Issuu

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012 646.998.3727 ericfirestonegallery.com

Women Across America 1945–1979 May 12 – July 31, 2026

Eric Firestone Press 2026

Panel Discussion between Katy Siegel, Melissa Rachleff, and Robert Mattison Introduction by Jennifer Samet

The exhibition Women Across America poses a question: What would the history of postwar American art look like if it was told through the work of women artists? This was addressed during a June 2026 panel discussion at the gallery with Katy Siegel, Melissa Rachleff, and Robert Mattison. With time and hindsight, we are freer to analyze how identity, feminism, and subject matter play a role in abstraction. At the time, the dominant critical methodology was focused on formal qualities, scale, singularity, and signature style. However, the exhibition demonstrates variety, inventive material approaches, reflections on personal experience, and community interaction.

The discussion focused on the work of three artists

in the exhibition: Grace Hartigan, Martha Edelheit, and

Helen Frankenthaler. However, the three major themes addressed—experimentation, subject matter, and

reception—provide a framework for considering all 26 artists on view. For example, material experimentation characterizes the work of Jeanne Reynal, Sari Dienes, and Adaline Kent. Subject matter, and allusions to

nature, are found in the work of Elaine de Kooning,

Jane Freilicher, Shirley Gorelick, and Edith Schloss.

Poetic or spiritual symbolism defines the abstractions of Elise Asher, Perle Fine, Ida Kohlmeyer, and Jeanne

Miles. Links between movement, music, mark-making and color are fundamental to Nina Yankowitz, Pat

Passlof, and Alma Thomas. Connections to identity can be located in the work of Lee Krasner and Miriam Schapiro.

The exhibition presents an expansive way of con-

sidering abstraction in this period, with artists who are well known, and also those whose work has not been fully considered. The ways Mattison, Rachleff, and

Siegel approach their consideration of Frankenthaler, Edelheit, and Hartigan also expands our understandopposite

Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s 1957 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Photograph by Burt Glinn © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos.

ing of the very definition of abstraction. They syn-

thesize it with experience, subject matter, and studio process, presenting the work as inextricably woven into life’s fabric.

Helen Frankenthaler at her retrospective, Kongresshalle Berlin, October 1969. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. Photograph courtesy United States Information Service, U.S. Mission, Berlin. Photographer unknown.

Jennifer Samet: Bob, you’ve described your friend-

ship with Grace Hartigan as the longest artist rela-

Raw for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and also

impacted your work as a curator and historian of

projects examine the legacy of Helen Frankenthaler on

tionship you’ve had. Would you discuss how this has her work?

Robert Mattison: I knew Grace Hartigan for 26 years.

I was 29 and she was 60 when we met. I had just

edited the publication “The heroine Paint.” Both

contemporary artists. How did you initially respond to Helen Frankenthaler’s work?

Katy Siegel: I wrote my dissertation on Abstract

joined the faculty at Lafayette College, and she was

Expressionism, but I wasn’t interested in Helen

program at Maryland Institute College of Art. The

about Willem de Kooning, the relationships he created

teaching at the LeRoy Hoffberger School of Painting painter Ed Kerns who had studied with Grace at the

Hoffberger program suggested that I might curate an

exhibition on Hartigan. I was familiar with her Abstract Expressionist painting, but what struck me was the

breadth of her work, the longevity of her career, her continuous reinvention, and varied techniques. I

curated the first show in 1983 and would go on to

write the first monograph on her career and do four-

teen other projects with her.

JS: Katy, in 2015 you curated the exhibition Pretty

Frankenthaler’s work at that point. I was thinking

between his body and materiality, so I was interested in Joan Mitchell, Jack Whitten, and Mark Bradford— artists coming out of the gestural tradition engaged with both the natural and social worlds. I was asked to write about Frankenthaler years later by John Elderfield and Gagosian Gallery.

I decided to investigate Frankenthaler through the

lens of contemporary artists, including Laura Owens

and Mary Weatherford. I came to see Frankenthaler’s

Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1954. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

work in a different way through their eyes. I began

but she was not celebrated. John Elderfield, decades

way she worked with an expansive understanding of

and his scholarship made the case for her as a se-

to understand the seriousness of it, in terms of the

the medium of paint. I also became interested in the

idea of the image of the woman artist. My initial essay turned into the book “The heroine Paint” and let me explore those issues.

later, was a great champion of Color Field painting,

rious artist. However, he framed her within a limited

world of painting, so it was a deepening rather than a reconsideration.

After her death in 2011, as so often happens,

Frankenthaler is different from most of the artists in

people are freer to think and talk about an artist and

except relative to her husband Robert Motherwell. She

might not have recognized or condoned. The project

this exhibition, in that she was not under-recognized, had serious recognition right out the gate—she was the youngest artist in the Ninth Street show. The

language of the critics was colored by sexism, which must have been unbearable, but she was selling

and showing and being taken seriously from the

very beginning. She had a long period reigning with Motherwell as an Upper East Side power couple.

However, she was not influential for younger wom-

en and feminists the same way that Joan Mitchell or

Alice Neel were. She was canonized and had a market,

the importance of her work in a way that she might or I did in 2015 put her in the context of younger painters, queer painters, feminists, and artists who were involved with performance and other media.

JS: Melissa, you curated the landmark exhibition

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 at New York University’s Grey Art

Gallery, and wrote the accompanying book. How do

the artist-run galleries fit into Martha Edelheit’s early artist life and work?

Announcement for Martha Edelheit’s solo exhibition at Judson Gallery, April 14–May 5, 1961.

Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Ladder, 1965, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 ✕ 90 1/2 in.

Melissa Rachleff: Martie was involved in two artist-run

strates a commitment to painting. But, at this time,

Street artist cooperative galleries were morphing

artists, who included Lucas Samaras, Robert Whitman,

Gallery—which emerged as the first wave of 10th

into something else. The Reuben Gallery was started by Allan Kaprow, who gathered a group of artists

and opened the space at 61 Fourth Avenue. Judson Gallery was started by one of the pastors at the

Judson Church, Bud Scott. Scott then realized it would be better for artists to run the gallery, and enlisted

Claes Oldenburg. There was an interchange between the Reuben Gallery and Judson. Martie’s first exhibi-

tion was at the Reuben in May and June of 1960, and then she had a second show at Judson in April and May of 1961.

This exhibition, Women Across America, demon-

galleries—the Reuben Gallery and the Judson

the late 1950s and early 1960s, Martie’s circle of

Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and George Brecht, were not

quite interested in the rectangle. They wanted to make something in between sculpture or painting. They

were thinking through concepts of space. They were inventing another way to confront material. Martie’s

experimentation sets up an interesting conversation within this exhibition.

