At New York College’s Grey Art Museum, the top of artist Rona Pondick—a solid of it, anyway—might be seen rising from a pedestal within the middle of 1 gallery. Her pores and skin is pink, her ear is translucent, her head is bald, and her eyes are closed. It’s exhausting to look away from her as she pushes by means of a mattress of unnaturally yellow resin, rising from a floor that has hid her for therefore lengthy.
Pondick’s sculpture, titled Magenta Swimming in Yellow (2015–17), acts as a worthy icon for the Gray’s present exhibition, “Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years.” Pondick is without doubt one of the greater than 300 women-identifying artists who’ve acquired an award from the group Nameless Was A Lady since its founding 29 years in the past. This exhibition, organized by critic Nancy Princenthal and curator Vesela Sretenović, options round a fifth of them.
The present isn’t complete, which is partly a consequence of the modest dimension of the Gray, a smallish museum that recurrently places on mighty exhibits. (Disclosure: I interned there as an undergraduate pupil over a decade in the past.) However even in its partial type, the exhibition persuasively means that Nameless Was A Lady has reworked the US artwork scene for the higher, preserving alive many ladies’s practices when many establishments wouldn’t. Greater than merely appearing as a boosterish celebration of this beloved group, the exhibition additionally spotlights the hard-won battle for visibility and the perseverance required to climate it.
Most of the works listed here are somber and placing. There’s Laura Aguilar’s Stillness #25, a 1999 {photograph} by which the nude artist lies curled up within the Californian desert, her face turned away from her viewer. But in contrast to a material blowing above Aguilar, the artist stays there, planted stoically to the bottom. Close by, there’s Janet Biggs’s 2007 video Airs Above the Floor, by which a swimmer writhes round in a pool. This swimmer resists gravity to stay underwater for a chronic time period—one thing that requires coaching and bodily endurance. It’s powerful to maintain up that form of work, and harder nonetheless do it when nobody is watching.
These two items, like most of the others within the present, had been made roughly across the similar time the artists received their grants from Nameless Was A Lady, a corporation whose title is typically affectionally abbreviated as AWAW. Aguilar had not acquired a significant survey on the time (and wouldn’t till 2017, the yr the Vincent Prince Artwork Museum stuffed that void); Biggs nonetheless has not had a retrospective.
Rona Pondick, Magenta Swimming in Yellow, 2015–17.
Courtesy the artist and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston/Personal assortment, Boston
AWAW, which now awards 15 grants yearly, has acknowledged loads of artists with extra established institutional bona fides. Jennie C. Jones, a sculptor set to do a fee for the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s rooftop this summer season, acquired one in 2017; her class of grantees additionally included Amy Sherald, whose work are actually being surveyed by the Whitney Museum. Andrea Fraser was well-known as a number one institutional critique artist by the point she acquired her AWAW award in 2012, and photographer Louise Lawler was thought-about a core member of the Footage Era lengthy earlier than she acquired hers in 2010.
A spread of different acclaimed artists have additionally acquired AWAW awards: Joan Jonas, Senga Nengudi, Carolee Schneemann, Betye Saar, Cecilia Vicuña, Yvonne Rainer, Lorraine O’Grady, Simone Leigh, and Tania Bruguera, to call however a couple of. A large portion of AWAW’s alums might hardly be thought-about nameless, since a lot of them have a great deal of title recognition now.
It wasn’t at all times that method, in fact. Not so way back, there was a pointy gender imbalance in US museums. (The pattern continues in the present day, in keeping with recent reporting by journalists Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns.) And so, in 1996, photographer Susan Unterberg fashioned AWAW with plans to treatment the issue, borrowing her group’s title from Virginia Woolf’s proto-feminist treatise A Room of One’s Personal (1929).
Till 2018, the yr that Unterberg publicly named herself because the group’s founder in a splashy New York Times profile, AWAW was one thing of an open secret inside the artwork world, with many followers within the know however little public consciousness. Artists and artwork world literati muttered in regards to the group in personal, regardless that the press was slower to take word. However now, AWAW’s cohort has grown so massive that nobody can ignore it, and the group’s grants, at present valued at $50,000, are as carefully watched as a number of the nation’s greatest artwork prizes.
