Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Email
“Many of the artist in this exhibition really didn’t want to be thought of as ‘women artists,’ per se, but just as artists, just as painters.” —Corey D’Augustine
For our Women’s History Month programming, we’ve shared with you a number of videos focussing on groundbreaking historical and contemporary feminist artists. But is an artist ever just an artist? For generations now, artists of varying stripes have tried to separate the artist from the art to create a pure art, few more so than the abstract expressionists and their focus on process. Combined with a nascent women’s empowerment movement that would lead to the Feminist movement, women abstract painters in the postwar period in New York often sought to be portrayed simply as ‘artists’ rather than ‘women artists.’ The Museum of Modern Art explored this dynamic in depth in its groundbreaking 2017 exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction that featured nearly 100 works from over 50 women artists active roughly between 1945 and 1968.
Within the context of this exhibition, for MoMA’s great How to See video series, educator and art historian Corey D’Augustine grants these artists their wishes with a close examination of the work of five incredible painters who happen to be women, Hedda Sterne, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Yayoi Kusama.
