"“It feels like Her is almost an exoskeleton of yourself,” I tell Ilana, “because you wear all of these different hats. You’re a mother, you’re a businesswoman, you’re an artist, you’re—”
Ilana cuts me off.
“All women are,” she says. “I am not exceptional. It comes with the gender territory.”
We pull up seats at a tiny table. Even perched in a chair made for toddlers—dangerously close to baskets of pipe cleaners and half-used glue sticks—Ilana looks perfectly put together. Regal, even. I watch her lips move and experience an uninvited, feral desire to feed her berries out of my hand. Dark red ones. Still warm from the sun.
“All women are multitasking,” she says, waving one leopard-print gloved hand like she’s reciting a law of physics. “We hold the family together. If something happens, we tape it. We make it right.”
In the art world, women have long been underestimated, underrepresented or simply left out of the frame. Between 2008 and 2020, only 11% of works acquired by major American museums were by women—and just 0.5% by Black women. Think about that."
—Leslie Bateman, Inside of Knoxville