Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and visual artist active primarily in New York. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Audrey Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
Jean Conner née Sandstedt is an American artist.
Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Ganesh's work across media includes: charcoal drawings, digital collages, films, web projects, photographs, and wall murals. Ganesh draws from mythology, literature, and popular culture to reveal feminist and queer narratives from the past and to imagine new visions of the future.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist and archivist. She is best known for her work as a graphic designer during the 1950s and 60s, having created over 150 designs for book covers and museum catalogs. Her work has played a significant role in the evolution of American modernist graphic design, integrating European avant-garde with experimentation to create a distinct visual vocabulary. Cohen later continued her career as a fine artist working in a variety of media. In 2011, she was named an AIGA Medalist for her achievements in graphic design.
Paulina Olowska is a Polish painter and photographer, who also works in the field of performance and video-art, social action and applied art. The areas of her artistic explorations are modernist utopias and research on the work of 20th century artists, which she combines with her own creative practice to bring unjustly forgotten ideas back to life. A characteristic thread in Olowska's work is her interest in female attitudes in art and her search for "protoplasts"; such as Alina Szapocznikow and Zofia Stryjeńska. The artist lives and works in Rabka-Zdrój.
Andrea Cochran is an American landscape architect based in San Francisco. She is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and one of seven designer women featured in the 2012 documentary Women in the Dirt.
Jacqueline "Jac" Leirner, is a Brazilian artist. Leirner is best known for the sculptures and installations she creates from mundane objects and ephemera, including devalued bank notes, used envelopes, promotional tickets, empty packs of cigarettes and plastic shopping bags.
Nina Chanel Abney is an American artist, based in New York. She was born in Harvey, Illinois. She is an African American contemporary artist and painter who explores race, gender, pop culture, homophobia, and politics in her work.
Elizabeth Sher is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, known for eclectic short films, documentaries about women, art, aging and health, and mixed-media artwork employing digital and analog modes. Her films combine humor, honesty and an interest in everyday experiences; while not strictly autobiographical, her work often explores issues that parallel her own life cycle. The San Francisco Examiner described her early short films as "witty combinations" of music and imagery, formal experimentation, clever editing and rewarding interviews, "infused with arch satire"; Amalia Mesa-Bains wrote that her documentaries create "that special mix of common sense, irony and human insight [that] inspires us to talk more, laugh a lot and trust each other." Sher's films have screened at the Kennedy Center and the London, Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Raindance international film festivals, and been broadcast on PBS and public television networks throughout the world; they have been recognized with awards from the American Film Institute, National Education Media Arts Fest, and the Mill Valley and Bare Bones International film festivals, among others. Her art has been exhibited internationally and belongs to the public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). Sher lives and works in Oakland, California and exhibits with the collective, Mercury 20 Gallery.
Franz Hillinger was an architect of the Neues Bauen movement in Berlin and in Turkey.
Carol Flax is an American artist who specializes in representational collage, or “Cut Paper Mosaics” as she describes. Flax lives in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on the Cape Cod peninsula where she finds inspiration in the surrounding landscape like Gray’s beach and Lewis Bay.
Katie Edith Gliddon was a British watercolourist and militant suffragette. She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) for whom she campaigned for which she was imprisoned in Holloway Prison in 1912. Specialising in painting flowers, in her later years she was a teacher of painting and drawing.
Edith Bry (1898–1991) was an American painter, printmaker, and glass artist. During her long career she combined technical skill with an impulse to innovate. Critics noted her versatility, pointing to skill in handling oil painting, lithography, etching, drawing, watercolor, and wood carving. Her style ranged from realist to abstract and from what one critic called a "discipline of an inner reticence" to a "more dynamic emotional expressionism." Her early-career still lifes drew praise and a figure-group called "Exiles" received much attention following its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her mid-career work was more expressive and abstract as she tried, as she put it, to rid herself "from the tyranny of nature." At the end of her career she was particularly known for semi-abstract work in glass and enamel, mainly of religious subjects.
Luce Turnier was a Haitian painter and collage artist. One of Haiti's leading artists, Turnier achieved international renown for her fusion of Haitian culture and modernist style.
Sue Hettmansperger is an American artist known for paintings and collages that work across the spectrum of modernist abstraction and representational imagery. Her work explores the interconnectedness of human, botanical and inorganic systems, scientific concepts and ecological concerns. She has been awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Des Moines Art Center, among other institutions. She lives and works in Iowa City and is Professor Emerita of Art at the University of Iowa.
Edith Schloss was a German-born American artist, art critic and author primarily known for abstract paintings and assemblages. She received art training first in her native Offenbach, Germany, and then, successively, in Florence, London, Boston, and New York. She spent the early part of her career working during the cold months in Manhattan and during the warm ones in coastal New England and then spent the last five decades of her life in Italy where she wintered in Rome and painted during the rest of the year in Liguria or Tuscany. While living in Italy she collaborated with the avant-garde composer Alvin Curran who later became her partner and lifelong friend.
