The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Yale exhibition celebrates 150 years of women artists
In appreciation of the roster of women artists who have graduated from Yale and left an impression on the international art world, Yale University Art Gallery presents “On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale” through January 9, 2022.
“This is the first exhibition and publication to tell the long and complex story of the visual arts at Yale from a female perspective,” said curator Lisa Hodermarsky. She said the exhibition displays work across media and time in dialogue with one another, while the accompanying book and audio guide give voice to these women artists through first-hand archival accounts such as their letters, writings and oral histories.
Furthermore, the exhibition dovetails with several anniversaries of the suffragist movement.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Women Suffrage Association in 1869, coincidentally the same year that the Yale School of the Fine Arts was founded.
“In 1920, women were granted the constitutional right to vote — 100 years in 2020,” said Hodermarsky. She also noted The ERA movement of the mid-20th century, the recent MeToo# movement and “the very current challenges facing women’s freedoms in this country surrounding control of their bodies.”
“This exhibition presents work that demonstrates the genius and resiliency of the women who came to Yale to study over the past 15 decades and be taken seriously in their chosen profession,” she added.
The artists included in the exhibition represent just a small percentage of the thousands of artist-graduates of Yale who continue to produce work. Given the time restraints on the exhibition’s organization which, due to the pandemic, were extended by a year, the decision was made to build this exhibition entirely from the Yale collection.
“We began by distilling a list of artist-graduates of Yale, and then set about comparing that list with our collection holdings — acquired works and promised gifts to the collection,” Hodermarsky said. “The results were surprisingly promising — the show includes important examples in the oeuvres of these artists.”
“On the Basis of Art” highlights more than 75 artists who worked or are working in a broad range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, print, photography, textile and video.
Here is a sampling of some of the artists included.
Maya Lin
In 1982, Lin was selected in a national competition for the winning proposal of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.—a notable feat considering she was still an undergrad at Yale at the time. She not only became the creator of one of the most significant monuments in the nation’s history, but Lin was also the first woman to design a federal monument for the National Mall.
Eva Hesse
A German artist who helped usher in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s, Hesse aimed to illustrate the absurdity of life by using elements that visually seem to be in opposition. Although her artistic career lasted just a little over a decade, she is notable for pushing the boundaries of modern art by working with new materials and going beyond stylistic definitions such as minimalism and abstraction.
Irene Weir
The artist was known for creating posters in the 1890s that promoted the significance of cultural heritage, as well as flower and landscape paintings, powerful murals painted during the 1920s and portraits. An example of the latter is a famous portrait of Marie Curie which hangs at Memorial Hospital in New York City today.
An-My Lê
A Vietnamese-American photographer who left her country as a 15-year-old after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Lê’s strong body of work examines the impact, consequences and representation of war. Njideka Akunyili Crosby The artist is known for negotiating the cultural terrain between her adopted home in the U.S. and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transferbased paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds.
The exhibition is divided into six different sections, each showcasing a different theme.
“Carving a Presence” demonstrates the persistence of the genre of portraiture; “Sculpting Space and Place” features two and three-dimensional objects; “Threading Myth, Legend, and Ritual” highlights artists who engage tradition and storytelling in their practice; “Modeling Nature, Tracing the Human Footprint” presents the different ways in which artists have depicted the natural world and have examined humankind’s relationship with nature; “Drawing Identity” reveals how artists have challenged societal labels and offered thoughtful and powerful critiques of cultural systems; and “Casting History, Etching Memory” explores how artists have memorialized or reflected the past.
“Though structured around two anniversaries of women on Yale’s campus marking advances for the female gender, the hope is that visitors will experience this exhibition as a nongendered experience,” Hodermarsky said. “The work shown is superior work — not defined or encaged by the gender binary.”
For more information, visit artgallery.yale.edu.