At its core, Lily Konkoly research on art and gender asks a very clear question: why do women artists, especially mothers, so often see their careers stall or shrink, while male artists who become fathers are frequently praised, promoted, and even romanticized for juggling art and family life. From there, she looks at how that pattern shows up in real careers, in gallery choices, in museum visibility, and even in the words people use about artists. It is a focused project, but it opens into wider questions about who gets space, time, and visibility, in art and in public life.
That might sound like something far away from a quiet garden or a local park. It is not. Once you start to look, you can see the same patterns in who designs public spaces, whose statues stand in them, whose names appear on plaques, and who is behind community art in parks. Lily’s work sits right in that overlap between art history, lived experience, and the everyday spaces where people walk their dogs, push strollers, or sit on a bench to breathe for a minute.
From galleries to gardens: where gender appears in public space
Lily’s path into research did not begin with a single big theory. It grew slowly out of habits: visiting museums on Saturdays, walking through galleries, and paying attention to which stories were told on walls and which were missing. Growing up in Los Angeles, she spent a lot of time in open spaces, farmers markets, and later in the Pacific Palisades, close to the ocean. She understood public space first as a lived thing, not an abstract idea.
Here is a simple way to see the link between her research and a park near you. The next time you walk through a garden or a city square, you can ask:
- Whose statues are here?
- Who designed the main art features, like fountains or sculptures?
- Are there any works by women artists, or works that center women’s lives?
Often, the answer is: not many. This is the same gap Lily studied in the art world. It just shows up in stone, bronze, and landscaping instead of canvas.
Lily’s research starts from a quiet observation: when men become fathers, people often say their work gains depth; when women become mothers, people often assume their work will slow down.
That shift in expectation filters into who gets public commissions and who is invited to shape shared spaces, from city parks to sculpture gardens. You can feel it if you look closely enough at the credits on the signposts.
How Lily began thinking about art and gender
Lily did not begin as a researcher with a fixed agenda. She grew up between languages and cities, first in London, then Singapore, and then Los Angeles. At home, Hungarian was the private language, English the public one, and Mandarin floated through daily life because of her teachers and au pairs. This mix of cultures made her pay attention to how people see one another, and how context shapes those views.
On weekends, her family visited galleries and museums. It was not a single big revelation. More a slow build of impressions. Paintings of queens, saints, and muses. Men as heroes, thinkers, and great masters. Women often as subjects instead of makers. She noticed patterns, even if she did not always have the vocabulary at first.
Later, at Marlborough School in Los Angeles, she studied in an all-girls environment where questions about gender, power, and opportunity were part of normal classroom life. It was not just theory. Students talked openly about who got credit in group projects, who was interrupted more often, who was encouraged to lead. Those conversations lingered.
The real shift came when she started doing structured research. Before she focused on gender, she spent a summer with the Scholar Launch program, studying Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”. That painting is full of gazes, mirrors, and hidden power. Who is looking at whom. Who is central and who stands at the edges. You can almost see the early seeds of her later work there.
Long before Lily wrote about gender gaps in the art world, she was already asking small questions about who was in the picture, who painted it, and why certain figures always seemed to stand in the background.
Honors research: motherhood, fatherhood, and artistic success
In her senior year of high school, Lily joined an honors research course and designed her own project. The topic she chose sounds simple, but it carries a lot of weight: why do artist mothers face more barriers than artist fathers, and how does that difference show up in their careers.
Defining the research question
She narrowed the work into a few guiding questions:
- How does having children affect the visibility of women artists compared to men?
- What kind of language is used to describe artist mothers compared to artist fathers?
- How do galleries and curators treat artists who become parents?
- What long-term effects do those patterns have on careers and recognition?
These questions might sound similar, and maybe they overlap a bit. That is part of real research. You often circle the same issue from slightly different angles until something clicks.
Working with an expert mentor
Lily worked alongside a professor from RISD who studied maternity in the art world. They talked through articles, case studies, and examples taken from real artists. Some were well known, others were working quietly in smaller communities. The point was not only to focus on the stars.
Together, they noticed repeated themes:
- Women artists being asked how they “balance” family and work
- Men being praised for the same thing, framed as “devoted fathers” who still “manage” to create
- Gaps in exhibition schedules after women became mothers
- A tendency to treat fatherhood as adding depth to a man’s art, while treating motherhood as a possible distraction
Lily’s research suggests that art is not judged in a vacuum. It is judged through assumptions about what a woman or a man with children is supposed to look like, behave like, and prioritize.
