Image: Lincoln Glenn, New York
‘Making Space: American Women Artists and the Century of Change’ will close on Saturday, August 22, at Lincoln Glenn Gallery, 542 West 24th Street in New York. The group exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and mixed media to examine how women artists claimed visibility, authorship and formal freedom across a century of cultural and artistic change.
The exhibition spans works dating from the 1930s through the early 2000s. According to the gallery, the presentation moves across abstraction, figuration, feminist practices and self-taught approaches, placing artists with distinct methods and positions within a shared account of persistence and self-definition in the American art world.
Artists included in the exhibition are Mercedes Matter, Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Ida Kohlmeyer, Louise Nevelson, Virginia Berresford, Harmony Hammond, Diana Kurz, Joann Gedney and Jane Freilicher. The list brings together figures associated with different artistic languages and generations rather than presenting them as members of a single movement.
That distinction is central to the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, authored by Clanci Jo Conover. The catalogue notes that the artists did not share one unified ideology: Lee Bontecou rejected aesthetics she classified as “wimp feminine,” while Diana Kurz participated in feminist protests. Jane Freilicher resisted pressure to follow avant-garde trends, whereas Lynda Benglis used provocation and spectacle to confront entrenched sexism.
The gallery describes the works as demonstrating how creative practice became a form of resistance and self-definition, enabling artists to make space through persistence, collaboration and artistic conviction. A press text by Jenny Mushkin Goldman, reproduced in the exhibition materials, focuses on the works’ use of exposed canvas, negative space and areas of openness, describing these formal qualities as creating a sense of lightness and freedom within the exhibition.
‘Making Space’ is presented within Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s broader programme of American art from the 19th through the late 20th century. The gallery says its focus includes the Hudson River School, American Impressionism, the Ashcan School, American Modernism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, with particular attention to artists active between the 1940s and 1970s whose contributions have been under-researched or less published in subsequent decades. The exhibition remains on view at 542 West 24th Street through August 22.
