The Bennett Collection
The Bennett Collection is an art collection established and maintained by art collectors and philanthropists, Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt of San Antonio, Texas. They are also the founders of the Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realists, which awards $50,000 biennially to a woman figurative realist painter following a juried competition followed by a traveling exhibition of the works of the 10 finalists for the Prize. History Bennett and Schmidt established the collection in 2009. At that time, the couple began collecting art with a special emphasis on paintings of women by women artists. In the intervening years, the couple has acquired a collection of paintings of women by women. These works span the period from the early 1600s to the present and include works by deceased artists as well as those by important women painters working today. Both Bennett and Schmidt have stated that among their primary goals in starting the collection was to address what they viewed as systemic discrimination against women artists by ‘big art’ and to promote figurative realism, a genre they believe has fallen out of favor because of the bias of curators and museum directors in favor of abstraction and avant-garde