The exhibition “New York Women Abstract Artists” opened at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art this Thursday, with a reception and accompanying panel discussion. It will run through March 21.
The exhibition features seven female artists who have lived and worked in New York City, and it details their experiences with the city — SoHo in particular — that shape the trajectory of their lives and careers.
Curated by Vered Lieb, the exhibit features work from Beatrice Mady, Claire Seidl, Joan Thorne, Kim Uchiyama, Michal Sapiro and Reneé Hanan Plata.
Within their works and throughout the panel, the women explore painting, style, gender and the city that ties them all together.
“Living in New York during the ‘80s and ‘90s was a wild time,” Plata said during the panel. “It was very active. I was surrounded by artists, eating at openings to survive.”
“Oliver,” “Miss Ruby,” “Margaret” and “Gretchen,” four of Plata’s oil paintings, currently hang alongside the work of her contemporaries in the Sarah Moody Gallery. Each of these pieces features an emphasis on color and line, exemplifying abstraction with their simplicity. Lieb said these depictions are meant to provoke viewers into examining their life’s path.
Over the course of the panel, Plata and her peers talked about the influence of location on their work and also described how gender often played a role in their creations as well.
“When I started trying to show my work in the early ‘70s, I had to give images to my male artist friends because art viewers were not coming to see women’s work,” Thorne said.
Thorne said this marginalization was a common theme for her throughout her early career.
When she eventually had her first one-person show at a museum in New York, she became the first woman to be given a solo exhibition at that gallery. The experience of Thorne’s female colleagues often mirrored her own.
“We were women who felt lost. We felt that we had to create ourselves, invent ourselves because women were not taken seriously,” Thorne said.
Fellow panelist Shapiro brought a new approach to the issue, describing that her art is a product of her merit as an artist and not her status as a woman.
“People have said, ‘I want you to be in a show that’s going to be feminist art.’ And I said no. I’m not a feminist,” Shapiro said. “I believe in femininity, I believe in feminism, but that has nothing to do with my work. I’m not making female art.”
Regardless of each panelist’s position on how gender influences art, their works share a distinct set of traits.
Color, line, and shape dominate the exhibition, which is typical of abstractionism. From the crisp lines and boundaries characteristic of Uchiyama’s work to the hectic overlapping compositions preferred by Mady, fans of abstract art are sure to find something to their taste. It all comes in a comprehensive display put forward by Lieb, who left viewers with a parting thought.
“A good painting is like a poem that hangs on your wall,” Lieb said.
