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Her Canvas

March 31, 2015 Art | The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center | College of Arts and Humanities | School of Music | School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

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Eight UMD women discuss their passion for the arts while navigating around gender bias in their field.

By Beena Raghavendran, Diamondback 

In 2015, women gracefully soar through the air en pointe and actresses take our hands and let us melt into their characters and sculptors build their imaginations into real life.

But for women in the arts, it wasn’t always that way.

Scores of Shakespearean plays featuring female characters banned women from Elizabethan and Jacobean staged showings, substituting young boys for their roles.

The classical music canon features Bach and Beethoven and Brahms but never a female equivalent, and for much of history, women weren’t allowed to play in orchestras.

Painters Van Gogh and Monet and Picasso saw worldwide accolades. Only when female artists gained suffrage did they begin the climb to fame.

As Women’s History Month draws to a close, The Diamondback spotlights eight female artists who are barreling forward to achieve their goals, sometimes in spite of the gender inequality they face. The wage gap is real — in this state, women still get 87.4 cents for every dollar earned by a man. These women hope to challenge any gender barriers in their fields, college work and careers.

The consensus? The barriers for women in the arts are falling, but there are still some obstacles to hurdle through. Here are their stories. Read More.