Women in the Arts Fall 2019

Fall 2019

CHAMPION WOMEN THROUGH THE ARTS dear members and friends,

I believe that art reflects our shared humanity—our best qualities, traits, and talents. This fall at the museum we will have a wonderful slate of exhibitions, by women photographers and the renowned feminist artist Judy Chicago, that address universal hopes and fears.

We will present Chicago’s newest body of work, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. We are proud of NMWA’s longstanding relationship with Chicago, who loaned us one of her most iconic paintings, Through the Flower, for the museum’s grand opening in 1987. She said at that time, “It’s important to protect and preserve women’s art. Existing institutions don’t have a very good track record.” Our relationship has only grown since then. We have exhibited Chicago’s work on several occasions, and our Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center will be the repository of her visual archive, an important research resource.

Also opening in September, Live Dangerously presents work by contemporary women photographers who capture images of women in natural landscapes. Visitors will enjoy the grandeur of these photographs and the artists’ perspectives.

Throughout the fall, we will offer an exciting schedule of programs, including Shenson Chamber Music Concerts, film screenings, Fresh Talks, children’s programs, and the premiere of a musical about the women’s suffrage movement.

We hope you will join us. warmest best wishes,

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay Chair of the Board

MUSEUM INFORMATION

WOMEN IN THE ARTS

1250 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20005

Fall 2019 Volume 37, no. 3

PUBLIC TRANSIT

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Women in the Arts is a publication of the National Museum of Women in the Arts® DIRECTOR

Susan Fisher Sterling EDITOR

Elizabeth Lynch ASSISTANT EDITOR

https://blog.nmwa.org

Alicia Gregory

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Christina Papanicolaou

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Women in the Arts is published three times a year as a benefit for museum members by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20005-3970.

Copyright © 2019 National Museum of Women in the Arts. National Museum of Women in the Arts®, The Women’s Museum®, and Women in the Arts® are registered trademarks of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

On the cover: Judy Chicago, In the Shadow of Death, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2015; Kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, 12 x 9 in.; Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY Founder’s photo: © Michele Mattei

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Contents

“What women go through has been despised, marginalized, or ignored. I set out to change that.”

JUDY CHICAGO, PAGE 10

↑ 20

Live Dangerously

Twelve photographers explore how the Earth’s physical terrain can enable women’s self-discovery, expression, and empowerment. orin zahra

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FEATURES

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The Building Blocks of Museum Programming

NMWA’s staff and board are reflecting on the ways the museum’s unique building supports ambitious exhibitions and programs. winton smoot holladay

↑ 10

Judy Chicago— The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction

The celebrated feminist artist discusses her newest body of work—an unflinching look at mortality, death, and extinction— in an exclusive interview. virginia treanor

↓ 24

Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age This focus exhibition highlights women artists who excelled in an era of unprecedented economic growth. virginia treanor

// DEPARTMENTS

2 Arts News 4 Culture Watch 6 Education Report 7 Dedicated Donors: Jill and Jeffrey Stern and the Photography Buyers Syndicate 16 Calendar 28 Recent Acquisitions: Nineteenth-Century American Paintings 30 Museum News and Events 33 Supporting Roles 36 Museum Shop

Arts News 2

Right: Vanessa Barragão, Botanical Tapestry, 2019

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PHOTO COURTESY OF HEATHROW AIRPORT

Below right: Claudia Comte, Aurélien (Underwater Cacti), 2019

Claudia Comte’s underwater sculptures, made of reinforced concrete, support new coral growth.

F-STOP MOVIES

Celebrating the Environment in Public Art Around the world, emerging women artists are using their practices to both celebrate and support the environment in eclectic and inventive mediums.

Fiber artist Vanessa Barragão created a twenty-foot-wide tapestry map of the world in celebration of a partnership between London’s Heathrow Airport and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Using a range of techniques including latch hooking, felt needling, carving, and crochet, the Portuguese artist mapped out a detailed, textural surface that communicates the planet’s diverse climates and topography.

Barragão spent 520 hours on the handcrafted work, which is on view at the departure area of Heathrow.

Off the coast of Jamaica, at the East Portland Fish Sanctuary, artist Claudia Comte installed permanent underwater sculptures to help revitalize the coral reef. The cactus-shaped forms, made from reinforced concrete, delight swimmers and snorkelers—and they also support coral life. In

January, the marine sanctuary will overlay baby coral from its nursery on the sculptures, promoting new growth. Comte said she chose the cactus, which is a recurring image in her work, because “placing cacti on the seabed creates quite a rupture.”

For Comte, cacti represent a potential future of the earth on land and sea.

Black Women Writers Remember Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall Following the death of towering writer, editor, and teacher Toni Morrison, on August 5, at age eighty-eight, grief transfigured into tributes from some of the many writers and artists who prized her work. Morrison, winner of accolades including

the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, famously said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

She inspired and challenged generations of writers.

Playwright Lynn Nottage called Morrison “part of my literary

PHOTO BY GIANFRANCO GORGONI

Italian artist Marisa Merz

COURTESY OF: THE ARTIST AND FRIEZE LONDON

Himali Singh Soin, still from we are opposite like that, 2019, single-channel video (detail)

DNA,” and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith lauded her for “enthralling readers with her commitment to the inner lives of black characters.” Artist Kara Walker, who created a cut-paper work for a New Yorker magazine cover in homage to Morrison, said, “Through her work and words, she became something like a muse, teacher, mother, clairvoyant, and judge. Always a presence urging me on.”

Writer Edwidge Danticat honored Morrison in an essay along with a remembrance of novelist Paule Marshall, who

died August 12, at age ninety.

In her work, for which she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Marshall explored the relationships between Caribbean and African American identities.

Danticat wrote of both Morrison and Marshall, “Before I ever saw them in the flesh, I was in awe of their words.”

Playing a Long Game Sotheby’s Mei Moses Indices, which track art-market trends, published a recent study showing that sales prices of work by women artists grew

much faster than those by men from 2012 to 2018. The sales index of work by women artists increased 72.9%, in comparison with 8.3% for works by men during that period. Sotheby’s report also reveals, however, that “male artists have consistently captured more than 90% of the total market by volume and 93% by value. This split of market share remains almost identical to a decade ago.”

In Memoriam: Marisa Merz Italian artist Marisa Merz, the sole female artist in the Arte Povera (“poor art”) movement,

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FRIEZE LONDON

JOIN US!

which eschewed elite, commercial art, died July 19, at age ninety-three. Merz only began making art in her forties; early works included aluminum mobiles and functional objects, such as a plywood swing for her daughter. Later, she began creating wax heads, figurative sculptures, and immersive installations. Merz was belatedly recognized as a leading Arte Povera artist, having often been excluded from exhibitions or unnamed when her work was featured.

In 2017, the Met Breuer presented her first major retrospective, which toured the U.S. and Europe to wide acclaim.

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Himali Singh Soin Wins Frieze Artist Award The 2019 Frieze Artist Award, which supports a commissioned work by an emerging international artist at the Frieze London art fair, has been given to Himali Singh Soin. The artist’s practice spans text, performance, and film, and she frequently uses the natural environment—particularly ice—as metaphor. Singh Soin’s new work will debut at the fair, October 4–6, and will reference Victorian-era fears of an imminent ice age in Britain, today’s looming climate catastrophe, and myths surrounding people and the natural world.

Champion women through the arts with NMWA membership

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Clockwise from top left: Kara Walker’s New Yorker magazine cover with Quiet as It’s Kept, 2019; in remembrance of Toni Morrison

Culture Watch //

EXHIBITIONS

CALIFORNIA

GEORGIA

Julie Mehretu

WAP: Myra Greene

Los Angeles County Museum of Art November 3, 2019–May 17, 2020

Moca GA, Atlanta On view through November 2, 2019

In this mid-career survey, Mehretu employs architecture, abstraction, and her complex printmaking techniques to examine themes of colonialism, diaspora, and displacement.

Greene uses fabric, dye, silk screening, and sewing to explore representations of race and culture, creating a personal relationship to abstraction.

CONNECTICUT

KANSAS

Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age

Light & Shadow: Alyson Shotz and Kumi Yamashita

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield RM On view through November 10, 2019 By building optical effects through color and collage, Cwynar’s photography, installation, book-making, and film interrogate stereotypes and commercialized beauty standards.

Wichita Art Museum On view through January 5, 2020

© KUMI YAMASHITA

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RM

KANSAS // Kumi Yamashita, 0 to 9, 2011; On view at the Wichita Art Museum

This exhibition features two sculptors who create work of ethereal beauty by manipulating air, space, light, and shadow.

MISSOURI

TEXAS

Zarina: Atlas of Her World

Beatriz González: A Retrospective

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis On view through February 2, 2020 In an exhibition spanning her more than five-decade career, Zarina’s prints and sculptures embrace themes of memory, place, and loss.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston October 27, 2019–January 20, 2020 This retrospective presents more than one hundred works from the early 1960s through the present by González, who comes from the “radical women” generation in Latin America.

CONNECTICUT // Sara Cwynar, Ultra Cosmetics (Nail Polish Forty Fabulous Shades),

2018; On view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone The Jewish Museum November 1, 2019– March 22, 2020 Feinstein’s first survey brings together three decades of multidisciplinary work exploring notions of the feminine in popular imagination.

© RACHEL FEINSTEIN ; PHOTO BY MARCUS LEITH

© SARA CWYNAR, COURTESY OF COOPER COLE, TORONTO AND FOXY PRODUCTION, NEW YORK

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NEW YORK

NEW YORK // Rachel Feinstein, Adam and Eve, 2007; On view at The Jewish Museum

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BOOKS

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WASHINGTON

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness

Muholi employs conventions of classical portraiture, fashion photography, and ethnographic imagery to pose critical questions about social injustice and the black body.

Three Women

The Women of Atelier 17

Elizabeth Acevedo’s follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Poet X, again centers and celebrates young women of color— their dreams, intelligence, grace, resilience, and fierceness.

With the Fire on High (Harper Teen, 2019) tells the story of Emoni Santiago, a high school senior and single mother in Philadelphia who has an otherworldly talent in the kitchen and dreams of becoming a chef.

Acevedo brings Emoni to life by highlighting the complexities of being a teenager with big responsibilities: she is wise beyond her years, headstrong, guarded, and loving. She is also afraid—of the future, of failure— and buoyed by the strong women in her life. We root for Emoni as she navigates school, motherhood, a new crush, and a challenging culinary arts class that brings her to Spain for a life-changing immersion. As Emoni grows into her gift—and herself—she finds magic and solace in the kitchen: “[My food is] infused with the people I come from. But it’s also a way for me to look forward: to watch the recipes…transform, grow, and feed the hungriest places inside me.”

RM North American Reciprocal Museum benefits for NMWA members at the Friend level and above

For nearly a decade, journalist Lisa Taddeo undertook complex, intensive reporting on the sexual experiences and desires of three American women. Three Women (Simon and Schuster, 2019) unveils individual tales of longing, self-doubt, love, and torment as the women grapple with power dynamics, infidelity, and rape. Taddeo’s eerily descriptive reporting reads like a captivating novel. Although her subjects represent a limited demographic—three straight, white women—each story immerses readers who identify with their want or yearning. As Taddeo says, “It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are in our rawest moments.”

Taddeo narrates each woman’s formative life events: a seventeen-year-old girl seduced by her high school English teacher, a young mother unsatisfied with a sexless eleven-year marriage, and a submissive entrepreneur controlled by her husband’s fantasies. As voyeurs, we empathize with these women while their communities judge them.

In explicitly detailing female lust, Three Women reveals why this topic is perpetually taboo: the scrutiny of men and other women can damage the spirit.

By revealing nuanced truths, Taddeo upholds the unsung stories of women whose reality has been denied.

Christina Weyl explores the printmaking practices of a group of twentieth-century women artists in The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (Yale University Press, 2019). Run by Stanley Hayter, Atelier 17 existed from 1927/28 until 1988—it was located in Paris for most of those years, but after Hayter fled France during World War II, he reestablished the studio in New York. There, from 1940 to 1955, it became a nexus of technical experimentation and gathering space for artists including Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Dorothy Dehner, and Louise Nevelson. Weyl’s extensive research—based on archival material and interviews with Atelier 17 artists and their families and friends—brings the studio to life as artists dealt with technical printmaking challenges as well as gender dynamics that affected their work’s critical reception. She describes the slowly changing milieu prior to the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s: “With their inky hands and sore shoulders, women artists of Atelier 17 shifted the gender balance and gained credibility as leading experts within the printmaking community.”

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// Christina Papanicolaou

© ZANELE MUHOLI; COURTESY OF STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG, AND YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK

With the Fire on High

WASHINGTON // Zanele Muholi, Ntozakhe II, Parktown, 2016; On view at the Seattle Art Museum

International SPAIN

A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana Museo del Prado, Madrid October 22, 2019– February 2, 2020

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This exhibition presents two artists who broke away from the prevailing stereotypes assigned to women and their artistic practices nearly four centuries ago.

See works from NMWA’s collection

// Alicia Gregory

// Elizabeth Lynch

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Seattle Art Museum On view through November 3, 2019

Education Report 6

Far left: Attendees at the 2019 ABC Advanced Teacher Institute show their collaborative artwork from a STEAM lesson on color perception

PHOTO BY IMAGINE PHOTOGRAPHY

Communities of Learning For several weeks each summer, the National Museum of Women in the Arts transforms into a classroom, an art studio, an experimentation station, and a gathering place for dedicated pre-K–12 educators. These passionate teachers convene for professional development programs inspired by the Art, Books, and Creativity (ABC) Curriculum.

