Before Holt’s Sun Tunnels, all major Land Art projects (Spiral Jetty (1969), Double Negative (1969), Lightning Field (1977)) had been completed by male artists. Holt broke the glass ceiling, paving the way for the ascension of one the most brilliant Land Artists, Maya Lin, whose work is visibly indebted to Holt’s in its focus on ecology, history, and complex systems in nature.
Joan Jonas is a prolific artist, who has greatly influenced the generation of performance artists to follow. She developed her own particularly fluid language and style of working, and furthermore revolutionized the practice by incorporating video and single circuit video loops into her work.
Rosalyn Drexler is an ex-professional wrestler whose experience as ‘Rosa the Mexican Spitfire’ influenced her subsequent work as a visual artist and writer, and who is now becoming recognized as a key feminist voice in the Pop Art movement.
Given how little of her work was actually exhibited during her lifetime and how much of it was lost, Oppenheim’s impact on future generations is all the more remarkable.
Kay Sage is among the few Americans associated with early Surrealism. She fully integrated the language of the movement within her own practice and achieved notable success during her lifetime.
Riley became an icon, not just of Op art, but of contemporary British painting in the 1960s, and she was the first woman to win the painting prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968.
In pursuit of realism, Freilicher, by remaining true to herself, inspired other painters of her era such as Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter, Milton Avery, and Hedda Sterne in their engagements with representation. She was also profoundly important to the poets with whom she surrounded herself.
Though it does her aesthetic reach a considerable disservice, Flack is best known for her contribution to the Photorealist movement of the 1970s.
Matter’s life’s work incorporates elements of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Hofmann’s principles of spatial composition with pure color, automatist compositions of the early New York School, and the innovations of her Abstract Expressionists peers.
Though not recognized as widely as she should be, Nell Blaine’s career stands as a microcosm of post-World War II stylistic tendencies – from gestural Abstract Expressionism to the geometries of pure abstraction and eventually to a lyrical realism that included still lifes, landscapes, and interior views.