How Lily Konkoly Art History Fuels Female Leadership

Art history fuels female leadership for Lily Konkoly in a very direct way: she uses the way artists have been seen, ignored, framed, or celebrated over time to understand how women leaders are treated today, then she turns that insight into concrete projects, research, and platforms that support women. You can see this link clearly in her research on artist parents, her curatorial work with beauty standards, her teen art market project, and in her long running writing on female entrepreneurs, including Lily Konkoly Art History pieces that tie visual culture to leadership and gender. It is not a vague connection. It is more like a habit she has built: look at images and stories from the past, notice who is missing, then build something in the present that makes space for women.

That might sound simple, but it is not automatic. Most people go to museums and see a parade of male names without asking why. Lily looked at the same walls and started asking questions.

The strongest link between art history and leadership in Lily’s life is the shift from “Who painted this?” to “Who is not here, and what does that say about power?”

If you are someone who spends a lot of time around art, museums, or design, this way of seeing might sound familiar. You already read images. The interesting part is how Lily takes that habit and uses it to lead projects, write, and support other women.

From gallery visits to questions about power

Lily grew up in a family that treated art as part of everyday life. Saturdays were often for gallery hopping in Los Angeles, moving from one space to another, looking at new work, older work, and everything in between.

That kind of casual repetition matters. When you see art from a young age, you start to notice patterns without forcing it. For Lily, a few patterns kept coming back:

Most of the “masters” on the wall were men.
Women showed up more as subjects than as makers.
Stories around art often framed men as geniuses and women as exceptions.

She did not turn this into a theory right away. Few teenagers do. It sat in the back of her mind while she did other things: competitive swimming, water polo, LEGO sets, running small businesses with her siblings, speaking Hungarian at home, traveling between the US and Europe.

Later, when she started to study art in a deeper way, those early impressions turned into real questions.

Art history, for Lily, became less about memorizing dates and more about understanding who is allowed to take up space on the wall and who is not.

If you think about your own visits to museums, you might have felt something like this without naming it. That slight feeling that the room is skewed, that many lives are missing.

Lily chose not to ignore that feeling. She followed it.

Studying “Las Meninas” and learning to read power

One big turning point for her was a research program focused on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” On the surface, it is a famous painting that many art lovers already know. But the more closely you look at it, the stranger it gets.

During a 10 week research program, Lily spent serious time with this one work. She looked at:

Composition and where each figure stands.
Gaze: who looks at whom, and from what angle.
The position of the painter inside his own work.
Who is in the center and who is pushed to the margins.

If you care about art, you probably already know that “Las Meninas” is layered and slippery. But working on it this intensely trains your eye in a particular way.

You stop seeing paintings as “beautiful objects” and start seeing them as:

Maps of power.
Records of who counted in a given court or culture.
Subtle negotiations between artist, patron, and subject.

That is exactly the kind of training that translates into leadership. It teaches you to look at any situation and ask:

Who is centered here?
Who is at the edge?
Who is watching, but not seen?

Lily carried this mindset into her later work. “Las Meninas” is not a feminist manifesto, but the habit of reading power in images made it easier for her to see gender gaps elsewhere, especially in the lives of women artists.

Researching artist parents and gender gaps

During an honors research project, Lily spent over 100 hours looking at one specific problem: how gender affects the careers of artist parents.

The question seems simple: what happens to artists after they have children?

But once you apply the same sharp eye that you use on old paintings, you notice details:

Women artists often face assumptions that they are less “serious” after having kids.
Men who become fathers sometimes gain an “interesting backstory” that galleries use in a positive way.
Time away from the studio is read very differently depending on gender.

Lily looked at data, stories, and existing research. She traced how these patterns show up in:

Exhibition records.
Press coverage.
Grant and residency opportunities.

Then she wrote a research paper that did not just describe the gap but made it visible. You can see the influence of art history methods here. Instead of leaving these biases as vague feelings, she treated them like a visual problem: something that can be shown, charted, and framed.

