The Invisible Woman
March 19, 2019 7:12 AM   Subscribe

I'm in my 40s and feeling a bit shit about being invisible. I need art by women who are currently in their 40s. Strong preference for visual art in traditional mediums.
posted by fluttering hellfire to Media & Arts (16 answers total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lola Gil has a new exhibition:
Her latest exhibition Thirsty, which you can catch at Capitol Hill gallery Roq La Rue today, explores what "thirst" really means with "narratives of drought and climate change, but also the more ambiguous slang term meaning an insatiable lust for life and creation."
See also Roq La Rue: Exhibitions
posted by Little Dawn at 7:54 AM on March 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


Dana Schutz, painter
Elinor Carucci, photographer
Rachel Kneebone, sculptor
Cecily Brown, painter
Chantal Joffe, painter
Kara Walker, sculpture, installation
Jenny Saville, painter
Julie Mehretu, painter, printmaker

My other favorites are Taryn Simon and Sarah Sze, but I didn't link them because they don't use traditional mediums.
posted by xo at 8:42 AM on March 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


Trish Tillman makes sculpture: "Imagine a ménage à trois between a suburban thrift store, a midcentury modern furniture salon, and a sex shop—the love children born of such a hot-’n’-heavy session might be Trish Tillman’s sculptures." An interview with her.
posted by jocelmeow at 8:45 AM on March 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


Julie Mehretu "makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. In her highly worked canvases, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography." (via White Cube)
posted by Little Dawn at 8:45 AM on March 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


I just saw this Roni Horn show at the Menil Drawings Institute, beautiful.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 9:22 AM on March 19, 2019


Kara Walker, painter and silhouettist
posted by holborne at 9:45 AM on March 19, 2019


(sorry, didn't see that she'd already been mentioned)
posted by holborne at 9:46 AM on March 19, 2019


Although she's not currently in her 40s, I can't help but suggest Frida Kahlo. What a woman.
posted by strelitzia at 10:56 AM on March 19, 2019


Read Lisa Congdon’s recent “introduction” on her Instagram. I love seeing her work pop up and she got a late start.
posted by amanda at 11:29 AM on March 19, 2019


SWOON (aka Caledonia Curry) and Clare Rojas (aka Peggy Honeywell) are both in their 40s.
posted by montbrarian at 11:56 AM on March 19, 2019


I like this question! A few more:
Laura Owens, painter
Justine Kurland, photographer
Deana Lawson, photographer
Carissa Rodriguez, photographer & videomaker
posted by lisa g at 7:25 PM on March 19, 2019


I'm a woman artist in her 40's, though I suppose it would be against the rules or something to promote myself.
posted by all the light we cannot see at 9:54 PM on March 19, 2019


Jennifer Moss, painter, etc.
posted by D.C. at 2:54 AM on March 20, 2019


I suppose comics are not thought to be within the list of traditional mediums in the U.S., but I want to mention Kristen Haas Curtis, an American artist living in Switzerland because of her "La Rentrée," a series about going back to college in midlife, which you can find on the front page of her website. She has also made a collaborative graphic novel with her young daughter, Princess Wolf and Her Life of Darkness.
posted by jocelmeow at 7:47 AM on March 20, 2019


Jenny Dubnau, who may be in her fifties.
posted by vitabellosi at 12:55 PM on March 20, 2019


Mickalene Thomas!

Zoe Leonard

Also in the realm of amazing women past their 40s but still living: Vija Celmins, Cindy Sherman, Mierle Ukeles, Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin.

Carolee Schneeman and Barbara Hammer both died very recently. For examples of women who never let their age and diminished visibility in the world slow them down or convince them they were not important.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 6:45 PM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


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