Lavinia Fontana, Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni, c. 1590, oil on canvas , Gift of Funds from Anonymous in memory of Montana Walker Strauss, and Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2022.38.1

Women Artists

Explore works by women artists spanning time, place, and media, ranging from 16th century portraitist Lavinia Fontana and 17th century Dutch still life painter Judith Leyster to 18th century American impressionist Mary Cassatt to modern art by Georgia O'Keeffe, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Zarina, Alma Thomas, Helen Frankenthaler, Ruth Asawa, Marisol, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, and more.

Selected works

  • This nearly abstract painting is created with flowing bands and triangular forms of mostly single colors in caramel brown, pine and spring green, apricot orange, plum purple, or fuchsia, with some bands of unpainted canvas in this horizontal painting. A wide, tan-colored band rises from the lower left corner toward the upper right. There are triangular forms in pumpkin orange to our left and another near the lower right. With the brown band, they recall hills along a valley. Pink, orange, deep purple, and fuchsia are painted in bands in the lower right corner and across the bottom. Above the tan band, a wide swath of spring and dark green may suggest hills beyond, with swirling yellow, black, pink, and blue under a patch of lavender purple that spans the top edge of the canvas, which could be the sky. The painting is signed and dated at the lower right corner, “Frankenthaler ’73.”
  • Printed with tones of black, gray, and smoky gray, two oversized hands reach out of an ocean and hold up a masted ship in this horizontal etching, aquatint, and drypoint. Closer to us, the black silhouette of a woman sinks under the surface of the water, face down with her arms thrust back and her mouth gaping open. Her features are exaggeratedly rounded to reference stereotypes historically connected with Black and African people. The wave surges to our left, and the giant hands lift the boat just left of center of the composition. Small in scale, two silhouetted people stand on a flat area to the left. One wears a brimmed, flat-topped hat, a coat with tails, and holds up a tool, perhaps a hoe. The other wears a spiky headdress and skirt and holds up a stalk of sugar cane. The sky is pale gray to either side of a plume of white and a black void with jagged edges, which spreads like a seeping stain down the middle of the sky. Under the image and across the bottom of the page, the artist wrote “A.P. VI/VIII” to the left and “KW 2010” to the right lightly in graphite.
  • Shown from about the waist up, a woman with smooth, pale skin sits in a chair facing our right in front of a canvas on an easel in this vertical portrait. She leans onto her right elbow, which rests on the seat back. She turns her face to look at us, lips slightly parted. Her dress has a black bodice and a deep rose-pink skirt and sleeves. She wears a translucent white cap over her hair, which has been tightly pulled back. A stiff, white, plate-like ruff encircles her neck and reaches to her shoulders. She holds a paintbrush in her right hand and clutches about twenty brushes, a wooden paint palette, and a rag in her left hand, at the bottom right of the canvas. The painting behind her shows a man wearing robin's egg-blue and playing a violin.
  • A small brown dog and a pale-skinned little girl wearing a white dress sit in matching celestial-blue armchairs in this horizontal painting. To our right, the girl sits with her legs angled to our left. She slumps back with her legs spread, and her left elbow, on our right, is bent so that hand rests behind her head. Her other elbow is draped over the armrest. Her dark brown hair appears to be pulled back, and tawny brown eyes under faint brows gaze down and to our left. She has a small nose set in a round face and a coral-pink mouth closed in a straight line. Her white dress has touches of gray, soft pink, and powder blue with a wide plaid sash around her waist. The pine-green, black, and sapphire-blue sash is accented with overlapping vertical and horizontal lines of burnt orange, light blue, and mustard yellow. Her socks match her sash and come up to mid-calf, over black shoes with silver buckles. The small dog has scruffy black fur and a russet-brown face. It lies curled in the chair opposite the girl, to our left, with its eyes closed and ears pricked up. The rounded backs of the upholstered chairs curve down to become the low arms. The vivid and light blue fabric of the chairs is scattered with loosely painted strokes of avocado and forest green, peach pink, cherry red, plum purple, and white. Beyond the chairs closest to us is another armchair and an armless loveseat, both covered with the same fabric. They sit at the back of the room, in a corner flooded with silvery light coming through four windows on the right side. The furniture is arranged on a peanut-brown floor. The artist signed in the lower left, “Mary Cassatt.”
  • The spiraling whorls of a nearly round, pearl-white shell fills this square painting. The inner edges of the shell’s whorls are shaded with pale spring green, especially to our right, and the innermost spiral is pale pink. The outer lip, that is, the open end of the shell, faces down to our right. The shell sits against a stone-gray background and casts a shadow to our left.

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