Salomon is neither a self-taught nor an outsider artist, for she received an artistic education and remains in the mainstream of art. Neither is she just a Holocaust artist. While her work testifies the experience of Nazi control and wartime, it also displays distinct artistic skills and a capacity for creative expression.
Georgia O’Keeffe spent 70 years making art and contributing to the development of American modernism. She was a prominent member of the creative Stieglitz Circle, influencing early American modernists. She is notable for her role as a pioneering female artist, and although she disavowed their interpretation of her work, she was a strong influence on the artists of the Feminist art movement, including Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, who saw feminine imagery in O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. A prolific artist, she produced more than 2000 works over the course of her career. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is the first museum in the United States dedicated to a female artist, and its research center sponsors significant fellowships for scholars of modern American art.
In both her photographs as well as her films, Levitt created objects of fascination drawn from the seemingly mundane reality of everyday life. Transforming scenes and subjects into performances that flirted with the surreal, the intimate moments captured in her work spoke to the wonders of the human condition.
Albers made her mark on the Bauhaus, the weaving art form, and the conception of “women’s” crafts with her innovations. Beyond the integration of abstract modernism into textile weavings, Albers also introduced new technologies to the weaving workshop.
Though Hesse’s career spanned little more than a decade, her work has remained popular and highly influential. On the one hand, the enduring fascination with Hesse derives from her remarkable “life of extremes.” But Hesse’s work, itself, was very much part of an equivocal and unique era in history, when artists were seeking new modes of expression in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism.
Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.
In both her life and her art, Tamara de Lempicka offered a new image of the modern woman: part jazz-age femme fatale, libertine and social climber, and part canny self-promoter, self-styled experimental artist and astute cultural and historical prognosticator. In many ways, Lempicka’s artistic output has been assessed as inseparable from her larger-than-life character and, more significantly, her gender.
Cindy Sherman epitomizes the 1980s technique of “image-scavengering,” and “appropriation” by artists seeking to question the so-called truth potential of mass imagery and its seductive hold on our individual and collective psyches.
Elizabeth Murray’s experiments with the shaped canvas were unparalleled, taking what other artists had begun to play with to its apotheosis. Her use of rich but oftentimes discordant color, the massive size and complexity of the canvas(es), and the interweaving of the cartoonish, the disturbing, and the playful influenced her peers and artists in the proceeding decades.
Although Martin abandoned the artistic hub of New York in favor of a solitary existence on the other side of the continent, she continued to refine her practice while traveling, writing, and experimenting with filmmaking. Perhaps ironically, her seclusion skyrocketed her fame; many devotees ventured to New Mexico in search of Martin, who reluctantly received her callers. The last few decades of her life were spent painting and writing, her practice becoming a metaphor for her search for tranquility. Her work is especially influential in India and China.