During the week of July 8, the museum welcomed twenty-two teachers—from Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.—to the ABC community. During the training, they engaged with subjectmatter specialists and museum educators, brainstormed artsintegration lesson concepts, and reflected on their teaching in relation to their students’ needs and capacities. Participants generously shared their experiences, wonderings, and ideas.

They learned with, and from, one another.

Two weeks later, fourteen alumni of the ABC Institute attended the ABC Advanced Teacher Institute. This talented cohort included teachers of subjects ranging from visual art to English language arts, math to music, and social studies to science. Some participants

educate early childhood learners and others teach English language learners. They reach students from a variety of backgrounds in their Maryland, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., schools. During their time at NMWA, these educators explored deep connections across visual art, language arts, math, and science through sessions that required interdisciplinary thinking and problem-solving.

Talented guest instructors from Georgia, Texas, and Maryland enriched the week.

This summer was a special one for NMWA educators: it marked the tenth anniversary of the ABC Institute and the fourth anniversary of the Advanced Teacher Institute. In the past decade, the ABC Initiative’s teacher programs have served 272 educators. Collectively, this alumni network teaches an estimated 34,860 students each school year. Liz Jacobi, a fourth-grade teacher in Maryland, says, “I truly believe attending both ABC institutes has transformed my career. I’ve learned there are so many ways to make teaching transdisciplinary and how important that is for students’ overall learning.

I’m excited that I learned how to use art to teach reading and writing.”

Below: A group of artists’ books and artwork created during the 2019 ABC Advanced Teacher Institute

PHOTO BY ADRIENNE L. GAYOSO, NMWA

PHOTO BY IMAGINE PHOTOGRAPHY

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Left: A participant in the 2019 ABC Teacher Institute participant leads a small-group discussion about Alice Neel’s T.B. Harlem (1940)

This alumni network has not only enriched the museum’s culture of learning during the summer months, it has also opened doors for the museum by enabling educators to introduce the museum’s mission and values to a wider local and national audience. Alumni have welcomed NMWA educators into their classrooms to teach their students, coordinated NMWA-led professional development opportunities for their peers, and helped museum educators develop and refine the popular Young Learners Tours.

NMWA educators are awed by, and proud of, the collective impact of the ABC initiative so far; its growing community anticipates the years to come.

Alumni Memories On the occasion of these anniversaries, we reached out to alumni to hear how ABC has enriched their teaching, students, and schools. Here are

a few of the many responses we received: “NMWA educators crafted an immersive and intensive experience that affirmed the importance of art as a way to develop critical thinking in children and adults.”—Debbie Silverman (fourth-grade teacher, Maryland) “Like so many of my students who are doing my assignments for the first time, I was exploring making art and talking about art for the first time. I learned strategies that made me comfortable as a learner and that I know will make my students more comfortable as they learn and apply new concepts.”—Keith Pieschek (middle-school reading/English teacher, Maryland) “The ABC Institute . . . was just a wonderfully inspiring experience. I hope this institute will continue to inspire more teachers in all disciplines and school levels.”—Ellen Rosenthal (retired middle-school art teacher, Virginia)

Dedicated Donor DEDICATED DONORS: JILL AND JEFFREY STERN AND THE PHOTOGRAPHY BUYERS SYNDICATE

© JEAN BUBLEY; PHOTO BY LEE STALSWORTH

Far left: Jill and Jeffrey Stern

There are many ways to support NMWA’s mission!” says Jill Stern. “We found a great way to pursue our interest in photography while helping to build NMWA’s collection,” by donating works that she and her husband, Jeffrey, acquired through their membership in a group called the Photography Buyers Syndicate.

This limited-membership group, founded in 2001, comes together to purchase large collections of photographs, often consisting of rare material directly from artists’ collections or estates. Members can choose to purchase works on the condition that they not be resold—photographs can be collected and kept, or they can be donated to public institutions.

Through this unique model, the group supports artists’ estates through large purchases, but does so without damaging the market through overexposure.

Most significantly, according to the group’s mission statement, their donations bolster public access and recognition by

“As NMWA shines a light on photography, the gifts from the Sterns and other members of the Photography Buyers Syndicate enrich and deepen our collection.”

NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling

“help[ing] build the permanent photography collections of arts institutions.”

As syndicate founder Mike Axelrod describes, the Photography Buyers Syndicate grew out of a rare opportunity.

He and his wife, Joyce, were serious photography collectors, though they started with an impulsive purchase at a New Orleans gallery in 1993.

They returned home to San

Left: Esther Bubley, Untitled (Beauty, junior grade: the largest red ribbon on Norma’s mirror was won 11 years ago in the Saunders County “better baby” contest), n.d.; Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in.; NMWA, Gift of Jill and Jeffrey Stern

Diego and dove into educating themselves about the history of photography. They wanted “to understand the medium and its context,” as Axelrod describes, to make better-informed collecting decisions and discover their passions. Over the following years, they built connections at the Museum of Photographic Arts, where Axelrod became a board member, and with Howard Greenberg, whose eponymous New York City gallery has been a preeminent photography institution for more than three decades.

After the merger of Time Warner and AOL in 2000, Greenberg contacted Axelrod with surprising news—he had been offered 800 photographs by groundbreaking artist Margaret Bourke-White from the Life magazine archive. The corporation declined to pursue Greenberg’s suggestion that they create a museum instead, and in 2001 Axelrod organized what became the group’s first syndication in order to purchase the trove: “It was one chance in

a lifetime,” he says. The group has now held twenty-six syndications—Greenberg contacts Axelrod when a promising set of materials is available, and Axelrod shares the opportunity with his fellow collectors.

The Sterns, who joined the syndicate in about 2012, are Washington, D.C.-based attorneys with a long-held interest in NMWA. “When I got involved with the group,” says Jill, “I wanted to make sure that NMWA was supported.”

Along with other members, they gave a major gift in 2014 of photographs by Esther Bubley (1921–1998), who documented American life during World War II and the years afterward. This gift enabled NMWA’s 2015 exhibition Esther Bubley Up Front, showcasing the collection addition. Syndicate members have recently pledged a new donation, of more than 160 works, by documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015). Jill Stern added, “I have been a strong advocate within the group of trying to find more women photographers for our collections, and also an advocate for donating the Esther Bubley and Mary Ellen Mark photographs to NMWA.” NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling says, “Jill and Jeffrey Stern are wonderful friends to the museum, and we are grateful for their keen enthusiasm for women artists.

As NMWA shines a light on photography—a medium in which women excelled from its earliest days—the gifts from the Sterns and other members of the Photography Buyers Syndicate enrich and deepen our collection.”

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PHOTO BY KEVIN ALLEN

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The Building Blocks of Museum Programming

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Winton Smoot Holladay

Early this year, during the federal government shutdown that closed the Smithsonian museums for nearly a month, a woman from Australia unexpectedly discovered NMWA. She wrote to us afterward, “As an Australian art fan who arrived in D.C. with plans to see the Smithsonian (a trip six months in the making) only for it to be shut down, I couldn’t believe my luck in finding your museum. Sixteen days in D.C. and New York City, and your museum was the only one to take my breath away. It was the best part of my entire trip, and I just wanted to say thank you as a woman, a tourist, and an art appreciator.”

Comments like this, of wondrous discovery and shared commitment, make all of us involved with NMWA so proud. Our mission and our unique building offer a special place for visitors to engage intimately with art by women in a way that no other museum in the world can.

Pride of Place As we have discussed in recent issues of Women in the Arts, NMWA’s leaders have been carefully assessing our historic building’s needs for the future. A skilled team of architects and engineers, who undertook necessary roof repair work after damage from a historic snowstorm, have been helping us to address the question of what comes next: Which renovations and improvements will give NMWA the best state-of-the-art museum building for the coming decades?

9 Opposite: In July 2019, the Great Hall was filled with visitors for the DC Art Book Fair and July Free Community Day Left: A team installs site-specific work

by Clare Rojas on the building in 2012, part of D.C.'s 5x5 public art program

PHOTO BY KEVIN ALLEN

historic structure while making the outside of the building more inviting, animated, and enticing.

Public programs bring stand-out speakers and sold-out audiences to the museum’s dynamic Fresh Talks and other offerings from the Women, Arts, and Social Change initiative. Attendees fill the Great Hall for Sunday Suppers and cocktail hours, and pack the performance hall for riveting conversations, Shenson Concerts, and presentations. This department, too, is hoping for a major facilities upgrade: an infrastructure project that could update the audio-visual technology of NMWA’s event spaces as well as its galleries, creating experiences that are still intimate but make use of accessible new technologies.

Our front-line staff—shop, security, docents, and volunteers—love introducing visitors to the museum’s galleries, library resources, and other spaces. They often comment that clearer signage would make their jobs easier by introducing the museum’s mission to visitors in new and engaging ways.

They also speak of improvements including more convenient and beautiful areas to gather, explore, and engage.

Turning Roadblocks into Building Blocks The museum takes great pride in its enthusiastic visitors, as well as all of the learning and inspirational connections that take place in its 1908 building and Kasser Wing. For more than thirty years, its education, research, exhibitions, and public programs have brought the remarkable accomplishments of women artists to the museum’s ever-growing audiences.

But our work is not done, and our building holds the key to our future. What could improve these inspiring and exciting programs? Our wheels are turning. As our building experts work diligently on a renewal project, staff and board leaders are working together diligently to turn our hopes and dreams into real plans. // Winton Smoot Holladay is the Vice-Chair of NMWA’s Board

of Trustees.

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As we formulate the answers to this question, we are looking deeply at all of our programming—past and present— to help improve visitors’ experiences of the museum in the future. While we know that audiences love NMWA’s ambitious and distinctive programming, we have begun to run up against limits related to our physical space, which we are excited to resolve and reimagine.

For example, the museum’s education team presents highly popular hands-on workshops for children and adults, its renowned Art, Books, and Creativity (ABC) Teacher Institutes, and school field trips, among other programs. The department, though, has never had a dedicated classroom space for these activities, often using the museum’s performance hall stage or the board room as temporary spaces for art-making and teaching. One of our dreams is to have a purpose-built classroom, which would enable us to host more ambitious workshops and enhance our substantial offerings for students and teachers.

To share more about the story of women and art, the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center continually builds its book holdings and biographical files on global artists and digitizes its expansive collection of archival materials to better serve researchers, museum professionals, students, and visitors. The library’s exhibitions centered on its renowned collection of artists’ books also enchant and inspire guests of the LRC. Staff envisions one day welcoming visitors to a flexible interpretive space that integrates the library’s stacks and digital resources with a state-of-the-art meeting and gathering area for conversations with artists as well as scholarly lectures, reading groups, and film screenings.

NMWA curators have done amazing things inside—and outside—the historic building. Artists love the manageable scale of the galleries and the care taken by staff in displaying art. The museum has a robust and exciting exhibition schedule each year, and it also was among the first in the country to create new and diverse thematic installations with its collection. The response from visitors is overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing deep appreciation for the diversity of objects on view. When the curatorial team discusses its wish list for the future with the architects, at the top of their list is increasing gallery space within the building to show more art.

Outdoors, the New York Avenue Sculpture Project is currently showcasing work by Betsabeé Romero, its fourth exhibition of public sculpture by women artists. The museum also has activated the building’s exterior through a large-scale mural by Esther Mahlangu in 1994 and site-specific works

by Clare Rojas in 2012. As part of our plan for the future, here, too, curators are thinking of novel ways to honor our

Judy Chicago The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction SEPTEMBER 19, 2019–JANUARY 20, 2020

Virginia Treanor

NMWA is proud to debut Judy Chicago’s latest body of work, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.

The pioneering artist has dedicated her career to visualizing historically taboo subjects—including the process of birth, women’s anatomy, and toxic masculinity—in diverse mediums including painting, sculpture, needlework, porcelain, stained glass, and even firework performance. Chicago, who celebrated her eightieth birthday in July 2019, continues to push boundaries with The End. This body of work extends her commitment to challenging the status quo and grappling with all facets of the human condition.

Title Panel: Mortality, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2015; Kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, 9 x 12 in.

ALL IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO; © JUDY CHICAGO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; PHOTOS © DONALD WOODMAN/ARS, NY

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comprising nearly forty works of painted porcelain and glass, as well as two large bronze sculptures, The End looks unflinchingly and intimately at mortality, death, and extinction. The series is presented in three sections: “Stages of Dying,” which illustrates the five stages of grief; “Mortality,” a personal rumination on death; and “Extinction,” depicting flora and fauna fatally threatened by humans. Works in “Stages of Dying” are executed in china paint on white porcelain, while those in “Mortality” and “Extinction” are made from kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, an extremely labor-intensive process. A bronze relief featuring Chicago’s likeness is included in “Mortality,” and another featuring endangered animals is part of “Extinction.”

Chicago answered questions about what prompted her to tackle the subjects of death and extinction, why she chose the materials she used, and how she is ensuring her legacy.

Virginia Treanor: What inspired this project?

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Judy Chicago: I have always had a strong sense of my own

mortality because of my childhood, which was shadowed by the deaths of many family members and friends. As a result, I am quite surprised that I have lived so long. In 2012, I had a significant health scare and really thought my life—as incredible

as it has been—was soon going to be over. That was not the case, but the experience impelled me to look at my fears of death and to start down the path of discovery that, six years later, resulted in The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction.

“As difficult as it was to confront my own mortality, it brought me to a place of acceptance.”

VT: Why did you choose to confront death—a topic that

most people try to avoid?

JC: I am most comfortable with the truth and, as an artist,

most interested in what has been left out of the artistic legacy. Until recently, for example, women’s experiences of menstruation and birth, the Holocaust, and other significant and universal aspects of the human condition or history were rarely seen.

