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.

What 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 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

women were not getting airplay during certain decades, especially as figurative artists, it wasn’t going to make sense chronologically. I would rather read art history again with a more inclusive scope. And in this case looking at women. What is their story? How do women see women?” Karnes asks.

In essence, the show has the palpable intensity of a series of studio visits, as though diverse minds that have spent entire careers broaching these subjects were invited and destined to enter into conversation. They have all explored the missing female subjectivity as defined outside the male gaze, as though this were audacious. They plumb their own depths.

The fact that some of the trailblazers—often hailed as radical, activist, groundbreakers, pioneers—were being granted retrospectives meant adjustments. The Ringgold that Karnes had wanted was going into the artist’s highly anticipated retrospective in New York, so Karnes had to adapt. The iconic late Neel is similarly the subject of a retrospective traveling from New York to Paris, but Karnes was able to source a Pregnant Nude from the 1960s. The Semmel work will leave a six-decade-career-spanning retrospective and come immediately to the Modern.

“The reality was that it wasn’t always easy to get exactly the painting I wanted. Most of the time I did, but for good reason when I didn’t.” The reason: an inflection point. A swell. A new reckoning and resonance. An acceleration of attention. And if it presented hurdles, “It means they’re finally getting a major exhibition

Faith Ringgold, Woman in a Red Dress, 1965, oil on canvas, 33 x 18 in. Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York © 2022 Faith Ringgold / ARS member. Arpita Singh, My Mother, 1993, oil on canvas, 54 x 72 in. From the Collection of Sharad and Mahinder Tak © Arpita Singh. Photograph courtesy of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Talwar Gallery.

somewhere,” Karnes says.

Leaning into figuration, these artists map themselves using the body. In one section, the pale, exposed flesh of Neel’s Pregnant Nude is taken up by the psychosocial intimacy of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Sarah and the profound, luminous corpulence of Jenny Saville’s triptych Strategy. In some, the plumbed frontier is nudity; in others the bridge between self and other; in others, race. All seize upon their theme with profound power. San Francisco–based Christiane Lyons, who recently had a solo show in Los Angeles titled Some Women: A Total Portrait With No Omissions, proposes subjectivity as the antidote to objectification. In vibrant, kaleidoscopic paintings that layer contemporary imagery gleaned from internet searches of terms borrowed from women’s depictions in art history—“model,” “reclining,” “portrait”—the woman shatters and shivers, breaks apart to form a new image and individuality. “My work examines how women are seen as both subjects and objects,” Lyons says. “I want them to appear as new subjects.”

Marilyn Minter, best known for her provocative enamel paintings, video, and photography, takes on the erasures from art history—the pubic hair and, here, bathers who inhabit no stream banks but the liminal space of the modern shower, blurred pallor witnessed as though through the erotically refracting prism of a fogged glass wall.

Danielle McKinney allows the Black female gaze to interrogate and transfix you. In her paintings, it arises from a place of smoldering self-awareness and self-containment, where privacy is paramount. Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based Maria Berrio’s oeuvre of collage executed with Japanese paper melds cross-cultural commentary with patternings that refract hybrid identities sensitively. And Nicola Tyson insists on the creative authority that comes with practicing a play tied to self-determination.

“The beauty is [that] it always used to be young bad boys. And now it’s old ladies and young bad girls,” says Minter, who at 73 brooks no apologism. “Women are so terrifying because of the power we have. It’s

“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...”

—Andrea Karnes, chief curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Above: Danielle McKinney, Corner Store, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Ben Shenassafar collection © Danielle McKinney. Courtesy of the artist; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. Photograph by Matthew Booth; Below: Marilyn Minter, Red Flare, 2018-2019, enamel on metal, 84 x 60 x 2.06 in. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

Clockwise from top: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Dwell: Me, We, 2017, acrylic, transfers, colored pencil, charcoal, and collage on paper, 96 × 124 in. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Gift of the Director's Council and museum purchase, The Benjamin J. Tillar Memorial Trust. 2019 © Njideka Akunyili Crosby; Emma Amos, Three Figures, 1967, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in. The John and Susan Horseman Collection. © Emma Amos. Courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Amy Sherald, A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2020, oil on canvas, 106 x 101 in. Private collection. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde.

just a lot easier to fit into your assigned roles. But they’re not working anymore. They haven’t been working for quite a while. And I don’t think we had language for it yet.”

“I do think it’s very timely,” Lyons adds. “I also think that it’s about time that it happened. How else are things going to get talked about unless we put them out there?”

The specter of tokenism or ghettoizing can, detractors may say, stalk any show that posits female artists as common denominator. But the conversation is too specific; there have been too many heroes. Amid the energy of a group show—bold, defiant, magisterial, erotic, charged—the totality is curated with such intelligence that the works form a conversation. It is as though we were seeing a cohort from the inside out.

I am not at all surprised when, over the phone, Lyons tells me a story—that her undergraduate mentor long ago gave her tubes of oil paint that had belonged to her own mentor, the late Joan Brown, whose work figures in the exhibition and inspired Lyons’ own practice. “It’s just a continuation of what artists should do for each other,” Lyons tells me of the gesture. (Coincidentally, she has named paintings after four women who are now in the show with her.) Her experience is a microcosm of the scaffolding of nesting affinities that underlie the show. “There’s always going to be more than one person that changes the way we see. And that’s the glorious thing,” Minter says.

Sometimes it is hardest to show what is already there. In the midst of the fizzing energy of a group show, the hope is that people will make connections. P

Above: Hope Gangloff, Queen Jane Approximately, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 66 x 108 in. Collection of Alturas Foundation, San Antonio, Texas. © Hope Gangloff. Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Below: May Stevens, Forming the Fifth International, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 78 × 120 in. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York. © May Stevens.