More important than the impact her diverse work has on the art market is its influence on other artists and movements, which spans generations. To this day, she represents herself as a lone wolf most comfortable with being known as independently avant-garde.
Laurie Anderson’s career spans four decades and her contributions to the histories of performance art, experimental music, contemporary visual art and installation have received wide recognition.
As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo’s artwork has been associated with Primitivism, Indigenism, Magic Realism, and Surrealism. Posthumously, Kahlo’s artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon.
Ono’s performances and instructional paintings of the early 1960s changed forever the relationship between artist and audience.
Since the discovery of her work around the time of her passing in 2009, Maier’s photographs have been made available to public viewers through many exhibitions and books. To the next generation of street photographers, Maier’s work provides an historical example of the way in which everyday scenarios can be imbued with a particular aesthetic power, and that through thoughtful framing and composition, the photographer might then find a way of using their camera to capture something of the psychological space of their subjects.
Hilla Rebay left a profound legacy on the art world. Playing a key role in shaping modern art of the twentieth century, she was among the first artists to use the term “non-objective” to describe the abstract art that she and her colleagues were creating. She made it her life’s mission to further the importance of non-objective art and to educate others about this movement. Her greatest achievement in this effort was her success in convincing Solomon R. Guggenheim to collect non-objective art. In doing so, she helped support the career of many artists and set in motion the building of a collection that would become the foundation of one of the world’s greatest modern art institutions.
In the 1980s, many women artists felt their careers were precarious enough that they could not succeed as artists and fight the feminist battle too. The Guerrilla Girls proved them wrong. They succeeded in transforming the relationship between art and politics. They made activism seem not only acceptable, but vital to full participation in the art world.
Ringgold’s work as an artist, an activist, and an educator has influenced both the art world and communities beyond the art world. Her founding or co-founding of many arts organizations focused on issues faced by women of color has created many opportunities for those artists.
Izquierdo’s work opened up new possibilities for using symbols tied to Mexican traditions in a way other than to serve the nationalist discourse in art at the time. Izquierdo believed in art for art’s sake and wanted to go beyond the bounds of political art then. While the concept of art for art’s sake traced back to nineteenth-century European avant-gardes, in her context of post-revolutionary Mexico, this direction in art especially bucked the trend of using art as a propagandistic tool. Instead, art’s meaning, for Izquierdo, could be personal and variegated, not following the lines set by the politically powerful art establishment then.
The style of Romaine Brooks’ art in many ways defies classification and does not easily fit into one stylistic category. However, she has been most frequently linked to the movements of Aestheticism and Symbolism because of her leaning towards the non-narrative and the romantic and lyrical qualities of her portraits. While Brooks did not embrace the vivid colors of many of her fellow modernists, she nevertheless made the same bold and somewhat simplified expressive gestural lines as her contemporary Fauves and Cubists. Her portraits are unapologetically honest and real in the same way that the likes of much later twentieth century portraitists, including Alice Neel and Lucian Freud took on board.