Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond

E R V E V E E V E V E V • N E E• N V N E • E N • NE • N N E • N E N E E E ON D O N O N N D O O O D R D D R E V ER ER D V ER E V E ER V E V E V N E • E N • E N E E• N E• N NE E• N NE• ON N D O ON O N D O O D ER D R D D E R R R EV R V E E E E E V • NE E V V •N E V E N • N • N E • N E • E N E E N E N O O ON ON D O ON D O D D ER D V ER R D ER V ER ER E E V E V V V N E • E N E N NE• E• N E E• N NE E• N E• N N O N O N O D D O D O R D D O D ER R E R R V E R V E E E E E V • NE E V V •N V E E N • N E N • • N E • E ON NE E ON NE N N O D O O D O D D R D R D R E R E ER R V E V E E E V E V V • N E E• N N V N E • E E •N • E E• N E N E N E N O N N O N D O O D O R D DO D R D R E R E R E R V E V E V E E V E • NE E V E NE V • N • N NE• N ONE E• N NE• ONE N O D O ON D O R D

NEVER DONE 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond

Nina Chanel Abney

4

Sheree Hovsepian

72

Joyce J. Scott

140

Gina Adams

6

Juliana Huxtable

74

Tschabalala Self

142

Laura Aguilar

8

Hayv Kahraman

76

Joan Semmel

144

Diana Al-Hadid

10

Mary Reid Kelley

78

Beverly Semmes

146

Laylah Ali

12

Corita Kent

80

Mindy Shapero

148

Diane Arbus

14

Lisa Kereszi

82

Cindy Sherman

150

Firelei Báez

16

Harriet Korman

84

Shahzia Sikander

152

Rina Banerjee

18

Deana Lawson

86

Alisa Sikelianos-Carter

154

Endia Beal

20

Ellen Lesperance

88

Amy Sillman

156

Tanyth Berkeley

22

Malerie Marder

90

Laurie Simmons

158

Huma Bhabha

24

Julie Mehretu

92

Lorna Simpson

160

Suzanne Bocanegra

26

Ana Mendieta

94

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

162

Katherine Bradford

28

Joan Mitchell

96

Kiki Smith

164

Diane Burko

30

Carrie Moyer

98

Shinique Smith

166

Andrea Carlson

32

Lillian Mulero

100

Jenny Snider

168

Syd Carpenter

34

Laurel Nakadate

102

Joan Snyder

170

Jordan Casteel

36

Sophia Narrett

104

Nancy Spero

172

Judy Chicago

38

Dona Nelson

106

Kathia St. Hilaire

174

Sonya Clark

40

Gina Occhiogrosso

108

Stephanie Syjuco

176

Renee Cox

42

Alice O’Malley

110

Sarah Sze

178

Jess T. Dugan

44

Robyn O'Neil

112

Barbara Takenaga

180

Dyke Action Machine!

46

Catherine Opie

114

Lenore Tawney

182

Chioma Ebinama

48

Roberta Paul

116

Mickalene Thomas

184

Jane Fine

50

Rachel Perry

118

Mildred Thompson

186

Natalie Frank

52

Howardena Pindell

120

Tiny Pricks Project

188

Chitra Ganesh

54

Sara Rahbar

122

Sara VanDerBeek

190

Anna Gaskell

56

Wendy Red Star

124

Kara Walker

194

Vanessa German

58

Erin M. Riley

126

Marie Watt

196

Nan Goldin

60

Faith Ringgold

128

Carrie Mae Weems

198

Nancy Grossman

62

Deborah Roberts

130

Millie Wilson

200

Kathy Grove

64

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson 132

Paula Wilson

202

Guerrilla Girls

66

Martha Rosler

134

Saya Woolfalk

204

Martine Gutierrez

68

Erika Rothenberg

136

Daesha Devón Harris

70

Alison Saar

138

When the Constitution of the United States of America was signed by fifty-five white men in 1787, women were “unacknowledged in its text, uninvited in its formulation, [and] unsolicited for its ratification.”

Even when the 19th amendment—which stated that US citizens could not be denied the right to vote based on their sex—was ratified in 1920, many women were still denied this right. While the federal suffrage amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex, it did not address the intersectional discrimination that many American women faced: many women continued to be denied because of race. Native American, Asian American, Latinx and African American suffragists had to fight for their own enfranchisement long after the 19th Amendment was ratified.

Never Done is intended to be a celebration, a conversation, a critique, and a commemoration of the journey women have taken and have yet to take.

Never Done aims to go beyond politics to create conversations about art, gender, race, and intersectional identities. To do so, this exhibition presents artwork by a diverse group of women: Black, brown, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and differently-abled women and non-binary artists; artists working in photography, painting, printmaking, collage, textile, and sculpture; artists from across the United States and from different generations. Moreover, statements from each artist reflect on their work in relation to women’s rights, feminisms, justice and representation, and the legacy of the suffrage movement. Taken together, this project reveals the myriad experiences women have and the multiplicity of views and modes of expression that women employ to communicate what is important to them.

The gallery floor is marked with the floor plan of the Wesleyan Chapel— site of a landmark suffrage meeting in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.

The exhibition proposes a symbolic dialogue between 20th-century and contemporary artists and early suffragists in a conversation across time that both critiques and expands on the suffragists’ initial accomplishments and shortcomings. But most of all, Never Done is a space for new ideas and new communities to question, debate, and critique the power hierarchies and systemic inequities that remain entrenched in our culture: our work is never done.

Minita Sanghvi and Rachel Seligman

Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond is organized by Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director For Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator, Tang Museum, and by Minita Sanghvi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Business, Skidmore College.

Quoted above: Rhodes, D. L. (1991), Justice and Gender, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. This exhibition is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Friends of the Tang.

Whet, 2017 Acrylic, spray paint on canvas 60 x 60 inches Collection of Susan and Tom Brock

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nina chanel abney

Current events, social media, and popular culture have always driven my work—basically anything that’s going on in the moment I’m creating the work. Because none of my paintings are planned, everything is completely intuitive. When I begin painting, I have a general idea of what I want the painting to be about, but I have no idea how it will end up looking. Over the last ten years, I think my work has always reflected what was going on at the moment I created it. There’s always been some sense of politics in the work.

Nina Chanel Abney, 2018

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Aaniin czhichigeYan what are You doing, 2020 Hand-cut calico on antique child's quilt 48 x 33 inches Courtesy of the artist and Accola Griefen Fine Art

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gina adams

My newest body of work, Maajiigin wa’aw akiing miinawaa, envisions future generations as “the way the world begins again and again” (June Jordan). As a descendent of both Indigenous and colonial Americans, I draw upon my ancestors’ experiences in assimilation boarding schools for this new series of child-size, antique quilts. These works extend from my Broken Treaty Quilt series and are created with the help of my twelveyear-old nephew Zach. This work was inspired by a conversation between my aunt and nephew about our Ojibwe language and by Zach’s desire to learn. In collaborating with Zach to cut the letters within an Ojibwa dialogue that is specifically around our children relearning and interpreting the language, we are changing the history that was taken from us but not lost. We are choosing to heal our minds, bodies, and spirits, as well as future family generations, from the trauma inflicted in the past.

Gina Adams, 2020

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In Sandy's Room (Self Portrait), 1990 Black-and-white photograph 39 x 49 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Peter Norton, 2019.48.4

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laura aguilar

What I am trying to do with the series is to provide a better understanding of what it’s like to be a Latina and a Lesbian by showing images which allow us the opportunity to share ourselves openly, and to provide role models that break negative stereotypes and help develop a better bridge of understanding. I also hope that the pieces provide the opportunity to explore ourselves and others, and to express our own beauty, strength, and dignity. Within the Lesbian and Gay community of Los Angeles, people of color are yet another hidden subculture; we are present, but remain unseen. Through the work on this series, I have found this subculture to be a caring and diverse community of women who are quite proud and connected to their heritage.

Laura Aguilar, 1988

I’m trying to convince myself I’m not what I always thought of myself: “I’m ugly, I’m fat, I’m not worth living” . . . I am these things, too: I am a kind person, a funny person, a compassionate person. In the photographs, I’m beautiful. I’m kind to myself.

Laura Aguilar, 2018

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We Will Control the Vertical, 2009 Eight-color screen print 30 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Exit Art, 2012.19.4a

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diana al-hadid

Women in our world, in our culture, and most cultures, are asked to take up less space. I think that when you’re accustomed to shrinking and being asked to take up less physical space—lose weight, be small, speak quietly, speak less, take up less space on a train, take up less psychological space, give more space to others around you—in every sense women are asked to get smaller, to be smaller. It’s very familiar; every woman knows this intuitively. So when you’re asked to be small in so many different spheres of your life, in so many different ways of existing, you find an outlet. When you’re lucky enough to find a way or an environment or a safe area to be large, sometimes it can get explosive. So I’ve been fortunate in finding a way that feels comfortable for me, and I have no issue making large work. I don’t know why I got that lucky, because that is an outlet for me.

But I suspect that it’s because of being asked to be smaller in other areas of my life growing up.

Diana Al-Hadid, 2017

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Untitled, 2000 Pencil on paper 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection

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laylah ali

The themes of my work remain somewhat consistent: I continue to deal with the amalgam of race, power, gendering, ambition, human frailty, murky politics, and the other complex combinations that we so often treat as separate entities. The figures that I make are an allegorical means to address the gray or unexplored areas for which language is often inadequate.

Laylah Ali, 2020

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Transvestite with a torn stocking, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966, printed later Gelatin silver print 19 7/8 x 16 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Alan Mark and Jeffrey Fraenkel, 2015.40.16

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diane arbus

What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.

Diane Arbus, date unknown

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Untitled (Temple of Time), 2020 Oil, acrylic on archival printed canvas 94 1/2 x 132 3/8 inches Wilks Family Collection

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firelei báez

It’s funny, I’m a Dominican citizen, but I was raised here. My accent’s American, my sense of the world is American, a lot of the work I’ve made wouldn’t have been made if I’d been raised in the Dominican Republic. My work addresses race and class and in the D.R. they would be like, what’s wrong with your brain? Why are you speaking about these issues? . . . Right now, I’m either Latin American or I’m American.

Art collections are built around those two identity politics. So someone like me has to choose a camp. There’s no space for that in-between.

Firelei Báez, 2017

Afro-Caribbean artists raised in the US are often interested in a global context. Because we come from places without fixed identities, we are often able to make connections to all kinds of different things and see ourselves as being part of a larger global diaspora, including the African American discourse.