When I began my research on the history of death and how it has been represented in art, I was struck by what

Opposite: Stages of Dying 5/6: Depression, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2015; China paint on porcelain, 12 x 16 in.

VT: What inspired you to work with the three distinct

mediums of glass, porcelain, and bronze?

JC: Throughout my career, I have selected techniques that seemed suitable to the subject matter in which I was interested. In terms of The End, first, I wanted it to be modest in size. Some years ago, I saw Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series and was struck by how powerful the work was, even though it was small. Second, I wanted it to be in my own hand because I wished to demonstrate that art does not have to be huge in order to be important or moving. Third, the small scale and hand-painting allowed for more personal images.

Right: A Desperate Weariness, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2015; Kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, 12 x 9 in.

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Below: How Will I Die? #1, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2015; Kiln-fired glass paint and luster on black glass, 9 x 12 in.

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an anomaly it is that contemporary society attempts to distance itself from death, even though it is an inevitable part of life. It was interesting to discover that many earlier societies incorporated an awareness of death more openly than we do.

Declining, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2016; Kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, 12 x 18 in.

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“I believe that the function of the artist is to help us deal with challenging aspects of the human condition.”

Painted porcelain seemed the appropriate technique for “Stages of Dying,” based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work on the stages of grief. But the “Mortality” and “Extinction” series are on black glass, which is both strong and fragile—it seems a perfect metaphor for life. The inclusion of two bronzes— the “Mortality” relief, which introduces that section, and the “Extinction” relief that concludes the last series—brings the subject matter into “high relief” and, hopefully, makes it more real.

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VT: Was it hard to confront death throughout the long

period you spent making these works? Did it heighten or quell your anxieties?

JC: As difficult as it was to confront my own mortality, it brought me to a place of acceptance. I hope that I will be able to face my end with courage, grace, and humor.

Much harder was the “Extinction” section, which took two years of intense painting and was excruciating to create. To be faced every day with what we are doing to

other creatures and the planet was to enter the kingdom of hell. My only preparation for such enduring grief was the Holocaust Project, created from 1987 to 1993 with my husband, photographer Donald Woodman. That was hard, but this was worse.

VT: Reflecting on your entire body of work, how do

you view this series fitting into—or departing from— that oeuvre?

JC: Taking on these subjects is consistent with the rest of my work in that I have never shied away from difficult subject matter. In fact, I believe that the function of the artist is to help us deal with challenging aspects of the human condition.

I set out to make a contribution to art history, and I have tried to do that by developing a language in which the female experience becomes a pathway to the universal. It has been male experience that has been considered universal, while what women go through has been despised, marginalized, or ignored. I set out to change that.

VT: Can you tell us about the online portal that will

provide access to your archival material?

JC: For the last two years, NMWA (which will hold my visual archive) has been collaborating with the Schlesinger Library Opposite: Extinction Relief, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2018; Patinated bronze, 53 ½ x 30 ½ x 14 in.

for the History of Women in America at Harvard University (which houses my paper archives) and Penn State, a premier institution for art education (which holds my art education archive), to create the Judy Chicago Portal.

The Portal—which will launch on October 17, 2019, at the Schlesinger Library—will allow worldwide access to my archives and will link to other institutions that hold major collections of my work (like the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, where The Dinner Party is housed). I am thrilled that it seems my work has overcome the erasure that has eclipsed the contributions of so many worthy women, which is one of the goals of my life.

//

JUDY CHICAGO: NEW VIEWS

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New Views on an Iconic Feminist Artist

// Virginia Treanor is the associate curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

new vıews

In conjunction with the presentation of The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, NMWA announces the new book Judy Chicago: New Views. As the first major monograph on Chicago in nearly twenty years, this fully illustrated volume provides fresh perspectives by leading scholars and curators.

Featuring her newest work, The End, as well as major examples from throughout her career, this book offers a new examination of Chicago’s wide-ranging artistic expression and powerful voice.

Judy Chicago: New Views features an introductory essay by writer and sociologist of culture Sarah Thornton, who frames Chicago’s legacy. An interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, illuminates her life and art. Essayists Chad

Alligood, Manuela Ammer, Massimiliano Gioni, Philipp Kaiser, Jonathan D. Katz, Martha C. Nussbaum, and William J. Simmons each explore a body of Chicago’s groundbreaking work.

Buy the book: Turn to the Museum Shop section on page 36 for order information.

Hear from the artist: Chicago will appear at NMWA in conversation with renowned philosopher and book contributor Martha C. Nussbaum on September 22. Find more information on the calendar on page 17.

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Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition is made possible by the MaryRoss Taylor Exhibition Fund.

Additional support is provided by the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund and the members of NMWA.

Calendar 16

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EXHIBITIONS

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Daily / Weekly / Monthly

KEY

Gallery Experience: Conversation Pieces Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction September 19, 2019– January 20, 2020

F Free

Live Dangerously September 19, 2019– January 20, 2020

M

Free for members



Free for members and one guest

MOST DAYS 2–2:30 P.M. // M A O

Join us for thirty-minute conversations that spotlight two works on view. Check in at the Information Desk.

A

Free with admission

Gallery Talks: Lunchtime Talk Series

R

Reservation required at https://nmwa.org

WEDNESDAYS 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

O

No reservations required

E Exhibition-related program

Bite-sized, staff-led talks encourage visitors to look closely and discuss works on view.

Free Community Days FIRST SUNDAYS 12–5 P.M. // F M O

The first Sunday of each month, NMWA offers free admission to the public. Enjoy current exhibitions and the collection galleries.

Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age October 11, 2019– January 5, 2020 More is More: Multiples On view through September 22, 2019

September

9 / 18

Join us for a special preview of Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. The newest body of work by the iconic feminist artist continues her commitment to challenge the status quo and advocate for change.

New York Avenue Sculpture Project: Betsabeé Romero On view through September 20, 2020

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Power in My Hand: Women Poets, Women Artists, and Social Change On view through October 31, 2019, in the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center; Open Monday–Friday, 10 A.M.– 12 P.M. and 1 P.M. –5 P.M.

Judy Chicago, Stranded, 2016; On view in Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO ; © JUDY CHICAGO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY; PHOTO © DONALD WOODMAN / A RS, NYW

Member Preview Day: Judy Chicago—The End

WED 10 A.M.–2 P.M. // M + O E

9 / 18

Gallery Talk: New York Avenue Sculpture Project

WED 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

Visit https://nmwa.org for reservations, a complete calendar of events, and more information.

9 / 21

Museum Day

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SAT 10 A.M.–5 P.M. // F R

NMWA opens free of charge as part of Smithsonian magazine’s 15th annual Museum Day. This event offers free admission for two to visitors presenting a Museum Day ticket.

9 / 22

Fresh Talk: Judy Chicago: New Views

SUN 4:30–7 P.M. // R E

Judy Chicago speaks with philosopher Martha Nussbaum about her newest body of work and signs copies of the NMWA-published monograph Judy Chicago: New Views. Ticket includes program, one copy of the book, and Catalyst cocktail hour. $80 general; $65 members.

9 / 25

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler

WED 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

October

10 / 2

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler

WED 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

10 / 2 Shenson Chamber Music Concert: Jamie Bernstein & Spencer Myer

WED

7:30–9:30 P.M. // F M R

Artistic Director Gilan Tocco Corn welcomes writer and concert narrator Jamie Bernstein and pianist Spencer Myer for a program honoring composer and musician Leonard Bernstein.

10 / 6

Free Community Day

SUN 12–5 P.M. // F M O

10 / 6

Drop-In Tour: Fierce Women 2.0

Visitors enjoy a Fierce Women 2.0 tour at NMWA, in a gallery with Jaune Quick-toSee Smith’s Indian, Indio, Indigenous (1992)

10 / 19 SAT

In this tour for children ages 3 to 6 accompanied by adults, participants adventure through the galleries to explore animals in art and create their own artwork.

10 / 23

10 / 23

WED

WED

Discover a squad of fierce women who blazed trails as artists, activists, and innovators. Limited space—check in at the Information Desk.

10 / 9

10 / 16

WED

WED

Gallery Talk: Live Dangerously 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

10 / 27 SUN

Cultural Capital: The Big Quiet 7–9 P.M. // R

Shop: MakeHER Mart 10 A.M.–4 P.M. // M A O

Support women-owned small businesses by shopping handcrafted arts and merchandise of local women artists and artisans in this annual market.

Gallery Talk: Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

10 / 16 Cultural Capital: Contact High—Screening & Conversation

WED 7–9 P.M. // R Journalist and producer Vikki Tobak and music historian, DJ, and producer Adrian Loving lead a conversation with women photographers from Tobak’s book Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop (2018), plus a film screening featuring the photographers. $20 general; $15 members, seniors, students.

Gallery Talk: Judy Chicago—The End 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

The Big Quiet comes to NMWA’s Great Hall for an evening of guided meditation featuring string instrumentalists and sound practitioners. $35 general; $30 members, seniors, students.

SUN 1–2 P.M. // F M O

Young Learners Tour: Animal Adventure 10–11 A.M. // F M R

10 / 27 Fresh Talk: Rooms of Her Own—Women, Art, and Ownership in the Hotel Industry

SUN

4:30–7 P.M. // R

Part of the 2019 MakeHER Summit, meet innovative female hoteliers and artists who are changing the hospitality industry to focus on sustainability and the preservation of place and culture. Featuring Zita Cobb of the Shorefast Foundation and Fogo Island Inn; other speakers TBA. Ticket includes museum admission and Catalyst cocktail hour. $25 general; $20 members, seniors, students.

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PHOTO BY KEVIN ALLEN

Janaina Tschäpe, Fiji, from 100 Little Deaths, 2002; On view in Live Dangerously © JANAINA TSCHÄPE; IMAGE COURTESY OF JANAINA TSCHÄPE STUDIO

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11 / 6

Cultural Capital: Mujeres de Cine

WED 6:30–9 P.M. // F M R

Celebrate women in Spain’s film industry with a screening of Celia Rico Clavellino’s Journey to a Mother’s Room (95 min.). The film is an intimate mother/daughter drama that looks at life inside the empty nest.

//

R

Reservation required at https://nmwa.org No reservations required

Free for members



Free for members and one guest

O

A

Free with admission

E Exhibition-related program

10 / 28 MON

MakeHER Summit Workshops 10 A.M.–3 P.M. // R

Designed for creative women entrepreneurs, this intensive day of workshops provides networking, tools, and tips to help projects and businesses thrive. Includes breakfast and lunch. $25 general; $20 members, seniors, students.

10 / 30 WED

Gallery Talk: Live Dangerously 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

November

11 / 1 FRI

Exhibition Party: Live Dangerously 8–11 P.M. // R E

You’re invited to celebrate Live Dangerously, which features fierce, dreamy, and witty photographs of the female figure in Earth’s terrain. Includes exhibition entry, music, light bites, and open bar. $55 general; $45 members.

11 / 3

Young Learners Program: Read for the Record 2019

THU 12–1 P.M. // F M O

Join us for bilingual story time and artmaking! Children ages 3 to 6 accompanied by adults will hear, in English and Spanish, Thank you, Omu! (¡Gracias, Omu!) by authorillustrator Oge Mora and create an original work of art.

KEY

F Free M

11 / 7

11 / 13 WED

Gallery Talk: Judy Chicago—The End 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

11 / 17 Fresh Talk: Art, Power, and the Vote: 100 Years After Suffrage

SUN 4:30–7 P.M. // R A century after the 19th Amendment was passed, artists, organizers, and activists continue to work together for social change. Hear from artists responding to social unrest and activists on the front lines. Includes museum admission and Sunday Supper. $25 general; $20 members, seniors, students.

11 / 20 WED

Gallery Talk: Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

11 / 25–27 Cultural Capital: 19: The Musical MON-WED 7–9:30 P.M. // R Join us for the world premiere of 19, a musical telling the dynamic story of the suffragists who fought to get women the right to vote—the 19th Amendment. $50 general; $45 members, seniors, students.

11 /27

Gallery Talk: Live Dangerously

WED 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

Free Community Day

SUN 12–5 P.M. // F M O

11 / 3

Drop-In Tour: Fierce Women 2.0

SUN 1–2 P.M. // F M O

11 / 6

WED

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

PHOTO BY KEVIN ALLEN

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Discover a squad of fierce women who blazed trails as artists, activists, and innovators. Limited space— sign up at the Information Desk.

Visit https://nmwa.org for reservations, a complete calendar of events, and more information.

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December

12 / 1

Free Community Day

SUN 12–5 P.M. // F M O

12 / 1

Drop-In Tour: Fierce Women 2.0

SUN 1–2 P.M. // F M O

Discover a squad of fierce women who blazed trails as artists, activists, and innovators. Limited space—sign up at the Information Desk.

12 / 4

12 /11

Gallery Talk: Judy Chicago—The End 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

Gallery Talk: Live Dangerously

WED 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E PHOTO BY EMILY HAIGHT, NMWA

12 / 14 Young Learners Tour: Spotting Shapes and Looking for Lines

SAT 10–11 A.M. // F M R

In this tour for children ages 3 to 6 accompanied by adults, participants explore shapes and lines in artworks throughout the galleries.

12 / 18 WED

Gallery Talk: Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age

2 / 2

January

SUN 12–5 P.M. // F M O

2 / 2

Free Community Day

SUN 1–2 P.M. // F M O

1 / 5

SUN 12–5 P.M. // F M O

1 / 5

SUN 1–2 P.M. // F M O

WED

1/8

Gallery Talk: Live Dangerously 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E Artists in Conversation: Janaina Tschäpe

WED 6:30–8:30 P.M. // R E

Artist Janaina Tschäpe shares her stories and artwork featured in Live Dangerously. Includes in-gallery conversation and refreshments. $30 general; $20 members, seniors, students.

