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Anonymous Was a Woman

Jae Ko | linn meyers | Joyce J. Scott | Renée Stout

DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

David and Carmen Kreeger were passionate and generous patrons of the arts in Washington, DC and beyond. They routinely opened their home to the public to share their collection and had the vision, and generosity, to establish The Kreeger Museum to share art and music with others.

I am pleased to honor the Kreeger legacy of supporting Washington-area artists with this exhibition, Anonymous Was a Woman: Jae Ko | linn meyers | Joyce J. Scott | Renée Stout, curated by Dr. Vesela Sretenović. A seasoned scholar and curator of modern and contemporary art, she previously served as Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. She is now an independent curator and the founder of the Nonalignedart platform.

This exhibition follows Anonymous Was a Woman: The First 25 Years organized by and presented at the New York University’s Grey Art Museum, April 1-July 19, 2025, and co-curated by Nancy Princenthal and Sretenović and focuses on recent work created by the four Washington-area grantees. It is an absolute honor to present this exhibition and celebrate these artists; we are thrilled to welcome Ko, meyers, Scott, and Stout back to our gallery spaces and commemorate their work as well as the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant program.

My sincere and heartfelt thanks to Susan Unterberg for creating and funding this essential grant program, to Vesela Sretenović for conceiving and curating this outstanding exhibition, and to Jae Ko, linn meyers, Joyce J. Scott, and Renée Stout for their participation in this exhibition and for sharing their beautiful work with us.

Thank you to Bruce and Leslie Forrest, the Marilyn Lichtman Fund, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for their generous support in presenting this exhibition.

Finally, thank you to the amazing Kreeger team for its unflagging commitment and enthusiasm, and to my Board of Trustees for their support.

The Kreeger Museum

Helen Chason Director

CURATOR’S ESSAY

Anonymous Was a Woman: Jae Ko | linn meyers | Joyce J. Scott | Renée Stout is a sequel to a comprehensive group show, Anonymous Was a Woman: The First 25 Years. Organized and recently presented by New York University’s Grey Art Museum (April—July 2025), the Grey exhibition was co-curated by Nancy Princenthal and me.

Celebratory in nature, the Grey exhibition marked the first quarter-century of the Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW) grant program, established in 1996 by visionary philanthropist and artist Susan Unterberg. The program is dedicated to supporting mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Its name refers to a phrase in Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, which underscores the challenges that creative women have historically faced in a male-dominated society.

The Grey exhibition featured 41 works by 25 artists who received the award between 1996 and 2020, shedding light on the conceptual and visual development of art made by women artists during those years. By contrast, The Kreeger Museum exhibition concentrates exclusively on four AWAW recipients who reside and work in the Washington, DC metropolitan area: Jae Ko (AWAW 2012), linn meyers (AWAW 2023), Joyce J. Scott (AWAW 1997), and Renée Stout (AWAW 1999).

While the Grey showcased works created around the time of each artist’s award, the Kreeger spotlights the most recent work of its participating artists, picking up where the Grey show left off in 2020. Moreover, whereas the Grey exhibit offered a broader overview of artistic production by women-artists in the first 25 years of the award, the Kreeger exhibit takes a more deliberate and attentive approach, offering an in-depth look at new works by Ko, meyers, Scott, and Stout.

Anonymous Was a Woman: Jae Ko | linn meyers | Joyce J. Scott | Renée Stout not only highlights artists from the DMV area—aligning with the Museum’s mission—but also expands the reach of the AWAW program beyond New York City, further advancing its goal of supporting and amplifying the creative work of women artists. I hope this focused and modest-in-scope initiative paves the way for future curatorial projects that offer new perspectives on the presentation and interpretation of art by women.

the play of light and shadow. Yet, over the years, Ko’s practice has evolved in terms of material, texture, and color. The Rhombus series presented at the Kreeger marks a significant departure for her. While her exploration of the transformative power of paper continues, the impression and energy of these rhomboidshaped works feel distinctly different.

Composed of rerolled paper tightened diagonally within a rectangular frame, these rhomboid compositions appear dense. Yet, through a carefully chosen palette of soft tones, they become weightless, almost airy. The Rhombuses sway gently, reminiscent of a soft breeze. Their palette—a mélange of blues, yellows, and greens—is entirely new, evoking impressions of changing skies, rolling hills and vast grasslands.