JS: How was Martie a part of this rule breaking down-

town scene? How does materiality and the incorporation of non-traditional artifacts and collage materials

John William Waterhouse, I am Half-Sick of Shadows, said The Lady of Shalott, 1915, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 ✕ 29 in. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of Mrs. Philip B. Jackson, 1971, 71/18.

Martha Edelheit, Shy Lady of Shalott, 1958–59, oil, wire, sheet metal, canvas, and wood, 48 ✕ 38 in.

play a role in her expression in the two works on view:

large figurative paintings of the mid-to-late 1960s, she

(1958–59)?

Within a complex, multi-figure composition, you see a

Caged Language (1959), and the Shy Lady of Shalott

MR: The format of Caged Language suggests a

scroll, and includes Hebrew and Yiddish. It is very

incorporated herself, but not as the central subject.

subtle representation of the artist working, signing a painting, or her studio tools.

Unlike some of her other friends, Martie didn’t go to

much located in a specific time in New York City, with

art school. She went to the University of Chicago, after

1950s, many Jewish artists, including her contempo-

her work out after a few years of working demon-

collaged newsprint from the Daily Forward. In the late raries, were mining language and their family’s culture in their work.

Shy Lady of Shalott suggests a different narrative;

there is a literary reference. It leads to subject matter that Martie would explore over the next decade, the body as self and as psycho-social referent. In her

the High School of Music and Art in New York. Putting strates a willingness to be vulnerable. Going back to

Shy Lady, in the Arthurian myth of the Lady of Shalott in Alfred Tennyson’s poem, the lady was cloistered away from society weaving, working on something

that no one sees, like an artist in a studio. If she were to leave the tower, something tragic would happen.

Grace Hartigan and Willem de Kooning, 1953. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

But, in this case, Martie puts her work out there for

have a studio in the city, and she would support him

but you see the beginning of a figure, and that figure

That lasted for about a year with Grace until she

conversation. The painting is conceptually abstract, could be a self-portrait, someone stepping up.

JS: Bob, can you speak about how Grace Hartigan

jettisoned him and got her own studio on Essex and Hester Street.

In New York, she started to go to galleries, and

shifted between abstraction and representation, or as

she went to the Jackson Pollock exhibition at Betty

an idea of the impure?

were shown. She said, “I couldn’t understand them,

it was discussed in that time, from pure abstraction to

RM: Grace was born in New Jersey and grew up with

no background in art. She married in high school and traveled west with a husband and a young child. Her

young husband was sent to the military. He said, “I’m not sure I’ll be back. So, why don’t you take some art lessons?” She did. She said, “I drew and I cried.”

She made her way back to New York and began

taking classes with the Newark artist Isaac Lane Muse. They became a couple, and his idea was that he would

by having a drafting job in Newark, New Jersey.

Parsons in 1948, where his earliest drip paintings

and they were just tremendous.” She found out that Pollock was in the Hamptons, hitchhiked out there, and spent four or five days with Pollock looking at

these paintings. Then she asked him, “After this, who should I pay attention to?” Pollock said, “Everyone’s shit, except for me and de Kooning.” So she met Bill de Kooning.

She began to generate her own work, in which

she quickly absorbed Abstract Expressionist modes of gestural painting. By the early 1950s, she had

Grace Hartigan, East Side Sunday, 1956, oil on canvas, 80 × 82 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of James I. Merrill, 56.180. © Estate of Grace Hartigan. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room and the Garden, 1934–35, oil on canvas, 50 × 53 1/4 in. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift © 2026 Pierre Bonnard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

decided that she had stolen the style from other art-

KS: When I was in school, the history of post-war

like Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giotto.

way of looking formed a canon that celebrated monu-

ists. So her solution was to paint from the old masters, In this way, her work hovered between recognizable

imagery and abstraction. With Grace, it was never one or the other. Abstraction has sources in life, and life is always there.

This led to her paintings of downtown city life.

Irving Sandler once said that to walk through the

Lower East Side with Grace was like walking through ancient Byzantium. She knew the vendors, the meat purveyors, and the clothing shops. Her abstraction came from synthesizing these sources, and the

improvisational paint work came from her emotional response to them.

artists was taught as art since Jackson Pollock. That

mental scale and an attitude of muscular masculinity. I began thinking about how Frankenthaler had

an equally important material breakthrough.

What would the history look like if you started with

her? It is about allowing the material a certain amount of freedom to do what it wanted to do, what it could do. Frankenthaler saw her medium as her body,

plus the raw canvas, plus the flowing paint. It refutes Clement Greenberg’s reading of color field painting, which is disembodied. It allowed for a bodily

presence that loosened control, and for frankly feminine-coded colors.

Melissa referred to the common thread between

JS: Katy, can you address Frankenthaler’s very signif-

many members of the “second generation.” It is the

of the possibilities that it opened to other artists?

champion of this, and he considered subject matter

icant invention of the soak-stain technique, and some

reference to subject matter. Frank O’Hara was the

their great contribution. He meant two things. The first

this community of artists and writers. She rejected

frequent reference to landscape, the horizon, sky,

me use that term in relation to her. At one point,

was nature as subject. We see that in Frankenthaler’s

land, and water, through a combination of drawing and staining. And then he also thought that these younger artists allowed for their own subjectivity, their own

the idea of a “woman artist,” and she would not let

she was offered a show at the women’s museum in Washington, DC and turned it down.

At the same time, she increasingly recognized and

perceptions and responses.

spoke about this issue. She thought about how she

JS: Melissa, you mentioned how in just a few years

whole life was conditioned by being a woman in the

after making the work that we have on view, Martie

would begin to paint figuratively, first from her imagi-

didn’t want to be seen as a woman artist, but how her art world.

So, the last show I curated of her work in 2023

nation and then working from models, What elements

was called Great Women. It examined Grace’s career

view this stylistic shift?

abstract work. Joan of Arc was a recurring subject.

do you see as constants in her work, or how do you

MR: Maybe this goes to the influence of Pierre

Bonnard on New York-based artists during the 1950s.

After he died in 1947, MoMA presented a monumental retrospective and catalogue the following year. Both became influential to many artists, like Larry Rivers,

who was close to the artists showing at the Reuben and the Judson galleries. Bonnard’s work takes on

through paintings of women. Pallas Athena is a very

Then there is the heroic Saint George and the Dragon. In her early career, Grace had two exhibitions

where she used the pseudonym George, as homages to George Sand and George Eliot. The person who convinced her to return to using the name Grace

was Dorothy Miller, the most powerful woman curator in New York.

