The great artists of the 20th century transcend gender and culture, even if women artists such as Mildred Thompson and Wanda Pimentel are not as prominent in the public imagination as Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko.
Thompson, a black abstract expressionist who died in 2003 at age 67, and Pimentel, a Brazilian pop artist who died in 2019 at age 76, will be appearing at the 2nd Annual Independent 20th Century in Lower Manhattan in September. He is one of the artists who attracts attention at art fairs.
“We’ve been able to increase women’s representation for centuries,” says the fair’s founder, Elizabeth Dee. “Going into the early 1900s, it was incredibly difficult to bring about equality between male and female artists, but we succeeded in making it happen.”
The Independent is an invitation-only trade show that also hosts a contemporary show in New York in May and is known for its thoughtful curation. In addition to focusing on women artists, 20th century events also include various interpretations of famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Alexander Calder. Also participating will be BIPOC, Caribbean and South American artists, as well as several galleries with self-taught artists.
Featured female artists range from Alexandre Gallery’s presentations of Lauren McIver (b. 1909) and Edith Schloss (b. 1919) to S94 Design’s exhibition of the work of Myrtle Williams, born 1955. Both galleries are based in New York.
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New York’s Gallery Lelon & Company will exhibit Thompson’s vibrant, abstract “window paintings.” Although she was a “great artist, thinker and scholar,” she felt alienated from the New York art world of the 1960s, and she decided to leave America, Dee said. “Her racism was intolerable and she had not made any progress in terms of her evaluation of her own work.”
Thompson, who studied at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1950s, returned to Germany in 1963, where he was accepted and supported, and after receiving an artist-in-residence grant from the city of Hamburg, he moved to the United States in the mid-1970s. I’m back. He is at Howard University in Tampa, Florida.
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel of São Paulo, Brazil brings Pimentel’s edgy pop art to The Independent for its first posthumous exhibition in the United States
“She’s an incredible force. Her work is beyond extraordinary,” Dee says. The history of American pop art is male-dominated, but the world’s history is female-dominated, she says.
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Pimentel’s best known and studied works are a series of paintings titled: Envolvimento According to the gallery’s description of the artist and her work, the work offers “a sharper depiction of women as victims of consumer culture, literally entangled in household objects.” These works were considered a response to Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1960s. The gallery’s solo exhibition of Pimentel’s work aims to place her work within a broader context, including one painting from the 1990s and paintings from two of her earlier series. Caminho ao elo sobre-humano (The path to superhuman bonds)created in 1965-1966.
The fair will also include New York’s Tucher Gallery, which will exhibit the 1970s work of Regina Bogut, an American abstract expressionist born in 1928 who was “part of New York’s Downtown Bowery scene.” Yes, says Mr. Dee.
Luxembourg & Company in London will exhibit Alice Barber’s work. She is “another female Abstract Expressionist who shouldn’t have received it, but should have,” Dee said. Barber appeared in the 1973 exhibition “Women Choose Women” organized by art critic Lucy Lippard at the New York Cultural Center.
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Barber, an American who died in 1982, was also “in the conversation,” Dee says. “This isn’t like looking under a rock and finding some great genius that you’ve never told anyone about. These are artists [who] He was very important to the community. ”
Nahamad Contemporary in New York presents Marie Laurencin from an earlier period, a French artist who was part of Pablo Picasso’s inner circle and was taken seriously as an artist at the time. She died in 1956 when she was 72 years old Laurencin painted Coco her Chanel and Gertrude was collected by her Stein. “I can’t imagine anyone being more successful in Paris at that time,” Dee says.
Laurencin’s work regained attention in Japan in the 1980s, when collectors interested in Cubism began collecting works by other artists in Picasso’s circle. Interest in her work has since subsided, but the Nahmad family has collected and currently displays it, along with works by Picasso and Georges Braque, Dee said. “This is a moment because there are a lot of young artists who are making paintings like this right now and tapping into her legacy, and they’re not even aware of her work,” she said. Masu.
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Among other exhibitions of women artists, New York’s Fridman Gallery will show the work of Dinga McConnon, who was part of the black art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery will show the work of Dinga McConnon, who was part of the black art movement of the 1920s. We are exhibiting three female artists who were born and were politically active. and in the 1930s, Vivian Brown, who passed away in 1993, and Mae Stevens and Camille Billops, who passed away in 2019.
Stevens was a founding member of SOHO20, a feminist gallery founded in 1973. That same year, Billops also purchased a loft to display the Hatch Billops Collection, with the goal of “preserving and promoting black culture,” according to Ryan Lee. Brown founded the Black Cultural Coalition and the collective “Where We At.”
“The history of these things is not as well known as Cedar Tavern,” Dee says, referring to the avant-garde New York artists’ haven of the 1950s and ’60s. “We need to expand our understanding of which artists belonged to which circles artistically and how that functioned in relation to racial issues in this country.”
The Independent 20th Century will be held from September 7th to 10th at Cipriani South Street in New York’s Battery Maritime Building.