Jae Ko’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, Asia, and Europe, including at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX, and Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and Grounds for Sculpture. Among her commissioned work is a major piece at Meta’s (Facebook) Washington, DC headquarters. Ko has received numerous awards including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Anonymous Was a Woman,

Installation image of Jae Ko’s Rhombus series.

and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Ko has received multiple awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Presently, she divides her time between Washington, DC, and Piney Point, Maryland, a small community on the Chesapeake Bay.

linn meyers (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in DC, NYC, and LA)

The moon steals the sun’s life-affirming light and transforms it, revealing beauty we might not otherwise see—to me, that is very similar to the work that artists are doing.

linn meyers is best known for her intricate paintings, drawings, and wall installations that explore infinite possibilities of mark-making. Made up of meticulously hand-drawn lines and dots, meyers’ works generate mesmerizing yet ambiguous visual arrangements. Suggestive of topographical maps, cosmological charts, and psychological landscapes, meyers’ art elicits a tension between chaos and order, logic and unpredictability. The density of her forms and the complex visual rhythm underscore the layered meanings embedded in the work, inviting viewers to immerse themselves fully in its physical and temporal dimensions.

—linn meyers

Installation image of linn meyers’ work.

meyers’ most recent paintings on display here–The Moon is a Thief and Law of the Meander—speak of precarious conditions of human existence. As the artist explains, the title The Moon is a Thief is a slight modification of a quote from Shakespeare: “The moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun’ (Timon of Athens).” The phrase reflects the idea of the moon “stealing” its light from the sun. In contrast, Law of the Meander is drawn from Le Corbusier, evoking the concept that wandering—seemingly aimless—ultimately leads you to where you are meant to be. Unstretched and unframed, both paintings are swirling compositions in flux. Although loosely structured around a grid, they intentionally resist its constancy, instead conveying a sense of instability that mirrors the uncertainty of our present moment. With creased surfaces that bear the wear and tear of time, they resemble old folding maps—suggesting the roadways of the past while pointing to the ever-shifting landscapes we now inhabit. In this way, the works exist between structure and displacement, memory and amnesia. Their flowing, portable nature reflects the complexities of contemporary life shaped by unpredictable external forces and subjected to constant change and insecurity.

meyers’ seven Untitled (Musical Score Drawings) are also recent works. These pieces grew out of collaboration with composer Nicky Sohn and choreographer Alysa Pires, artists with whom meyers has been collaborating on a new BalletCollective production premiering in late October in New York City. These small works on paper are made on top of a musical score written by Sohn. For meyers, they represent “warmups” for her work that will finalize the collaboration–a limited edition print entitled The Magnitude of Verticality that will be released on the occasion of the Ballet premiere. Improvisational and fluid, the works are arranged in a rhythmic cadence that echoes movement and flux.

meyers’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Hirshhorn Museum, The National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian American Museum, and the Katzen Arts Center at American University all in Washington DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan, and the British Museum, London, among many other prestigious venues. meyers is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, several DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowship awards, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. meyers currently divides her time between Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and New York.

Installation image of linn meyers’ Untitled (Musical Score Drawings)

Joyce J. Scott (b. Baltimore, MD, lives and works in Baltimore, MD)

While I don’t have the ability to end violence, racism, and sexism, my art can encourage people to look and think… Power of art as a wearable spirit is unsurmountable… the power is to make yourself accessible to others.

—Joyce J. Scott

Joyce J. Scott works across media. She is a weaver, sculptor, printmaker, performance artist, and educator. The artist is best known for her beaded and blown glass sculptures and wearable art, including jewelry, which resist a traditional separation of arts and crafts. Scott’s art is shaped by her personal views and beliefs about lived experiences—especially as they relate to American culture, its history, and her own African American heritage and community. Moreover, her work directly confronts issues of racism, sexism, domestic violence, injustice, and ecological crisis. Yet, the artist addresses these themes with exceptional craftsmanship, grace, and humor. Weaving beauty and spirituality is essential to her practice as it challenges common stereotypes about social hierarchies and reveals deeper discontents of humanity at large.