1 / 15

WED

1 / 22 WED

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

1 / 29

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler

12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

WED

Free Community Day Drop-In Tour: Fierce Women 2.0 Discover a squad of fierce women who blazed trails as artists, activists, and innovators. Limited space—sign up at the Information Desk.

Drop-In Tour: Fierce Women 2.0 Discover a squad of fierce women who blazed trails as artists, activists, and innovators. Limited space—sign up at the Information Desk.

1 / 8

February

12–12:30 P.M. // F M O E

2 / 5

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler

WED

12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

2 / 12

2 / 15

SAT

WED

Gallery Talk: Collection Sampler 12–12:30 P.M. // F M O

Young Learners Tour: Color-Full Fun 10–11 A.M. // F M R

In this tour for children ages 3 to 6 accompanied by adults, participants become “Color Detectives” as they explore color throughout the galleries.

// Education programming is made possible by Mrs. Marjorie Rachlin,

the Leo Rosner Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Wells Fargo, the Harriet E. McNamee Youth Education Fund, William and Christine Leahy, and the Junior League of Washington.

The Women, Arts, and Social Change public programs initiative is made possible through leadership gifts from Denise Littlefield Sobel, the Dauray/Davis Family Fund, and the Susan and Jim Swartz Public Programs Fund. Additional funding is provided by the Bernstein Family Foundation, the Revada Foundation of the Logan Family, and Stephanie Sale.

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WED

Rania Matar, Rayven, Miami Beach, Florida, from the series “SHE,” 2019; Archival pigment print, 37 x 44 in.; Courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery

LI E D NGEROUSLY September 19, 2019–January 20, 2020

How can our planet’s physical terrain enable women’s self-exploration, expression, and empowerment? In Live Dangerously, twelve photographers interrogate this question by positioning female figures in natural surroundings to suggest provocative narratives. As a pendant exhibition to Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, this presentation similarly delves into themes surrounding women’s bodies and the natural world. It is drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary photography and enhanced by key loans. Collectively, the fierce, dreamy, and witty images in Live Dangerously illuminate landscapes and their role in constructing personal histories and identities.

© RANIA MATAR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ROBERT KLEIN GALLERY

Orin Zahra

© JANAINA TSCHÄPE; IMAGE COURTESY OF JANAINA TSCHÄPE STUDIO

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Janaina Tschäpe, Frick Park, from 100 Little Deaths, 2000; Chromogenic color print, 31 x 47 in.; NMWA, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

100 Little Deaths Live Dangerously prominently features the performative and fantastical works of Janaina Tschäpe (b. 1973). Upon entering the exhibition, viewers encounter a multi-gallery, floor-to-ceiling installation of the one hundred large-scale photographs that comprise Tschäpe’s 100 Little Deaths (1996–2002), presented in its entirety at NMWA for the first time.

Each image in the series depicts the artist lying prostrate in a different location around the world—passageways and staircases in India, at the base of the monumental Moais statues on Easter Island, on the shores of Fiji, and more. With various vantage points and camera angles—from bird’s eye views to extreme close-ups—the results of this repeated encounter are both startling and intentionally theatrical.

Tschäpe inserts herself into these sites as a way to contemplate her own passing from the earthly realm. Her images also reflect a four-year global trek replete with adventurous travel and exploration.

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Artists’ interventions present women as intrepid in the extreme conditions of nature.

In Her Element Artists in Live Dangerously depict the female body immersed in various landforms, exploring rocky terrains, green valleys, deserts, and bodies of water. Rather than seeming daunted

by these landscapes, figures climb, run, and swim through the sites, freely embracing the sublime elements of nature.

Several of the photographers capture women near crashing waves or underwater as though the aquatic landscape is their natural habitat. For example, the model in Rayven, Miami Beach, Florida (2019), from the ongoing “SHE” series by Rania Matar (b. 1964), turns her face in profile under a stormy gray sky as green waves collapse into foamy ripples at her feet. With her eyes closed and lush golden locks flowing in the breeze, she appears completely serene amid the turbulent background.

Dry, arid terrain became a frequent backdrop for pioneering fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895–1989).

Working for Harper’s Bazaar magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, Dahl-Wolfe preferred to photograph models outdoors in natural light, and often took them on location to exotic settings. She shot California Desert (1948) in the Mojave Desert and positioned her model so that the curves of her body subtly echo the dips of the white sand dunes.

For more than thirty years, Kirsten Justesen (b. 1943) has used ice as a pivotal element in her art. In her “Ice Pedestal” series (2000; printed 2015), a new addition to NMWA’s collection, Justesen positions herself atop blocks of ice wearing only rubber boots and gloves, letting the ice blocks melt, and then refreezing the puddles. Her photographs record this repetitive process of transition from solid to liquid to solid, capturing the idea of mutability and impermanence. DahlWolfe’s images of bare skin on forbiddingly hot surfaces and Justesen’s interventions with frozen materials present women as intrepid in the extreme conditions of nature.

Xaviera Simmons, One Day and Back Then (Standing), 2007; Chromira C-print, 30 x 40 in.; Collection of Darryl Atwell

Mischief Makers Female bodies dominate and activate the land in Live Dangerously. At times, they appear to be in precarious circumstances, as in Untitled #104 (A Short Story of Happenstance) (2003) by Anna Gaskell (b. 1969). A figure dressed in black with a white, Victorian-style petticoat is upturned against a forested background. Gaskell crops the figure so the viewer only sees two legs sticking up in the air, humorously implying that something has gone awry for this character.

In other instances, individuals rebel and disrupt societal expectations of women. Justine Kurland (b. 1969) scours locations with links to the nineteenth-century Western frontier to frame her narratives about adolescent women in the landscape. In Smoke Bombs (2000), from Kurland’s series “Girl Pictures,” three teenagers set off fireworks outdoors under a concrete overpass, their crouching bodies Kirsten Justesen, Ice Pedestal #2, 2000 (printed 2015); Chromogenic color print, 36 x 36 in.; NMWA, Gift of Peter J. Lassen

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© XAVIERA SIMMONS, COURTESY OF DAVID CASTILLO GALLERY

Pointing to the pre-Civil War history of the American South, when black bodies were constitutionally considered the property of white plantation owners, Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974) raises an incisive question: Who, historically and traditionally, gets to exist in the sublime with regard to landscape photography and landscape painting? In One Day and Back Then (Standing) (2007), the artist depicts herself as a character gazing directly out at the viewer, tucked into a thicket of reeds, dressed in a dark trench coat, and covered in blackface. The viewer must confront intentionally ambiguous aspects of the image, such as the identity and intentions of the subject, and the meaning of blackface in this context.

Simmons reflects on the current social status of both black and white Americans: “How might our entire history have been different had America fulfilled its emancipatory promises to its freed slaves and their descendants instead of commemorating its defeated Confederate planters?”¹

enveloped by wisps of smoke. Kurland says, “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals. The girls in these photographs have gathered together in solidarity, claiming territory outside the margins of family and institutions.”² Decades earlier, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) explored the act of physically altering or unsettling the environment through smoke and flames. In her famed Siluetas, Mendieta marked outlines of her body with gunpowder or sulfur, then ignited the silhouettes, leaving traces of her corporeal form in the ground. In Volcán (1979), she transformed the silhouette into a volcano-like crater filled with live coals that emitted smoke. For the artist, burning this shape into the ground was a sign of returning the body to earth, a primordial source of female sexuality and power.

Conventional art historical representations of female figures show them passively linked to the landscape through gendered associations of nature, eroticism, and fertility. In contrast, Live Dangerously is seen through the lens of the female gaze, with images of women reclaiming the landscape. Contemporary women photographers relate women’s bodies to cycles of life and spur profound questions about how—and where—we live our lives.

© KIRSTEN JUSTESEN, DENMARK

Live Dangerously is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibition is made possible by the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund, with additional support provided by the members of NMWA. Notes: 1. Xaviera Simmons, email to the author, July 1, 2019.

2. Kurland quoted in Tish Wrigley, “Documenting Girlhood: Justine Kurland’s Captivating Pictures, 20 Years On,” in AnOther Magazine (June 5, 2018), https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/10908/documenting-girlhoodjustine-kurlands-captivating-pictures-20-years-on.

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// Orin Zahra is the assistant curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

PHOTO BY LEE STALSWORTH

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Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age October 11, 2019–January 5, 2020

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Virginia Treanor

The lives and works of several highly successful women artists, including Judith Leyster and Rachel Ruysch, illuminate the Dutch Golden Age. This period of unprecedented economic growth, from the late sixteenth century through the first quarter of the eighteenth,

featured a rising middle class of wealthy merchants who fueled demand for paintings and prints of still lifes, portraits, and scenes of everyday life. This focus exhibition reveals women who excelled as artists in this era, pushing boundaries in art and in life.

Opposite: Judith Leyster, The Concert, ca. 1633; Oil on canvas, 24 x 34 ¼ in.; NMWA, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

Distinct Talents, Distinct Lives

One common assumption about historical women artists is that marriages, pregnancies, and childcare hindered their ability to continue producing art. Family-focused labor certainly affected many women’s careers, but equally significant

25

Judith Leyster, Self-portrait, ca. 1640s; Oil on panel, 12 ⅛ x 8 ⅝ in.; Private Collection

Considering a group of these women together may upend common assump­tions and uncover surprising connections.

factors were their economic status and prevailing social norms (particularly regarding the nursing of children).³ As is evident from the small group of Dutch and Flemish artists in Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age, women who had children often had vastly different career trajectories from one another.

The career of Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) lasted an astonishing seventy years, and she was arguably the most successful artist during this time period. She sold work to an international circle of patrons. Ruysch also had eleven children with her husband, Juriaen Pool, an artist himself.

Evidently, Ruysch’s pregnancies and births did not adversely affect her career.⁴ As a successful painter from the upper middle class, Ruysch would have had the economic means to hire significant domestic help.

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Changing the Narrative The story is too familiar: women artists of the past, renowned in their own lifetimes for artistic skill and success, were written out of (Western) art history by the time it was an entrenched academic field in the early twentieth century. Not until the 1970s was there a concerted effort by art historians, informed by the principles of feminism, to recover the names and works of historical women artists. Today the names of Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Mary Cassatt are familiar, and their works appear in exhibitions and publications alongside those of their male contemporaries.

Because the work of recovery is ongoing, the predominant narrative about early modern women artists has been that they were rare—exceptions to the rule. However, as more names are rescued from near obscurity, it is evident that women artists were far more common than modern art history has recognized. This is not to say that they came near to equaling the number of male artists; the second-class status of women was pervasive in early modern Europe, and discrimination often kept them from accessing the same level of training as their male counterparts.

The 1976 exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was the first major attempt to exhibit the work of historical women artists. Since then, other presentations, many organized

by NMWA, have focused on groups of women artists from the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth-century France, and Impressionism, to name a few. To date, however, there has never been an exhibition devoted to a group of Dutch and Flemish women artists of the so-called Golden Age.¹ This is remarkable given the sheer scale of artistic production in the Netherlands during this period. By some estimates, there was one painter for every 2,000–3,000 inhabitants, a ratio exceeding that of Italy during the same time.² It should not be surprising that women artists lived and thrived in this environment. Like women artists elsewhere in Europe, many Dutch and Flemish women were born into families of artists and received their training from fathers or brothers. However, some took the more traditionally “masculine” route of apprenticing with a recognized master and joining artistic guilds. Considering a group of these women together offers an opportunity to upend common assumptions and uncover surprising connections.

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For women who did not enjoy similarly high economic status, having children often did affect their artistic production, whether they ceased altogether or simply shifted their practices. However, making assumptions about women’s lives centuries ago can lead to inaccurate conclusions.

Historical works may not survive, for example, or may be misattributed, particularly for women artists.

Judith Leyster (1609–1660) contravened norms in many aspects of her career: she did not come from an artistic family, she likely apprenticed with a male artist, she was one of the first women admitted to the painter’s guild in Haarlem, and she took on her own students.⁵ She painted portraits and genre scenes such as NMWA’s The Concert (ca. 1633; p. 24), in which she may have depicted herself as the central figure. Today, relatively few works attributed to her are dated after her marriage to painter Jan Miense Molenaer in 1636.⁶ Some scholars have concluded that financial instability and

Maria Sibylla Merian, Plate 12 (above) and Plate 1 (right) from Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphoses in Surinam, 2nd edition, 1719; Hand-colored engravings on paper, each 12 ¾ x 9 ¾ in.; NMWA, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

domestic responsibilities, including the births of five children, impeded her artistic production. However, Leyster’s early-career tenacity makes it difficult to assume that she so drastically stepped back from her practice.

A recently rediscovered self-portrait by Leyster (p. 25) opens a new avenue for understanding the artist’s life and work. Like the well-known self-portrait at the National Gallery of Art that Leyster painted earlier in her career, which is full of gusto and vigorously applied paint, this later one, which most likely dates from the mid-1640s, also exudes painterly confidence. Much smaller in scale than the earlier painting, it reflects maturity and practiced skill and is no less powerful a statement. Again, Leyster presents herself as an artist with the tools of her trade—palette, paintbrush, and mahlstick—in her hands. The face and hands are painted much more freely in the later portrait, but her broad face and upturned nose are unmistakable.

Past is Present

Exhibitions on historical women artists are important because they begin to shift the historical record and reflect a culture that is committed to rectifying the omissions of the past.

They signify the changes in our own time and perspectives.

In displaying this art by Dutch women, we work to ensure that their legacies are preserved for future generations. // Virginia Treanor is the associate curator at the National Museum

of Women in the Arts.

Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age, presented in the Teresa Lozano Long Gallery of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, is organized by the museum and generously supported by the members of NMWA.

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Rachel Ruysch, Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies, and other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge, ca. late 1680s; Oil on canvas, 42 ½ x 33 in.; NMWA, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay

Notes: 1. Monographic exhibitions include Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, Worcester Art Museum and the Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem (1993); Judith Leyster: “Leading Star,” NMWA (1993); The Art of Clara Peeters, Rockoxhuis Museum, Antwerp, and Museo del Prado, Madrid (2016); and Michaelina. Baroque’s Leading Lady, Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2018).

2. Steve Holmes, Masterworks: Low and Surrounding Countries: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century Old Master Paintings (Santa Fe, N.M.: Rio Grande Trust, Rio Grande Press, 2008), 33.

3. See Frima Fox Hofrichter, “An Intimate Look at Baroque Women Artists: Birth, Babies, and Biography,” in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 139–58.

4. Hofrichter, 2005, 152.

5. It has been suggested that Leyster studied with either Frans Pieters, De Grebber, or Frans Hals. See Hofrichter, Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1989), 14.

6. Hofrichter says, “attributing this alteration in her work only to her marriage is too simplistic,” and notes that Leyster may have also collaborated with her husband on his painting after their marriage. Hofrichter, 2005, 148 n. 41.

7. See Marianne Berardi, Science into Art: Rachel Ruysch’s Early Development as a Still-Life Painter, PhD (University of Pittsburgh, 1998), 110.

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Natural Connections The lives and works of women artists in the Golden Age reveal connections between artists, patrons, and the subject matter of the natural world. The Dutch took pleasure in the wonders of nature—from flowers to food—and this is evident in the profusion of still life paintings executed during the era.

The field of botany took root in the Netherlands, where one of the oldest botanical gardens, the Hortus Botanicus (est. 1638), still exists in Amsterdam. Private citizens also tried growing and maintaining the new species of plants that arrived via the Dutch East and West India Companies. One of the best known of these individuals was a woman, Agnes Block (1629–1704), a wealthy and well-educated collector of plants and art. To document her gardens and specimens, Block commissioned artists to preserve the ephemeral organisms in paint and pencil. Featured artists Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) and Alida Withoos (ca. 1661–1730) both worked for Block during their careers. In 1687, Block commissioned Withoos to paint one of her prize plants: the first successfully grown pineapple in Europe. Unfortunately, Withoos’s painting does not survive, but fascination with the plant is evident in Merian’s illustration of it in her publication Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphoses in Surinam (p. 26). Merian based the images on observations of plants and insects during her travels to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America.

The greatest floral still-life painter of the Golden Age was Rachel Ruysch, whose gloriously baroque compositions burst with movement and color (p. 27). The verisimilitude she achieved was largely due to her experience of looking closely at organisms. Her father, Frederik Ruysch, was professor of botany at the Hortus Botanicus as well as a surgeon, obstetrician, and collector of medical anomalies. Surrounded by this array of natural wonders, Ruysch honed her observational power and artistic skill.⁷

//

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RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Nineteenth-Century American Paintings // Orin Zahra

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Three works, by Kate Newhall (1870–1917), Abigail Tyler Oakes (1823–1898), and Maria Dixon (active 1870s–d. 1896), are among the latest additions to the museum’s walls, enriching its holdings of nineteenthcentury paintings. They are museum purchases made possible by a generous gift from founding members Dr. Robert Beckman and Susan Beckman, in memory of Robert's mother, Marion Forman Beckman.

Marion Beckman was born in 1918 in Philadelphia. Although she had dreams of becoming an artist, she instead faced familial obligations to earn money to support her brother’s education.

“What really strikes me about

my mother is her persistence,” recalls Robert Beckman.

Working as a bookkeeper during the Depression years, she taught herself oil painting, producing landscapes and still lifes with the goal of honing her skills.

At the age of forty-five, she suffered a stroke and was never able to pursue her craft with the same vigor. “She was a courageous and loving wife and mother, and a dynamic selftaught artist.” Marion Beckman’s story is one that echoes the lives of many aspiring women artists. The Beckman family felt a deep resonance with NMWA’s mission: they were eager to help the museum unearth and shine a light on the cultural triumphs of women artists, particularly those whose contributions

were neglected or stymied.

Robert Beckman worked with the museum to select gifts that would be valued additions to the collection and aptly reflect Marion Beckman’s artistic interests. NMWA curators approached Hawthorne Fine Arts, a New York City gallery that specializes in works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, many by women largely forgotten to history. Beckman’s support allowed the curators to focus on and purchase these paintings, which particularly augment the museum’s representation of historical women artists exploring the American wilderness, a genre that has typically focused on male artists in art historical scholarship.

The Beckman family felt a deep resonance with NMWA’s mission— their recent gifts help shine a light on the cultural triumphs of women.

Kate W. Newhall, Near Plainfield, NY [In the Gorge], 1881; Oil on canvas, 16 x 25 in.; NMWA, Museum Purchase: Funds donated by Dr. Robert A. Beckman and Family in honor of Marion Forman Beckman

Abigail Tyler Oakes, View of the Connecticut River Valley, 1854; Oil on canvas, 17 ¾ x 24 in.; NMWA, Museum Purchase: Funds donated

by Dr. Robert A. Beckman and Family in honor of Marion Forman Beckman

realm. Of this painting, Robert Beckman says, “When we saw A Quiet Moment, we loved it, as we knew my mother would.”

This year, when Marion Forman Beckman would have turned 101, NMWA honors her life through the acquisition of three vibrant examples of historical American art. Through the Beckman family’s vision and support, the artists Newhall, Oakes, and Dixon join a fellowship of women whose artistic visions are recognized in the nation’s capital. Ready to be discovered by NMWA’s visitors, these works enhance the museum’s collection as it continues to tell a fuller story of women in the arts. // Orin Zahra is the assistant curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Note: 1. This is the second painting by Oakes in NMWA’s collection, after Hudson River Landscape (1852), a recent gift from the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Hudson River School was a mid-nineteenthcentury art movement whose artists depicted sweeping landscapes surrounding the Hudson River Valley.

Maria R. Dixon, A Quiet Moment, 1896; Oil on canvas, 18 x 14 in.; NMWA, Museum Purchase: Funds donated by Dr. Robert A. Beckman and Family in honor of Marion Forman Beckman

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The curators’ selection of the paintings by Newhall and Oakes was inspired by Marion Beckman’s own appreciation for historical landscapes and seascapes. Newhall was a prolific landscape painter, depicting subjects from the mountains and rivers of New England to coastal scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area. Near Plainfield, NY [In the Gorge] (1881) is rendered in careful detail. Its sense of quiet calm is enhanced by the stillness of the clear water, which captures the reflection of the nearby trees and rocky cliffs.

Abigail Tyler Oakes, one of California’s first professional women artists, created panoramic landscape paintings that have commonalities with those of the famed Hudson River School.¹ View of the Connecticut River Valley (1854) depicts a highly atmospheric background in a condensed composition. A small group of grazing cattle, lush vegetation, and distant mountain peaks direct the viewer’s eye to the hint of a town along a winding riverbank. Both successful artists in their lifetimes, Newhall and Oakes have not received the recognition they deserve posthumously.

Maria Dixon’s A Quiet Moment (1896) introduces a genre previously absent from NMWA’s holdings of interior scenes and portraiture— historical women reading.

The painting features a young woman, likely Dixon’s daughter, Tillie, leafing through a book.

Depictions of women reading had cultural significance in the late nineteenth century, as increased access to literature gave women intellectual freedom and exposure to worlds beyond the domestic

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Member News Member Spotlight: Tenley Peterson “I wanted to make sure my daughters would know women artists,” says Tenley Peterson, a NMWA supporter who bought a stair plaque in the museum’s Great Hall in 2018 to honor her two young daughters.

Peterson first came across NMWA because of a personal art project: designing matching art-themed dresses for herself and her daughters to wear on Mother’s Day. In her search for imagery of work by women artists, Peterson also found NMWA’s #5WomenArtists campaign that day and realized that she could not actually answer the question. “I wanted to change that for myself, too.”

Peterson has learned much more about women artists—she visits NMWA frequently with her daughters to check out the galleries, attend exhibition openings, and enjoy programming. She

loves that NMWA not only celebrates women artists, but also advocates for their representation. “The advocacy angle is very important to me,” she says. “I hope the museum continues to educate young girls and boys so that future generations can easily name not just five, but fifty women artists!”

One of Peterson’s fondest memories at NMWA is taking her daughter to a Young Learners Tour. “I remember my daughter sitting at the base of portraits

by Frida Kahlo and Amy Sherald, being taught by a museum educator about shapes and colors.

Where else in the world could my children have such a unique and special experience?”

PHOTO BY MARGOT SCHULMAN

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Members and friends enjoy the launch of a recent exhibition

grapples with her own mortality as well as the deaths of entire species. Admission is free for members with a guest.

On November 1, come for a party in honor of Live Dangerously, featuring contemporary photographers who depict the female body in natural settings. Tickets ($55

Celebrate Fall Exhibitions On September 18, join a special Member Preview Day for Judy Chicago—The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, in which the iconic feminist artist

“Where else in the world could my children have such a unique and special experience?”

PHOTO COURTESY OF TENLEY PETERSON

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NMWA member Tenley Peterson

The daughters of member Tenley Peterson sit by the plaque dedicated in their honor in NMWA’s Great Hall, wearing dresses inspired by an Alma Thomas painting in the museum’s collection

general, $45 members) include exhibition entry, music, refreshments, and open bar. Turn to the calendar on pages 16–19 for information about these events and other chances to enjoy NMWA’s newest exhibitions.

Year-End Gifts to Champion Women in the Arts With the end of 2019 approaching, you can boost your support of women in the arts through a year-end gift to NMWA. –– Donating appreciated stocks, bonds, or mutual funds is quick and simple and may provide you with significant tax benefits.

–– If you are 70 ½ or older, you can make cash gifts totaling up to $100,000 from your traditional or Roth IRA to NMWA. –– Contribute through a donor advised fund (DAF), which can be established with a number of entities, including community foundations and financial services companies.

–– Many companies offer a matching gift program to current employees and retirees that could double—or even triple—your generous contribution to NMWA. Visit https://nmwa.org/support or call 866-875-4627 for more information.

Committee News On June 6, the UK Friends of NMWA toured Faith Ringgold at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London. The first solo exhibition in a European institution by celebrated African American artist Faith Ringgold, this retrospective featured paintings, story quilts, and political posters from series that she has created over the past fifty years. Following a tour led by curator Melissa Blanchflower, committee members had the opportunity to meet and speak with Ringgold about the exhibition.

PHOTO BY NYG &C

Massachusetts Committee of NMWA Visits Artist Studio at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum On June 2, members of the Massachusetts Committee of NMWA attended a studio visit and artist-led workshop with Venetia “Tia” Dale in Boston.

Faith Ringgold discusses her work with members of UK Friends of NMWA

The Brooklyn Museum panel featured four artists nominated for Paper Routes— Women to Watch 2020

Dale, whose work was featured in NMWA’s exhibition Heavy Metal—Women to Watch 2018, was awarded a Polly Thayer Starr Visiting Artist residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. After a special viewing of souvenirs and other items collected by Isabella Stewart Gardner, committee members participated in a special workshop led by Dale in the Bertucci Education Studio.

The Greater New York Committee of NMWA Hosts Women to Watch Event at the Brooklyn Museum The Greater New York Committee of NMWA hosted a panel discussion on July 11 at the Brooklyn Museum, moderated by Carmen Hermo, associate curator of the

PHOTO BY BRIT TANY DAVIS

Above left: Women to Watch 2020 nominated artists at the Brooklyn Museum with members of the Greater New York Committee Left: Mississippi-based artists Angela Ball and Ruth Miller with members of the Mississippi Committee at the Honored Artists’ Luncheon

Women to Watch 2018 artist Venetia Dale at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

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Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The panel featured four artists from New York State who have been nominated for inclusion in NMWA’s upcoming exhibition Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020. NMWA Associate Curator Virginia Treanor delivered opening remarks for the event. The discussion was followed by an intimate dinner with nominated artists Liz Jaff, Oasa DuVerney, Sara Jimenez, and Susan Hamburger. Treanor and NMWA Assistant Curator Orin Zahra attended the panel and dinner as special guests.

Mississippi Committee Hosts Annual Honored Artists’ Luncheon The Mississippi State Committee of NMWA held its Annual Honored Artists’ Luncheon on August 6 at the Country Club of Jackson. Committee members gathered to honor artists Angela Ball and Ruth Miller. Four student artists—Tarrah Mills, Shaquanna Nolden, Haley Rountree, and Addison Whitner— were also celebrated at the luncheon. The students were awarded scholarships in recognition of their academic and creative achievements.

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The UK Friends of NMWA Tour Faith Ringgold Exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries

Museum News Superlative Museum Supporter Gladys Kemp Lisanby Gladys Kemp Lisanby has been a supporter of NMWA since its earliest days. She believes strongly in the museum’s mission and outreach, saying that art expands the mind, spurs imagination, and inspires creativity. She has been active as a member of the Women’s Committee, the NMWA Advisory Board, and the Foundation Board of the Legacy of Women in the Arts Endowment, which she currently chairs.

Lisanby and her late husband, James, first became involved with the museum when they lived in Pascagoula,

Mississippi. NMWA Founder Wilhelmina Cole Holladay met Gladys through a mutual friend, the late Evelyn Moore, who headed the museum’s Women’s Committee. Holladay was so impressed with her vitality, ideas, and organizational skills that she asked her to organize the Mississippi State Committee in 1998, a challenge Lisanby enthusiastically accepted. The committee, which continues to this day, supports arts education through scholarships and promotes women artists throughout the state with its yearly Honored Artists' Luncheon and donations of art to NMWA.