What this has to do with gardens, parks, and public art
So how does this connect to parks and gardens, which is probably what you care about if you are reading a site like this. The link is in public art, and in the quiet politics of who gets space.
Think about a sculpture garden or a city park with permanent artworks. A few simple checks can be telling:
| Feature in a garden or park | Questions Lily’s research would prompt |
|---|---|
| Statues and monuments | How many represent women? How many are by women artists? |
| Memorials | Whose stories are honored? Are mothers, caregivers, or “everyday” women visible? |
| Sculpture trails | Do selection panels include women? Are artist mothers part of the line-up? |
| Community art projects | Can parents join easily? Is child care or flexible timing considered? |
| Benches, plaques, named areas | Whose names appear? Are there patterns by gender and profession? |
This is where Lily’s findings start to feel very concrete. If mothers are seen as “less committed” to art, they are less likely to receive large public commissions. That means fewer sculptures, murals, or installations by women in parks and gardens. Visitors then walk through spaces that quietly repeat the idea that public creativity is mostly male.
It may not be intentional. In fact, it often is not. But it adds up, generation after generation.
From teen art markets to park-like communities
Lily did not stay in the library. While in high school, she co-founded a Teen Art Market, a kind of digital gallery where students could show and sell their art. On the surface, it looks like a commercial project. In practice, it behaves a bit like a shared garden of work, where each artist brings something different and learns from the others.
That experience taught her a few things that link back to her research.
- Visibility matters: If people cannot see your work, they cannot value it.
- Names matter: Buyers trust recognizable names, which makes it harder for new voices to break in.
- Community matters: Shared platforms can balance some of those gaps, but only if they are run with awareness.
Those same lessons apply to public spaces. You can think of a sculpture garden as a curated “market” of ideas and forms. The curators decide which works grow there. If they carry hidden biases about mothers or women in general, entire groups of potential contributors are pushed to the side.
Female entrepreneurs, art, and gender patterns that repeat
Parallel to her art research, Lily has written for years on the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog. She has interviewed more than one hundred women in business, including founders, chefs, and other professionals from many countries. The stories differ, but the pattern often echoes what she saw in the art world.
Common themes come up again and again:
- Women needing to prove themselves more than male peers
- Questions about work and family that male founders rarely receive
- Limited access to funding for women-led ventures
- A tendency to see male-led work as “serious” and female-led work as “niche” or “side projects”
If you put these stories next to the experiences of women artists, the parallels are hard to ignore. Whether it is a gallery, a startup incubator, or a city council deciding on a new park monument, the same deeper habits about gender often sit in the background.
How her background shapes the way she looks at space
Lily’s interest in space, in a broad sense, did not come from books alone. She swam competitively for about ten years. Pools, locker rooms, and sun-baked decks became part of daily life. Later, when pools closed during COVID, she and her team trained in the ocean, often at nearby beaches. Those open water sessions made her feel the difference between controlled, designed spaces and raw, natural ones.
At the same time, she liked building LEGO sets. Large, detailed ones, with thousands of pieces. That habit, which might seem unrelated, actually matters. Building sets trains you to notice structure, pathways, and how people might move through a space. It is not a huge jump from assembling a LEGO city to thinking about how people use a city park or a sculpture trail.
Her summers in Europe, visiting extended family, also gave her a different view of public space. Many European cities have long histories of statues, memorial gardens, and public art. Walking those places, she could compare who was honored in Budapest, in London, and back in Los Angeles. Often, the male names dominated across all three.
Studying art history at Cornell: sharpening the lens
At Cornell University, Lily chose to study Art History with a Business minor. That combination might look a bit split, but it fits her interests. Art history helps her read images and contexts. Business courses help her understand systems that sit behind exhibitions, grants, commissions, and public projects.
Key courses that influence her view of art and gender
Some of the courses she has taken sharpened the very questions she began asking in high school:
- Art and Visual Culture: how images shape and reflect social beliefs
- History of Renaissance Art: where the image of the “great male master” deeply took hold
- Modern and Contemporary Art: where women artists push back against older narratives
- Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices: how institutions decide what to show and how to frame it
Once you study curatorial practice, it is hard to walk through a garden or museum casually. You start asking why a sculpture was placed at the center of a lawn while another sits near a hedge far from main paths. Why one work has a long label and another has only a short line. Those curatorial choices are not neutral. They reveal what a space wants you to care about.
