The Power of Women in the World of NFT — Diela Maharanie
Women’s History Month is a weekly exhibition co-organized by SuperRare and the World of Women community. According to research published in November 2021, women artists accounted for only 5% of all NFT art sales in the previous 21 months, and WoW is on a mission to change that.
WoW tries to create equal and fair opportunities for every creator. For Women’s History Month in March, WoW will be partnering with SuperRare as a curator. Each week will feature a different artist from a different geographic and cultural background and bring new and fresh blood to the SuperRare platform.
This time we present Diela Maharanie, a female artist from Indonesia, an illustrator and visual artist whose work is mostly bright and colorful, full of vibrant patterns in highly saturated hues that give her characters a sense of mystery.
Maharanie’s colors and patterns are embodied in dreamy illustrations and ethereal imagery. Her brushes are like those of a young child, painting endless imaginary worlds where everything is colorful, whether it is people, scenery, or animals. She uses her brush to tell a subtle story, presenting the realm she wants to pursue and think about things from her works. Her illustrations, paintings, and embroideries have been shown in several exhibitions around the world, and she has collaborated with famous companies such as Instagram, Apple Music, Adidas, Intel, Whatsapp, and so on.
Maharanie first learned about NFT from Clubhouse, where she stumbled into a channel where artists talked about NFT and were intrigued by what they were discussing. She was attracted by the idea of digital works available on the blockchain and the idea of a royalty system for artists’ work. She gradually began to explore various art platforms on her own, such as SuperRare, KnownOrigin, Foundation, and Opensea, among others.
Maharanie used to keep drawing almost every day, working on NFT projects at least once a week. But now she takes a break every week to tidy up and give herself space to adjust because the pace of the NFT field is so fast that it’s hard to keep track of all the changes. It’s also a wake-up call to herself to create at her own pace, rather than following the crowd. We can find that in the digital art industry, the renewal is so fast that almost every week a new artist pops up and a new market trend. For their works to be favored by the market, more and more creators gradually try to imitate the works of artists who sell better, instead of creating them for themselves, which makes the standard of the digital art market uneven.
Women are the foundation of a family, a society, and even a nation, for that reason we need to invest in women’s better education and health and give equal opportunities as men do. happy international women’s day!
She also has her ideas about the identity of female artists in the NFT field. In the first few months of NFTs, Maharanie felt that the field was dominated by men and that all the higher sales were made by male artists. But as the NFT space has grown and the community has learned and grown, more artists who are female artists or projects led by women are getting more attention from people and the market.
Maharani’s hope is simply that everyone is not competing based on gender. Even in today’s contemporary art world, it is still the “patriarchy” that dominates the discourse, and even at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which is recognized as one of the most prestigious in the art industry, there are very few solo exhibitions by women artists in the research, and this trend has not gotten any better in recent years. The trend has not gotten any better in recent years, and this is a serious situation that women artists cannot ignore.
But in the world of NFT, everyone is an artist, and the only way to make this community bigger and stronger is to support each other. Being an artist can finally be appreciated for doing what you love, which is a new way for creators to be economic.
The atmosphere in the female NFT artist community is very positive! Everyone is supportive and encouraging of each other’s art, and in Maharanie’s 15 years of working in the creative industry, she has never felt such an atmosphere. Because in the world of NFTs, everyone is focused on their art and projects, doing their best to make the field better and more progressive, rather than competing to get clients or get into galleries like in the traditional art world.
In her HERSTORY series, each woman she depicts is lifelike and colorful, with different skin tones and expressions. But they all give a rich sense of narrative, and each character is fleshed out as if they were jumping off a computer screen and telling their stories.
In the international market, Maharanie’s work was selected for the 2010 SESW exhibition in Austin, USA, and also participated in world touring exhibitions such as the World Exhibition of Illustrators in Paris, Marseille and Toulouse.
Whether in the art market or in traditional society, women’s creativity and abilities cannot be ignored, and each one of them is using their power to create a wider space for other women. On March 8th, International Women’s Day, ArtGee wishes every woman the best of luck in becoming the woman she wants to be, without being held back by anyone.