Great women are an underlying theme in her

quotidian life, like his wife, the bath, their meals.

work, from queens and empresses, to repainting

reality, but also has a foot in fantasy. These qualities

to make women heroes in my art, but most of the

Martie’s work has a foot in a similar representative

are often held together by an erotic imagining com-

bined with a classical approach to the figure. Another constant: there is a voluptuousness in Martie’s use

the Renaissance. At one point she said, “Bob, I seem men I depict are headless. I wonder if there’s anything to that.”

I think about the fluidity of her painting, her will-

of material. The paint is squishy; it suggests giving

ingness to reinvent herself over and over again, from

“junk” abstractions, this same attitude—though pared

paint. This openness to all sorts of possibilities was

herself permission to play and to be messy. From the down—is translated into figuration.

JS: Bob, how did your responses to Grace Hartigan,

thick impasto painting, to dripped rills and runs of

essential to her deep sense of being a creative woman in this world. ◼

and your curatorial choices, evolve over the time you worked with her?

RM: My last show considered Grace’s particular idea

of feminism and gender. She was very close to the gay community and inspired by the work that came from

Edited by Jennifer Samet

Helen Frankenthaler working in her East 83rd Street and Third Avenue studio, New York, 1964. Photograph by Alexander Liberman. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles © J. Paul Getty Trust.

The Exhibition

1 Lee Krasner Present Conditional, 1976 collage on canvas 72 ✕ 108 in.

2 Ida Kohlmeyer Suspended, 1968 mixed media on canvas 57 1/4 ✕ 69 in.

3 Nina Yankowitz Scanning Punctuations, 1975 acrylic on canvas 48 ✕ 121 in.

4 Pat Passlof Character for Sky, 1973 oil on canvas 72 ✕ 52 in. (detail follows)

5 Pat Passlof Untitled, 1959 oil on paper mounted on canvas 24 ✕ 18 in.

6 Pat Passlof Untitled, 1960 oil on paper mounted on canvas 24 ✕ 18 in.

7 Grace Hartigan Donna, 1951 oil on board in artists frame 18 1/2 ✕ 22 3/4 in. Private Collection (detail opposite)

8 Grace Hartigan Oranges, 1953 oil on paper mounted on printed book 11 ✕ 8 in.

9 Elise Asher For My Daughter on Her Thirteenth Birthday, 1960–62 oil on canvas 58 ✕ 34 in. (detail opposite)

10 Elise Asher Untitled, 1958 oil on paper 14 ✕ 20 in.

11 Elise Asher Exodus, 1958 oil on canvas 58 ✕ 70 in.

12 Mary Abbott Untitled, 1955 ink and collage on paper 13 ✕ 17 in.

13 Mary Abbott Untitled, c. 1951 oil on canvas 24 1/4 ✕ 45 in.

14 Elaine de Kooning Basketball #40, 1977 oil on canvas 84 ✕ 66 in.

15 Perle Fine Rigid and Biomorphic No. 3, 1945 oil on canvas 38 ✕ 63 in. Private Collection

16 Adaline Kent Luna, 1952 cement with pebble and shell inclusions 9 1/2 ✕ 12 1/2 ✕ 5 1/2 in.

17 Adaline Kent No. 3, 1953 ink and gouache on paper 63 ✕ 30 in.

18 Adaline Kent Lost Things, 1946 tempera on incised Hydrocal 11 1/2 ✕ 17 in. (detail opposite)

19 Hedda Sterne Untitled, 1947 oil on canvas 40 ✕ 30 in.

20 Jeanne Miles Untitled, 1956 mixed media on canvas 9 ✕ 11 in.

opposite 21 Jeanne Miles #2, 1952 oil on canvas 17 ✕ 12 1/4 in.

22 Helen Frankenthaler Highland Road, 1969 acrylic on canvas 40 1/2 ✕ 93 1/4 in. Private Collection (detail opposite)

23 Helen Frankenthaler Untitled, 1969 acrylic on canvas 12 1/2 ✕ 9 in. Private Collection

24 Helen Frankenthaler Thanksgiving Day, 1973 glazed stoneware 13 1/2 ✕ 17 1/2 in.

25 Helen Frankenthaler Night Brook, 1974 acrylic on canvas 32 ✕ 139 in. (detail follows)

26 Jeanne Reynal Young Woman, 1970 mosaic tesserae, concrete, and steel 82 ✕ 5 ✕ 10 in.

27 Jeanne Reynal Woman, 1970 mosaic tesserae, concrete, and steel 71 ✕ 8 ✕ 6 in.

28 Jeanne Reynal Untitled, 1966 smalti and Japanese shell on pigmented cement 40 ✕ 40 ✕ 3 in. (detail follows)

29 Alma Thomas Untitled, c. 1971 gouache on paper 16 ✕ 16 3/4 in. Private Collection

30 Jane Freilicher Aurora, 1959 oil on linen 50 ✕ 63 in. Private Collection (detail opposite)

31 Miriam Schapiro Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, 1954 oil on canvas 60 ✕ 50 in.

32 Miriam Schapiro Mother & Child, 1959 oil on canvas 59 ✕ 49 in.

33 Edith Schloss Pink Zinnias and Wavy Sea, 1969 oil on canvas 11 3/4 ✕ 21 in.

34 Betty Parsons Summer Sun, 1957 oil on canvas 26 ✕ 30 1/2 in.

35 Martha Edelheit Shy Lady of Shalott, 1958–59 oil, wire, sheet metal, canvas, and wood 48 ✕ 38 in.

36 Martha Edelheit Caged Language, 1959 oil, wire, sheet metal, canvas, and wood 46 ✕ 72 in. (detail follows)

37 Zoe Longfield Untitled, c. 1949 oil on canvas 25 3/4 ✕ 33 3/4 in.

opposite 38 Beatrice Mandelman Untitled (Abstraction with Pale Tones) 50-P75, c. 1950s casein on masonite with gold enamel 48 ✕ 30 in.

39 Ellen Key-Oberg Bird Form, 1953 glazed terracotta 23 1/2 ✕ 15 ✕ 7 in.

40 Shirley Gorelick House Plant, c. 1960–61 oil on canvas 46 ✕ 40 in.

41 Janice Biala Untitled (Vue de la ville: Paris (65 Bd de Clichy), c. 1949 oil on canvas 13 ✕ 18 in.

opposite 42 Janice Biala The Indian Vase (For Duncan and Lily), 1947 oil on canvas 27 ✕ 20 in.