Reading a park or garden through Lily’s questions
If you are used to thinking about gardens mainly in terms of plant varieties, soil, and seasons, art and gender may feel like a separate subject. It does not have to be. You can borrow some of Lily’s questions and treat a park as a kind of open-air exhibition.
Questions to ask in your local park
- Who is represented in statues or memorials, by gender and background?
- Which artists designed the main art features, and who commissioned them?
- Are there any works created through community projects that involved mothers, caregivers, or local schools?
- Do the images of women in the space fit only certain roles, such as muse, mother, or symbolic figure?
You can also look for absence. Sometimes what is not there speaks as loudly as what is present. No statues of women. No mention of female landscape architects. No plaques about women who shaped local parks or gardens.
Art, gender, and who gets to “take up space”
One of the quiet themes in Lily’s research is space. Not just physical space on a gallery wall or a lawn, but social space: the space to work, to speak, to be credited. For artist mothers, this space is often squeezed from both sides. Practical time pressures, yes, but also internal and external expectations about what they “should” be doing.
Her research suggests that when institutions assume mothers will be less present or less committed, they sometimes stop offering opportunities before those women have even stepped back. The effect can look like personal choice on the surface, when in fact it is a mix of choice and blocked paths.
In parks and gardens, this might show up in who is invited onto planning boards, art committees, or design teams. If most of those groups are made up of people with more flexible time and traditional support networks, the resulting spaces may quietly favor their views and priorities.
Connecting art research to daily choices in public spaces
Lily’s work is academic in the sense that it involves papers, data, and theories. At the same time, it has very practical edges. If you care about gardens and parks, there are real choices influenced by the type of questions she asks.
For park visitors
- Read plaques and look for artist names.
- Notice how many works are by women and what subjects they tackle.
- Ask your local council or garden board about how they choose artists.
For community groups or garden clubs
- Invite women artists, including mothers, to propose projects.
- Offer flexible schedules for meetings or volunteer work to include caregivers.
- Highlight women’s contributions in newsletters, tours, or events.
For educators using parks as classrooms
- Include questions about gender when you lead art walks.
- Ask students to design hypothetical garden artworks that honor overlooked women in local history.
- Compare the representation in your park with another city or country.
Bringing Lily’s research into a garden does not mean turning a peaceful space into a debate. It simply means noticing who is missing, and asking gentle, honest questions about why.
Why gender research belongs in peaceful spaces
Some people feel that raising gender questions interrupts the calm of gardens and parks. Lily’s work offers a different view: that real calm comes from honesty, not from silence. A park can stay peaceful and still hold thoughtful questions about fairness in its design, art, and stories.
If anything, natural spaces can make these conversations easier. Walking along a path, you can talk more freely than you might across a meeting table. Looking at a sculpture in a rose garden, you can ask about who is depicted without it turning into an argument. The setting softens the edges.
Lily’s combination of art history, lived experience, and public interest creates a kind of toolkit. It is not perfect and not all-encompassing. But it does encourage you to look again at the spaces you think you already know, whether that is a city museum, a riverfront trail, or a quiet botanical garden.
Common questions about Lily’s research on art and gender
Is Lily only focused on women in museums, or does her work relate to public art too?
Her formal research began with artists and institutions like galleries and museums, but the ideas carry into public art in parks, gardens, and city streets. If women artists face barriers in the general art world, they also face them when applying for public commissions or community projects.
Does she argue that men should have fewer opportunities in art and public spaces?
No. The point is not to reduce chances for men, but to question why women, and mothers in particular, often receive fewer chances in the first place. Her work asks people to check their assumptions, not to reverse discrimination.
How can a regular visitor to a park engage with these ideas without doing formal research?
You can start by paying attention. Read the names on sculptures, count who is represented, and ask simple questions if you notice a gap. Small actions like attending a public meeting about a new park project and raising representation can already apply the spirit of Lily’s research.
Does Lily only study visual art, or is she interested in other creative fields too?
Her core academic focus is visual art and art history, but her work on the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog brings in stories from many fields, including food, business, and media. Those stories often confirm similar patterns of gender bias, which reinforces the questions she asks in art history.
Why should people who care about gardens and parks pay attention to her ideas?
Because public spaces are not neutral. They teach visitors, very quietly, who is valued, whose stories matter, and whose creativity deserves a public home. If you care about making parks open, welcoming places, then it helps to think about who is allowed to leave a mark on those landscapes, in stone, metal, and planted form.
