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Lucía Rodríguez Mota, a Mexican-born artist passionate about mental health and multigenerational storytelling, has spent much of her career inspiring young women to pursue flameworking, just like she did. The journey has not always been easy for Lucía, as the unfortunate but often inherent obstacles of being a Latina woman have at times threatened to interfere with her dreams. Still, she perseveres as she aims to shape American culture through her unique lens and life experiences.
Lucía says she has been privileged in many ways as a female artist, but the most common issue she faces is mansplaining. “I constantly have male colleagues inferring that I don’t know how to do things,” she says. This is something women can face in any industry, so it should come as no surprise that the glass community has been infiltrated, too. With glass being a small sectarian community within the arts, many people have questioned Lucía’s skill because she wasn’t born into that world. She also faced expectations that she was going to soon marry and give up on her art, so many people didn’t feel the need to take her seriously as a creator.
Lucía is not the only woman who has had to work exceptionally hard to prove herself as an artist. Statistics have shown that in a study on the collections of 18 major U.S. art museums, 87% of the artists are male and 85% are white. Another study reflected that within 1.5 million art auction transactions across 45 countries, there was a 47.6% discount for paintings done by women despite experiments supporting the idea that consumers vary in their preferences. The only common thread is the active knowledge of the artist being a woman.
Flameworking, historically better known as lampworking, is a form of glassblowing which uses a torch to melt and shape glass. According to Lucía, flameworking requires less money and equipment to start, making it slightly more accessible as a craft than traditional glassblowing. “It allows you to go big with very little material,” Lucía says. “It is also important to notice that it is a form of art that has historically been done by women.” It’s true- women have been documented flameworking beads as early as the 1700’s. Back in 1902, women workers at a factory in Pennsylvania who made vials and bulbs over Bunsen burners were reported by their manager as being “infinitely more careful and painstaking than men have ever thought of being” and “achieving results never before known in the trade”. Yet still, in 2024, women across industries only make 84 cents for every dollar made by men.
Lucía feels as though the best way to begin closing the wage gap in art is to make the effort to know of and learn more about female artists. Traditionally, women are frequently expected to do unpaid labor such as domestic work and raising children, often resulting in less time to pursue passions such as art. Women are also faced with hurdles such as hostile work environments which push them out and, in a slightly more distant past, lack of access to education and employment. There are also countless stories of women having their artwork stolen and misattributed to men, not to mention the ones we will never know about. In an effort to begin trying to right these wrongs, Lucía encourages male artists to give their female counterparts the space to raise their voices and make careers out of their artistry. She also urges grant and collection committees to take great care to include women.
“In the arts, themes traditionally done by women (family life, childhood, and motherhood) have been regarded as unimportant, even though these tend to be universal experiences,” Lucía says. She feels that when young minorities are given the opportunity to see people who look like them represented within their passions, they are more likely to go after those dreams which once may have seemed wholly unattainable. Lucía aims to encourage young women to stick with their craft despite obstacles and to try and have tunnel vision for the bright future ahead. No matter what some discouraging statistics may say, the stories of minority artists such as women matter just as much as anyone else’s and deserve to be unapologetically told.
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Photos provided by the author.