43 Sari Dienes Psychedelic, 1950 paint on plaster 15 1/2 ✕ 17 1/4 in. (detail opposite)

Artist Bios

Mary Abbott (b. New York, NY, 1921; d. Southampton, NY, 2019) was

a notable woman of Abstract Expressionism, celebrated for her bold

exploration of color and form. Beginning in 1938, Abbott studied with

George Grosz at the Art Students League. After taking summer courses at the Corcoran Museum School of Art in Washington, DC, she returned to New York and rented a studio on Tenth Street. She enrolled in the

experimental Subjects of the Artist School, frequented the Cedar Tavern, and became one of the few women invited to join The Club, where she

engaged in conversations about art and philosophy with her peers. Her

boldly colored work maintained a connection to Haiti, the Virgin Islands,

and Southampton, three locales where she spent significant time. Using Mary Abbott in her Southampton studio, c. 1951. Photograph by Tom Clyde. Courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery.

diverse mediums including oil, oil stick, charcoal, gouache, pastel, collage, and sand, her works pulse with a sense of the sublime, showcasing a reverence for the natural world as well as rigorous abstraction. In the 1950s, Abbott frequently showed at Kootz, Tibor de Nagy, Tanager, and Stable

Gallery, participating in Stable Annuals in 1954, 1955, and 1957. Abbott parsed her own work as source material for new works and continually

developed her own modes of creative expression throughout her oeuvre and into the early 2000s.

Elise Asher (b. Chicago, IL, 1912; d. New York, NY, 2004) was a painter

and poet whose integration of poetry into her work represents a meaningful contribution to New York School painting. She understood her

self-described lyrical abstractionism of the 1950s and 1960s to be an

extension of her poetry, a form of communicating her writing in a more

total way. Asher, who was born in Chicago, grew up surrounded by writers. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later graduated from the

Simmons School of Social Work in Boston, MA. Following her graduation, Asher settled into her first marriage in Rochester, NY, but felt stifled by

suburban life. In 1947, she and her young daughter came to Greenwich Elise Asher, Spring 1966. Photograph by Hans Namuth. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

100

Village in New York City. Using her daughter’s poster paints, Asher began making Miro-esque works on shirt boards and drawing paper. Her early

abstractions feature swathes of color, like moody clouds or vegetation, and line work reminiscent of calligraphy. In 1960, she began integrating

the text of poems, often her own writings, into her compositions. These paintings are suggestive, abstract, and layered rather than literal and

legible. Asher began writing poetry in her 20s, later submitting to liter-

ary journals and eventually publishing three anthologies. Her paintings

also draw from the works of her husband, Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, as well as W. B. Yeats, John Keats, and William Blake. In the 1950s she spent summers in Provincetown, where her neighbor was the painter

and celebrated teacher Hans Hofmann. Asher was an original member

of the legendary artist-run space, the Tanager Gallery, which positioned

itself as an alternative to the mainstream uptown galleries. Rejecting the

dogma of Abstract Expressionism, Asher seamlessly merged her poetic and painterly practices, introducing text into canvas at a moment when

artists in other circles were experimenting with text in Neo-Dada, Pop, and Conceptualist practices.

Janice Biala (b. Biala, Poland, 1903; d. Paris, France, 2000) was an

American painter whose career bridged European Modernism and the

New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Her work is often a gestural reinterpretation of classical themes such as landscape, still-life, and

portraiture, animated with color and textured collage. Biala, who was born Janice Tworkov and made the name of her birthplace her own, immigrat-

ed from a Russian-occupied Poland to a Jewish tenement house on New York’s Lower East Side in 1913. She and her brother, Jack Tworkov, lived in Greenwich Village and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League and the School of the National Academy of Design. By late 1920, Biala was at the forefront of the fledgling art colonies of Provincetown, MA Janice Biala in her studio, 1956. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. Photo © Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

and Woodstock, NY. During a trip to Paris in 1930, Biala met and fell in

love with the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, who introduced her to

the artists of his circle including Constantin Brâncuși, Henri Matisse, and

Pablo Picasso, among others. Upon Ford’s death in 1939, she fled Europe under the rise of fascism. In 1940, she met Daniel “Alain” Brustlein, a

noted illustrator for The New Yorker, whom she would marry in 1942. After World War II, Biala and Brustlein split their time between New York and

her adopted city of Paris. She showed frequently at Stable Gallery in New

York, with five solo exhibitions there between 1953 and 1963, and Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. Major themes dominating her later paintings

include large sweeping landscapes featuring the shores of Provincetown, the sea circling Venice, and the architecture of Paris. Her work continued to meld abstraction with imagist concerns.

101

Elaine de Kooning (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1918; d. Southampton, NY, 1989) is

one of the prominent figures of Abstract Expressionism whose paintings demonstrate an enduring interest in figuration throughout her career.

De Kooning withdrew from Hunter College in 1937 and began studying art at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York with Conrad Marca-Relli,

who became a close friend. She also took drawing classes from Willem de Kooning, who would become her husband in 1938. Alongside her painting practice, de Kooning worked as an editorial associate at ArtNews.

Considered by some the voice of Abstract Expressionism, she was an

articulate defender of the movement. She acted as a centripetal force of

the New York art scene in the 1950s, bringing critics and artists into constant dialogue. She was also a founding member of The Club, a group of

avant-garde artists who met in Greenwich Village to discuss and debate

art from 1949 until 1962. In the 1950s, she showed at Sidney Janis Gallery Elaine de Kooning in her Long Island studio,1981. Photograph by Michiko Matsumoto, published in Portraits: Women artists, 1995 © Michiko Matsumoto.

and the Stable Gallery, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1953.

Though she first broke through with abstraction, she integrated figuration into her work for most of her career and became celebrated for her portraiture, often of friends or well-known subjects. Throughout her life, de

Kooning taught at institutions including Yale University and the Parsons New School for Design.

