It’s long been noted by feminist art historians: Women artists have been overlooked by the mainstream throughout history. As Linda Nochlin writes searingly in her iconic 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” “As we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male.”
The definitive, if less-acknowledged, role women have played throughout art history has been brought to light in recent major museum surveys, such as Swedish mystic painter Hilma af Klimt’s record-breaking retrospective at the Guggenheim New York in 2019; American portraitist Alice Neel’s 2021 survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the inclusion of the phenomenal Mexican painter Maria Izquierdo, a key figure of the Contemporáneos movement, in the Venice Biennale in 2024—almost seven decades after her death in 1955.
Our sense of history is being reshaped by revelatory exhibitions like this, and 2025 promises more monographic shows devoted to late women who may not have received their dues during their lifetime. To mark International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8th, Artsy is highlighting women artists whose tireless contributions to the visual arts are still not as well known as their male peers. This list is a reminder that there are still many neglected legacies yet to be uncovered, though this does not diminish the power of so many artists whose work has had an abiding influence and impact outside of them. Here are nine late women artists who are receiving overdue recognition on the international stage this year.
Joyce Wieland
B. 1930, Toronto. D. 1998, Toronto.
Joyce Wieland was the first living Canadian woman to be accorded a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, in 1971. The exhibition, a retrospective entitled “True Patriot Love,” featured sculptures and assemblages that revealed Wieland’s intertwined interest in the environment, feminism, and the society of her homeland.
Wieland overcame a difficult early life. While working as a graphic designer, she learned filmmaking and animation techniques that she later adapted into experimental films. In the 1960s, while living in New York, she created prolifically and experimented voraciously, creating avant-garde paintings, sculptures, and films in dialogue with both the burgeoning Pop and Conceptual Art movements. But she was only recognized by film circles—in 1968, her films were screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—and never really broke into the New York art scene. She returned to her home country in 1971, where she is still best known.
This year, the largest, most comprehensive exhibition on Wieland to date, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, runs through May. “Heart On” shows the scope of Wieland’s work, from figurative oil paintings, to sculptures fashioned with found objects, to 16mm film works composed of offcuts.
Alma Thomas
B. 1891, Columbus, Georgia. D. 1978, Washington D.C.
Resurrection, 1966
Alma Thomas
White House Historical Association
Cumulus, 1972
Alma Thomas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
After graduating from Howard University’s fine art department, Alma Thomas received scant encouragement or nurturing at university. She became a junior high school art teacher, a career that lasted 35 years. It was only later in life that Thomas began to paint confidently and to seek out a “new art representing a new era,” looking to nature to inspire her luminous, lucid works, and explosive, expressive patterns of color.
Thomas made history in 1972 when she became the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney. More recently, her painting Resurrection (1966) was the first artwork by a Black woman to be included in the collection of the White House. However, the extent of Thomas’s originality, flair, and influence has only gradually been acknowledged over the years and she never reached the acclaim of her male peers in abstraction. This year sees her four-venue retrospective, “Composing Color,” continue to tour the United States. Currently at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, the show draws on the largest collection of Thomas paintings (held by the Smithsonian, which first acquired Thomas’s work in 1970) and continues to bolster her astonishing legacy, consolidating her singular place in art history.
Read more: How Alma Thomas Arrived at Her Seminal Style of Vibrant Abstract Painting
Ithell Colquhoun
B. 1906, Assam, India. D. 1988, Cornwall, England.
The British Surrealist painter and occult artist Ithell Colquhoun was a pioneering figure who was right in the midst of the Surrealism movement (she met its protagonists André Breton, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí, and was photographed by Man Ray). Fusing her spiritual beliefs with her art, Colquhoun’s paintings are bursting with sensuality and eroticism, often referencing biblical stories and myths focused on powerful women. She explored her interest in the subconscious and dreams through techniques of automatism. Colquhoun is also known for her intense palettes ranging from warm amber to fiery pinks and lucid blues.
Colquhoun’s contributions were all but ignored, however, until very recently. This was due to both chauvinism in the Surrealist movement (which Colquhoun herself called out in her lifetime) and her removal from the British Surrealist Group for her ardent interest in the occult.
The Tate acquired Colquhoun’s archives in 2019, and her name has become more recognized following the Centre Pompidou’s 2024 centenary show on Surrealism (now at Madrid’s Fundación MAPFRE, and coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art later this year). A major touring retrospective, “Between Worlds,” also opened at Tate St. Ives (Colquhoun spent time in Cornwall, where the gallery is located) last month, and will travel to its Tate Britain location in the summer, reassessing the importance of this radical artist’s legacy.
Read more: The Pivotal Role that Women Have Played in Surrealism
Vivian Browne
B. 1929, Laurel, Florida. D. 1993, Manhattan, New York.
Umbrella Plant, 1971
Vivian Browne
RYAN LEE
Like many women artists, Vivian Browne was deeply engaged in community and activism, and while forging her own career she dedicated herself to fighting for space for others. Browne taught the history of Black art at Rutgers University, where she was a professor, and founded two advocacy groups: the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, fighting for Black representation in museums; and SoHo20, one of Manhattan’s first women’s art cooperatives.
Over a three-decade career, Browne also worked tirelessly to create paintings, prints, and works on paper that challenged the status quo: electric and emotive works that could not be easily defined as abstract or figurative, and were often disquieting and grotesque. Her most famous body of work, “Little Men,” comprises 100 satirical paintings and drawings of angry middle-aged white men. For 2025, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, has organized an extensive survey of Browne’s work, introducing material that has only recently been discovered. The show tours to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in the summer.
