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From the past to the exciting present and looking to the future, the Museum showcases great works of art from leading figures in art history, from Mary Cassatt to the masters of today, including Lynda Benglis, Kara Walker, Jennifer Bartlett, Chakaia Booker and a thrilling group of cutting-edge artists who offer signs of what is to come (including Wangechi Mutu, Marie Watt, Ghada Amer, Anne Samat, Rona Pondick and Tara Donovan). At the core of the show is an unforgettable group portrait of the tight-knit Abstract Expressionists (Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and others) known as “the 9th Street Women” from the exciting private collection of Cindy Lou Wakefield and Rick Friedman. A powerful gallery of sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Chakaia Booker is a highlight, while the second floor galleries, where FEM takes over, explode in a crescendo of new art and ideas. The curatorial approach to a radical re-thinking of art history convenes the women on our educational staff with Lindsay Smilow, scholar of feminist art history, who writes: “One hundred years after some women were granted the constitutional right to vote, FEM pushes past a century of essentialism and exclusion to explore the ways in which contemporary women artists make meaning of their complicated, multi-valent existence in our ever-changing world.”
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