Firelei Báez, 2018

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Mother gathered Three and no more dirty stones, tossed them to sky that could break what had hardened her ground and without frown or flirt of flower father like grease or butter slipped aside to free from forty and some more grown men who held her as housewife like plant life with Three or no more daughters, 2017 Acrylic, collage on wood panel 79 x 39 inches Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels

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rina banerjee “Mothers’ wild nature tossed stone” I had a moment of crisis to slow my pace, to reconsider my mother’s “wild nature” (jungli) coined by my father surrendered her, as unmotherly, my own daughter is a frenzy of activity, I reflect upon her as a blur of movements ready for the labor before her I reckoned. When once my daughter felt grown and she left my side for college, demanded her life to begin, I grew watchful and more steady. Her increased activity could place me to play catch. I needed to hold her place by my side as well as my own place in the world and my mother’s as well. That time which has passed remains with me now, its accented a wiry moment when I felt deflated and could hurt as if endangered. She was in the world without mother to be planted to grow and bring to life the world in her unique vision to breathe in me lasting spring. This painting was made to contemplate that reluctant birth of three girls, my sisters and I, my mother willed and the contagion of patriarchy she would battle with to share with us its dangers. That too to learn and teach how to survive when the world of my father’s creation would see us as without value . . . like three stones as the title of this painting shares. Our world was and our destiny was made out of the gravitational pull of migration spun out of post WWII, an emancipation of the colonies thrown out of England and the repercussions of partition in the making of Bangladesh throwing out Hindus, leaving Muslims family behind. My own mother, upon leaving India in 1968, folded into our American upbringing in the ’70s the dangers of war, identity politics, migration, racism, sexism, and all well before these topics became a subject to study in university or fashionable talk in the art world. They were these subjects that my mother’s daily nightmares where about, and the haunting nature of these dangers is what I burden my daughter Ananya with today. Male supremacy and Race supremacy like monsters toss the lives of people about like lifeless stones in discrete piles.

“Dolly,” my mother’s name, echoes how the object-ness of her place in the world without presence in the world and at home would be a literal.

Each and every day I take pleasure in the life I have as an artist and the animated mother I had. I also know I work to live not making a living out of work. Thinking about how my daughter will survive and have a lively life preoccupies my spirit. The work that is never done that a doll does not do or stones tossed in the air to land anywhere can do as they are not stony at all are in my thoughts to never rest. Our work remains always with effort to just survive and with no time to waste to make dreams come true so we as humans can be a family without monsters again.

Rina Banerjee, 2020

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Melanie, 2016 From Am I What You’re Looking For? Archival pigment print 40 x 28 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2019.8.2

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endia beal

I am a North Carolina based artist, curator, and educator. I use photographic narratives and video testimonies to examine the personal yet contemporary stories of women of color working within the corporate space. As a photographer, I witness the underrepresentation of stories by and for people of color within fine art circles and photojournalism.

My projects stem from my personal journey and struggles as a Black woman in corporate America.

Endia Beal, 2020

21

Grace (standing), 2006 Chromogenic print 69 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Zach Feuer Gallery, 2013.21.1

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tanyth berkeley

In this picture I made of Grace (a first-generation Mexican-American woman of profound beauty, born with albinism) I see the seed of an idea. An idea that includes diversity and a love of nature embodied in women. This seed has grown into a kind of wholistic feminism, one of intersectionality that involves seeing the environment as a victim of oppression. If we can grasp the concept of a toxic, colonizing mindset, that extends from the land and indigenous and oppressed peoples to the bodies of women, then we can truly change the systemic, brutal power dynamics currently in place. Grace, and the natural world she symbolizes, has her back up against the wall and she is stuck inside, imprisoned but not perhaps permanently?

Tanyth Berkeley, 2020

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Untitled, 2008 Ink on photograph 13 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Anne and Arthur Goldstein, 2015.3.14

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huma bhabha

We live in a world where people are constantly killing each other, and in a constant state of war. It’s troubling. It seems to be such an industry, they just can’t seem to tear themselves away from the industry of killing . . .

I don’t want to bum people out or anything, but that’s just the reality of our existence. At least I feel that. It’s interesting, even in this country, the number of killings going on. We’re killing each other, it’s not someone else coming and killing us.

Huma Bhabha, 2019

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96 Drawings of Anni Albers, Untitled Weaving from 1931, 2006 Pencil, gouache, ink, beeswax on paper on canvas 27 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of David Lang, 2015.10

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suzanne bocanegra

The Bauhaus School was progressive for its time in that it accepted both men and women as students. Women, however, were automatically assigned to the weaving workshop. Weaving is a gendered art form; it has historically been a symbol of the good and faithful wife, of the ideal and industrious homemaker.

In 2006 I decided to make a body of work out of my close looking at a 1924 weaving by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers. I abstracted the work in such a way that I could draw the essential image of the weaving myself.

And then I drew it—tens of thousands of times.

I did this partly as a form of discipline, partly as a way to translate the meditative repetition inherent in the structure of woven cloth, and partly as a way of understanding the ambition of an artist I admire in an art form so often dismissed as domestic.

Suzanne Bocanegra, 2020

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Superheroes, 2019 Oil on canvas 68 x 80 inches Collection of Nancy Mladenoff and J.J. Murphy

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katherine bradford

What I admire about these four young women is that they invented their own superhero outfits; in addition, they decided to share an overarching red power cape. They are a team yet each one has individualized their socks and their chest insignia. I feel enormous hope in their ability to think independently, yet at the same time it appears they have faith in the notion of working together as powerful female figures. My belief is that they are all going somewhere.

Katherine Bradford, 2020

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Grinnell North Moraine 1, 2 (Grinnell North Moraine, 1922, after Elrod Toole / Grinnell North Moraine, 2008, after Lisa McKeon), 2010 Oil on canvas (diptych), 72 x 84 inches (overall) Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Michael I Basta, 2015.25a-b

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diane burko

My practice, which exists at the intersection of art and the environment, is fueled by concerns about climate change. Climate change is a human rights issue. The human race is already suffering drastically from extreme weather disasters such as flooding and drought. Our planet’s ecosystems and species of all kinds are threatened with extinction as they disappear at alarming rates.

I endeavor to bring this crucial issue to light through images rather than words. My large-scale paintings as well as my time-based media invite the viewer to consider the critical moment we are in through visual and emotional lenses, hoping to inspire awareness and action.

Diane Burko, 2020

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Famished for Blondes, 2011 Oil, acrylic, ink, color pencil, graphite 59 1/2 x 84 inches Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery

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andrea carlson

“Fed up with dark ones, famished for light ones: that’s how he talked about people, as if they were—items on a menu . . .” —Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams Famished for Blondes is from a larger series of works that reference cannibal films, the VORE series. Its title is a line taken from the film adaption of Suddenly Last Summer (1958) by Tennessee Williams, a title that is also drawn into the piece. Both the play and subsequent film exploit the audience’s assumed fears and prejudices towards Indigenous peoples. As in many cannibal genre films, cannibalism is featured as an anti-colonial revenge method utilized by unnamed Indigenous people with little to no character development who have been exploited or abused by White, colonial protagonists. Removed from that context, the text is yet another settler on a shore alongside invasive species and the severed heads of John the Baptist and Medusa. Each narrative referenced in this piece arranges violence around bodily trophy-taking, where women are depicted as bait for this violence.

These shards of imagery, with individual staying power, are assembled on a shore—abandoned, contextless, and vulnerable to sea-change.

Andrea Carlson, 2020

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Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas, 2009–2010 From Places of Our Own Earthenware, acrylic, graphite 26 x 20 x 8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist, 2017.30

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syd carpenter

Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas When I began my series of farm portraits titled Places of Our Own, my purpose was to shed light on the obscured history of African American farms and gardens. The sculptures are representations of actual places and people. Each sculpture embodies a story of individual triumph over systemic racism used to deny Back people the right to stewardship over their own land. The Great Migration north and west to escape the indignities of the Jim Crow South often resulted in farms being abandoned, but not all. Ellis and Anna Mae Thomas commemorates one such farm. It is a farm that remained in the hands of Black women and men who passed it on to their descendants. Each sculpture in the Places of Our Own series is named for these women and men who tenaciously remained on their land despite the injustices, denials, and lack of acknowledgement for their part in providing a platform for economic sustenance in marginalized rural black communities.

Syd Carpenter, 2020

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Subway Hands 2, 2017 Oil on canvas 34 x 24 inches Collection of Holly Peterson

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jordan casteel

Subway Hands 2 (2017), part of my ongoing Subway series, depicts a person, unknown to me, seen during my commute several years back. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the relationship between the fingers, watch, and the weight of the outlined bag that possesses the familiar stream of commonly used “thank yous” printed on plastic bags that roam the streets of New York City. Sometimes the relationships between the mundane and society-at-large feel like coincidence or a conjuring, and then I remember that my community has been speaking for a long time with intense clarity.

These moments are right in front of us. We just have to be ready to receive them.

Jordan Casteel, 2020

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The Crowning, 2010 Lithograph 31 x 31 inches Courtesy of the artist, Salon 94, New York, and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

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judy chicago

It is no accident that at the mighty Bauhaus, where the tenets of modern art were formed, Joseph Albers taught painting—while Anni Albers, like most of the women there, was an instructor in weaving. Earlier, at The Great Royal School of Needlework, where the theories and ideas of William Morris and the other visionaries of the Arts and Crafts Movement were translated into fabulous stitchery, the men did designing and the women did the needlework. What men did was “art,” while what women did was, at best, “craft.”

—Judy Chicago, 1985

Over the ensuing years, I have created many images of the female divine, in part because I believe that art has an important role to play in re-envisioning our concept of god. Patriarchy is reflected in and reinforced by the structure of a male godhead. In my opinion, women will never achieve equality until this limited and male-centered concept is replaced by the idea of a universal divinity that incorporates both genders and at the same time, is beyond gender.

—Judy Chicago, date unknown

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Hair Craft Project with Chaunda, 2014 Pigment print on archival paper 29 x 29 inches Courtesy of Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore

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sonya clark

The Hair Craft Project amplifies the craft and ingenuity embodied in Black hair stylists. This project resists the legacy of subjugation and commodification of Black women’s bodies. Here, my hair, the fiber that holds the traces of my ancestors, is manipulated by Chaunda King, one of twelve stylists in the project. She masterfully parted and braided a path of cornrows to form a communal fingerprint, a reclaiming of our identity and our collective power as Black women to be, to be beautiful, to care for one another, to claim space, to refuse injustice, to live with liberty, to make space, to breathe.

Sonya Clark, 2020

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Chillin’ with Liberty, 1998 From Rajé Color photograph on paper 22 5/8 x 17 5/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of a private collection, 2019.15.3.7

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renee cox

I refuse to be put down, squashed, or made invisible. I’m here, seven feet tall, larger than life. The thing that I use is the gaze. Ninety percent of the time, I’m looking back at the viewer looking at me. It’s about creating freedom. I’m not one of these black artists who’s trying to run away from blackness. There is no post-black. There’s no post; it’s only the present.

I don’t even call myself a feminist. I just believe that women should have the same rights as men, and be treated and paid accordingly.

Simple. I hate to say it, but the whole feminist movement was for white women who lived in the suburbs, and in some ways they killed it for themselves. Men have been treating women badly for centuries.