Janet Biggs, Airs Above the Floor, 2007.
Courtesy the artist, New York
The Gray present is one other uncommon public-facing second for this unostentatious group, so Princenthal and Sretenović, the present’s curators, have properly used the event to shine a lightweight on AWAW winners which have but to obtain due recognition. By my calculations, only one artist right here—the photographer An-My Lê—has ever acquired a New York survey.
There isn’t a singular aesthetic on show, although naturally, there is no such thing as a small quantity of feminist critique to go round. In a single four-part 2018 portray by Dotty Attie, an A.I.R. gallery founder direly in want of a retrospective, there’s a shadowy shot of the actor Orson Welles re-presented in oil alongside textual content studying “WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MAN?” A solution arrives within the adjoining canvas, that includes a smiling nude girl fidgeting with an outdated radio. Beverly Semmes’s RC (2014) takes the type of a protracted movement of velvet pinned to a wall; it appears like a queen’s gown, however its title refers to “Tough Censor,” Semmes’s collection about feminine porn stars. The late Ida Appelbroog is represented right here by Monalisa (2009), her piquant tackle the feminine nude, by which a distended determine with lumpy pores and skin vacantly stares again at her viewers.
Many works cope with centuries of misogyny in additional implicit methods. The present features a unfold of artists who take up the male-dominated style of abstraction, from Polly Apfelbaum, who right here exhibits her rolled-up work on the ground, to Carrie Yamaoka, who imaginatively makes use of bubble wrap to create her splotchy surfaces. There are additionally works that slyly undermine machismo, together with a tire sculpture by Chakaia Booker that takes a logo of bad-boy automotive tradition and turns it slinky and playful. The shredded rubber wheels she’s exhibiting listed here are organized to look extra like a mom nursing a baby, a notion obliquely instructed by her sculpture’s title, Reclining Torso Breastfeeding Herself (2000).
Carrie Yamaoka, Blue Verso, 2018.
Courtesy the artist, Ulterior Gallery, New York, and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Sculptures, work, and fiber artworks are ample right here, however works of efficiency artwork and video artwork should not, a near-omission probably owed to the restricted assets readily available on the Gray. Much less forgivable is the entire absence of trans artists. Presumably in recognition of this lacuna, AWAW modified the language in its grant tips in 2018, with “women-identifying” now showing instead of “ladies,” however there had by no means been a trans AWAW grantee till 2022, the yr that micha cardénas was named a winner. (For the reason that Gray present ends in 2020, cardénas just isn’t included.) Change has come too slowly to this group, and to stay related for 29 extra years, AWAW has some slack to select up.
Quibbles with AWAW’s historical past apart, there might be little doubt that this group has reached its viewers. The prolonged line of holiday makers that fashioned on opening evening on the Gray is proof, and so are the choices on view on the museum, which testify to a thrumming group that’s solely increasing.
No shock, then, that some artists within the Gray present visualize networks of girls. One among them is Valeska Soares, whose 2017 piece For To (X) collages collectively the excised dedication pages of dozens of books. Practically all of the dedicatees go unnamed by the books’ respective authors, with males getting the identical remedy as females. (“We dedicate this ebook to all the lads in our lives,” reads one in every of Soares’s appropriated pages.) However it’s placing simply how typically phrases like “spouse” and “mom” recur right here, for as Soares’s piece demonstrates, anonymity disproportionately impacts ladies. Right here’s to the way forward for AWAW, a corporation that’s ensuring this not stays the case within the artwork world.
Correction, 4/3/25, 4:05 p.m.: A earlier model of this text misstated the quantity of artists who’ve received AWAW grants. It it’s greater than 300, not 251, the variety of artists who received between 1996 and 2020. Moreover, AWAW awards 15 grants yearly, not 10.