Sari Dienes (b. Debreczen, Hungary, 1898; d. Stony Point, NY, 1992)

was a groundbreaking experimental artist whose career links European Surrealism, American Neo-Dada, and Pop art. Dienes is best known for

her mixed media frottage paintings (painterly rubbings from textured surfaces) of rural and urban environments. Dienes’s foremost artistic belief was that raw materials and forms existed everywhere, and her goal was to see and reflect them. This attitude influenced her younger contem-

poraries and friends, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,

who, like Dienes, began using found objects and iconic visual symbols as the basis of their compositions and assemblage works. Dienes trained in

Paris and London at the Académie Moderne and the Académie Ozenfant. She came to New York in 1939 and, unable to return to the UK after the outbreak of the Second World War, lived in the United States for the

Sari Dienes with a plaster collage, 1951. Photograph by Villar studios.

rest of her life. Upon her arrival to New York, she helped establish the

Ozenfant School of Fine Arts. By the mid-1940s, her studio at 57th Street had become a hub for her artist community, which included John Cage,

Merce Cunningham, and Ray Johnson. During this period she worked with Stanley Hayter at the famed Atelier 17 at the New School, and printmaking techniques, incorporated into unique paintings or works on paper,

102

became integral to her practice. In 1961, Dienes moved to Gate Hill, an artistic commune known informally as ‘The Land,’ in Stony Point, NY,

where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. In 1973, Dienes joined

the feminist artist cooperative A.I.R., where she would exhibit through the last decades of her career. That same year, she established a home base above New York City’s oldest bar, the Ear Inn, which became the site of numerous experimental art performances and a hub for artists across visual art, music, and performance.

Martha Edelheit (b. New York, NY, 1931) is a pioneering feminist artist

whose work confronts dominant art historical paradigms, foreground-

ing the female gaze and desire. Long invested in eroticism, her lush and

vivid work is at once critical, sensual, and humorous. An important voice of the Women’s Art Movement, she is known for both her frank depic-

tions of sexuality and her insistence on their place within an art historical tradition and society. Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University in the 1950s. She established

herself in the center of the downtown avant-garde, becoming a member of the Tenth Street artist-run space, the Reuben Gallery, where her first

solo show was held in 1960. She, like other members Jim Dine, Rosalyn Martha Edelheit with her sculpture in her solo show at Reuben Gallery, New York, May 1960. Photograph by Henry Edelheit, MD.

Drexler, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Lucas Samaras, and Robert

Whitman, were expanding the definitions of art-making with the creation of Happenings and experimental objects. In the late 1950s, Edelheit

created her Extension Paintings, works that disrupted the rectangular dictate of painting by extending the pictorial plane with shaped sheet

metal, assemblage, and thick impasto. By the 1970s, Edelheit became

more involved in the Women’s Movement at large as an activist and art

worker. She was a member of Fight Censorship, alongside other women

artists foregrounding eroticism, including Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, and Hannah Wilke. She was also involved with The Women’s Caucus for Art, the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, and other feminist initiatives. She lives and works in New York.

103

Perle Fine (b. Boston, MA, 1905; d. East Hampton, NY, 1988) developed a unique style of abstraction defined by rhythmic, lyrical variations on Cubism’s formal components. In the 1940s and 50s, she exhibited at

Betty Parsons Gallery and in 1949, at the invitation of Willem de Kooning, joined The Club, a group of artists who frequently gathered to socialize, discuss one another’s work, and contemplate the theoretical under-

pinnings of Abstract Expressionism. Notably, Fine was one of very few

women invited to participate in the group. In 1954, she relocated to East Hampton, where she began experimenting more freely with color and

form. On joining the group American Abstract Artists in the early 1940s, Fine found support for her pioneering aesthetic interests and a collecPerle Fine in her Provincetown studio, Massachusetts, 1945. Photograph by Maurice Berezov. © AE Artworks. Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

tive of like-minded artists who were also investigating the possibilities

of abstraction. Works from this period were often inspired by music and dance, as well as forms and concepts found in nature and outer space. In the 1960s, Fine embarked on a teaching career, as a visiting lecturer

at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1961, and associate professor at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, from 1962 to 1973. She

constantly experimented over the decades of her career, creating wood reliefs with fragmented, rippling surfaces alongside her drawings and gouaches which refigure the modernist grid.

Helen Frankenthaler (b. New York, NY, 1928, d. Darien, CT, 2011) invented a technique of fully saturating her canvases with diluted paint, expanding

the possibilities of abstract painting. She played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting as an eminent

second-generation New York School artist. Frankenthaler grew up in New York City and attended the Dalton School, where she had her earliest art

instruction with Rufino Tamayo. She studied at Bennington College, where one of her professors was Paul Feeley, graduating in 1949. She later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann. Frankenthaler had her first solo exhibition in 1951 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Earlier that year, her work

was included in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, 1964. Photograph by Alexander Liberman. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Sculpture. In 1952, she created her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea by pouring thinned paint onto unprimed canvas on her studio floor. This would set her on a path of tireless experimentation and the devel-

opment of a singular and recognizable style over her six-decade career. Frankenthaler was occupied both with representing the natural world

through abstraction and the history of painting, reintegrating content

into abstract painting. She had her first major museum exhibition in 1960, at New York’s Jewish Museum, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney

104

Museum of American Art, followed by an international tour. Throughout

her career, she worked at a monumental scale and created an oeuvre that is singularly recognizable.

Jane Freilicher (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1924; d. New York, NY, 2014) developed

a six-decade practice defined by her distinctive style of painterly realism.

She responded to the light, fog, and sweeping horizon lines of Long Island landscapes observed from her Water Mill studio window and painted

images of downtown Manhattan, often juxtaposed with still life objects in the foreground. Freilicher was at the center of a community of influential artists and poets of the New York School, including painters Willem de Kooning, Rudy Burckhardt, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara.

Freilicher graduated from Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from

Columbia University. She studied with Hans Hofmann, both in New York Jane Freilicher, c. 1970s. Photograph by Joe Hazan.

and Provincetown, Massachusetts and in 1952 she had her first solo

exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. The artist’s foray into abstraction between 1958 and 1962, distinct from the figurative paintings she composed before and after this period, reflects an attitude of

freedom and experimentation when the artist recorded rural and coastal

environments in dreamy, improvisational paintings rendered from memo-

ry. The fluidity of brushwork Freilicher developed during this period would inform the still lifes and airy, sun-drenched landscapes of later decades. Shirley Gorelick (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1924; d. Washington, DC, 2000) is

known for her humanist paintings of subjects who have not traditionally been heroized in large-scale portraiture. A student of Brooklyn College

and Teachers College at Columbia University, Gorelick also studied under Hans Hofmann and experimented with several media including oil and

acrylic painting, etching, silverpoint, terra cotta, marble, and wood. She also re-examined art historical works through a contemporary female

gaze, casting the Three Graces as three African American men, for example. In the context of the feminist movement, Gorelick became involved with artist-run, women’s cooperative galleries. In 1973, she became a

founding member of Central Hall Artists Gallery, an all-women artist-run gallery in Port Washington, New York. Between 1975 and 1986, she had

six solo exhibitions at SOHO20 and participated in numerous group shows.