Installation image of Joyce J. Scott’s Joyce’s Passport

Art, PA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, Toledo Museum of Art, OH, and Seattle Art Museum, among others. She is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants, and awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, American Craft Council, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Smithsonian Visionary Artist Award, and Moore College Visionary Woman Award. Scott was named a MacArthur fellow in 2016.

When I make art, I have a need to process my life’s experiences in a way that makes them tangible…. Being a ‘mischif’ maker is being a necessary troublemaker.

—Renée

Although initially trained as a painter, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and moving to Washington, DC, in the mid-1980s, Renée Stout began to experiment with various media and techniques, including drawing, sculpture, and photography. Over time, she started incorporating found

Renée Stout (b. Junction City, KS; lives and works in Washington, DC)

Stout

Installation image of Renée Stout’s work.

objects and vintage photographs to create complex mixed-media assemblages and installations that reference ancient African traditions and symbolism, as well as contemporary socio-political events and everyday life in her DC neighborhood.

Drawn to the spiritual aspects of life, yet also a poignant critic of current ideologies and political realities, Stout approaches her art practice with vivid imagination, crafting make-believe stories infused with magic and fantasy. A visual storyteller at heart, her work is rooted in the vernacular, yet infused with magic and fantasy. Fascinated by fortune tellers and the healing power of Voodoo priests—traditions that trace their lineage from Africa through American slavery to the present—she creates art, particularly sculptural pieces, that often possess talismanic qualities. These works evoke an uncanny power and a sense of worship, aiming to provoke reflection on our own behaviors and belief systems.

In the Kreeger project, Mischif Maker, Stout presents a group of mixed-media paintings and sculptures, creating another pictorial narrative. Remnant of African diasporic histories, yet enhanced with personal symbolism and dark humor, the artist produces work that addresses both the absurdities of today’s socio-political climate and the realm of fantasy. The painting, The Ugly Truth, conveys themes of malice, damage, disruption, and terror, echoing demises of contemporary society. In contrast, other paintings—I Trust My Third Eye, Come Back Gil (Scott Heron), and The Mischif Maker—along with sculptures—Healing Staff, Harriet Tubman’s Divining Rod, and The Guardian—appear as sacred relics or objects of reverence. They are imbued with empowerment, resistance, and spiritual significance. Together, these works form an unsettling, yet compelling, “assemblage-conversation” that critiques the present state of affairs while offering an exit path to healing and spiritual solace where hopes and desires for well-being feel within reach.

Stout’s work has recently been exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX, and collaboratively at the African American Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Nasher Museum of Art and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, CA, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, Saint Louis Museum of Art, MS, Detroit Institute of Arts, MI, Nelson-

Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MI, and National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, among others. Scott was named a MacArthur fellow in 2016.

Dr. Vesela Sretenović Guest Curator

Installation image of Renée Stout’s work.

Jae Ko

Rhombus #1, 2025

rolled paper and pigmented ink

42 x 43 x 4 in.

Courtesy of the Artist and Opera Gallery Paris

Rhombus #2, 2025 rolled paper and pigmented ink 42 x 43 x 4 in.

Courtesy of the Artist and Opera Gallery Paris

Jae Ko

Jae

Rhombus #3, 2025

rolled paper and pigmented ink

42 x 43 x 4 in.

Courtesy of the Artist and Opera Gallery Paris

Jae Ko

Untitled, 2024

rolled paper and pigmented ink

3 pieces, 50 x 17.5 x 4 in. each, in wooden frames

Courtesy of the Artist

linn meyers

Law of the Meander, 2025 acrylic ink and acrylic gouache on linen

83 x 66.5 in.

Courtesy of the Artist

linn meyers

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #1), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in. each

Courtesy of the Artist

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #2), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in.

Courtesy of the Artist

linn meyers

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #3), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in. each

Courtesy of the Artist

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #4), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in. each Courtesy of the Artist

linn meyers

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #5), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in. each

Courtesy of the Artist

linn meyers

Untitled (Musical Score Drawing #7), 2024 ink and colored pencil on musical score by Nicky Sohn 17 x 11 in. each

Courtesy of the Artist