Art is Her Exhibition Series
Since 2020, the Trout Museum of Art’s Atrium gallery has been dedicated to a year-round Art is Her initiative. The Art is Her exhibition series celebrates female identifying artists and champions their goal of achieving museum presence equal to men. Women have long seen inequality in the art world, and today remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in museums, galleries, and auction houses. Let’s change the stats!
Art is Her is empowered by
Current Art is Her Featured Artist
CALLIE KIESOW | THROUGH JULY 2


Callie Kiesow received her AAS degree from the University of Wisconsin – Fox Valley in Menasha, WI and a B.A. from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. She is now an artist living and working in Milwaukee, WI, and an artist in residence at Var Gallery. She works primarily with charcoal and plaster and focuses on the human form.
Artist Statement:
My work contains unrecognizable figures that exist in dreamlike environments that are removed from reality. The figures are draped in bed sheets and are always caught mid-action in order to reflect specific psychological and physiological states. Figures depicted without a recognizable identity force the viewer to engage emotionally and suddenly become a part of the narrative. The work presents a duality of playfulness and tension within spaces that we generally see as confined, intimate, and familiar.
Stats to think about:
- Nearly half (45.8%) of visual artists in the United States are women; on average, they earn 74¢ for every dollar made by male artists. —National Endowment for the Arts 2019
- A data survey of permanent collections by the 18 most prominent art museums in the U.S. found that out of over 10,000 artists represented, 87% are male and 85% are white. —Public Library of Science 2019
- In a study of 820,000 exhibitions across the public and commercial sectors in 2018, only one third were by women artists. —The Art Newspaper 2019
- Only 13.7% of living artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America are women. —artnet News