Gladys Lisanby, left, with Board President Emerita and Endowment Chair Carol Lascaris and NMWA Trustee Betty Boyd Dettre

PHOTO BY REBECCA D’ANGELO

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In Washington, D.C., Lisanby’s efforts on the museum’s behalf have been numerous.

Lisanby chaired the Women's Committee’s Silver Tea, which raised funds to support the care and conservation of NMWA’s beautiful silver collection. She also served as chair of the

NMWA Advisory Board and received the group’s Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts.

Early in 2019, she marked her ninetieth birthday at the museum.

We are pleased to celebrate Gladys Lisanby’s accomplishments and look forward to her continued leadership.

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DC Art Book Fair 5.– 6. Attendees browse the third annual DC Art Book Fair, held at NMWA during the July Community Day 5.

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PHOTOS BY KEVIN ALLEN

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Fresh Talk: Accessory to Action 1. Fresh Talk speakers Douriean Fletcher, jewelry designer for the film Black Panther; Dr. Ayana Flewellen, co-director of the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project; and Dr. Maia Nuku, associate curator for Oceanic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2. NMWA Director of Public Programs Melani N. Douglass; Fresh Talk sponsor Stephanie Sale; speakers Flewellen, Fletcher, and Nuku; and NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling 3. Adornment artists lead a group walk to the Eaton Hotel, the site of the program’s after-party 4. During Catalyst cocktail hour, artists demonstrate the power of adornment

PHOTOS BY KEA TAYLOR

Museum Events

WITH THANKS

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is deeply grateful to the following donors who made contributions from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019.

Your support enables NMWA to develop groundbreaking exhibitions, expand its education, library, and outreach programs, and offer other special events to the public. Your contributions are critical to the museum’s success!

Although we can only list donations of $500 and above due to space limitations, NMWA is thankful for all of its members and friends. Spring Gala sponsors and donors are included below. Gifts to the Legacy of Women in the Arts Endowment Campaign are listed separately on page 35.

Individuals and Organizations $500,000–$1 million Anonymous, Jacqueline Badger Mars, Mildred Weissman $100,000–$499,999 D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Program, RBC Wealth Management and City National Bank, an RBC Company, Denise Littlefield Sobel, MaryRoss Taylor, Susan Wisherd* $50,000–$99,999 Alice L. Walton Foundation, Marcia and Frank* Carlucci Charitable Foundation, Betty Boyd and Rexford* Dettre, Martha Dippell and Daniel Korengold, Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips, Davis/Dauray Family Fund, Clara M. Lovett, Susan and Jim Swartz $25,000–$49,999 Bloomberg Philanthropies, Nancy and Marc Duber, FedEx/Gina Adams, Elva Ferrari-Graham, Cindy and Evan Jones, Marlene A. and Frederic V.* Malek, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, Laurie Nakamoto*, The Revada Foundation of the Logan Family, Dana and Jack Snyder, Christine Suppes, Patricia and George White $15,000–$24,999 AARP, Sunny Scully Alsup and William Alsup, Bank of America, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Lucy Buchanan Garrett, Deborah G. Carstens, Clark-Winchcole Foundation, Marcella and Neil Cohen, Linda L. and John Comstock, Ashley Davis, Belinda de Gaudemar, Jamie S. Gorelick and Richard E. Waldhorn, Winton and Hap Holladay, Leo Rosner Foundation, Inc., Gladys K. and James W.* Lisanby, Kristen and George Lund, Dee Ann McIntyre, The Milton and Dorothy Sarnoff Raymond Foundation,

The Honorable Mary V. Mochary, Northern Trust, Sara and Peter O’Keefe, Tara Rudman, Stephanie Sale, Sheila and Richard Shaffer, Patti Amanda and Bruce Spivey, TRESemmé, Versace USA, Inc. $10,000–$14,999 Anne J. Ambler in memory of Effie King Ambler, Gail D. Bassin, Bernstein Family Foundation, Charlotte and Michael Buxton, Carl M. Freeman Foundation, Rose and Paul Carter, Diane Casey-Landry and Brock Landry, Columbia University, Alexis DeutschAdler, Jean-Marie and Raul Fernandez, Lisa Claudy Fleischman, Galerie Lelong, Susan Goldberg and Geoffrey Etnire, Dorothy G. F. Gramenstetter*, LaVerna Hahn Charitable Trust, Bonnie Loeb, Lucas Kaempfer Foundation, Inc, Marcia MacArthur, Bonnie McElveenHunter, Kristine Morris, Kay W. Olson, The Honorable Katherine D. Ortega, Pernod Ricard USA, Jacqueline L. Quillen, Elizabeth Robinson, Geri Skirkanich, Kathleen Elizabeth Springhorn, Susan Fisher Sterling and Scott Sterling, Swarovski, Lucretia D. and William H. Tanner, John Tavss, Deborah Dunklin Tipton, Viacom, Inc., Marichu Valencia, Betsy Vobach, Paula Wallace/Savannah College of Art and Design, Alice W. and Gordon T.* West, Jr. $5,000–$9,999 Janice L. and Harold L. Adams, Susan and Robert Beckman, Grace Bender, Katherine and David Bradley, Nancy Taylor Bubes and Alan Bubes, Lorna Meyer Calas and Dennis Calas, The Chile Committee of NMWA, Mai and John Cleary, Lauren Talarico Cohen and Marc Cohen, Donna Paolino Coia and Arthur Coia, Elaine and Kenneth W. Cole, Commonwealth Packaging**, Lizette Corro, Elizabeth Cullen, Paula Ballo Dailey* and Brian Dailey, Diageo North America, Christian Dior Couture, The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, Judith Marks Ford, The Francis & Kathleen Rooney Foundation, Cornelia C. Friedman*, Carol and Henry Goldberg, Anjali Gupta, Carol and Rodney Hamilton, Ruth Juanita Harrell*, The Jane Henson Foundation, Sally and Christopher H. Jones, Alice D. Kaplan, Sandy Liotta, Nancy Livingston and Fred M. Levin, Dr. Kathleen A. Maloy and Ms. Heather L. Burns, Adrienne B. Mars, Marshall B. Coyne Foundation, Inc., Mary Potishman Lard Trust, Juliana and Richard E.* May, Daniel McCarthy, Honey McGrath, Cynthia McKee, Melvin & Estelle Gelman Foundation, The Mill Foundation, LTD, Dorothy S. Miller*, Nancy Peery Marriott Foundation, Irene Natividad,

Nancy Ann Neal, Jeannette T. Nichols, Marjorie and Philip Odeen, Peco Foundation, Amanda and Curtis Polk, Barbara Richter, Hilary Ross, Sachiko Kuno Foundation, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Saks Fifth Avenue**, Mary Beth Shimmon, Kathy Sierra, Kimberly Stanley, Sara Steinfeld, Jessica S. Sterchi, Nancy N. and Roger Stevenson, Jr., Joanne C. Stringer, Joanna Sturm in memory of Lee Weiss, Swell, Debra Therit, Annie S. Totah, Sarah Bucknell Treco, The United Kingdom Committee of NMWA, Frances Luessenhop Usher, Jayne Visser, Kim and Dirk Visser, Amy Weiss and Peter J. Kadzik, Wells Fargo, Claudia Zucker $2,000–$4,999 A G Foundation, Acción Cultural Española, Noreen M. Ackerman, Mark and Kathe Albrecht, Ambassador Yousef and Abeer Al Otaiba, Arent Fox LLP/Richard Gale, Roswitha Augusta and Donald Dittberner, Amy and Bret Baier, Rita Balian, Mr. and Mrs. John T. Beaty, Jr., Arlene Begelman, Sue Ann and Ken Berlin, Catherine Bert and Arthur Bert, M.D., Susan A. Block, Susan Borkin, Margaret C. Boyce Brown, Katherine and Richard Bruch, Beth B. Buehlmann, Bulgari, Melissa and Jason Burnett, Jane and Calvin Cafritz, Dr. Mary A. Carnell and Dr. Agnes Guyon, Kristin and John Cecchi, Renee Chodur, Mary and James Clark, Marian Cohen, Robyn and William Collins, Elizabeth Crane, Byron Croker, Lynn Finesilver Crystal, Elissa and Thomas Davidson, Kitty de Isola and Max Cambana, Sara Jo Victors Dew, Kenneth P. Dutter, Geraldine E. Ehrlich, The Embassy of Hungary**, The Embassy of Switzerland**, The Embassy of the United Kingdom**, Hanna G. Evans, Amra and Damir Fazlic, Kenneth R. Feinberg, Angelina Fiordellisi, Don Fitch, Anita Forsyth, Lucrecia Forsyth, Barbara L. Francis and Robert Musser, Anita Friedt, Jenny and Chappall Gage, Edna Galo, Elizabeth and Michael Galvin, Lee Anne and William Geiger, Barbara S. Goldfarb, Sally Gries, Diane Grob, Michelle Guillermin, Pamela Gwaltney, Robin and Jay Hammer, Carla Hay, Janet Ruth Heller, Anna Stapleton Henson, Vanessa and Chris Higgins, Thomas R. Hill, Yumi Hogan, Shelley and Allan Holt, Michelle Howard, The Italy Committee of NMWA, Jackson Family Foundation, Jan V. Jessup, Pamela C. Johnson and Wesley King, Ann Kaplan, Azali Kassum and Ian Myers, Audrey and Sheldon Katz, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts**, Arlene Fine Klepper and Martin Klepper, Doris Kloster, Malinda Krantz, W. Bruce Krebs, M. Leanne Lachman, Jacob J. Lahr, Saint Laurent, Dr. Amy K. Lamb**, Sandra W. and James Langdon, Jr., Anne M. Larner, Susanne and Eric Larsen, Carol

and Climis Lascaris, Cynthia Madden Leitner and Roger Leitner, Hanane Lemlih and Karim Rahmoune, Randi and Jeffrey Levine, Louis J. Kuriansky Foundation, Inc., Stacey and Gregory Lubar, Karen Lund, Patricia Macintyre, Linda and Larry Mann, Frances S. Marks*, Maria Teresa Martínez, C. Raymond Marvin, Ellen Stirn Mavec, Dan McGuinness, Fatima McKinley, Mellor Family Foundation, Morgan Miller, Milica Mitrovich, Darby and James Montgomery, Claudia Pensotti Mosca, Lee Murphy, The NAMASTE Foundation, Kim and Patrick Nettles, Melanie and Larry Nussdorf, Mary B. Olch, Maggie O’Neill**, Pamela J. Parizek, Nellie Partow, Cynthia Paschen, Margaret H. and Jim Perkins, Ella Peters, Tenley Peterson and Jeffrey Munns, Robin Phillips, Carla Plessi**, Olwen and Don Pongrace, Jean Porto, Maddie L. Preston, Toni Ratner Miller, Elizabeth S. Ray, Helena Ribe, Jacqueline Rooney, The Rosenstiel Foundation, Jean Hall and Thomas D. Rutherfoord, Jr., Chrissy and Mitch Sayare, Joyce E. Scafe, Karen and Bill Schuiling, Mary A. Severson, Shepherd Finkelman Miller & Shah, LLP, Dr. Cynthia M. Shewan, Eileen Shields-West and The Honorable John Robinson West, Ann L. Simon, Dot Snyder, Judy W. Soley, Dorothy W. Stapleton, Lisa Cannon and Charles Edison Taylor, Sara and Michelle Vance Waddell, Toni G. and Lee L. Verstandig, Brooke Taylor, Harriet L. Warm, Krystyna Wasserman, Anna Weatherly and George Contis, Elizabeth B. Welles, Betty Bentsen Winn, Carolyn and William Wolfe, Dorothy and Kenneth Woodcock, World Bank Community Connections Fund $1,000–$1,999 Anonymous (3), Ruth and Sam Alward, Sylvia A. Azoyan, Jamie Baldinger, Linda C. Barclay, Beloff and Geller Family Fund, Judith Blackwell, Sandra Bloch, Ginger and James Bowen, Bertha Soto Braddock, Bobbe J. Bridge, Margo A. Brinton, Ph.D. and Eldon Park, Marilyn Brockway, Jean B. Brown, Yolanda Bruno, Hanna Burruss, Carol Byrne, Charlotte Anne Cameron, Laura and Guy Cecala, Susan Combs, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Cox, Michael L. Crane, Dr. Linda Daniel, Paul Davis, Deena Sara Disraelly in honor of Barbi Striar Disraelly, Regina and Martin Donnelly, Alexis Dupre, Claire and Albert Dwoskin, Barbara Elky, Mary Evans, L. B. Ewing, Shirley B. Familian, Jill Ferrera, Nancy M. Folger, Helen H. Ford, Gail Frances, Mary M. Free, Sally Mott and John K. Freeman, Narges Gheissari, Pamela and Scott Gibson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Marguerite F. Godbold, Leslie F. Gold, Jim Goldschmidt, Carol Green, Emily B. Grigsby, Sheila and Patrick Gross, Susan Hairston, Nora Harlow, Fruzsina M. Harsanyi and Raymond