Renee Cox, 2016

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Dee Dee Ngozi, 55, Atlanta, GA, 2016, published 2018 Archival pigment print 20 x 16 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2018.17.1.16b

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jess t. dugan

While many women of color and queer people have contributed to the elevation of women’s rights in the United States, they are not well represented in mainstream history. My work uses visual representation, specifically photographic portraiture, as a way of interrupting and expanding our understandings of identity and belonging in movements for social justice and an equitable society.

Jess T. Dugan, 2020

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Straight to Hell, 1994 Offset poster 25 1/2 x 19 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Carrie Moyer, 2019.4.4

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dyke action machine!

Dyke Action Machine! was founded by Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner on the premise that visual representation = power. Up until 1997, when Ellen DeGeneres came out publicly, the rare lesbian depicted in film and television fell into a few sad stereotypes: endearing tomboy, no-nonsense gym teacher, man-hating activist, or creepy spinster.

This near invisibility in the mainstream media just didn’t compute for our generation of queer activist-artists who came of age during the Stonewall Riots, AIDS epidemic, and burgeoning movement for gay civil rights. Using humor and a feminist sensibility, Dyke Action Machine! infiltrated the commercial realm of advertising to expose the lack of lesbian representation as well as the underlying misogyny and homophobia in contemporary visual culture.

Dyke Action Machine!, 2020

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Free bleeding on a mountain, 2019 Watercolor on handmade Indian recycled cotton rag paper 12 5/8 x 8 7/8 inches Collection of Andrew Ong, courtesy of the artist, Fortnight Institute, and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery.

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chioma ebinama

One of the most profound injuries to women, but also all mankind, has been the stripping and devaluation of feminine power. In the push towards capitalist notions of progress and modernity, the Feminine has been dissolved into an empty force in society. We often mistaken femininity as something that functions in contrast to masculinity when in fact the union of both energies make us whole. My paintings are personal visions, reimagining the Feminine restored, enjoyed, and celebrated. I feel I am playing in a realm that is sensual and erotic. Not in a way that is pornographic or brings to mind candle-lit busty damsels.

But rather, it is a space where one is joyous, earthy, and free—what I believe to be a necessary dream for embracing our non-binary futures.

Chioma Ebinama, 2020

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Mama’s Last Words, 2020 Oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi

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jane fine Mama’s Last Words “Find the joy inside yourself and express it,” these were my mother’s last words.

It was an astounding bit of final advice from someone who was often tortured by anger. A brilliant and talented woman, born in 1916, my mother was also a painter. She led a life filled with frustration. Her prospects in dating, college, marriage, and a teaching career were all heavily influenced, if not outright dictated, by her parents. And like so many women of her generation, she moved from her parents’ home to her husband’s, with no control of her own finances until she was practically a senior citizen.

Luckily, she found salvation in painting and when I was a kid, she made abstract pictures that were gestural, aggressive, and passionate. I loved to watch her work but sometimes, very late at night, her passion turned to anger—beautiful paintings were rendered into nothingness by morning.

My mother derived much vicarious pleasure from my life as an artist.

She envied my freedom, even though I would never have achieved such self-determination without her encouragement. It was always good to talk art with her. A few hours before she died, I said to her, “you and I are lucky. We’ve had our painting to help us deal with our feelings, our anger.” She’d been quiet for the previous hour, but shook her head so vigorously in response that I became frightened. That’s when she offered me those beautiful last words.

Her advice reminds me of being a young artist, when male teachers complemented me on the innocence and sweetness of my paintings.

Although their comments were intended as compliments, I took them to be dismissive and sexist. I thought I should be tougher and angrier.

Decades later I learned to value the strength of my girlish spirit, even if its origin was a saccharine pop culture concoction of flower power, Saturday morning cartoons, and oddly happy T.V. family dramas. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s I quickly learned that underneath this sugar coating lay the reality of political assassinations, urban riots, and the Vietnam War. Perhaps as a result, my paintings have always been deceptively celebratory—a sense of danger lurks beneath joyful exuberance.

I suspect there is something particularly female about this strategy: a woman hiding her power beneath surface charm and seduction.

Jane Fine, 2020

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The Ram I, 2019–2020 Gouache, chalk pastel on paper 30 x 22 inches Courtesy of the artist

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natalie frank I elevate marginalized women and marginalized female storytellers by giving voice to their narratives. Working against an art history that has simplified and diminished women, I portray the full spectrum of female desire to provoke conversation about agency and imagination. I have deciphered the female nude and its hidden narratives since I began classical life drawing at age twelve. Three evolutions have defined my ensuing work: I have transitioned to literary narrative as a basis for storytelling; to drawing as my primary medium; and to interdisciplinary, collaborative projects that use my drawings to create new media.

Fairytales captivated me because many began as women’s oral tales that articulated female desires and fears through a fabulist lens, yet over time their authorship was erased and their voices neutered. I restore the identities of these overlooked female artists and transform their stories to create contemporary paradigm-breaking female heroines. My turn to literary narrative necessitated my transition to drawing. When I read these fairytales, I see images and colors—a product of my synesthesia.

Only the spontaneous, emotional act of drawing brings these images into focus. The intuitive layering of gouache and chalk pastel mimics the dense, unexpected complexity of female lives.

In 2015, as I drew the Grimm’s Tales for my first museum show at The Drawing Center, I realized that I could create a new genre—a combination of an art book and illustrated manuscript—by interlacing my full-page drawings with marginalia, translated stories by fairytale scholar Jack Zipes, and essays. Our subsequent collaborations yielded The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the first drawn volume on the feminist fairytale teller Madame d’Aulnoy. A collaboration with Ballet Austin—a full-length commissioned ballet based on my Grimm’s drawings for which I served as artistic director—forged another new vehicle for my work.

The Ram, a seventeenth-century tale of d’Aulnoy, follows a young girl after she is cast out from her family and takes refuge in the company of a handsome prince, who has been transformed into a ram. She is meant to return to the ram after her sisters marry but becomes distracted by worldly affairs and neglects her promise. The ram dies of a broken heart, and she lives the rest of her life in despair. This is a tale about virtue and honoring promises. It is notable that the heroine of the story does not embody and exemplify pristine ideas of feminine virtue. These failings give her a nuance and humanity that are not often represented in the female characters of fairy tales.

Natalie Frank, 2020

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Gravity's Dream, 2008 Thirteen-color screen print with monotypical background, hand flocking, googly eyes, glitter 20 x 30 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Exit Art, 2012.19.3d

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chitra ganesh

Over the years, I have had to periodically reevaluate these markers [of success]—they have shifted to accommodate my own autoimmunity and chronic health issues, as well as the structural conditions that continue to shape the trajectories available for women artists in a field that continues to be largely white and male. Now, success means: Being able to devote a majority of your time and headspace to what you do and also maintain an intellectual or artistic space that can be yours or that can be private, or that cannot be co-opted. Being able to have a full life and fall in love and have all kinds of registers of experience that are outside of the career. Being there for the long haul and the slow burn, year after year, and trying to have structures in place including friendship, artist centered non-for-profit spaces, collaboration, teaching and writing.

Chitra Ganesh, 2020

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Untitled #60 (by proxy), 1999 (reprinted 2015) Chromogenic print mounted on acrylic 60 x 70 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.6

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anna gaskell

My imagination was born in Iowa. Fortunately, I’ve got such a strong sense of place that I’m able to drag a little bit of Iowa with me wherever I go.

My mother was an evangelical Christian. As children, my brothers and I would join her on wild pilgrimages throughout the Midwest attending tent meetings, where we would watch miracles being performed, people speaking in tongues, healing by touch, surrounded by a belief in the impossible. I don’t remember anything strange in all of this, but more a feeling of excitement and a security in the faith that I felt from everyone there.

My work moves around and through many different stories and characters, but at the heart of it all, it’s about the suspension of disbelief, the possibility of the impossible, the absence of doubt, the completeness of faith.

Anna Gaskell, 2002

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I Will Not Suffer For You, 2017 Found object mixed-media assemblage 70 x 44 x 6 inches Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, New York

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vanessa german

A citizen-artist is, for me, that I center the idea that I believe that all human beings deserve and have the right to be as dimensionally, safely human as they can dare to be. Standing at the center of that and turning dimensionally in the sphere to say: I have one life; I will die; and what is the best way, the most thorough way, the most selfishly compassionate way—because compassion is a circle—that I can inhabit the living actions I believe all humans deserve?

Vanessa German, 2018

I want to be with my ideas; I want to do whatever I want to do. I center myself. I center my joy. I enjoy people. I ask people: What would you do if you could do whatever you want to do? They might say they would spend their first three days sleeping in. But what after that? What would you do with your legs? What would you do with your ideas? That’s actually something I think is a matter of survival. To really start asking human beings—“If you could design your life and your day, what would you do?”—it probably just sounds crazy, elitist, and full of shit for an artist like me to ask this. But I think it is important to connect to that earthling and human place on behalf of the earth. What is possible? We have repeated old, violent ideas for a long time. We could do different things.

Vanessa German, 2018

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Nan after being battered 1984, 1984 From The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Cibachrome print 16 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2018.39.1.69

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nan goldin

Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught it at the university. A friend of mine said I was born with a feminist heart. I decided at the age of five that there was nothing my brothers can do and I cannot do. I grew up that way. It was not like an act of decision that I was going to make a piece about gender politics. I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life.

Nan Goldin, 2003

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Road to Life, 1975 Lithograph on paper 19 5/8 x 25 3/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, 2012.4

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nancy grossman

Art is full of the myriad differences in human expression. As I search my vocabulary for the right words to encompass the original hope for a fair look, a fair appraisal, I am stunned into silence by the knowledge that less than a week ago a father in Iran was granted the right to behead his fourteen-year-old daughter for her desire to “run away” with the twentynine-year-old boyfriend “of her choice.”

My awareness of the universal existence of deep-seated misogyny prevents me from dedicating the days and nights of my short human life to changing the status quo in tiny, impermanent steps. Any progress toward fairness is soon lost. You learn if you wait your turn, that it will never come because you are female. So, early on, your eloquence is muzzled, whether by being raped and silenced or being “put in your place,” which doesn’t amount to equality with men or even a chance to distinguish yourself in any way. It leads to frustration and anger, with no place to put it, hold it, contain it. It simmers as slow boiling rage that must be held at a temperature that won’t upset the applecart, won’t blow its top like a volcano and destroy the whole existing landscape all at once. If you can’t bull your way—force your way—by sheer strength, the way forward is a crooked, winding, almost unintelligible path of trickster-ism and paradox.

Women’s work that is seen and is an acceptable success came into being in some way by breaking the taboo against knowing what you know . . . and what you’re not supposed to know even though you DO know.

Nancy Grossman, 2020

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The Other Series: After Man Ray, 1992 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of a private collection, 2001.9.14

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kathy grove

Broadly speaking my work has always been engaged with how an individual artist addresses the socio-political issues that govern our public lives. The personal is political. My aim is to address issues as an artist by covertly asking questions, not by overtly giving answers. Feminism has given me a frame of reference to take on the inequities embodied in the culture in which we live and mores with which we grapple. As a woman I am part of and apart from the general culture.