Shirley Gorelick, c. 1970s. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In 1976, Gorelick painted a nine-foot portrait of Frida Kahlo for “The Sister Chapel,” a feminist collaboration by thirteen artists which celebrated fe-

male role models and premiered its installation at P.S. 1 in Long Island City.

105

Grace Hartigan (b. Newark, NJ, 1922; d. Baltimore, MD, 2008) was a sig-

nificant member of the New York School whose work oscillated between

abstraction and figuration, referencing the quotidian as well as the canon of art history. She began her career as a mechanical draftsperson for a

new Wright Aeronautical factory, attending Newark College of Engineering at night. After moving to New York City in 1946, she became enmeshed

in a community of artists which included Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers, among

many others. A turning point in her career came with her inclusion in the landmark New Talent exhibition at Kootz Gallery, curated by art histori-

ans Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro. In 1952, Hartigan began to Grace Hartigan, c. 1950s. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

fuse her animated, abstract brushstrokes with figures and other subjects drawn from life, as well as art historical referents such as Peter Paul

Rubens and Diego Velásquez. She also established relationships with

poets, who further influenced subjects of her work. Significantly, Hartigan grew close to Frank O’Hara, whose poetry as well as commitment to

creating art from the content of everyday life influenced Hartigan. In 1960 Hartigan moved to Baltimore and in 1967 became the director of the

Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her later works mine popular culture, art history, visual culture,

and personal biography while maintaining the gesture and techniques of Abstract Expressionism to formulate a unique style all her own.

Adaline Kent (b. Kentfield, CA, 1900; d. Marin County, CA, 1957) was an

essential figure in the development of modernism in the Bay Area whose

work celebrates the beauty and mysteries of the natural world through material and abstract representation. Kent adapted biomorphic surrealism to

a West Coast sensibility, incorporating references to nature, mysticism and spirit in large-scale drawings, colorful abstractions incised on Hydrocal, sculpted bronze, magnesite or terracotta. These abstract works, conjur-

ing the rock formations of the Sierra Nevada mountains or suggestive of

anthropomorphic totems, are inspired by the landscape of California and

her travels abroad. After pursuing her formal education at Vassar College,

the California School of Fine Arts, and the Grande Chaumiere in Paris, Kent exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York and was a peer of Adaline Kent in her studio, 1956. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

artists such as Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. She married the artist Robert Boardman Howard and became a member of the so-called ‘first family of Bay Area Modernism,’ with father in-law archi-

tect John Galen Howard, brother-in-law surrealist artist Charles Houghton Howard, and several other Bay Area artists in the family.

106

Ellen Key-Oberg (b. Marion, AL, 1905; d. La Jolla, CA, 1989) was a sculptor whose work comprises organic and anthropomorphic figures fired as separate pieces fit together to create complex interlocking forms.

Key-Oberg studied with John Steuart Curry at the Art Students League, and at The Cooper Union, working first with stone and wood before

exploring the ceramic medium which allowed her to “open up space, in-

troduce light and air as part of the composition and develop forms freely.” Key-Oberg modeled and carved each piece before drying the clay to the leather hard stage and hollowing out its form. The surfaces are treated

with combed and stamped textures or grainy matte glazes. Often, the artist wedged dark brown and white clay together to create a marbled effect Ellen Key-Oberg at work, c. 1950s. Courtesy of Stevens Fine Art, Phoenix, AZ.

inspired by Native American pottery. In the 1940s and 50s, she exhibited

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and in the 1953 Whitney Annual.

Ida Kohlmeyer (b. New Orleans, LA, 1912; d. New Orleans, LA, 1997), the daughter of Polish immigrants, was a painter and sculptor who achieved international acclaim while living and working in New Orleans throughout her life. The artist only began her career as an artist in her thirties,

reflecting the freedom and creativity of her city. After completing her MFA at Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1956, Kohlmeyer studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A year later, she met

the painter Mark Rothko, who came to New Orleans as a visiting artist at

Tulane and set up his studio at Kohlmeyer’s family home. These encounIda Kohlmeyer, c. 1980s. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

ters, as well as the aesthetic influence of her collection of pre-Columbian,

Mexican, and African sculptures, informed her unique style of abstraction, spanning expressionist compositions of the 1950s, organic and geo-

metric frameworks of the 1960s, and contributions to the Pattern and

Decoration movement. Kohlmeyer’s admiration of the Spanish modern

artist Joan Miró, whom she met in Paris in 1956, influenced her decision to develop her own code of schematic symbols, which she employed

throughout the rest of her career. Kohlmeyer also explored sculpture, creating installations like Louisiana Prop Piece with Lynda Benglis, and later, playful, emblematic forms.

107

Lee Krasner (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1908; d. New York, NY, 1984) was an ab-

stract painter and key member of the New York School. Her practice over five decades reveals perpetual experimentation and reinvention, encompassing portraits, cubist drawings, collage, assemblage, and large-scale

abstract painting. Like many of her generation, Krasner supported herself in the 1930s by working for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. In 1937, she began to study with Hans Hofmann, and her

formerly naturalist paintings and drawings took on a modernist approach. Krasner joined the Artists Union and American Abstract Artists, which af-

forded her more opportunities to exhibit her work and reflected her com-

mitment to activism which continued throughout her life. Krasner married Lee Krasner, c. 1977. Photograph by Lenore Seroka. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © Lenore Seroka.

Jackson Pollock in 1945 and became a champion for his work, introducing him to the artist Willem de Kooning and critic Clement Greenberg,

among other key figures. In her studio on Long Island, nature became an immersive theme, evoked in broad swaths of color and rhythm. In 1965,

Krasner had her first solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and in 1975, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Zoe Longfield (b. San Francisco, CA, 1924; d. San Francisco, CA, 2013) was an American abstract expressionist painter who was active in the San Francisco Bay Area in the immediate postwar period. During her

brief active years, Longfield produced a significant body of paintings,

prints, and drawings that showcase a unique visual vocabulary that she employed, in her words, to “solve those inherent problems peculiar to

painting.” While pursuing her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of

California, Berkeley, Longfield studied with painters who were formative in the “Berkeley School” of abstract expressionism. She graduated in 1944 and briefly trained for a career as a professional ice skater. In 1946 she

recommitted to her artistic studies, attending the California Labor School Zoe Longfield in her studio, c. 1949. © Estate of Zoe Longfield.

until 1948 and then the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). At CSFA,

her teachers included Clyfford Still, whose anti-commercial ideas of art

influenced Longfield and her peers. In 1949, Longfield and eleven other students collaborated to open the landmark Metart Gallery. Occupying

a former laundry on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco, the gallery

was one of several cooperative art galleries that opened in San Francisco during the 1950s. Though she stopped painting in 1951, Longfield’s

practice reveals an affinity for rich color, thickly applied paint and totemic,

biophilic forms referencing emotional states and the natural world and her paintings remain vital.

