1) What is your criteria for listing contemporary artists?
2) Why do you list only women artists?
3) Why aren't women artists as well known as men?
4) I have a particular painting. What do you think it's worth? How do I find out if it's valuable?
5) I have a painting by an artist named So-n-So. Can you tell me more about the artist?
6) Have you ever heard of the artist So-n-So? I'm doing a research paper and need more information.
7) How come you don't have the artist What's-her-name listed?!
8) Would you add a link to my web page?
9) I think you should have a link to the artist Such-n-Such.
10) How come all the links are not live (clickable)?
11) One of the artist's web pages is in a language I can't read. Help!

1) What is your criteria for listing contemporary artists?

We've chosen to list artists whose work has stood the test of time. There might be many really fabulous women artists who are working right now and who are highly acclaimed, but we prefer to list only the women who have made history. That's our project: making you aware of the centuries of women artists, not highlighting the ones who are living and working right now. (The living ones can do their own PR, but the dead ones need a little help.) Another reason is that we have to limit the scope of our project in some way, otherwise it would be too huge and overwhelming. There are just two of us here.

2) Why do you list only women artists?

To list every artist in the world is more of a job than we want to handle. Even narrowing the list down to women keeps us pretty busy. We want to highlight women, because they haven't gotten as much coverage as men, especially women who were working centuries ago. Everyone has heard of Picasso, Monet, Michelangelo, and Raphael, but there is no immediate visual recognition of the fine work of most women artists unless it's Georgia O'Keeffe. Most mainstream art lovers are not readily aware of the fine work of Gentileschi, Sirani, Fontana, or Abbott, to name just a few. We want to change that.

3) Why aren't women artists as well known as men?

The main reason has to do with how women have been looked upon over the centuries. It was once thought (and sometimes is still thought) that women are not capable of being brilliant or even particularly intelligent. "Women can't make great art", it was said, and the common thought was that creative genius could only be attained by men.

However, there are some women in the early centuries who were indulged for their "eccentricity", their determination to make art. These were women who worked in the church, who were noble or were the daughters of famous artists.

In later generations (Victorian and later), women were encouraged to be well-rounded with a variety of skills in "the Arts". This didn't mean visual art necessarily, but instead the skills necessary to make a home beautiful and entertain guests: needlework and decorative arts, the playing of a musical instrument, etc. As long as it didn't interfere with the running of the home, art was tolerated and sometimes praised as a hobby.

Bear in mind that, throughout the centuries, women were also very busy having babies, taking care of children and making sure the children were educated. Until advances in medicine and methods of birth control, women had shorter lifespans due to the high mortality rate associated with child-bearing.

The subjects women painted were also affected by the times in which they lived. Women were sometimes court painters, or they stuck with "feminine subjects" such as a still life with flowers or scenes of women being domestic around the house.

In the later centuries, as times were changing and the world was becoming more industrialized, women were out of the home more. Activism was on the rise and women didn't feel as much pressure to conform to their outlined roles of the good wife and mother. Communication also speeds up change: people become stronger and more determined in a fight when they know they are not alone.

Women in the art world are not really any different than women in any other field. Those who were indulged in their eccentricities were often able to make a name for themselves. The rest pursued their loves in secret, to satisfy themselves. It's the work of those women that are lost to us.

4) I have a particular painting. What do you think it's worth? How do I find out if it's valuable?

We would love to help you with information on your artwork, but most of the time this is not information we have available to us.

The best thing to do is have the artwork appraised. This will cost you money and there's no way to get around it. If you think the work was made by a valuable artist, it could well be worth the cost of the appraisal.

If you aren't sure you want to spend money on an appraisal, do some research on your own first. Go to a fine arts library at a nearby university. Look up the artist if you know the name. If you don't know the name, bring a picture of the work and show it to the librarian. Ask if he or she can guess the style or the time period so you know where to start looking.

You can also ask at a local art school or university art department if there is an art history professor who would be willing talk to you for a few minutes to give you tips on how to discover if your painting is valuable or to give you tips on how to pick an honest and competent appraiser. Remember, these people are not professional appraisers and will be helping out as a kindness, so be considerate of the time they give you.

5) I have a painting by an artist named So-n-So. Can you tell me more about the artist?

Everyone we have information about is on our list. If she's not on the list we probably don't know about her yet. There were a lot of women artists working who are not "famous", even if they were prolific. Sometimes they never achieved popularity or they achieved popularity only in their particular region.

We get a lot of mail with this question and, as much as we'd like to, we don't have the time to research these artists for you. We add women to the web page as fast as we can according to a list that we collect from reader suggestions and from our own research.

If you have a particular artist you are interested in, we suggest the Google search engine.

6) Have you ever heard of the artist So-n-So? I'm doing a research paper and need more information.

We get a lot of students, mostly elementary and junior high students who are looking for shortcuts on their homework. While we like to help people, we think it's more valuable that students do their own work.

For those of you who are honestly trying to do your own research and you are just stumped, we would like to recommend our favorite search engine: Google!

Google ranks their search results by popularity, so that's a great way to find all the same things that other people are interested in and have already linked to.

There are also lengthy tutorials about how to search the Web, so we're not going to go into length here about how to conduct searches. If you are interested in learning more (and we highly recommend doing so), you can read the tutorials at Search Engine Watch. They have all sorts of really cool information about search engines.

7) How come you don't have the artist What's-her-name listed?!

There are two reasons we might not have an artist listed on the web site.

a) We've never heard of her. If you know of an artist that is not on the list, please tell us about her. Even better... give us an address where we can find a Web page about her.

b) We don't think she belongs on the list. (This is true of some contemporary artists that we don't want to list and we've discussed this in length at the beginning of this FAQ.)

8) Would you add a link to my web page?

If you have a page about a particular woman artist, sure! Send us the URL (Web address). We also like to link to other sites about women artists. Feel free to send any web sites that you think we might be interested in.

9) I think you should have a link to the artist Such-n-Such.

We appreciate suggestions. However, if you want to suggest an artist we should add to the list, could you please send us an address for a Web page on her? You don't have to, but if you do, the artist will undoubtedly get onto the page faster.

10) How come all the links are not live (clickable)?

Not only do we want to link to as many pages about women artists as possible, we also want to have as complete a list of women artists as possible. Many of the artists we list do not have Web pages devoted to them. If there's an artist you like, consider making a page for her and we'll add a link to your page.

11) One of the artist's web pages is in a language I can't read. Help!

We try to link only to English pages, because that's the standard language for the Internet. However, occasionally the only pages we can find on an artist will be in a different language. If you need to read the information as well as look at the pictures, try the translation tool at AltaVista.

Type the text you need translated into the space provided and select the language you want to translate from and the language you want to translate to. The computer will do the rest.

I'll warn you, the translations are a bit weird, because, after all, it's done by a machine, but at least it will help you get a rough idea of what the web page says.

Isn't technology great??

Pages produced and maintained by Wendy Russ and Carrie Carolin.