Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection featuring Pacita Abad: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC
Making Their Mark brings together over eighty works by an intergenerational and international group of women artists represented in the San Francisco Bay Area–based Shah Garg Collection. Featuring a wide spectrum of artworks—including painting, sculpture, installation, textile, beadwork, and ceramics from the past eight decades—the exhibition emphasizes dialogues between artists who circumvent and break through conventions in art-making, embracing craft techniques, new technologies, conceptual inquiries, inventive methods, and uncommon materials. Artists in the exhibition include Andrea Bowers, Suzanne Jackson, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell, Joan Mitchell, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Sarah Sze, Kay WalkingStick, and Mary Weatherford, among many others.
The exhibition is organized into six sections that illustrate key thematic threads: Gestural Abstraction, Painting and Technology, Craft Is Art, Of Selves and Spirits, Disobedient Bodies, and Luminous Abstraction. Each section juxtaposes works by emerging artists with the pathbreaking contributions of their predecessors, demonstrating how earlier generations anticipated current discussions around abstraction and representation, identity and power, and hybridity and performativity.
Making Their Mark envisions art history as an interconnected web of influences and affinities between artists who subvert traditional narratives and hierarchies established within a historically patriarchal field.
Many of the works on view question rigid and gendered distinctions between art and craft, eroding arbitrary and increasingly obsolete categories and value systems that many women artists have long challenged. Making Their Mark assembles significant works by artists whose innovative explorations demonstrate expansive vocabularies of art-making, highlighting the importance of prioritizing diverse perspectives that radically change how art histories are conceived.
