Happy International Women’s Day!

In honor of celebrating women during this Women’s History Month, I want to highlight some of my favorite female artists throughout history. These women broke down boundaries, changed the art world, and inspired generations of women to follow in their footsteps. As a young art nerd, I loved seeing people who looked like me creating all types of art and pushing the boundaries of who was allowed in a male-dominated space.

I hope by sharing a few of my favorite artists, you can get more familiar with their beautiful, intricate, and thought-provoking works, too!

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is best known for her different types of art – paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – that all feature vibrant colors and her signature polka dots.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano, in 1929. Today, she continues to produce paintings at her studio in Tokyo. She studied traditional Nihonga (Japanese-style) painting in Kyoto and moved to New York City in 1958. There, she was active in avant-garde circles during the formative years of pop art and minimalism, exhibiting her work alongside such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Allan Kaprow—figures who have cited Kusama as influential to the development of assemblage, environmental art, and performative practices.

Kusama exhibited widely in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in the mid-’60s, participating in exhibitions with artists associated with Nul, ZERO, and the New Tendency in Europe, where she began developing her interest in the optics and interactive elements of mirrors, electric lights, sound, and kinetics. The artist’s fame grew in the late 1960s through her radical antiwar happenings, which espoused nudity and polka dots in the streets of New York. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, where she has since resided. In recent years, Kusama has achieved tremendous critical respect as well as celebrity status. (information taken from here)

You can learn more about her history here.

I’m also excited about the upcoming Hirshhorn exhibit: One With Eternity

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history.

When Hilma af Klint began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen before: bold, colorful, and untethered from any recognizable references to the physical world. It was years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private. She rarely exhibited them and, convinced the world was not yet ready to understand her work, stipulated that it not be shown for twenty years following her death. Ultimately, her work was all but unseen until 1986, and only over the subsequent three decades have her paintings and works on paper begun to receive serious attention. (information found here)

You can learn more about her history here.

I was actually first introduced to af Klint’s work via this incredible Guggenheim exhibit back in 2019 that I had the pleasure of seeing.

Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker known for creating scenes that reflected women’s lives and perspectives in their daily life. She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, but lived much of her adult life in France where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists.

In June 1874, Cassatt settled in Paris, where she began to show regularly in the Salons, and where her parents and sister Lydia joined her in 1877. That same year, Edgar Degas invited her to join the group of independent artists later known as the Impressionists. The only American officially associated with the group, Cassatt exhibited in four of their eight exhibitions, in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886. Under their influence, Cassatt revised her technique, composition, and use of color and light, manifesting her admiration for the works of the French avant-garde, especially Degas and Manet. Degas, her chief mentor, provided criticism of her work, offered advice on technique, and encouraged her experiments in printmaking. Like Degas, she was chiefly interested in figure compositions. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the subjects of her works were her family (especially her sister Lydia), the theater, and the opera. Later she made a specialty of the mother and child theme, which she treated with warmth and naturalness in paintings, pastels, and prints. (information found here)

You can learn more about her history here.

I also love this article on how Mary Cassatt Painted Domestic Life in a Way Male Impressionists Couldn’t.

Frida Kahlo

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.

Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo’s approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits. (information found here)

You can learn more about her history here.

I’m also excited about the upcoming immersive experience – Mexican Geniuses The Exhibition.

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is considered one of the most important performance artists in the world. She was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946. A pioneer of performance as a visual art form, Abramović has used her body as both subject and medium of her performances to test her physical, mental, and emotional limits—often pushing beyond them and even risking her life—in a quest for heightened consciousness, transcendence, and self-transformation.

Characterized by endurance and pain—and by repetitive behavior, actions of long duration, and intense public interactions and energy dialogues—her work has engaged, fascinated, and sometimes repelled live audiences. The universal themes of life and death are recurring motifs, often enhanced by the use of symbolic visual elements or props such as crystals, bones, knives, tables, and pentagrams. While the sources of some works lie in her personal history (the circumstances of her childhood and family life under Communist rule in the former Yugoslavia), others lie in more recent and contemporary events, such as the wars in her homeland and other parts of the world. (information found here)

You can learn more about her history here.

Fun fact – the photograph of her with a scorpion below is entitled: Homage to Frida Kahlo (Portrait with Scorpion), 2014

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, renowned for her contribution to modern art. Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas. O’Keeffe mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916.

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists seeking a distinctive view of the nation. In the 1950s, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. She painted and sketched works that evoke the spectacular places she visited, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. At the age of seventy-three, she took on a new subject: aerial views of clouds and sky. (information found here)

Much of her extensive artistic productions became focused on diverse elements of the natural world: animal bones, shells, desert, sky, and most frequently, flowers. She often enlarged flowers, making a single flower dominate the entire pictorial space.

You can learn more about her history here.

I also love this Wisconsin Women Making History page for additional information on her life and painting and additional resources.

This article dives into the uplifting backstory behind one of her iconic works: Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills.

I hope by sharing more about these inspiring women artists, it encourages you to seek out their works the next time you visit a museum!

XOXO

Parisa