Kathy Grove, 2015

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Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?, 1989 Commercial offset lithograph on acid-free paper 11 x 12 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2020.5.24

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guerrilla girls

This poster is a great example of how we craft our work. We don’t write a boring headline like “There aren’t enough women artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” That wouldn’t grab anyone’s attention. Instead we twist the issue around and write a headline that’s unforgettable, pair it with an outrageous visual, and then prove our case with killer statistics. After you’ve seen this poster, we dare you to go into a museum and not wind up thinking about what is on the walls, and why.

Guerrilla Girls, 2020

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Demons, Chin 'Demon of Lust,' p93 from Indigenous Woman, 2018 Chromogenic print mounted on Sintra, hand-painted artist frame 43 5/8 x 31 5/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2019.29.1

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martine gutierrez Indigenous Woman is an independent art publication dedicated to the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity, and the ever-evolving self-image. It is a vision, an overture, a provocation.

The word “indigenous” here is used to refer to native cultures from a particular region, but also as a synonym for the natural and innate. It signifies a real, authentic, native-born woman. There was a time when I believed there was no such title for me to claim. I was driven to question how identity is formed, expressed, valued, and weighed as a woman, as a transwoman, as a latinx woman, as a woman of indigenous descent, as a femme artist and maker? It is nearly impossible to arrive at any finite answers, but for me, this process of exploration is exquisitely life-affirming.

In working to convey my own fluid identity—an identity that brides the binaries of gender and ethnicity—I aim in part to subvert cis, white, Western standards of beauty and raise questions about inclusivity, appropriation, and consumerism. From behind long lashes and lacquered lips, I use the fashion magazine’s glossy framework to play with perception.

I employ mannequins, advertorials, and indigenous textiles to reassert control over my own image. Mine is a practice of full autonomy—all photography, modeling, styling, makeup, hair, lighting, graphic design, and product design I have executed myself.

Indigenous Woman marries the traditional to the contemporary, the native to the post-colonial, and the marginalized to the mainstream in the pursuit of genuine selfhood, revealing cultural inequities along the way. This is a quest for identity. Of my own specifically, yes, but by digging my pretty, painted nails deeply into the dirt of my own image I am also probing the depths for some understanding of identity as a social construction.

Martine Gutierrez, 2018

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Tending Our Mothers’ Gardens (Lydia Bernard-Jones), 2019 Archival pigment print 36 x 27 inches Courtesy of the artist

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daesha devón harris

My entire life I have been surrounded by strong women, from my mother, to my grandmothers, aunts, cousins, mentors, and extended family. These women have struggled, sacrificed, persevered, and carried their families and friends without recognition or accolades, or even equality—all the while making time to share with me different tactics to navigate this world full of isms. It was not lost on me growing up that the Black women who filled my life with love and spirit were survivors of both racial and gender oppression. I am in awe of the ways that they exercise creativity by any and all means afforded to them. That is why I choose to honor these women in my artwork; it is something necessary, tangible and real that I can do.

Daesha Devón Harris, 2020

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Neural Glide, 2018 Silver gelatin photographs, silver gelatin photograms, nylon, artist's frame 41 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 5 inches Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

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sheree hovsepian I live with a hyper-awareness of my physicality. I attribute this to growing up—a woman, Middle Eastern, an immigrant—in Ohio and thinking of my body as a politically charged location.

There is a vulnerability in exposing oneself through a mark or gesture.

Much of my work lies in the valley of this vulnerability.

Historically, women have not held the position of authoring the canonical “mark.” We have been shortchanged historically in cultural institutions as they have not done their part in recording the products of women’s thoughts and bodies. A correction of this absence is what is yet to be achieved.

Looking to the future, generations of artists should have the opportunity to learn from, find kinship in, and be inspired by women (identifying) voices.

Sheree Hovsepian, 2020

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Kill Your Idols, 2017 Inkjet print 50 x 35 inches Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles

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juliana huxtable

I guess on some level, there is a part of me that believes I’m a humanist.

Maybe not in the sort of canonical way, but in some ways, I believe that there is something that prevents most people from stabbing another person. I don’t know what that is, but I think that queer people go through a lot of shit and I think that trauma is a source of inspiration and to me that’s more structural than it is spiritual. I think people who go through more, have to navigate more. Struggle is what creates beauty.

Juliana Huxtable, 2017

All art is about identity. Anyone who is making work, it’s like naturally their identity is going to be woven into what they do. But I think women, queer people, people of color unfairly share the burden of being told that what they do is identity, even though it’s not necessarily more or less about identity than what anyone else does.

Juliana Huxtable, 2019

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HyperInvisible 3, 2019 Oil on panel 50 x 50 inches Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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hayv kahraman

My mother called me once from Sweden to ask why I was making all these violent paintings; I told her that I just felt an affinity with these women, hiding the fact that I was in an abusive relationship [at the time]. But then again, I hid that from myself as well. It was not until years later that I could look back at these works and see how my personal life had interjected.

Hayv Kahraman, date unknown

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Keep Coiffing, 2011 Collage, watercolor, acrylic on paper 28 x 20 inches Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection

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mary reid kelly

I am very interested in people who do not, for some reason or other, tell their own stories, or can’t tell their own stories.

Mary Reid Kelley, 2016

My work almost always has a woman as the central character. This is partly because I play almost all of the roles myself, although I usually am also playing male characters. My work is about women, but it’s also about traditional gender roles and making fun of them, often through me playing a man, playing a woman or playing a monster. Being lighthearted with gender roles, that’s never going to go away. It’s going to evolve, and we’ve seen things evolve. I majored in women’s studies when I was in undergrad. That type of direction in academia has really broadened to include LGBTQ studies, queer studies, queer theory. I’m really glad my work is being recognized at this time so it can be in dialogue with that conversation.

Mary Reid Kelly, 2016

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power up, 1965 Serigraph on pellon 29 1/8 x 141 1/2 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Joseph B. Hudson, Jr. Esq. , 2015.33.1a-d

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corita kent

For my long training I have been taught not to talk about my adversity.

But I can talk about a kind of global adversity which I think is our personal adversity today. I think we have to have the awareness that everything is sacred, and when we lose that awareness we lose connection with the whole, with the cosmos. Art is one of the means amid adversity of reestablishing the connection. A picture may be a symbol for the whole if we look at it as a small cosmos.

Corita Kent, 1988

Of course, the rules of the communities were written by men originally, and they had been followed for so many centuries. And I think the longer things aren’t done, the harder it is to change them. So I think a great many of us went along being very concerned with the work we were doing, teaching and so forth, and were not as concerned with ourselves as people until we began to realize, along with everybody else, that what happened to the individual is largely what happens to the community; and that if the individual is developed to her fullest extent, that can only be good for the other people that she’s working with or for.

Corita Kent, 1977

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Helen Pontani's leg with curtain, Galapagos, Brooklyn 2001, 2001 From Fantasies Chromogenic print 20 x 24 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist, 2019.39.1.5

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lisa kereszi

“Never done” describes my adult life to a T. I only recently read and realized the truth in having it all, meaning doing it all.

Lisa Kereszi, 2020

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Untitled, 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 52 inches Private collection, Philadelphia

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harriet korman

In my work, freedom and liberation are realized and expressed through my choices. Fifty years of study and experimentation have brought me to the painting in this exhibition. Art is a good place to experience freedom and liberation. You come up against boundaries, you break rules. Action towards justice and equality is never over. For women in the arts, not only acceptance, but recognition and positions of leadership—for other people to look up to—is still needed. A few artists who come to mind in this regard are Eva Hesse, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Elizabeth Murray, and Lee Bontecou.

Harriet Korman, 2020

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Joanette, Canarsie, Brooklyn, 2013 Inkjet print on Sintra 42 1/2 x 34 7/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchased with generous funding from Nancy Herman Frehling '65 and Leslie Cyphen Diamond '96, 2019.7

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deana lawson

. . . inspiration came from invisibility or lack of seeing the presence of the brown body, even though I knew it had a certain majesty. My family is a big, big African American family in Rochester, New York. I know from stories, engagements, and parties there’s so much intelligence that’s not academic, but intelligent in a different way that I wanted to reference. I think as a black female photographer, my natural instinct was to image people who resemble people who I grew up around. In that sense, I didn’t make a political choice, but it was a political choice at the same time. … I guess my identity as an artist or as an individual is singular and everyone else has a singular vision. I’m not a documentarian. The staged part, where I insert myself by bringing props, by having people pose in environments that are not always their own, in a way inserts my singular dream vision within something that’s very real. James Baldwin said, “The crown has already been paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” I feel like every subject that I meet is wearing a crown. Not because I would take a picture of them, they already have that crown on. I want to capture within them something that represents the majesty of black life, a nuanced black life, one that is by far more complex, deep, beautiful, celebratory, tragic, weird, strange.

Deana Lawson, 2019

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Stay Safe, 2018 Gouache, graphite on tea-stained paper 42 x 29 1/2 inches (framed) Courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery, New York

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ellen lesperance

As an undergraduate I was a pretty straightforward figurative painter in a very traditional program. It wasn’t until graduate school that I really got into the visual vocabulary of knitting: it's not-square but grid-based formatting, the conventions of its pattern layouts, its language for writing a pattern—American Symbolcraft. I have been working with that vocabulary for twenty years, knowing, loving, that it has implicit limitations and that it's inherently Feminist: because women knit, because the history of handiwork is a woman’s history.

Ellen Lesperance, 2016

[This] painting is sourced from [a] photograph that I found in an archive at the People's History Museum in Manchester, England. It is a trio of women at a CND meeting (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in the mid 1980s. This particular instance of activist knitwear is amongst the very best I've ever found. . . The woman on the left wears the "Stay Safe" painting garment; its dove and rainbow and NO CRUISE text and Mondrian-like left sleeve are really clear. I extrapolated the text on the right arm to say "Stay Safe" and also added a design for the back side of the garment which is unseen, the missile. Also, in the painting, I assigned likely colors to the black and white values of the photograph.

Ellen Lesperance, 2020

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Untitled, 2001 Chromogenic print 48 x 60 inches Promised gift to the Tang Teaching Museum from Jack Shear

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malerie marder

In simple, unembellished terms women do not have equal representation in government. We do not have equal pay.

Female artists only comprise five percent of museum collections. Only an anointed few female artists have been recognized for their talents on the secondary market, which is far too often the barometer of any artist’s success.

Malerie Marder, 2020

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Untitled, 2000 Ink, colored pencil on vellum laid on paper 19 x 24 inches Collection of Jack Shear

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julie mehretu I am here. My mother as a modernist, an internationalist, a lifelong Montessori teacher, and a voracious lover of life has been one of my most profound influences.

