A New Reckoning The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth gathers the past for an of-the-moment conversation about female painters and portraiture. BY EVE HILL-AGNUS
Alice Neel, Pregnant Nude, 1967, oil on canvas, 33 x 53.87 in. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.
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hat exactly does it mean to have women painting women? The question opens onto a playground of nesting answers. In a major group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, opening in May and running through September, chief curator Andrea Karnes has gathered more than 40 women artists representing more than 50 years for a figurative show titled Women Painting Women that orchestrates an ambitious answer to the question. The show, in its magnitude, is rather breathtaking. The exhibition is anchored by heavyweights—Faith Ringgold, Alice Neel, Joan Semmel, Sylvia Sleigh (who infamously flipped the gendered narratives of nude group portraiture with The Turkish Bath in 1973)— who traversed much of the century; mostly one painting for each. And
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it centers on a challenge, a possibility, a variously filled lacuna teased out not chronologically but across thematic categories. “Since women have traditionally been left out of the canon of art, it seemed like a good idea to focus on an exhibition that would feature women artists of roughly the last 50 years,” Karnes reasoned. But more than that: “The term ‘woman’ is a contested term these days. It’s being liberated from its binary definition. The opportunity to have a show that is very inclusive of all women seemed interesting to me.” And so arises a dialogue between the iconic trailblazers, the younger generation, and mid-career artists that might have been inconceivable 20 years ago. “Because figurative art was not always in favor, and a lot of these