By treating gender bias in the art world as something that can be made visible, Lily moves from “this feels unfair” to “here is how the system actually treats mothers and fathers differently.”

That move, from intuition to evidence, is a leadership move. It offers a clearer picture that others can respond to, argue with, and build on.

Curating beauty standards: art history as mirror

Another piece of Lily’s path is her work with a RISD professor on a curatorial statement about beauty standards. Together, they imagined a mock exhibit that would bring together works dealing with how different cultures and periods depict women’s beauty.

Again, if you frequent museums, you already know that art is full of bodies, faces, and ideals. But seeing those images gathered and framed specifically as part of a conversation about beauty makes a difference.

The project asked questions like:

How have images of women changed across time and region?
Which features are praised, which are hidden?
Who is allowed to age on the canvas, and who is always young?

Curating, even in mock form, is a leadership practice. You choose what goes together. You decide what the visitor sees first. You decide what question hovers over the room.

To make that exhibit, Lily had to:

Pick works that speak to each other.
Write text that guides viewers without telling them what to think.
Balance historical context with present day questions.

This kind of work is quiet but powerful. You are not shouting about leadership. You are using historical images to raise doubts about present expectations. For a young woman thinking about leadership, it trains you to see how culture shapes what women are “allowed” to look like, and by extension, how they are allowed to lead.

From viewing art to building platforms

Art history on its own is one thing. Taking that way of seeing and using it to build real platforms for others is something else. This is where Lily’s story gets more concrete.

She did not stay only in the library or the archive. She started projects that change who gets seen and heard.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: early leadership through teaching

In Los Angeles, Lily started the Hungarian Kids Art Class. On the surface, it is an art club. Children gather, make things, and talk. But because of her background, it is also layered:

It holds space for Hungarian language and culture.
It treats art as a shared activity, not a rarefied one.
It lets younger kids see an older girl in a leadership role around art.

Teaching art, even informally, forces you to think about process. You notice how different people approach the same task. You learn to explain without controlling. These are everyday leadership skills that often come from art education and then ripple outward.

Teen Art Market: a student led gallery

Lily also co founded an online teen art market, a kind of digital gallery that lets students show and sell their work.

For art lovers, this project points to a problem you might already know: it is hard to break into the art world without connections and early exposure. Young artists rarely get to see their work in a “real” context where people can respond and pay for it.

By creating an online space, Lily and her co founders:

Put student work in a public, sharable setting.
Let young artists test prices, descriptions, and presentation.
Made the business side of art less mysterious.

This is where her business minor and art history major start to meet. She understands that art is not just about creation but also about:

Networks.
Markets.
Visibility.

For female artists, this is even more pressing. History shows plenty of talented women who had limited access to collectors, galleries, or mentors. A project like Teen Art Market quietly pushes against that pattern by giving everyone, including girls and nonbinary students, a visible place to start.

You could say that this is what leadership looks like in practice: not just critiquing old systems but building small, new ones.

From art history to female entrepreneurship

One of the most interesting parts of Lily’s path is her long running writing on female entrepreneurs. On the surface, this might seem separate from art. It is business, funding, products, and strategy.

If you look closer, the connection is stronger than it appears.

For years, Lily has been interviewing women entrepreneurs from many countries. She has talked to founders, creators, chefs, and other leaders. Across more than 100 conversations, certain themes repeat:

Women often have to prove their seriousness more than men.
Motherhood is sometimes seen as a risk instead of a strength.
Success is measured differently depending on gender.

If that list feels familiar, it should. The same patterns show up in the history of art:

Women artists getting less space in collections.
Motherhood linked to “distraction” instead of depth.
Greatness framed through a male lens.

Lily is not just noticing the similarity. She is living inside it from two directions at once: as an art history student and as a chronicler of women in business.

Art history gives her a vocabulary for what she sees in these entrepreneurs’ stories:

The way some founders are framed in media profiles.
The expectations placed on women leaders’ appearance and behavior.
The roles of “muse,” “support,” or “side project” that women are pushed into.