Julie Mehretu, 2020

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La Venus Negra [The Black Venus], 1981/2018 Black-and-white photograph 39 1/4 x 53 1/2 inches Courtesy of The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC and Galerie Lelong & Co. , New York

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ana mendieta

During the mid to late 1960s as women in the United States politicized themselves and came together in the feminist movement with the purpose to end domination and exploitation by the white male culture, they failed to remember us. American feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement. The white population of the United States, diverse, but of basic European stock, exterminated and put aside the Black as well as the other non-white cultures to create a homogenous male-dominated society above the internal divergency.

Ana Mendieta, 1980

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No. 5, c. 1955 Oil on canvas 69 x 68 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the American Federation of Arts, 1959.1

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joan mitchell

They call me “sauvage” in Europe, so I take it on. Because I’m direct and I don’t speak the—I say what I think and you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to be diplomatic, which I call hypocrisy and lying, really . . .

Lots of things women can’t be—“sauvage” is one of them.

Joan Mitchell, 1992

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Sagan, 2012 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 24 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection, 2017.22.1

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carrie moyer

In 1957, Life magazine published “Women Artists in Ascendance,” a glossy spread featuring Nell Blaine, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Jane Wilson posed glamorously in front of their own paintings. In other words, not so long ago, women artists were considered far more interesting to look at than their paintings. Flash forward to 2020; women artists continue to be supported and collected far less often than their male cohort. Independent institutions such as the Tang Teaching Museum are at the forefront of a movement to transform museum collections to reflect the audiences they serve.

Carrie Moyer, 2020

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Untitled Mirror, 1990 Gold leaf, aluminum leaf, oil on canvas 37 1/2 x 25 3/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist, ED2016.1.193

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lillian mulero

If art is understood to be convention of one kind or another, then inherent in that convention is an ideology and agenda, perspective, or if you will, a certain truth. Women and colonial conquests have been made over in an image that reflects the needs of the capitalist economy, or they have been made invisible or mute. Either way, my work encompasses more than one way of using materials or even being part of one genre at a time. Photography is combined with language and sculpture, sculpture is combined with painting, found objects or real things are used in conjunction with original constructions.

Lilian Mulero, 2017

I am interested in spiraling metaphor, the content and the container, where images take on meanings that multiply . . . I think of these paintings as self portraits.

Lillian Mulero, 1991

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Twister, 1995–1997 From The Seven Sisters Schools Chromogenic print 24 x 30 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, donated in memory of Meredith S. Moody, 2015.7

102

laurel nakadate

The work is absolutely feminist. I hope that my work has added to and complicated the conversations surrounding gender discourse. I hope that I've left a small bread crumb trail that resonates. The work means different things to different people; it has been imitated and re-performed.

It has brought me great joy as an artist, and for me, that is enough.

Laurel Nakadate, 2019

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Stuck, 2016 Embroidery thread, fabric 62 x 38 inches Collection of Teresa Enriquez and Michael Galex

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sophia narrett

Although I initially came to embroidery for material reasons, over time I have come to understand the deep role that the medium plays in defining my narratives. Far more than a rendering tool, the embroidered surface implicitly references a disturbing history of prescribed gender roles, repression, and injustice. It also harkens to a more recent history of feminist artists who used craft materials for political ends, questioning the problematic ways that value had traditionally been assigned to creative production. In this way, the very nature of the thread defines the meaning of my images. As I explore themes of love, sexuality, identity, and beauty, so many of the societal aspects that have shaped my own ideas of the feminine (with or without my control) come into play. My narratives explore power dynamics and the relationship between masculine and feminine energies. I often repurpose media depictions of love and sexuality to build my own narratives. I have a conflicted relationship to these pop culture depictions, and in my own narratives I alternately indulge in these fantasies, lament them, and criticize them.

For me, embroidery embodies this precarious relationship to societal definitions of the feminine.

Sophia Narrett, 2020

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Full Sack, 1990 Acrylic mediums, muslin, dyed canvas strips, dyed cheesecloth on canvas 56 x 60 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist, 2016.17

106

dona nelson I revere all of the women artists who have been so generous to me.

Their works, on the walls of my house, continue to inspire me every day.

Dona Nelson, 2020

Iva Gueorguieva, 2019 Silencing the Prophets Acrylic, hand-painted collage, photogravure collage on paper 30 x 22 inches Collection of Dona Nelson

Margery Mellman, 1994 Big Flower, oil on linen 36 x 36 inches Collection of Dona Nelson

Paula Tavins, 1973 Dr. Ph. Martin’s Radiant Concentrated Watercolor and acrylic on canvas with sewn canvas bags 14 x 9 ¾ inches Collection of Dona Nelson

107

Back and Forth, 2020 Acrylic ink, spray paint on pieced and sewn muslin 34 3/4 x 28 inches Courtesy of the artist

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gina occhiogrosso

I am a painter whose work is composed not only through the application of wet color on a surface, but through processes of disassembly and realignment, and though the incorporation of common, everyday materials like thread and fabric. The hallowed and often masculinized tradition of painting is subverted in my work through a repeated process of cutting and then sewing painted surfaces together to develop new forms, dynamic connections, and illusions of depth. These activities and elements allow me to explore anxiety, loss, humor, and heroic femininity.

Gina Occhiogrosso, 2020

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Storme DeLarverie, Chelsea Hotel 2010, 2010 Gelatin silver print 24 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2020.4.6

110

alice o’malley Storme DeLaverie, Chelsea Hotel, NYC 2010 belongs to a collection of portraits I began in August 2000 and later titled Community of Elsewheres. My intention was to create a living archive of a circle of artists (mostly friends) and the spaces that held us together in lower Manhattan at the turn of the twenty-first century. Over time, these pictures have provided a mirror for those who inhabit the margins, and a re-centering of the her-storically queer Other. They are an offering for future generations.

I was introduced to Storme by the painter Michele Zalopany, her longtime friend and neighbor at the Hotel Chelsea. I knew Storme only in a legendary context—as the one who threw the first punch at a police officer at the Stonewall Inn that hot summer night in 1969, and as the iconic butch sitting on a Central Park bench in Diane Arbus’s famous photograph, The Lady who Appears to be a Gentleman.

If a queer lens informs my relationship to representation and intimacy, post-colonial theory calls into question my role as spectator and collector (the focus shifts here). Storme was the embodiment of Black, queer, selforganized, community-centered, artistic, revolutionary politics, and I was on a mission to photographer her.

I returned to the Chelsea the next day and knocked on Storme’s door. We went for burgers and she told me about growing up with her Black mother and white father, who had moved from Louisiana to California to legally marry. Storme talked about running around town with Billie Holiday and the night she was stabbed in the back after a show at the Apollo. Storme was a singer too.

I went back again the next day and Storme opened the door just wide enough for me to see her black eye.

The details were muddy. Her short-term memory was failing. It was common knowledge that Storme walked the streets of Greenwich Village at night to keep a watch on young women heading home from the bars. Even at age eighty-three. I bought a raw steak for her eye and went home. On the third day, Storme said let’s do the picture.

When I think about Storme’s legacy I think about the voices that are missing in the story of women’s suffrage.

Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton have pushed for equal rights if she hadn’t been inspired by the political leadership of women in the neighboring Iroquois Nation tribes? If the early feminists had risen to the challenge of Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman speech, would they have allowed themselves to compromise their long-term support for abolition and prioritize the fight for (white) women’s suffrage?

In the summer of 1983, over ten thousand women gathered on a fifty-two-acre farm in Romulus, New York, twelve miles south of Seneca Falls and adjacent to the Seneca Army Depot, the largest nuclear weapons storage and shipment facility in the United States. We were there to protest the deployment of medium range cruise missiles on European soil under the Reagan administration. English women had also set up a peace camp at the gates of Greenham Common Army Base near London, where they were repeatedly arrested for blocking the convoys transporting missiles.

We were disrupting business as usual for the military industrial complex and living differently in community.

We began with the assumption that if our goal was to be equal to men, women were not thinking big enough.

Rather than seeking a place at the table, we were working to dismantle male-dominant systems of power that choose profit over the planet. We were creating a new world.

What remains to be achieved? Trans rights for one (sixteen trans women of color have been murdered in the United States this year alone), an end to climate change. The environment can’t sustain the patriarchy any longer.

Alice O’Malley, 2020

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To Receive Willingly What Comes Next, 2004 Graphite on paper 32 x 40 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Judi Roaman, 2012.21

112

robyn o'neil

For about twenty years, I drew middle-aged men in sweat suits roaming the earth doing all sorts of things, mainly bad. Without women, I knew these men would destroy the world. And they did.

Robyn O’Neil, 2020

113

Dyke, 1993 Chromogenic print 18 x 13 1/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2015.1.178

114

catherine opie

I concentrate on disturbing the devices that society imposes on variant communities to keep them ‘ghettoized’ by class, race, sexuality, and gender. It’s important that my work be seductive as a visual language, as I want to keep the viewer engaged. This allows for multiple readings which challenge viewers to consider both people and space in their various complexities.

Catherine Opie, date unknown

115

Pink Hat Cat #2, 2017 Colored pencil, gouache on wood panel 12 x 12 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist and bkprojects / beth kantrowitz, 2020.14

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roberta paul

The pink hats seen everywhere on January 20, 2017 will remain with us forever. Worn by thousands of women marching across the world, the hats marked the emergence of a new movement.

Pink Hat Cat is my personal response to the symbolism of the hat. The pink hat sits atop a cheetah, an animal that entered into my work as a recurring theme eight years ago. The cheetah represents strength and dignity for me, and Everywoman.

Roberta Paul, 2020

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Lost in My Life (Me Too), 2018 Archival pigment print 60 x 40 inches Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York

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rachel perry One late afternoon in 1973, I was walking home after school down an elm-lined street in Northfield, Minnesota, feeling sorry for myself. My mother had started working again. She was commuting to Boston three days a week to work with Dr. Edwin Land, co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. I missed her.

But as I watched my feet avoid cracks in the sidewalk, I also felt proud that my mother was out in the world. She was doing something important, something she enjoyed, something only she could do. I was aware that few women were able to do such things. What has stayed with me ever since is the certainty that I could do things too.

Years later, when my mother left science and went to art school, I followed. As I began to find my own voice through making, I discovered something essential about the creative process: most artists don’t know what they’re going to make until they make it. And in my own work, truths hidden even to me reveal themselves in the act of creating.

The potential that lies in what we don’t notice prompts all my work: the Karaoke Wrong Number videos, Soundtrack collages, Chiral Lines drawings, and especially the Lost in My Life photographs. The Lost in My Life series documents scenes in which I perform on sets that I have created in the studio. In these self-portraits, I am always only partially visible through objects that come from my everyday existence. The stuff of my life and the materials in my art are the same.

My work in the exhibition Never Done was originally commissioned by the New York Times Magazine who invited artists to respond to the Me Too Movement. I experienced my colleagues’ reactions as parallel to my own. Their words aligned with what I’ve been thinking since childhood: “My voice hasn’t been heard. I’m a small part of the whole, but I insist on being heard.”