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Supporting Roles

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Garcia, Marilyn J. and Philip Hayes, Jean E. Hayward, M.D., Pat and Fred Henning, Lilo A. Hester, Celia Hope Hodgson and Louise J.P. Goodall, Toney Hopkins, Lia Kahler and Thomas Huber, Betty Hudson, James R. Meadows, Jr. Foundation, William and Alice Janes, Jane’s Fund, Madelyn Jennings, Margaret M. Johnston, Julie Karcis, Kay Kendall and Jack Davies, Susan Ker-Seymer, Elizabeth P. Kirchner, Janece S. Kleban, Anne R. Kline, Christina Knowles and Christopher Petite, Carol and Martin Paul Kolsky, Ruth and Mahesh Kotecha, Barbara J. Kraft and Peter Winkler, Suzanne S. La Pierre, Julia M. Ladner, Mary Lou Laprade, Elissa Leonard, Bari R. and Keith D. Levingston, Barbara Liotta, Judy R. Loving, Joanne Lyman, Maryann Lynch, MATINE Studio**, Marcia Mau and Frank Moy, Debra McLeod (Grant Me The Wisdom Foundation), Owen McMahon, Jr., The Meeker Rom Family Foundation, Joyce Henderson Mims, Leila W. Misher, Lynn Montz and John Leubsdorf, Sharon Moody and Kenneth Kent, Helen Mulkeen, Mary Murphy, Gretchen and David Neal, Eva Neumann, Heidi Nitze, Bu Nygrens, Susan O’Brien, M.D., Occasions Caterers**, Carol J. Olson, Joan Mitchell O’Neill, Maureen A. Orth, Jeanne Paparazzo, Lois M. Pausch, Sarah Perot, Sheryl A. Pesce, Ann Marie Pinto, William Pollak, Dr. Michael and Mrs. Mahy Polymeropoulos, K. Shelly Porges and Rich Wilhelm, Timothy M. Price, Sarah M Pritchard, Martha A. Prumers, Jean W. Roach, Dr. Markley Roberts, Mary Anne and Jim Rogers, Karen Rogers-Still, Aleza and Joe Rosenberg, Emily G. Ross, Bonnie and Thomas Rosse, Irene Roth and Vicken Poochikian, Susan M. Ryan-Deaner, Julie and Captain David Sapone, Christopher M. Sargent, Mary Schmidt and Russell Libby, Dennis Siegner, Joan Simon, Doris G. Simonis, Esther Simplot, Andrea Roane and Michael Skehan, Beverly Hall and Kurt Smith, Kristin Smith, Marsha S. Soffer, Susan Kahn Sovel, Martha Spak**, Mr. and Mrs. George Stamas, Alice and Ken Starr, Dr. Marjorie L. Stein, Jan W. Stevenson, Courtney P. Stockland, Holly G. Stone, Josephine L. Stribling, Regina Sullivan, Jane Swicegood, Carol F. Tasca, Amanda M. Termuhlen, Patt Trama, Catherine Pendola Tringali*, Upstairs on 7th, Rena T. Vakay, Elzbieta Vande Sande, Rosa Ines Vera and Joseph Carey, Linda Weber Kiousis, Candace King Weir, Christie-Anne and Jeffrey Weiss, Karen Wilson, Dr. Deborah M. Winn and Dr. Allan Jaworski Rhett D. Workman, Yuen Foundation, Susan Zawel $500–$999 Anonymous (2), A. Holmes Parker Foundation, Elizabeth W. Abad, Diane Abeloff, Ms. Margery Al-Chalabi, Elena

and Robert Allbritton, Carolyn Alper, Ruth Altheim, Robert Aptekar, Claire Arnold, Patricia Baig, Baltimore Center Stage**, Sharon Balzer, Kathleen Barclay, Marie A. Barton, G. Bauer, Danielle C. Beach, Esq., Avi Benaim**, Janet and Robert Benson, Sherle and Michael Berger, Mary Ellen Bergeron, Barbara E. Berner and Rev. Milton T. Berner, Anne Bielucke, Sharon K. Bigot, Deborah Bishop, Frances and Daniel W. Blaylock, Gaylyn N. Boone and James Dorcy, Bottega Veneta, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Raj K. Boveja, Mary Boylan, Anne E. Branch, Gwen Brewer, Leonie M. and John R. Brinkema, Terri D. Bullock, Doris Burd, Deborah Butterfield, Moyra Byrne, Paula Cahoon, Karen A. Macedo Cambra, Elaine Cardinale, Brenda Daley Carr, Casey and Jack Carsten, Shelley Carton, Ms. Jeanne Norman Chase, Vicki E. Chessin, Cecelia Scearce Chewning, Sheila Clark, Kittie B. Clarke, Ellen Coleman*, Myrna ColleyLee, Elizabeth Colton, David Yurman, Sara and Philip Davis, Doloras E. Davison, Sue De Abreu Forehand, Barbara Denrich, Karen Detweiler, Gina Devito, Lesley Devrouax**, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Deborah J. Dorshimer, Ellen Drew, Margaret P. and Peter Dzwilewski, Doug and Joyce Eagles, Margaret M. Ellis, Deborah and Philip English, Loretta Fabricant, Valerie Facey, Sandy Falloon, Tarry D. Faries, Joyce Itkin Figel and Brad Figel, Denise J. Fiore, Albert L. Folsom, Ann Ford and Anthony Scialli, Marie J. Fouts, Constance S. and Joseph P.* Franklin, Tracy Freedman, Susan Freydberg, Cary Frieze, Kathryn Fritzdixon, Virginia Elkin Fuller, Pauline Garcia, Joseph L. Gastwirth, Mary C. Giglio, Ms. Beryl Gilmore and Mr. Joseph Asin, Merry Glosband, Ruth Goldstein, Grace Gorlitz, Barbara and Rich Gray, Catherine A. Green, Nita N. Grover, M.D., Kathleen A. Guinn, Teresa Gutsick, Lorraine Gyauch, Nancy Hackerman, Alice Haddix, June Hajjar, Sandi and Larry Hammonds, Nadine S. Hardin, Dana A. Harrison, Mary J. Hayden and Carla J. Tamaso, Delphine Hedtke, Ruth Hemming, Elizabeth Hemminger, Jo M. Hendrickson, Charles T. Hendrix, Angeline and W. Randolph Herman, Jennefer A. Hirschberg, Meredith Hope, Steven B. Hopping, M.D., Larry D. Hothem, Marissa A. and James Huttinger, IBM Corporation Matching Grants Program, Nancy Insprucker, J.Crew, Diane M. Jacobs, Hollye Jacobs, Indu Jindia, Anne and Clay Johnson, Gretchen W. and James L. Johnson, Anne C. Kaplan, Caroline Kaplan and Douglas Clark, Amy Kaster and Dale Leibowitz, Janet R. Kelly, Peaches Kempner, Leslie J. Kenyon, Cookie Kerxton, Gladys Kessler, Margery Kibby, Cheryl Kiddoo, Katherine Kiehn and Alexis Lane Jensen, Christy Kim, Kay Kimpton, Clyde Kirkman, Charlotte

Koenigsaecker, Susan A. Kowalski, Lynne S. Kraus, Leonard Kreppel, Bette E. Landman, Robin Rosa Laub, Emmanuelle and Brieuc Le Bigre, Elena Lebedeva, Ruth and Edward Legum, Mary K. Leskovac, Lori Leveen, Canice K. Levin, Sharon I. Lewis, Peggy and Richard Lidstad, Charles Lieppe, Elizabeth and Jan Lodal, Liz Minyard Lokey, Carl M. Louck, Anne H. Magoun, Elizabeth Marchut Michalski, Margaret Evans Tuten Foundation, Susan Marsch, Priscilla and Joe R. Martin, Christina Maslach, Marsha Mateyka, Margot Duysen McCullers, Sandy McKenzie, Nancy McKimens, Margaret Tafoya McLaughlin and Wilma Conley Tafoya, Laurie E. McNeil and Patrick W. Wallace, Iris McWilliams, Janet Meister, Elizabeth G. Menaghan, Josie Merck, Gail B. Meyers, Pamela MillerHornik, Nancy Milstein, Mary Mocas, Bruce Monblatt, The Morphos Gallery, Patricia L. Mote, Lola M. Muller, Linda Myers, Melissa Nabors, Constance and Richard Neel, Ginny and Hartley Neel, Christie Neuger, Georgine Neureiter, Yvonne B. Nevens, Ellen C. Ng, Audrey Niffenegger, Monica T. O’Neill, Susan Palmer Aulik, Carol Parker, Zoe H. Parker, Helene Patterson and Leo Mullen, Betsy Peitz, Mary A. Pemberton, Diane Percival, Marta M. Pereyma, Beverly Peterkofsky, Meredith and Burnett Peters, Anne Wallace Peterson, Elizabeth and John* Phillips, Edith and John Poertner, Amelia Preece, Jorgen A. Rasmussen, Helen Reid, Anne Richardson, Diane C. Robertson, Pamela Roby in memory of Winifred Scammon Reed Roby, Lucinda Romberg, Maria E. Rubio, Lydia M. Ruyle, Donna Z. Saffir, Gretchen Schnabel, Timothy P. Schoettle, Larissa Schultz, Karen Schwartz, Scott/Courtney Fund of Horizons Foundation, Lynne C. Sendejo, Sarah Shlesinger, Rae L. Siporin, F. Louise and Wayne Smith, Virginia Smith, Linda Watkins Sorkin, Michele Sperling, Richard E. Stafford, Pegge M. Steele, Liezel Strauss, Douglas K. Struck, David Stuart, Kim and Sarah Baldwin Swig, M. Elizabeth Swope, Mary and Charles Teeple, The Texas State Committee of NMWA, Sharen A. Thomas, Linda J. Thompson, Debra L. Tillery, Joan and Maurice Tobin, Sherry Trechter, Micaela A. Trumbull, Valetta, Nataly Vostrikov, Sarah Vradenburg, Susan Weiss, Carolyn L. Wheeler, Valerie and John Wheeler, Pamela and George Willeford, Arbe J. Williams, Lynora Williams, Susie S. Williams, Jane Wilson, Lucy and Scott Wilson, Richard Winter, Margaret K. Wolf, Mary Lee Wood, Wanda C. Wood, Ret., Mary A. Zadrozny, Jan Zahrly * Deceased ** In-kind gifts

NMWA strives to ensure the accuracy of donor information. We apologize for any errors or omissions. Contact 866875-4627 with changes or questions.

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay—Chair of the Board, Winton S. Holladay—ViceChair of the Board, Martha Dippell— President, Gina F. Adams—First Vice President, Susan Goldberg—Second Vice President, Dana Snyder— Treasurer, Rose Carter—Secretary, Pamela Parizek—Audit Chair, Marcia Myers Carlucci—Building Chair, Amy Weiss—Communications Chair, Carol Matthews Lascaris—President Emerita and Endowment Chair, Sheila Shaffer—Finance Chair, Ashley Davis— Government Relations Chair, Nancy Duber—Nominations Chair, Nancy Nelson Stevenson—Works of Art Chair, Susan Fisher Sterling—Alice West Director**, Janice Lindhurst Adams, Charlotte Clay Buxton, Diane CaseyLandry, Lizette Corro, Betty Boyd Dettre, Deborah I. Dingell, Anjali Gupta, Cindy Jones, Sally L. Jones, Marlene Malek, Jacqueline Badger Mars, Juliana E. May, Bonnie McElveenHunter, Mary V. Mochary, Jackie Quillen, Stephanie Sale, Julie Sapone**, Kathleen Elizabeth Springhorn, Jessica H. Sterchi, Joanne Stringer, Mahinder Tak, Annie S. Totah, Sarah Bucknell Treco**, Frances Luessenhop Usher, Ruthanna Maxwell Weber, Alice West, Patti White ** Ex-Officio NMWA ADVISORY BOARD

Sarah Bucknell Treco—Chair, Noreen M. Ackerman, Sunny Scully Alsup, Kathe Hicks Albrecht, Jo Ann Barefoot, Gail D. Bassin, Arlene Begelman, Sue Ann Berlin, Catherine Bert, Brenda Bertholf, Marilyn Brockway, Margaret C. Boyce Brown, Deborah G. Carstens, Rebecca Chang, Paul T. Clark, Donna Paolino Coia, Elaine Cole, John Comstock, Linda L. Comstock, Beth Crane, Byron Croker, Lynn Finesilver Crystal, Liz Cullen, Verónica de Ferrero, Belinda de Gaudemar, Katy Graham Debost, Betty Boyd Dettre, Alexis Deutsch-Adler, Kenneth P. Dutter, Geraldine E. Ehrlich, Elva Ferrari-Graham, Lisa Claudy Fleischman, Anita Forsyth, Lucrecia Forsyth, Rosemarie Forsythe, Anita Friedt, Claudia Fritsche, Barbara S. Goldfarb, Sally Gries, Diane Grob, Michelle Guillermin, Anjali Gupta, Pamela Gwaltney, Florence Helbling, Sue J. Henry, Anna Stapleton Henson, Kitty de Isola, Jan V. Jessup, Alice D. Kaplan, Janece Smoot Kleban, Arlene Fine Klepper, Doris Kloster, Malinda Krantz, Nelleke Langhout-Nix, Cynthia Madden Leitner, Fred M. Levin, Gladys K. Lisanby, Sarah H. Lisanby, M.D., Nancy Livingston, Bonnie Loeb, Clara M. Lovett, Joanne Ludovici, Patricia Macintyre, Maria Teresa Martínez, C. Raymond Marvin, Ellen Stirn Mavec, Pat D. McCall, Dee Ann McIntyre, Cynthia McKee, Fatima

McKinley, Constance C. McPhee, Suzanne S. Mellor, Milica Mitrovich, Claudia Pensotti Mosca, Deborah E. Myers, Jeannette T. Nichols, Kay W. Olson, Monica T. O’Neill, Katherine D. Ortega, Margaret H. Perkins, Patti Pyle, Drina Rendic, Helena Ribe, Barbara Richter, Elizabeth Robinson, Tara Rudman, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Stephanie Sale, Consuelo Salinas de Pareja, Steven Scott, Marsha Brody Shiff, Kathy Sierra, Ann L. Simon, Kathern Ivous Sisk, Geri Skirkanich, Dot Snyder, Denise Littlefield Sobel, Patti Amanda Spivey, Kathleen Elizabeth Springhorn, Sara Steinfeld, Josephine L. Stribling, Susan Swartz, Cheryl S. Tague, MaryRoss Taylor, Lisa Cannon Taylor, Brooke Taylor, Debra Therit, Deborah Dunklin Tipton, Marichu Valencia, Nancy W. Valentine, Sara M. Vance Waddell, Paula S. Wallace, Harriet L. Warm, Krystyna Wasserman, Patti White, Betty Bentsen Winn, Rhett D. Workman

LEGACY OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS ENDOWMENT CAMPAIGN

We wish to thank all of the supporters of the Legacy of Women in the Arts Endowment Campaign, whose generosity guarantees that NMWA will endure and forever inspire for generations to come. Although we can only list donations of $10,000 and above due to space limitations, NMWA is grateful to all donors to the endowment.