Gabriele Münter
B. 1877, Berlin. D. 1962, Murnau, Germany.
Landhaus Mariahalde bei Rorschach, 1914
Gabriele Münter
Ludorff
Gabriele Münter had no choice but to forge her own path: Women were banned from art schools in Germany at the time she began experimenting with photography, and then later painting portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Münter’s involvement with the German movement The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) has focused more attention on her work recently, though it was long overshadowed by that of her partner and teacher, Wassily Kandinsky. Münter rebelled against tradition in her art as much as in her life, and her works were informed and influenced by her cosmopolitan lifestyle and perspective; travels to the Nordic region and North Africa left an imprint on her planes of color.
Now understood to be a key figure in German Expressionism, and an important contributor to European modernism, Münter is the subject of two major exhibitions this year: a recently closed survey at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and another forthcoming at the Guggenheim in New York in November.
Emily Kam Kngwarray
B. 1910, Utopia, Australia. D. 1996, Alice Springs, Australia.
Merne Atherrke, 1994
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
L'Appartement
This is a big year for Emily Kam Kngwarray, who is to be celebrated in a solo exhibition at Tate Modern, alongside a major group exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the 16th Sharjah Biennale.
Kam Kngwarray was an Anmatyerre elder, who lived and worked for most of her life in a remote desert area, Utopia, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. She lived most of her life with no contact with the outside world. The artist worked in batik and took up painting with acrylics only in her seventies. She worked as an artist for eight years, producing in that time a staggering 3,000 paintings. Her works were inspired by her experiences as custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites—places of ancestral importance believed to contain stories and knowledge. Her vivid painted visions of this land evoke her intense sense of identification with the place she lived.
Kam Kngwarray became known to the wider art world at age 80. In 1997, she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. The Tate Modern exhibition, however, marks the first major museum show on the artist in Europe.
Suzanne Valadon
B. 1865, Bessines-sur-Gartempe, France. D. 1938, Paris.
The Abandoned Doll, 1921
Suzanne Valadon
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The French painter Suzanne Valadon is an example of how being outside the mainstream also afforded women artists greater artistic freedom. Valadon grew up with a single mother in poverty, and after working for a time as an acrobat in the circus, she taught herself to draw and paint, studying artists’ techniques while working as a model and muse. She was never associated with any style and bucked the trends of the time. Her irreverence for traditions made history: She is known as the first woman to paint a male nude, and her raw, real female nudes and portraits of working-class women equally scandalized audiences at the time.
Though Valadon received considerable praise during her lifetime, including becoming the first woman painter to be admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, there have been few exhibitions on Valadon since the 1960s. This year, a Centre Pompidou survey, featuring almost 200 works and running through May, is the first major monographic exhibition on Valadon in France since 1967.
Ruth Asawa
B. 1926, Norwalk, California. D. 2013, San Francisco
Sculptor Ruth Asawa made an extensive impact as an artist, activist, and educator. Yet, for decades, she was widely known as “the fountain lady,” owing to the public artwork installed in Union Square, San Francisco, in 1970, made in collaboration with 200 local schoolchildren. In 2017, David Zwirner began representing the artist’s estate, which has led to broader worldwide recognition and a deeper understanding of Asawa and her myriad innovations as an artist. In recent years, the Whitney held the first exhibition of Asawa’s drawings (“Ruth Asawa Through Line” in 2023), and she was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2024.
Untitled (P.002-I Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Five-Pointed Center Star, Embossed [Silver]), 1973
Ruth Asawa
David Zwirner
Untitled (P.001, Tied wire tree with six branches), 1995
Ruth Asawa
David Zwirner
Yet it is only this year that Asawa will have her first major international retrospective. The show covers the full range of Asawa’s five-decade practice, from her sculptures, drawings, and work with the communities she was embedded in, to works that have never been seen in public before. Beginning at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in April, the show will tour to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and finally, Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. This retrospective will give an unprecedented view of Asawa’s vast, unbridled, and inventive practice, from her intricately crafted, abstract wire sculptures—often suspended in space—to baskets, watercolor paintings, and drawings of flowers and figures.
Read more: The Enduring Legacy of Ruth Asawa’s Mesmerizing Sculptures
Kaari Upson
B. 1970, San Bernadino, California. D. 2021, New York.
Portrait (Vain German), 2020-2021
Kaari Upson
Sprüth Magers
The late American artist Kaari Upson only worked for a short time; she passed away aged 51 in 2021. The artist’s trademark was leaving her artworks intentionally undone. As Upson said: “There are no fixed boundaries in my art, it’s more like a fragmented narrative full of cracks and openings that you can enter and leave wherever you wish.”
The first museum retrospective dedicated to Upson, opening May 27th at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, positions Upson as one of the leading artists of her generation, in her multimedia work evoking fantasy, desire, and obsession. The show will celebrate her work’s versatility, inventiveness, and intensity through performances, films, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Many of these works were inspired by a collection of personal belongings Upson found in an abandoned property across the street from her parents’ home in San Bernardino, California, in 2003. She invented the identity “Larry” for the man these once belonged to, and they inspired an ongoing body of work.
Prior to her death, Upson was beginning to exhibit at national and international institutions, including the Whitney Biennial in 2017, and a solo exhibition at the New Museum the same year. This retrospective helps establish the artist’s thrilling legacy.
Browse available artworks by late women artists in the collection “Late Women Artists in the Spotlight.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/fQTt8Zb
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