108

Beatrice Mandelman (b. Newark, NJ, 1912; d. Taos, NM, 1998) was an artist whose abstract paintings and collages are associated with the group known as the Taos Moderns. Mandelman attended Rutgers University

and the Art Students League in New York, where she was also employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP)

as a muralist and then as a printmaker in the Silk Screen Unit. During her

time in the WPA, she was actively involved in the New York art community

among artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile

Gorky. Treating print as a fine art, she regularly showed around the United States and several museums acquired her work in the early 1940s. In

1944, she left New York for Taos, New Mexico, and became a key figure of

the Taos Moderns. The New Mexico landscape and culture had a profound Beatrice Mandelman in Taos, c. 1950. Courtesy of Mildred Tolbert.

influence on Mandelman’s style, producing bright palettes, crisply defined geometric forms, and flattened surfaces. In 1948, she travelled to Paris,

where she studied with Fernand Léger, leading to further emphasis on flat

planes of bold color within her work, which she continued to explore in the remaining decades of her career in Taos.

Jeanne Miles (b. Baltimore, MD, 1908; d. Los Angeles, CA, 1999) was

an artist who experimented with mediums and styles to attain spiritual dimensions within her work, drawing from ancient, esoteric, and mod-

ern traditions. Miles was born in Baltimore and was among first women to attend the art school at George Washington University, where she

earned a BFA. She got a personal grant to travel to Tahiti in 1937, where

she became enamored with the landscape and indigenous culture. From

there, she went to France as a stowaway on a cargo ship, arriving in Paris, the capital of the art world. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and developed a Fauvist style. In 1938, she showed at the

Salon des Indépendants. To escape Nazi-occupied France, she returned to the United States, where she took a large apartment in Greenwich

Jeanne Miles, c. 1970s. Photograph by Stella Snead. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Village and became part of the downtown bohemian scene, developing friendships with Clyfford Still and Theodoros Stamos, with whom she

would teach in her apartment. Miles had her first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1943, with several exhibitions to follow as part of

the gallery’s stable. A lifelong student of spiritualism, she incorporated

various religious and esoteric traditions into her work, often working with vivid colors, silver or gold leaf, and mandala imagery.

109

Betty Parsons (b. New York, NY, 1900; d. Southold, NY, 1982) was an ab-

stract painter and sculptor who shaped the trajectory of mid-century art in the United States through her career as a gallerist that was informed by her own eye. Parsons moved to Paris in 1923, where she lived for a

decade. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, alongside students including Alberto Giacometti and several artists who she would eventually show in her gallery. Parsons became integrated into the artistic milieu, surrounding herself with fellow expatriates like Sylvia Beach,

Gertrude Stein, and Adge Baker. After returning to the United States in 1933, Parsons showed her own work and worked for several New York galleries curating exhibitions that were patronized by Parsons’s circle.

In 1946, she opened her eponymous gallery where she championed unknown artists and gave many new voices their start. After the closure of

Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in 1947, Parsons inheritBetty Parsons, 1963. Photograph by Alexander Liberman. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles © J. Paul Getty Trust.

ed many artists from that roster, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Clyfford Still. All the while, Parsons remained com-

mitted to her own practice, creating gouaches and oil paintings featuring brash colors and bold shapes. In 1960, Parsons began spending time on the East End of Long Island, where she developed a sculptural practice involving gathering driftwood from the beach, building abstract sculp-

tures painted in vibrant colors. Throughout her career, Parsons champi-

oned not only new talent, but artists from groups often underrecognized in the art world because of gender, sexuality, or race.

Pat Passlof (b. Brunswick, GA, 1928; d. New York, NY, 2011) was an ab-

stract painter of the New York School whose tireless exploration of color and form gave her work a distinct voice. Having grown up in New York, in 1948 Passlof left to study at the famed Black Mountain College, where she took classes with Willem de Kooning. She continued to study with

de Kooning privately after returning to New York, and became a fixture

in the downtown arts scene, attending meetings at The Club (eventually

organizing “The Wednesday Night Club”), showing at the March Gallery on 10th Street, and marrying fellow painter Milton Resnick. Passlof was the

subject of a solo exhibition at the famed Green Gallery, New York in 1961. In the 1960s and 70s she also showed at the Globe Gallery, the Feiner

Gallery, and the Landmark Gallery. While she utilized biomorphic forms Pat Passlof in her studio on Tenth Street, c. 1958. Photograph by Jesse Fernandez. © Estate of Jesse Fernandez. Courtesy of Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.

and was influenced by the existentialist ideology associated with Abstract Expressionism, her work was constantly varied in terms of touch, form,

and palette. She used repeated patterns and marks across the canvas to create dynamic rhythms and drew upon experiences and memories. Her

compositions often suggest abstracted landscapes like the later work of

110

Claude Monet, although Passlof frequently worked in a vertical format. She lived and worked on the Lower East Side, in a former synagogue.

She also spent time with Resnick in the Shawangunk Mountain area of

upstate New York, where she took influence from the space and air of the

mountain ridge for her painting. Passlof was also a beloved and dedicated

professor who taught at Richmond College, CUNY, from 1972 to 1983; and

the College of Staten Island, CUNY from 1983 until 2010.

Jeanne Reynal (b. White Plains, NY, 1903; d. New York, NY, 1983) was

a mosaicist whose revival of ancient techniques and experiments with

abstraction mark a significant contribution to the New York School. Reynal was dedicated to challenging expectations of the medium by creating,

as she described, “a new art of mosaic, a contemporary and fresh look

for this ancient medium.” Her work was largely abstract and was shown at prominent venues for modern art like Betty Parsons Gallery in New

York City. Reynal apprenticed from 1930–38 with Boris Anrep, a Russian mosaicist working in Paris. She spent the World War II years living in

San Francisco and in Sierra Nevada, California. There she developed a relationship with the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Art Jeanne Reynal working in her New York studio. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. Photo © Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(now SFMOMA), introducing her to the work of Jackson Pollock and other

first-generation New York School artists and showing her own work in the museum’s Annual exhibitions from 1940–46. Reynal was also associated with the Surrealists—many of whom were living in exile in the U.S.—and spent time traveling with André and Elissa Breton. In New York City in

the 1940s she developed friendships with artists including Willem and

Elaine de Kooning. In 1955, she married Thomas Sills, a largely self-taught African American painter, who became her companion as she travelled internationally studying mosaic techniques.