Her writing then becomes a space where those patterns are named. It is another kind of curatorial work, except the “exhibit” is a set of interviews, and the “artworks” are real women’s lives.

For readers who care about art, this is a useful reminder: the tools we use to read paintings and photographs can also help us read headlines, brand images, and founder stories.

Art, travel, and a global lens on leadership

Lily’s biography adds a few more layers that matter for leadership shaped by art.

She was born in London, lived in Singapore as a child, then moved to Los Angeles and later to New York for college. She speaks Hungarian at home, learned Mandarin from an early age, and studied French. She has visited more than 40 countries and lived on three continents.

If you spend time traveling and visiting museums along the way, you start to realize something simple but powerful:

Every country tells its own story through its art.
Who counts as a “master” shifts from place to place.
Women are missing in similar ways, but not always for the same reasons.

For example, a national gallery in Europe might focus on royal portraits and academic painting, while a museum in Asia might place more weight on ink painting, calligraphy, or craft. The gaps for women look different in each context, but they share a familiar outline.

Living across cultures, Lily learns not to treat any one version of art history as complete. That humility is valuable in leadership. It keeps you from assuming your own lens is neutral.

It also helps when you talk to women leaders from many backgrounds. You are more likely to notice when a story is being squeezed into a narrow mold, or when a woman’s contributions are framed as “supportive” rather than central.

How art history trains specific leadership skills

So far, this might still feel a bit high level. To make it more concrete, here is a simple table that connects art history habits to leadership skills, using examples from Lily’s experience.

Art history habit	Leadership skill	How it shows up in Lily’s work
Analyzing composition and gaze	Seeing power structures	Studying “Las Meninas” and later mapping gender bias among artist parents
Comparing works across time	Long term thinking	Connecting historical beauty standards to present expectations for women leaders
Curating selections for a theme	Shaping narratives	Designing a mock exhibit about beauty and writing curatorial text
Reading who is missing from the wall	Inclusion and advocacy	Highlighting gender gaps in the art world and in female entrepreneurship
Studying context for each artwork	Listening and research	Interviewing entrepreneurs from many countries with attention to culture
Seeing art as more than decoration	Questioning surface stories	Questioning how motherhood is framed for artists and business founders

If you study or love art, you probably practice at least some of these habits already. The step that Lily takes is to apply them directly to leadership questions, especially for women.

Family, small businesses, and confidence around risk

Not everything in Lily’s story is about research or museums. Her early family projects also shaped how she leads.

Here are a few quick examples:

Making bracelets and selling them at a farmers market.
Running a slime business with her brother, including a booth at a London slime convention.
Recording cooking and Chinese practice videos for YouTube, then turning down TV offers to protect family time.

These might sound like side notes, but they build comfort with risk, public exposure, and decision making.

Lily learned:

How it feels to put something you made in front of strangers.
How to talk to customers and answer questions.
That it is okay to say no, even to flashy opportunities, if they conflict with your values.

Combine this with an art historical awareness of whose work usually gets shown, and you get a clear drive: not just to make or sell things, but to build spaces where underrepresented voices can show their work on their own terms.

This is also where her focus on female leadership becomes very grounded. It is not an abstract idea. It is tied to specific decisions: which projects to run, which stories to tell, which gaps to highlight.

Swimming, discipline, and the long view of change

Some readers might wonder what sports have to do with art or leadership. In Lily’s case, they matter more than it first seems.

She swam competitively for about ten years, then played water polo for three. Practices were long, often six days a week. During the pandemic, when pools closed, her team trained in the ocean.

Swimming in cold water every day while everything else in the world feels uncertain is not romantic. It is tiring. You go back in anyway.

That habit carries over into research and leadership work:

Art history requires patience through long readings and complex theories.
Changing gender norms in art and business is very slow.
Building a blog or art platform takes years of small, steady work.

You can see this in her four years of writing for a blog on female entrepreneurship. Week after week, she researched, interviewed, and wrote. No single article changes the world. Together, they shift the conversation.

