User:Nyahalexander/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Women artists

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because our Wikipedia project is centered around research under published and researched Chicana artists, so I thought that an article about women in art would be a good place to start my project. This article is important because it gives a history of women's contributions to the art world, and it explains the discrimination and difficulties that women artists face. Upon my initial reading of this article, I thought that it was very thorough and I enjoyed the amount of sources linked and the amount of images included in the article. I also liked that they included prominent women artists that work in the various mediums that they covered in the article. I think that while this article was effective in many ways it also failed to consider things like race and socio-economic status of women artists enough or in a truly meaningful way, and it highlighted primarily European women which still have more privilege that other women artists of different backgrounds.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section-

The topic sentence of this lead section is strong and clearly outlines that the rest of the article will focus on highlighting the contribute that women artists have made to the field, and makes a point of the fact that they have been historically undervalued and under-recognized which is a major problem. From the lead section you would understand the goal of the article is to bring attention to women artists, but it does not specify how it will do so. The lead section talks about the Feminist art movement, but does not delve into this topic deeply in the article, making it a general fact/statement that is not developed and may leave the reader wondering more about the connection it has to this article. The lead section is not overly wordy and works well in some ways, but overall it does not fully give the reader an idea of what will be covered in the sections of the article.

Content-

The content in the article is relevant to the page as it talks about women artists and refers back to statements made in the Leading Section by discussing contributions women artists have made in fields that are often considered to be 'male mediums'. The information in the article covers art made by women up to 2011, so it is fairly up to date, but it could include some more recent artists that have emerged as that leaves a ten, nearly eleven year gap between the women they highlight and the contemporary art that has been made by women since then. The content does deal with an equity gap, sexism, but it fails to do so in an intersectional way. The article mainly focused on white women artists, and could have been greatly improved by including more WOC and identifying the very different struggles they have from white women artists as they are facing both sexism and racism. Overall, the content made sense for the theme of the article, but it focuses primarily on the struggles and contributions of white women, making the title inaccurate as all other women do not have space in this article.

Tone and Balance-

With this subject matter, achieving a truly neutral tone is difficult, but the article did a good job of critiquing the reality, that women artists do not get the recognition they deserve, without just making it an article of complaints and instead uplifting those women they wish to empower. As previously stated, the perspectives of WOC artists are under-represented in this article with white women dominating this article. I do not think that the article tries to force an opinion on the reader, but simply gives them more information and resources and hopes to expand how they think of art and artists.

Organization and Media–

The organization of the article makes sense as it takes various art mediums and makes each one a section and includes the contributions from women for each medium. At some points the lists of artists or the amount of links can be overwhelming and take away from the impact of the article. For any article discussing art, images are extremely important, so the inclusion of images of the artists and their work was very important and impactful. The layout of the media worked well visually and as a supporting role to the text.

Overall, this article had a large range of information and would be useful to someone interested in learning about and discovering new women artists. The images really aid the effectiveness of the article and support the claims of women artists being just as talented and capable as their male counterparts. However, the title of this article is rather misleading. While it does talk about women artists, there is a silent White/European that exists before the rest of the title. There is no true dedication to presenting multiple perspectives nor considering intersectionality which is detrimental to the article. It is fairly well written, informative, and packed full of great images and sources; but the lack of diversity makes the article subpar.