I want to make visible the unseen, and draw attention to the unnoticed.

Who wants to speak now? Who have we not heard from? There’s noise out there—where is the individual voice? Where is my voice?

Rachel Perry, 2020

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Untitled #6F, 2009 Mixed media on board 6 1/2 x 11 5/8 inches Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

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howardena pindell

It’s scary how much President Trump has polarized people: those on the margins of society have either become more progressive or more fascistic. Fortunately, Trump is not interested in culture, which has enabled artists to continue making political work. In Nazi-era Germany, Adolf Hitler’s regime famously targeted artists, stole important works from Jewish families and created the category of ‘degenerate art’ that they sought to eradicate. At the moment, artists in the US are still able to do what they want – although, if someone does catch Trump’s attention, I fear he will start attacking artists as well.

Howardena Pindell, 2019

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Flag #5 Kurdistan, 2007 Collected vintage objects on vintage US flag 65 x 35 inches Courtesy of the artist and Carbon 12

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sarah rahbar

It’s about falling, standing and attempting to survive it all; our geographic locations, each other and ourselves.

In the end we are all just visiting.

We come to this world alone and we leave alone.

But while we are here we try so desperately to belong to something, to someone and to somewhere.

Metamorphosing and transforming for the means of surviving it all, our foundations lay, but our houses have burned to the ground.

Building castles in the sky, for a species that cannot fly, brick by limb we tear it down.

Sara Rahbar, 2020

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Fall, 2006 From Four Seasons Archival pigment print on Sunset Fiber rag 23 x 26 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.27.1

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wendy red star

Apsáalooke Chief, Alaxchiiaahush (Plenty Coups), once said, “Education is your most powerful weapon. With education you are the white man’s equal; without education you are his victim.”

Absorbing these sentiments to action, I dedicate myself to educating and excavating the buried histories of my people. My weapon and my intention are that the next generation of artists, students, and observers might use my artwork as a trustworthy starting point from which to continue telling, preserving, and understanding Apsáalooke cultural knowledge.

Wendy Red Star, 2020

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Reflections in Seoul, 2020 Wool, cotton 70 x 100 inches Courtesy of the artist and PPOW, New York

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erin m. riley

When I began documenting the body—my body, our body—I was directly responding to the internet culture in which I was growing up. A culture that was deeply exploitative and misogynistic, one that begged for image sexting in private only to publicly share these images and critique them in message boards and other internet forums. I felt I had only two choices: temper my sexuality and not trust anyone, or take images with the understanding that these might end up in a public sphere, embracing my body, my sexuality and exploring the medium of the time in which most young people participated. This was all happening to me in the early 2000s, and my exploration of self-portraiture in tapestry has continued since then.

While I was weaving Reflections in Seoul, an image I took in a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea, I was reading and listening to news reports of the horrible case about the Nth Room—a very recent case using the shame of sexuality to exploit young girls into taking pictures of their bodies for the fodder of the internet. Not much has changed in the twenty years since I started weaving pictures of my body in lieu of revenge porn, except that people have figured out how to monetize the shame that girls are raised to have around their nude bodies.

Erin M. Riley, 2020

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Woman Free Yourself, 1971 Offset print 24 x 18 inches Courtesy of the artist and ACA Galleries, New York

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faith ringgold

I paint from my experience. This is what I know. I am not a man or European and wanted to learn and express the lives of my sex and people—not others. So it is important to me to include my people in the conversation. These political and feminist works are more relevant today than ever—it’s important to keep the women’s movement and the social justice issues alive —keep it going.

Faith Ringgold, 2019

Two steps forward, one step back. We have made progress over the last hundred years but there is much more work ahead to overcome social injustice and gender inequality. Whenever I experience racism or sexism, I express it in my art—always showing optimism. I like to turn wrong into right in a positive way.

Faith Ringgold, 2020

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Glass Castles, 2017 Mixed media on paper 30 x 22 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchased with generous funding from Ann Schapps Schaffer ’62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2017.52

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deborah roberts

This work focuses directly on societal standards of beauty and the construction of both race and gender identities. By challenging notions of what is considered ideally “beautiful” in both art history and pop culture, I seek to make space and create a more inclusive dialogue for the women of color whose identities have been historically marginalized.

The multitude of layers that make up each Black child depicted in my work represents the countless narratives and societal pressures they must struggle through to construct their own identity in a world full of inequality and injustice.

Deborah Roberts, 2020

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Chronicles from the Village Series: "I Am a Civil Rights Worker," 2010–2012 Mixed media on paper 15 x 22 inches Collection of Warachal Eileen Faison, courtesy of ACA Galleries, New York

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aminah brenda lynn robinson

And so even though our ancestors guide us, keep us, they also give us voice so that we can pass it on. And I guess that is the purpose of my work, simply, to pass it on.

My mother did button work, and she made sure my sisters and I learn.

My father, he was the one who made sure I learned how to speak, and to give me this joyous life of creating. He, too, was an artist.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 2015

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Bathroom Surveillance or Vanity Eye, c. 1966–1972 From Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain Photomontage 18 1/8 x 19 1/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Jane Greenberg, Class of 1981, 2012.2

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martha rosler

My art is a communicative act . . . a form of an utterance, a way to open a conversation.

Martha Rosler, 2000

I was always surprised at the differentiation between what girls were supposed to do and what boys were supposed to do because I was pretty much a tomboy. But I didn’t realize until I was probably in late high school, I guess, and maybe even early college, that this was completely translated into these infantilizing images of women in advertising.

Pop art generally tended to produce an image of a woman who was a pre-pubescent girl—and anorexic at that. It was completely acceptable and considered cute.

Martha Rosler, 2018

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Surviving TV, 1988 Acrylic, vinyl on canvas (diptych) 40 x 69 1/2 inches (overall) Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.16a-b

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erika rothenberg

I am passionately interested in exposing American exceptionalism (and its hubris, corruption, and prejudice) in a non-didactic, humorous way, with words, images, and diverse media from painting to photography to large-scale public artworks and museum installations. In the 1980s I was disturbed by the lack of social responsibility in government, corporations, and the media. The TV networks were conservative, powerful, and discriminatory gatekeepers. Now we have thousands of platforms to watch online twenty-four/seven but the issues remain the same.

Erika Rothenberg, 2020

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Breach, 2017 Woodcut on vintage linen seed sack 43 ½ x 19 3/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2020.23

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alison saar

I feel that in all my work, sculpture, painting and prints and drawings, my women simultaneously testify to their history of inequity and to their strength and perseverance.

Alison Saar, 2017

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Untitled Fairy Tale from the Graphic Novel Series, 2019–2020 Seed beads, thread 42 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches Courtesy of Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore

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joyce j. scott

My work is politically and socially oriented because that’s what keeps me up at night . . . It’s important to me to use art in a manner that incites people to look and carry something home—even if it’s subliminal—that might make a change in them.

Joyce J. Scott, 2018

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Vanity, 2020 Silk, charmeuse, velvet, fabric, painted canvas, acrylic on canvas 96 x 84 inches Longlati Foundation collection

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tschabalala self

The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise. I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.

Tschabalala Self, 2020

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Recline, 2005 Oil on canvas 40 x 58 inches Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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joan semmel

The representation of women in art in the past embodies the views and desires of the men who produced it. Women today are determined to reclaim that image and be seen as they see and experience themselves.

Although the change in the status of women has been slow, it is steady and speeding up. Art has always played a part in fomenting change and focusing attitudes. As an artist I hope my work can play a part in that necessary evolution.

Joan Semmel, 2020

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Pink Pot, 2008 Paint on magazine page 7 1/2 x 10 6/8 inches Collection of Ian Berry

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beverly semmes

With this body of work, I did some drawings and then I put them away for five years or so. I couldn’t figure out how they would fit into anything I was thinking about. I couldn’t justify to myself why I would be doing this. And if I showed them, at the time, to a few people, I’m sure they just told me to keep it to myself. It didn’t have a framework. Tucking the work away for a while gave me time to ponder what it meant to work with these magazines while considering myself a feminist; I learned to live with the idea that I can have a feminist point of view and work on pornographic images.

Beverly Semmes, 2015

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There's no place that I am, 2003 Color pencil, acrylic, ink on paper 28 x 31 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Judi Roaman, 2014.2.16

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mindy shapero

My work speaks to the act of feminism in ways that are both conscious and unconscious. The materials I use are often connected to gender roles — women’s crafts, sold at crafting stores. I use these materials in abundance so that they become nuanced and the actual materials become less recognizable from a distance; requiring an intimacy to be fully perceived. I think this is a parallel act to how we live in our male dominated world. Certain materials are considered less serious and less important because of who they are made for. These “feminine” materials combined with common hardware store materials (“masculine” materials) like spray paint and caulking, create an edge and equalize the gendered aspects of the materials. From a distance, the scale is relative to the human body, challenging the viewer to be intimidated by the top, and noting the gravity of the visual weight of what is on top, looking down at the viewer. All of these ideas are further thought about in the grander scale. The act of having to come up close to understand the details might be more a feminine gesture; to ask the viewer to slow down and keep going further in. What does it mean to be a female artist in a world that is dominated by the male artist, the male gaze? As a sculptor, there is a constant discussion and threat that a female hand has the ability to create an image of scale and weight and design. My process is a microcosm of how our art world looks, which in turn is a problem of the entire world. To be heard and taken seriously is still a basic right and fight that we are faced with on a daily basis.

Mindy Shapero, 2020

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Untitled (Pregnant Woman), 2002/2004 Chromogenic print 28 1/2 x 19 3/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection, 2017.22.13

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cindy sherman

There’s a theory that there were so many women photographers at the time because we felt nobody else was doing it. We couldn’t or didn’t really want to go into the male-dominated painting world, so since there weren’t any artists who were using photographs, we thought, “Well, yeah, let’s just play with that.”

Cindy Sherman, 2014

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Maligned Monsters I, 2000 Aquatint, sugar-lift, spitbite with chine collé 30 x 22 inches Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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shahzia sikander

Creativity has no national, racial, or religious boundaries. Learning how to coexist begins with understanding and celebrating all our identities, pluralities, and intersections. Along these lines, art and literature have always played significant roles in shaping our understanding of differences and similarities. Imagination is essential for all of us. It is empowering.

Shahzia Sikander, 2019

My interest in Islamic visual tradition is not to be conflated with my being a Muslim. I am often asked about what it means to be a Muslim artist or to define contemporary Islamic art. With the crisis around migration, religion, and nationalism, I am invested in creating art that can confront social and cultural hierarchies. The stakes are higher for artists who practice (or are perceived) through the rubric of politicized Muslim histories. This is particularly the case for those artists, like myself, whose works may not fit into any dominant narratives, especially those bound by narrow definitions amidst the emergence of “terror” as a defining aesthetic force on the global stage.

