#5WomenArtists to See this Spring

Five years ago, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., asked people if they could name five women artists. Sadly, few could. #5WomenArtists became a social media campaign designed to draw attention to women in the arts. This year, 1800 institutions around the world are involved. The good news is that there are countless women artists, both contemporary and historical, and they’re starting to get some of the attention they deserve. 

Scientists have suggested that the earliest cave paintings were created by women artists. Renaissance, Baroque, and Impressionist women painted alongside male counterparts and works that were wrongly attributed to men for centuries are just starting to be correctly reassessed and exhibited with proper credit. It’s been a long time coming. 

Women’s history month is a great time to start getting to know more women artists and their work. This season many of New York’s top museums are making it easy. Whether you see them in person or online, here are five extraordinary exhibitions featuring women artists. 

Alice Neel: People Come First, March 22–August 1  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alice Neel was painting complex, lively portraits when the rest of the art world was concentrating on drips, splatters and soup cans. She was out of step with her own era, but at the same time, completely in tune. She just focused on people – mostly her New York neighbors – and their stories and struggles. “I am a collector of souls,” Neel once said. Some 100 works are being brought together for Neel’s first U.S. museum retrospective in twenty years. They give a sense of this radical painter, fearless artist, social activist, and great humanist. As a bonus, there’s a free, virtual online opening on March 25th, so if you don’t regularly get to rub elbows with curators and hear directly from them, this is your chance.

Julie Mehretu, March 25—August 8, The Whitney Museum of American Art

Thirty paintings and forty works on paper by Ethiopian-American artist, Julie Mehretu should create enough power to light up the entire city. Her energetic abstractions capture movement and mystery, even as they reveal concepts about history, politics, and social justice. Her compositions, often filled with bursts of enigmatic marks, seem like codes or calligraphy from some not yet invented or long forgotten language. They swirl, they excite, they entice, but they never deliver an obvious message. They’re dense, challenging, and rewarding. 

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, June 18-September 26, The Morgan Library 

Pakistani born Shahzia Sikander is known internationally for using traditional Indo-Pakistani styles and materials to address contemporary realities. She’s used mosaics, video, miniature paintings and more to create images that seem foreign, exotic or even ancient but express ideas on feminism, colonialism, environmentalism, globalism, and equality. This exhibition presents 15 years’ worth of works, starting from her early career.

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life, March 11–Sept. 6, MoMA PS1, Long Island City

Niki de Saint Phalle’s playful, colorful female figures with plump forms and cartoonish colors may not seem like feminist statements, but they are. Among the first women to create monumental sculptures of women, she was self-taught, and experimented with many forms before arriving at her “Nana” series. Despite the fact that they look a cross between the Popping Fresh Doughboy and Sgt. Pepper’s Yellow Submarine, her work is insistent and consistent, and was taken seriously by the art world. De Saint Phalle is more known in her home country of France, where her sculptures continuously frolic in a fountain outside of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is the first New York exhibition dedicated to her work. 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, May 7 – Sept. 21, The Jewish Museum

Rife with symbolism, mystery, tension and the unexpected, Louise Bourgeois’ art delves into the deepest levels of what makes us human. Her thoughts on motherhood, sex, death, strength and love take unusual forms. Buildings, spiders and bodies all express something, but often not what we expect. Though Bourgeois stated that art was akin to psychoanalysis for her, she was deeply familiar with Freudian psychology, having been in therapy for many years. The exhibition, “Freud’s Daughter,” presents journals, and art, including a selection of the artist’s original psychoanalytic and automatic writings — many on view for the first time – as well as installations, like the groundbreaking “The Destruction of the Father.” 

Top: Alice Neel, (American, 1900–1984), Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973, Oil on canvas, 55 7/8 × 44 in. (141.9 × 111.8 cm) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweetser Fund, © The Estate of Alice Neel