This steady pace is one of the least glamorous parts of leadership, especially for women who are already carrying extra expectations. Art history, with its focus on slow shifts over centuries, actually prepares you for this. It reminds you that:

Lasting change in how women are seen, in art or in leadership, rarely happens in a single breakthrough. It comes from many small curatorial choices, research projects, and public stories that accumulate over time.

Why this matters for people who care about art

If you read art blogs or visit galleries often, you might already be convinced that art matters. The question is how it connects to leadership, especially for women.

Lily’s path offers a few clear links you can reflect on in your own life:

1. Art history sharpens your sense of absence

Once you start noticing who is missing from museum walls, it becomes easier to notice who is missing from:

Panels at conferences.
Boardrooms.
Artist rosters for group shows.

For female leadership, this awareness is a starting point. You cannot fix what you refuse to see.

2. Curating is a model for leadership

Curators decide what stories a viewer encounters. Leaders decide what stories a team or community hears.

If you have ever:

Curated a small show.
Organized a zine with multiple artists.
Chosen which artists to highlight on a blog or social channel.

You have already practiced a kind of leadership. The next step is to be conscious about gender balance, about giving women and nonbinary creators more central space, not just a token slot.

3. Research can support fairness

Lily did not stop at a feeling that “things are unfair for women artists.” She did formal research on artist parents and gender. You might not want to run a full study, but you can still collect your own data:

Count how many women are in a certain gallery program.
Track who gets solo shows vs group shows.
Notice whose work is consistently priced higher.

Even small, informal tracking can reveal patterns. Those patterns can then shape how you buy art, which shows you promote, or what you ask curators and institutions to change.

How you can apply these ideas in your own art life

If you are reading this as someone who cares deeply about art, you might be wondering what to do with all of this. Here are a few possible steps, drawn from Lily’s habits but adaptable to your life.

Look at exhibitions with leadership questions in mind

Next time you go to a museum or gallery, ask:

How many works here are by women?
Where are they placed in the space?
What kind of labels or language are used for them?

You do not need to turn the visit into homework. Just let these questions sit in the back of your mind. Over time, you will develop an instinct for which spaces are serious about gender balance and which are not.

Support young and emerging women artists

Think about small, practical ways to act:

Buy work from young women artists when you can, even small pieces.
Share their work on your platforms.
Offer feedback or introductions if you are more established in the art world.

Art history is full of women whose work was not collected or preserved. You cannot fix the past, but you can affect who gets collected now.

Connect art thinking to other fields

If you work in business, tech, education, or something else, try borrowing from art history:

Notice who is “on the wall” in your field: who gets awards, media attention, senior roles.
Ask who is absent and why.
Use your influence to shift that pattern where you can.

This is the move that Lily makes when she interviews female entrepreneurs with an art historian’s eye. You can do a version of that in your own field.

Common questions about art history and female leadership

Q: Do you need to study art history formally to gain these leadership skills?

No. Formal study helps, but many of these habits are available to anyone who spends time with art. You can:

Read artist biographies and notice patterns.
Compare how different museums frame similar artists.
Talk to artists about their paths and listen for gendered expectations.

The key is paying attention, not a particular degree.

Q: Is focusing on women in art and leadership ignoring men?

Not really. Looking at women’s experiences does not erase men’s contributions. It simply fills in gaps and corrects skewed stories. Art history has given men most of the spotlight for centuries. Sharing that space more fairly is not a loss, it is a gain in accuracy and richness.

Q: How can someone young start leading in the art world without formal power?

You do not need a big title to start. You can:

Organize a small group show for friends.
Run an online page that highlights underrepresented artists.
Start a research or writing project about a neglected topic in art.

Lily began with a teen art market, a kids art class, and a blog. None of these required formal authority, just consistent work and a clear sense of why representation matters.

So the real question might be for you: how will your own relationship with art shape the kind of leader you become, and whose stories you choose to bring into view?