Shahzia Sikander, 2019

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Black to the Future, 2017 Archival inkjet print, glitter 18 x 11 inches Collection of Ian Berry

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alisa sikelianos-carter

My work examines the ways Black people have been erased and discriminated against. The world I imagine with my paintings and collages is one in which we become so magnificent, so bright, and so visually stunning that you cannot ignore us in all of our divinity and beauty. Our bodies rebel and expand to protect us, and simultaneously signal our power. In my world, we are everywhere and everything, our value is never bargained with; in my world, Blackness is sacred and we thrive.

Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, 2020

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Untitled (#6), 2007 Gouache, colored pencil, etching on paper 34 x 28 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Anne and Arthur Goldstein, 2015.3.12

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amy sillman

I want to expand the question of when something is done. I want to vex the ending. I want to mess around with that. I like the idea that if you make a work that has no clear ending, then you must play with the ending. Because if you don’t, you’re not highlighting the weird, lovely openness of abstraction. All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about.

Amy Sillman, 2018

I think I’m partly a feminist and partly just a discontent, a person with a political sense of anger and suspicion and curiosity. I try to look at the gaps and not overlook the work of people who’ve been buried because of sexism and racism. And I don’t buy into the cliché of what the artist is supposed to be doing and thinking. So I don’t hibernate in my studio, I don’t work in an ivory tower, and I would say that I think in a way that’s queer – in a very complex, non-binary, structurally ambivalent way.

Amy Sillman, 2018

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Lying Objects (House), 1992 Offset lithograph 9 1/4 x 14 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Charles Hayward and Betsy Senior, 2012.12

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laurie simmons

When I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I’m not going to say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

Laurie Simmons, 2014

You know, my subject has always been women. And I don’t want to sound like preposterously idealistic, but I would like in my lifetime, to experience a world where women, all kinds of women can connect and support each other.

Laurie Simmons, 2015

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Untitled (melancholy dame/ carmen jones), 2001 Gelatin silver prints, Plexiglas, vinyl lettering 22 3/8 x 39 1/4 inches (overall) Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.22a-b

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lorna simpson

Sometimes, in terms of representations of femininity and masculinity, what sometimes gets lost in a singular feminist perspective that does not consider the gyrations of gender bending. The construction of femininity is a construction, yes, but also it can be twisted and turned around in such a way that doesn’t necessarily mean it is pointing to the female body or male body in such a binary fashion. The culture is already there and has always been, but not as equal citizens. I think there is more progress to come.

Lorna Simpson, 2016

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Crop Circles, 2003 Mixed media on canvas 36 x 24 inches Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

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jaune quick-to-see smith

I have used political, social and environmental messages in my work for more than forty years and over time they have become more blatant, more prominent. Sometimes the reception is warm and welcoming, sometimes not so much. I had a board member of a prominent museum tell me that he liked my painting but not my messages. I thanked him for being so honest. Here’s what I’m thinking about that: if a silent painting hanging on a wall can incite or foment some annoyance, some response, some agitation, then I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, which is to get a message out there somewhere where it’s not supposed to be. I think that’s quite an accomplishment.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 2017

In the past I’ve used pictographic forms but I discovered that people associate my Indian heritage with the pictographic forms, and then they see me in the past, and they see me as kind of a cave painter or that I’m recreating the past in some way—which is how they want to view the Indian anyway, in this nostalgic way. That’s how they view Indian people in the movies, that we were, that we don’t exist anymore, that we’re only in the past. [Even] our Indian museums encourage this kind of thing: The Natural History Museum here in New York treats as if we’re dead, they don’t talk about the living tribes or the living people.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 1990

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Mind’s Eye, 2015 Watercolor, pencil on monoprint 11 1/2 x 8 inches Promised gift to the Tang Teaching Museum from Jack Shear

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kiki smith

Of course, we have a long way to go to achieve equality in most aspects of life. There are strides that have to be made, and we are all going to hell in a handbasket in relationship to larger issues of planetary disaster. All of us are implicated in that, and in perpetuating inequality.

That’s all of our department.

Kiki Smith, 2019

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Salt & Pepper, 2010 Screen print with collage and hand edition 30 1/8 x 22 1/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Exit Art, 2012.19.5e

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shinique smith

I am proud and grateful to have created a sustainable practice for myself and maintained a consistent market through disparities in institutional recognition and gallery representation for a woman of color, especially within the field of abstraction.

Since the beginning of my career I’ve built education and programming with kids and communities into all of my museum shows and projects.

Having completed a Master of Arts in Teaching prior to earning my MFA and worked with students from elementary to graduate levels, education and sharing my inspiration with other young people and people of color has always been a priority. I’d never thought of it as activism or as the subject of my work, but more like what’s required to build a legacy.

These efforts and ideas continue to inspire me, and I am quite proud that my art has provided inspiration to others.

Shinique Smith, 2020

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Shadow on the Wall, 1985 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Dona Nelson, 2020.12.2

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jenny snider

In 1970, I was invited by a new friend (Louise Fishman) to join a consciousness-raising group of women artists. We were four painters: Sarah Draney, Louise, Harmony Hammond, and me, as well as one sculptor: Patsy Norvell, and one writer/anthropologist: Elizabeth Weatherford. This group met for four years, once a week, to talk about our work and its relationship to our lives. Not surprisingly, the artists were all working abstractly, and all using the grid (remember, 1970!). Because of these meetings, I learned to draw from life—my own life—because I learned what my life really was.

Lessons Learned . . .

Political: Like other oppressed groups, women have been identified not only as culturally deprived and backward, but historically bankrupt. We must continue to be on guard and resist false stereotyping.

Aesthetic: Form and content are inseparable, and distinctions between abstraction and figuration are less useful than between narrative and sequence.

Jenny Snider, 2000

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And Always Searching For Beauty, 2001 Oil, acrylic, papier-mâché, herbs on linen 78 x 102 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips in honor of their daughter, Marjorie Phillips Elliott, Skidmore College, Class of 1980, 2001.10

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joan snyder

Woman-Planet/A Place Maybe the male artists of our generation didn’t have stories to tell. We had so many stories. And we had dramas we needed to enact. The men were the inheritors of Color Field, AE, Minimalism—we were not. We, perhaps, had not much to inherit. Not only were we reacting against the history of contemporary art in the late ’60s early ’70s, but we were also digging deeply in another direction, into ourselves. And in this spirit, we were forming groups: political groups, women’s conscious raising groups, and collectives so that we and other women from all over the world would have a forum, our own forum.

We (women) were, so it seemed, on a different track, maybe even on a different planet. Perhaps that’s why Linda Nochlin could not find great women artists when she went looking for them. Perhaps they were to be found, but on a different planet . . . on “womanplanet.” And so we decided, the collective unconscious being hard at work, to get together, to figure out ways to be heard, to show this strong and different work, to organize, to protest, and to continue speaking this new language, our own language.

Joan Snyder, 2009

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Artemisia II, 1985 Color woodcut with acrylic on paper (triptych) 20 1/4 x 108 3/4 inches Private collection, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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nancy spero

I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest. I see things a certain way, and as an artist I’m privileged in that arena to protest or say publicly what I’m thinking about. Maybe the strongest work I’ve done is because it was done with indignation. Considering myself as a feminist, I don’t want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art. In a convoluted way, I am protesting—protesting the usual way art is looked at, being shoved into a period or category.

Nancy Spero, Year unknown

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Beauty Exchange, 2019 Oil-based relief on paper on canvas, heat-treated aluminum, hair packaging, emboss paper, wire 48 x 60 inches Collection of Nixon Chustz

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kathia st. hilaire

My work stems from a religion of Africa and the African diaspora called Vodun which was the source of psychological liberation that enabled the Haitian Revolution. Vodun has been widely misunderstood by the world; it has been portrayed as primitive, its rich history and complexity ignored. Wanting to tell my own narrative of the consumption of beauty products and natural resources and how it relates to the Haitian diaspora led me to experiment with printmaking. Investing in materials that can look like multiple forms, like painting, printmaking, or textiles etcetera, interests me. Figuration has helped me affirm and memorialize controversial, historic, and political issues that deal with both marginalized and privileged communities of the neo-diaspora.

Kathia St. Hilaire, 2020

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Cargo Cults (Head Bundle), 2016 Archival pigment print 20 x 15 inches Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

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stephanie syjuco

The history of photography—and especially ethnographic photography— is fraught with questions of representation and agency. Who wields the power in creating images of other peoples, and who is relegated to being a “subject” of such photographs? Cargo Cults is a photographic series that revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture of colonialera Philippines via contemporary, fictional display. As a former American colony, the Philippines was an early photographic testing ground for notions of empire and military expansionism during the early part of the twentieth century, becoming a projection for fantasies of “Otherness” and aiding in the construction of American whiteness. In this restaged work, I position myself with mass-manufactured goods purchased from American shopping malls, which are restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterning and costume. Purchased on credit cards and returned for full refund after the photo shoots, the cheap garments hail from the distant lands of Forever21, H&M, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Target, The Gap, and more.

Pulling from earlier projects reworking “dazzle camouflage”—a World War I technique of painting battleships with graphic black and white patterns in order to confuse enemy aim—the disruptive outlines shift the viewer’s attention from foreground to background in an attempt to “find” the false subject. Black and white calibration charts encroach upon the pictures, and in some cases overlap and cover portions of the figure, as if insisting on their ability to “correct” the situation.

Stephanie Syjuco, 2020

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P. 242, 1998 Cibachrome print 18 3/4 x 14 7/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of a private collection, 2019.15.2.2

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sarah sze

Protest requires focus . . . If the Occupy movement could have focused around one moment or image—like John and Yoko in a bed—it would have helped that movement a lot. My work really reflects the sense, I think, that we have masses of information coming at us from sources we don’t know, and the speed of that makes the hierarchy of what to protest against very slippery all the time.

Sarah Sze, 2016

That’s the hardest thing about being an artist: being able to trust an action when it can be a completely absurd decision, to trust that the outcome might be quite fruitful. It might not be, and then you have to have the resilience to pick yourself up and try something else. You also have to have a way of cutting off the [internal] judging of what you’re doing, so that you can see results and respond to them. The work makes the work, so you have to keep making the work, even when it’s failing, and working through it so that you can make progress.

Sarah Sze, 2018

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Blue Silvergreen Wheel, 2007 Acrylic on wood on panel 42 x 36 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Michael O. Gold and Sirje Helder Gold in memory of their beloved son Maximilian Arnold Gold, 2020.22.1

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barbara takenaga

As an abstract painter, I like the open-ended aspect of reading an image.

It is just paint and form. The image is almost a thing or event or narrative; it’s a little elusive.

While I’m definitely a feminist, is the image? It is part of a body of work that I made over ten years, using the same radial symmetry, working from the center outward. In submerged ways, these paintings were celebratory elegies, a painting process mourning my mother’s death in a repetitive, labor intensive way. While she would not have called herself a feminist, my mother was a force, a mover, and a “doer” in the world.

