We are pleased to present paintings, sculpture and installations by pioneering women whose creative contributions have shaped the gallery in meaningful ways. With work that spans more than seventy years, the exhibition includes longtime gallery artists and the next generation of women we have added to our programming more recently.
“The gallery has a long history of championing women,” says Sundaram Tagore. “From our earliest days in SoHo, we represented extremely talented women from the New York School who had been overshadowed by their male peers, including Susan Weil (b.1930), a gifted American artist who had a major influence on Robert Rauschenberg’s oeuvre. We sought to challenge prevailing beliefs at the time that Western men were making the most collectible art.”
This exhibition highlights work from the gallery’s archives, including Weil’s 1949 paper collage Secrets, which was included in MoMA’s 2017 retrospective Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends and the group show Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 in 2016.
The collage is made from bits of paper torn from the artist’s journal and arranged into an illegible composition. When hung in proximity to a vanity fabricated from razor blades by Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Lipi (b.1969), it sparks a conversation about women’s private spaces and the secrets they learn to compartmentalize.
American artists Joan Vennum (1930–2021) and Miya Ando (b. 1973) are both known for their colorful abstract landscapes that depict fleeting atmospheric phenomena. When Vennum’s lush, layered canvases are brought together with Ando’s luminous metal paintings, the dialogue expands from concepts of liminal spaces to the different ways in which we perceive the passage of time.
The exhibition also features embroidered drawings by Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha (b.1965), tactile paper constructions by Indian-born Detroit-based artist Neha Vedpathak (b.1982), sumptuous photographs by British-American photographer Karen Knorr (b.1954) and more.