111

Miriam Schapiro (b. Toronto, Ontario, 1923; d. Hampton Bays, NY, 2015)

is widely known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement and a leading force in American post-World War II art. Following her formal training at the University of Iowa, she moved to New York with her husband, Paul

Brach, and integrated into the New York School. Recognized for her colorful and sensuous abstractions of this period, Schapiro showed regularly at André Emmerich Gallery, where in 1958, she was the first woman to

have a solo exhibition. Despite considerable success, she felt an outsider to the male-dominated Abstract Expressionism scene, and her work of this period explores themes of feminine interiority. Schapiro moved to

La Jolla, California in 1967, following Brach’s appointment as chair of the Miriam Schapiro at Tanager Gallery, 1953. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. Courtesy of Miriam Schapiro Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. Photo © Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

newly formed art department at University of California, San Diego, and his insistence upon Schapiro’s hire at the institution. Here, she became an early practitioner of computer art, resulting in significant paintings.

In 1971, Schapiro worked with Judy Chicago to move the Feminist Art

Program to the California Institute of the Arts, where they established a

radical curriculum for women art students that led to the groundbreaking Womanhouse installation of 1972. Shortly thereafter, Schapiro began incorporating collage into her formal compositions, using gendered

materials to create her signature ‘femmage’ work. She was a founder of

the Pattern and Decoration movement during the mid-1970s. Committed to a feminist imperative, Schapiro traveled around the United States to

teach workshops, complete residencies, and lecture on feminism and art, earning the nickname “Mimi Appleseed.” Schapiro remained active into

the early 2000s, integrating themes of art historical collaboration, theater, and her Jewish heritage into her later work.

Edith Schloss (b. Offenbach, Germany, 1919; d. Rome, Italy, 2011) was a

German-born American artist, art critic, and writer who was integral within New York’s postwar art scene. She was immersed in the interchange

between poets and painters in the 1940s and 50s. Her work comprises

bright, intimate abstractions based on landscapes and still lifes, as well as assemblage boxes with found-object contents. Arriving in New York on

a convoy fleeing London during World War II, Schloss studied at the Art

Students League and attended lectures at The Cooper Union and The New Edith Schloss with an installation of her work, c. 1940s. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photo © 1947 The Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York.

School for Social Research. Schloss exhibited paintings and assemblage

works in New York beginning in the mid-1940s, including in the legendary

cooperatives Tanager Gallery, Workshop Gallery, and Jane Street Gallery. In 1962, Schloss left for Italy, where she would remain for the rest of her life, drawing inspiration from the Mediterranean landscape, and working in community with artists such as Giorgio Morandi and Cy Twombly. Her

112

paintings explored the intersection of the intimate and the sublime. As she

wrote, her works represent the “quiet and balance in still lifes of homespun objects lined up against the pageant of the sea.”

Hedda Sterne (b. Bucharest, Romania,1910; d. New York, NY, 2011)

was a Romanian American artist whose prolific career intersected with

European Modernism, Surrealism, and the New York School. Sterne tirelessly developed new ways of interpreting the world around her. Sterne

studied at several key studios in Europe: in Vienna at the School of Arts and Crafts and in Paris at Académie de la Grande Chaumière as well as the ateliers of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. In 1929, she began her

studies at the University of Bucharest in philosophy and art history. With the outbreak of World War II, Sterne left New York City, where she was

ushered into gatherings of the “surrealists in exile,” such as Max Ernst,

who became a close friend. Her works gained the attention of important dealers including Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons. Sterne’s early Hedda Sterne, 1947. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2026 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

forays into figuration, reflecting her interest in Surrealism, would give way to machinic, architectural, and nonobjective abstraction. The artist often

worked in a highly physical way using palette knives, her fingers, or sharp tools to scrape lines into the paint with a sgraffito technique. Her striking presence in the famous photograph known as The Irascibles, published in Time Magazine in 1951, reflects her central part in the community of

Abstract Expressionist painters of the period. Sterne is among the most frequently exhibited women painters of her generation.

Alma Thomas (b. Columbus, GA, 1891; d. Washington, DC, 1978) created

work that defined the Washington Color School, with richly saturated colors and tessellated pictorial planes. In 1907, Thomas’s family left Georgia for Washington, DC in search of greater educational opportunities and

relief from racial violence in the South. Thomas became the first graduate of the newly formed art department at Howard University in 1924 and

earned a master’s degree in education from Columbia University a decade later. Thomas was also instrumental in the 1943 formation of the Barnett Aden Gallery, among the first Black-owned galleries in the United States.

After nearly forty years as an art teacher in the DC public school system, Thomas retired in 1960 and began to paint seriously for the first time in

her career. She developed a signature abstract style of gestural, staccaAlma Thomas in her studio, 1968. Photograph by Ida Jervis. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

to brushstrokes inspired by nature observed in Washington’s parks, the garden beyond her kitchen-studio, and memories of roses around her childhood home.

113

Nina Yankowitz (b. Newark, NJ, 1946) has created daring and dynamic

works of abstraction imbued with her formal and social justice concerns

over the last six decades. Yankowitz studied at Temple University and the New School for Social Research before graduating in Fine Art from the

School of Visual Arts. Leaving behind painting’s drum-taut support, she developed her Draped Paintings, Pleated Paintings, and several other

radical innovations of unstretched canvas and paint, many of which have a direct relationship with music. A founding member of the feminist art

collective Heresies (1970s–1990s), she has worked across and beyond traditional art forms in New York City since the 1960s. Growing up in

the legendary folk music venues of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Nina Yankowitz, c. 1970s. Photograph by Max Kozloff. Courtesy of the artist.

spending the summer of 1968 in Woodstock, NY inspired Yankowitz to

embrace emerging technologies and media. Sound especially came to underpin her practice. Early in her career, Yankowitz participated in the inaugural 1973 Whitney Biennial and moved to a loft building in low-

er Manhattan, where she created paintings like color notated musical

scores. As Yankowitz has explained, “When I hear sound I see color, and when I see color, I hear sound.” The artist now lives and works in both Sag Harbor and New York City.

114