Despite wanting to be a proper doctor’s wife in our little town in Nebraska, she was an adventurer at heart, a golfer, a gardener, and she loved to go fishing with my father. She wore jeans instead of shirtwaists and loved to pole vault as a kid. She was a raconteur, with many wild and often hilarious stories of growing up poor, living in a tiny house with nine siblings, one of a few Japanese American families, on a farm in the middle of the Great Plains. I recently found some drawings that my mother made as a ten-year-old—lovely little pencil works. I think Ceil had untapped artistic promise.

Barbara Takenaga, 2020

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Shrine I, 1995 Plexiglas, egg, string, stone 9 x 8 x 8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Toshiko Takaezu, 1996.51

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lenore tawney

But it was very controversial, what I said, and everybody got sore and angry and took sides, and I just said that we had to follow our own inner being.

Lenore Tawney, 1975

. . . as I was weaving, the warp began to hang in places looser than the woven part. I thought to myself, it won’t be any good. Then I thought, But I don’t have to show it to anybody; it’s just for myself. And I felt free! I did as I wanted. And then when I took it off the loom and threw it on the floor I felt that tiny click near the heart that meant: it was not bad. So I learned in that piece that I had freedom to do what I wanted.

I didn’t have to please anybody but myself.

Lenore Tawney, 1971

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Madame Mama Bush, 2012 Chromogenic print 48 x 60 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchased with generous funding from Nancy Herman Frehling '65, Leslie Cyphen Diamond '96, Pamela Kochen-Baroukh '82, and Ann Schapps Schaffer '62 and Melvyn S. Schaffer, 2016.30.1

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mickalene thomas

I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I’m black and a woman. You don’t necessarily have to claim that but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman.

Mickalene Thomas, 2015

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Advancing Impulses, 1997 Oil on vinyl 50 x 50 inches Courtesy of the Estate of Mildred Thompson and Galerie Lelong & Co. , New York

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mildred thompson

On certain levels, perhaps we [black Americans] might be able to identify with certain parts of certain African cultures. To copy symbols that one does not understand, to deliberately make use of a form that one does not know how to analyze or appreciate was for me the height of prostitution. I had spent long years trying to find out who I am and what my influences were and where they came from. It was perhaps because I had lived and studied with “whitey” that I had learned to appreciate my Blackness as well as how American I truly am. My experiences throughout Africa had made my knowledge of being an American more than clear. There are recordings in our genes that remember Africa. If they are strong enough and we are free of false denials, they will surface and appear without deliberation no matter what we do.

Mildred Thompson, 1987

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Works from the Tiny Pricks Project, 2018–ongoing Mixed media Dimensions vary Courtesy of Diana Weymar

left:Linda Stone Such a Nasty Woman 10 x 10 inches right:Teresa Delaney But I have to deal with…

12 x 11 inches

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tiny pricks project

Tiny Pricks Project is a public, international, textile-based protest project. About ninety percent of the participants and followers are women. Embroidery and domestic textiles are strongly associated with women and their work. The quest for justice and the ability to make this quest personal is, I think, something women have always done. Part of this project is about the freedom to express an opinion, but a deeper, more subtle part is about the way in which women gather around, communicate, offer compassion, and defy traditional expectations.

Diana Weymar, 2020

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In Memory of Their Feelings (Title taken from Susan Sontag who took it from Frank O’ Hara) Images of women in groups.

Soft warm toned, their shadows turning purple.

They face the camera plainly, adamant in their equality, 100 years ago.

I drift in and out of past, present and future women.

I am awoken to a reckoning.

Voting rights, were not granted at once to all non-male citizens.

For many in America it was even later into the 20th century.

Thousands of years into the larger evolutions of human civilization and hundreds of years into the existence of this nation.

This anniversary is not a single date, nor singularly celebrated amongst all.

What does that say about our current parties?

So much still to do.

I don’t do enough for the fight except exist, Eclipse I, 2008 Digital chromogenic print 19 3/8 x 15 1/2 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of the artist, 2010.9

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sara vanderbeek and dream of new appliances to relieve me of some of the burdens born by women now and then.

But the heavy one, the one in which we/she/they must always be the vessel, and the vestige of other’s wants, remains.

Images of women and men in high-cut leotards on the French Riviera.

37 years ago.

I dance on the beach with my daughter moving in and out of my long shadow.

I sing aloud only the lyrics I know.

“I’m still standing . . . looking like a true survivor . . .”

She sings instead “I can’t stand it . . .”

Perhaps then I am fighting in my own way, through her, and her limited patience for any demand upon her being.

I work to reimagine The Cult of Image Cult of Objects Cult of Motherhood I think of how my body houses all of these bodies and how it is worn weary by all its carrying

I am equally lifted by the history within me.

Sontag wrote in an early journal.

“I am my history.”

My image pictured within images of women.

Now. I see myself these days As a smaller image within my mother’s image.

She is in her wheelchair, Or in a memory of the kitchen in my childhood home, With its small tv on the counter and how she likes to say, “Life’s a Bitch.”

(I ache to see and touch her like I wish to speak to those women 100 years ago at the beginning of what we are now recognizing was a start to something ongoing and eternal.)

Meetings with students and friends, equally mediated.

My image within their images.

Their images within my image.

Collectively, we become.

A Continuum.

Sara VanDerBeek, 2020

Yet.

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Companion Species (Saddle), 2019 Reclaimed blanket, thread, embroidery floss, Czech beads 80 x 87 inches Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle

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marie watt As for the word FEMINISM—I didn’t understand feminism until I went to college. In all honesty, I found the movement a bit confusing. As a citizen of the Seneca Nation, I was raised with a matrilineal perspective: women in our community (and by extension, women in the entire Iroquois Confederacy) have always been responsible for passing on our clan lineage and tribal enrollment rights. We are also the custodians of the land. Historically, voting rights were the domain of Clan Mothers, who nominated a tribal leader or chief; however, a Western ballot-style voting system is commonplace these days.

My husband, Adam, jokes that the Seneca language is made up of commands. And part of the humor in that is that those commands are most often coming from our mothers, aunties, and grandmothers, who speak with great authority. For these reasons I believe I come from a long line of proto-feminists. In my house, indigenous feminisms lift up equity and honor the voices, the bodies, the cultural esteem, the intellect, the labor, the economic sovereignty, the safety, the health, the creativity, and the humanity of women and girls. These are human rights, not privileges. My husband is one of my favorite feminists. Feminism is not female-centric. Feminism takes a community.

My interest in the prefix PROTO- emanates from the term proto-feminism, which describes my relationship to feminism. Proto-, the prefix, recalls things that come before, like organisms, epochs, and relationships (ancestral, communal, cosmic). In Companion Species (Saddle), I think of “proto-, proto-, proto-” as a mnemonic device that recalls the past— in my case, indigenous matrilineal proto-feminisms—so that it can lead us into the present and future. A saddle provides support, but it’s also an encumbrance, a weight, and a responsibility. It takes a similar kind of effort to uphold and live the values of feminism, which are highly personal, but also very public. Embodying one’s feminisms looks different on each person, and will look different over time.

I find writing about feminism and feminisms difficult. It’s like a ball of string that I get tangled in. The word feminism is loaded and often misunderstood, and it frequently alienates people who could or should be allies. Feminism is so elastic, and putting words to paper feels so fixed.

Marie Watt, 2020

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Resurrection Story Without Patrons, 2017 Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift, spit-bite, dry-point 42 x 51 1/8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2019.27

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kara walker

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected . . . that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

Kara Walker, 2003

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Untitled, 1990 From The Kitchen Table Gelatin silver print 24 x 20 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, The Jack Shear Collection of Photography, 2015.1.133

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carrie mae weems

A woman stands in the thaw of winter, the beginning of spring, reflecting, considering, imagining; contemplating the past, and imagining the future.

With one step, she could be in the future in an instant, or in the past or in the moment, the now. But to get to now—to this moment—she needs to look back over the landscape of memory.

Carrie Mae Weems, 2020

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Lace Curtain Window, 1991 Custom French window with vinyl panes, brass hardware, lace curtains, latex paint 48 x 36 x 8 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, gift of Peter Norton, 2015.26.30

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millie wilson

In my work I have used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity informed by queer sexuality, femininity, race and class. I have used humor, parody and homage to point to stereotypes of difference. I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist as subject and citizen . . . I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, photographs and other inventions; as improvisational sites where the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge.

Millie Wilson, 2011

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In the Desert: Mooning, 2016 Collagraph on muslin from two plates, handprinted collage on muslin, inkjet collage on silk on canvas, wood 69 1/2 x 43 3/4 inches Tang Teaching Museum collection, purchase, 2017.8

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paula wilson

In 2007 I relocated from New York City to the high desert town of Carrizozo, New Mexico (population 900). That move, away from the entrenched power centers of the city, enabled me to slow down and reconsider how my art-making could be integrated into my everyday life.

Playfully teasing out the expectations for how art should look and feel, my work shape-shifts from paintings, prints, and sculptures to murals, clothing, and rugs. I reflect a worldview true to my experiences as a Black-Biracial woman living in the desert, celebrating an ecosexual identity with an attentiveness to the insects, plants, and animals around me. I find within feminisms’ an ever-shifting awareness, an invitation to see and make the world anew.

Paula Wilson, 2020

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The Four Virtues (Prudence), 2017 Archival inkjet pigment print on paper 44 x 34 inches Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

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saya woolfalk

I gravitate towards the utopian potentials of digital space (post race, post gender, post human etc.), but understand that people live in real bodies that experience real consequences based on how they are gendered, sexed, raced and classed. As I currently explore things like augmented and virtual reality, I constantly bring us back to actual bodies in space, real dancers that have physical manifestations not just phantoms that exist in digital space.

Saya Woolfalk, 2016

Although cultures do have important political utility, the idea that cultures develop in vacuums is false. Cultures really build on each other.

American culture is a serious hybrid—an agglomeration of all of the different immigrant groups and nationalities. It’s history of European colonialism, slavery, and Native American history made our culture what it is today.

Saya Woolfalk, 2017

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Howardena Pindell Pindell, Howardena. “50 Years of Art and Activism: An Interview with Howardena Pindell.” Interview by Osei Bonsu. Frieze, September 25, 2019. https://www.frieze. com/article/50-years-art-and-activism-interview-howardena-pindell Faith Ringgold Tan, Ken. “The Fantastic Life of Faith Ringgold.” Hyperallergic, January 1, 2019. https://hyperallergic.com/477794/ the-fantastic-life-of-faith-ringgold/ “Faith Ringgold Powerfully Resists Injustice with Optimism.” Elephant, May 27, 2020. https://elephant.art/faith-ringgold-painting-interview-race-gender-27052020/ Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Kedmey, Karen. “How Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Made History into Art.” Artsy, June 9, 2015.https://www.artsy.net/article/ artsy-editorial-how-aminah-brenda-lynn-robinson-mad e-history-into.

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