile magazine does not solve the larger, more insidious problem: an art world that upholds inherited power structures at the cost of ethical behaviour. Similar abuses occur frequently and internationally on a large scale within this industry.

May Morris was one of the leading artists of the Arts and Crafts movement whose designs for everything from wallpaper to baby’s Christening mittens became the defining feature of many a wealthy, progressive household at the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, May’s brilliance at needlework helped raise what had previously been a trivial female hobby or, worse still, domestic drudgery, into fine art.

In total, at least 170 women are known to have been commissioned by the capital’s transport system since 1910. Many more are likely to have designed posters for the system, their identity hidden by initials, subsumed under the name of an Advertising Agency, or simply unsigned. For the first time, this exhibition attempts to recognise some of these forgotten design heroines.

“Latinx” for anyone in North America with roots from Latin America — male, female or gender-nonconforming — and “Chicanx” for anyone of Mexican descent."