Endowment Foundation Trustee ($1 million+) Anonymous, Betty B. and Rexford* Dettre, Estate of Grace A. George, Wilhelmina C. and Wallace F.* Holladay, Sr., Carol and Climis Lascaris, Estate of Evelyn B. Metzger*, The Honorable Mary V. Mochary, Rose Benté Lee Ostapenko*, The Madeleine Rast Charitable Remainder Trust*, The Walton Family Foundation Endowment Foundation Governor ($500,000–$999,999) Noreen M. Ackerman , P. Frederick Albee and Barbara E. Albee*, Catherine L. and Arthur A. Bert, M.D., J.W. Kaempfer, Jr., Nelleke LanghoutNix, Joe R. and Teresa L. Long, James R. and Suzanne S. Mellor, National Endowment for the Humanities, Drs. A. Jess and Ben Shenson*, MaryRoss Taylor, Alice W. and Gordon T. West, Jr., Endowment Foundation Fellow ($200,000– $499,999), Catharina B. and Livingston L. Biddle, Jr.*, Marcia and Frank* Carlucci Charitable Foundation, Costa del Sol Cruise, Kenneth P. Dutter, Estate of E. Louise Gaudet, Lorraine G. Grace*, William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Estate of Eleanor Heller*, Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston/ The Shenson Foundation, in memory of

Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson, Dorothy S. Lyddon*/Seven Springs Foundation, Marlene McArthur and Frederic V.* Malek, Victoria J. Mastrobuono*, Sea Goddess I and II Trips, Alejandra and Enrique Segura, Sheila and Richard Shaffer, Clarice Smith Endowment Foundation Counselor ($100,000–$199,999) Gina and Eugene Adams, Janice L. and Harold L. Adams, Nunda and Prakash Ambegaonkar, Carol C. Ballard, Baltic Cruise, Eleanor and Nicholas D. Chabraja, Clark Charitable Foundation, Hilda and William B. Clayman, Julia B. and Michael M. Connors, Martha Lyn Dippell and Daniel Lynn Korengold, Gerry E. and S. Paul* Ehrlich, Jr., Enterprise Rent-A-Car, FedEx Corporation, The Geiger Family Foundation, Barbara A. Gurwitz and William D. Hall, Caroline Rose Hunt*/ The Sands Foundation, Cindy and Evan Jones, Alice D. Kaplan, Dorothy and Raymond LeBlanc, Lucia Woods Lindley, Gladys K. and James W.* Lisanby, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Adrienne B. and John F. Mars, Juliana and Richard E.* May, Bonnie McElveenHunter, Irene Natividad, The Miller and Jeanette Nichols Foundation/ Jeannette T. Nichols, Nancy O’Malley*, Lady Pearman, Reinsch Pierce Family, Foundation/Lola C. Reinsch and J. Almont Pierce, Julia Sevilla Somoza, Marsha Brody Shiff, June Speight*, Kathleen Elizabeth Springhorn, Mahinder K. and Sharad Tak, Sami and Annie Totah Family Foundation, Elzbieta Chlopecka Vande Sande Endowment Circle ($50,000–$99,999) Linda Able Choice*, George* and Ursula Andreas, Arkansas Fifty, Lulu H. Auger*, Virginia Mitchell Bailey*, Sondra D. and Howard M. Bender*/The Bender Foundation, Inc., Patti Cadby Birch*, Laura Lee and Jack S. Blanton, Sr.*/Scurlock Foundation, Anne R. Bord*, Caroline Boutté , BP Foundation, Inc., M. A. Ruda* and Peter J. P. Brickfield, Margaret C. Boyce Brown, Martha Buchanan, Charlotte Clay Buxton, Sandra and Miles Childers, Mary and Armeane Choksi, Donna Paolino Coia and Arthur Coia, Margaret and David Cole/The Cole Family Foundation, Holland H. Coors*, Porter and Lisa Dawson, Courtenay Eversole, Suzy Finesilver*/The Hertzel and Suzy Finesilver Charitable Foundation, Karen Dixon Fuller, Alan Glen Family Trust, Peter and Wendy Gowdey, Laura L. Guarisco, Jolynda H. and David M. Halinski, Janie Hathoot, Hap and Winton Holladay, I. Michael and Beth Kasser, William R. and Christine M. Leahy, Louise C. Mino Trust, Zoe H. and James H. Moshovitis, Joan and Lucio A. Noto, Marjorie H. and Philip Odeen, Nancy Bradford Ordway, Katherine D. Ortega, Margaret H. and Jim Perkins,

Ramsay D. Potts*, in honor of Veronica R. Potts, Elizabeth Pruet*, Edward Rawson, Jane S. Schwartz Trust, Jack and Dana Snyder, Judith Zee Steinberg and Paul J. Hoenmans, Susan and Scott Sterling, Nancy N. and Roger Stevenson, Jr., Jo and Thomas Stribling, Susan and Jim Swartz, Elizabeth Stafford Hutchinson Endowed Internship—Texas State Committee of NMWA, Frances and William* Usher, Stuart and Chancy West, Betty Bentsen Winn and Susan Winn Lowry, Yeni Wong

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Endowment Patron ($25,000–$49,999) Micheline and Sean Connery, Sheila ffolliott, Georgia State Committee of NMWA, New York Trip, Mississippi State Committee of NMWA, Northern Trust, Estate of Mary Marvin, Breckinridge Patterson, Chris Petteys*, Lisa and Robert Pumphrey*, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Estate of Madoline W. Shreve*, Patti Amanda and Bruce Spivey, Sahil Tak/ST Paper, LLC, In honor of Alice West, Jean and Donald M. Wolf, The Women’s Committee of NMWA Endowment Sponsor ($15,000–$24,999) Deborah G. Carstens, Stephanie Fein, Martha and Homer Gudelsky*, Sally L. Jones, Louise H. Matthews Fund, Lily Y. Tanaka, Liz and Jim Underhill, Elizabeth Welles, Dian Woodner Endowment Friend ($10,000–$14,999) Carol A. Anderson, Julia and George L. Argyros, Mrs. Joseph T. Beardwood, III, Catherine Bennett and Fred Frailey, Susan G. Berk, Mary Kay Blake, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lynne V. and Richard Cheney, Esther Coopersmith, Darby Foundation, Juliet De Laricheliere* , Jack J. Dreyfus, Jr.*, Patricia M. and Clifford J. Ehrlich, Mary Page and Thomas B. Evans, Lois Lehrman Grass, Anna Stapleton Henson, Alexine C. and Aaron G.* Jackson, Jan Jessup, Pamela Johnson and Wesley King, Helga and Peter-Hans Keilbach, Howard and Michelle Kessler, Ellen U. and Alfred A. King*, Jacqueline Badger Mars, C. Raymond Marvin, Clyde and Pat Dean McCall, Edwina H. and Charles P. Milner, Evelyn V. and Robert M.* Moore, Harriet Newbill, Estate of Edythe Bates Old, PepsiCo., Inc., Anne and Chris Reyes, Savannah Trip, Mary Anne B. Stewart, Paula Wallace/Savannah College of Art and Design, Marjorie Nohowel Wasilewski, Jean S. and Gordon T. Wells * Deceased (all lists current as of August 5, 2019)

WO M E N I N T H E A RTS

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Museum Shop

Shop NMWA online at https://shop.nmwa.org or call 202-783-7994

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Sandalwood Incense Rope Relax and center yourself with this hand-rolled, fair trade sandalwood incense from Nepal,

by Catherine Rising. Wrapped in vintage fabric. $28/Member $25.20 (Item #30998) D.C. Leather Coasters Show your Washington, D.C., pride with flag coasters by local business Stitch & Rivet. Set of four made from leather with protective wax finish; debossed flag. Packaged in storage tin.

3 ½ in. diameter. $34/Member $30.60 (Item #31017)

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Holiday Candle Usher in the spirit of the winter holidays with this festive soy-wax candle that includes notes of tart cranberry, lightly spiced pear, and sparkling prosecco. 7.5 oz. Fifty-hour burn time. $25/Member $22.50 (Item #90010)

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls 2 This sequel to the New York Times bestseller includes 100 new bedtime stories featuring the adventures of extraordinary women from Nefertiti to Beyoncé. Hardcover, 224 pages. $35/Member $31.50 (Item #3193) Women Artists Catalogue Get to know NMWA’s collection via this accessible catalogue featuring ninety highlights from the museum’s collection.

Hardcover, 239 pages. $30/ Member $27 (Item #1219)

“Mi Casa Es Su Casa” Throw Blanket Help your guests feel at home with this fun, inviting throw blanket featuring the classic Spanish expression of hospitality. 100% cotton; 44 x 68 in. Machine wash cold. $110/ Member $99 (Item #90011)

Great Women Artists This new volume from Phaidon presents five centuries of fascinating female creativity through more than 400 compelling artworks. Hardcover, 464 pages. $59.95/Member $53.95 (Item #1397)

“GRL PWR” Graphite Pencils Put the power in your hands with these graphite pencils— perfect for jotting down ideas, notes, and sketches. Pack of six #2 pencils. $8/Member $7.20 (Item #29799)

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Judy Chicago T-Shirt

by Prospect NY This unisex tee celebrates feminist artist Judy Chicago.

Sizes XS–XL. 60% combed ring-spun cotton and 40% polyester, with silkscreen print. $55/Member $49.50 (Item #27166)

What do you hope to achieve with your products?

We believe in the power of art. It has the ability to ignite our senses, expand our minds, provoke conversation, and effect change. Our goal is to increase access to original artworks by today’s top contemporary artists––and thereby multiply the power of art.

Why do you think it is important to champion women in the arts?

We recently did a project with Judy Chicago that

Judy Chicago Suffrage Soap

by Prospect NY Chicago commemorates the women’s suffrage movement with this goddess-shaped, unscented, vegan soap bar in the “suffrage white” worn by women who fought for equal rights.

5 x 2 ½ in. $22/Member $19.80 (Item #50198)

commemorated the American suffragists who, in 1913, marched on Washington to demand the right to vote.

Today, with a contemporary women’s movement and #MeToo in full force, it has been difficult for me to grasp that there was a moment in recent history when my voice, as a woman, was inconsequential. We have come a long way since then, but there is still so much more work to do.

If art is a reflection of our society, then numbers tell all: in U.S. museums, less than 30% of solo exhibitions are given to women artists; in U.S. galleries, only 30% of represented artists are women. To overcome the remaining obstacles and create an equitable future, we must champion the contributions of women artists past and present and, ultimately, change the narrative of history.

WO M E N I N T H E A RTS

Judy Chicago Silk Scarf

by Third Drawer Down This 100% silk scarf is based on one of Chicago’s early feminist works, Through the Flower (1973), symbolizing her struggle as a woman artist. 43 x 43 in.

Gift packaged. $138/Member $124.20 (Item #25219)

Q&A with Laura Currie, founder of Prospect New York, a company that collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural organizations to create limited-edition art products.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LAURA CURRIE

Judy Chicago: New Views Leading scholars and writers provide fresh perspectives on Chicago’s wide-ranging artistic expression and powerful voice in the first major monograph on the artist in nineteen years.

Published by NMWA, this fully illustrated volume features key bodies of work from throughout Chicago’s career. Hardcover, 240 pages. $49.95/Member $44.95 (Item #117)

Becoming Judy Chicago In this intimate biography, Gail Levin chronicles Chicago’s journey from obscurity to fame, drawing on personal letters and diaries, writings, and more than 250 interviews with friends, family, admirers, and critics.

Softcover, 485 pages. $29.95/ Member $26.95 (Item #1392)

MODERN MAKERS

1250 New York Avenue NW Washington, DC 20005-3970

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COMING SOON

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

© GRACIELA ITURBIDE

February 28 – May 25, 2020

Lyrical and provocative blackand-white images by celebrated photographer Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942, Mexico City) capture the rich tapestry of cultures, daily rituals, social inequalities, and coexistence of tradition and modernity across Mexican society. A major presentation of work from throughout the artist’s five-decade-long career, Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico tells a visual story of the country since the late 1970s. Approximately

140 photographs reveal the lifestyle of the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert, exploitation of workers among the Mixtec of Oaxaca, and the vital role of women in Zapotec communities. Iturbide’s empathetic approach to photography reflects her deep connection to her subjects and offers powerful insight into the beauty and complexities of Mexico’s cultural heritage.

// Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico is organized

by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Graciela Iturbide, Cayó del cielo (Fallen from Heaven), Chalma, 1989; Gelatin silver print, 12 ¼ x 18 in.; Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography