Georgia O'Keeffe was a seminal American artist known for her oil paintings of animal skulls and flowers. Characterized by their sophisticated gradations of tone and color, O’Keeffe’s works are often lauded for their female perspective and iconic aura. “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know,” she once said. “I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower—and what is my experience if it is not the color?” Born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, WI, she studied first at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, then under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League, and finally with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University Teacher’s College. Briefly working as an elementary school art teacher in New York, she was given her first solo exhibition by the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. Stieglitz and O’Keefe went on to wed in 1924, through her husband she was introduced to several American Modernists, including Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. Having mainly focused her gaze on the architecture of New York for the past decade, her interests shifted abruptly after her first trip to New Mexico in 1929. Falling in love with the scenic beauty and culture of the Southwest, over the following decades, she made annual visits to New Mexico, before moving permanently to a place called Ghost Ranch in 1949. O’Keeffe was inducted into the American Academy of Arts of Letters in 1962 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985. She died at the age of 98 on March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe, NM.

Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist painter best known for works depicting mothers with their children such as The Boating Party (1893). Cassatt was a determined artist who achieved critical and commercial success at a time when few women painters were taken seriously. “I have touched with a sense of art some people—they felt the love and the life,” she once said. Born on May 22, 1884 in Allegheny City, PA, Cassatt traveled throughout Europe at an early age. There, she developed her interest in art and went on to spend much of her adult life in Paris. She participated in numerous early exhibitions of Impressionist art, and maintained a long friendship with Edgar Degas. Like Degas, Cassatt’s work never wholly broke with tradition, but rather assimilated some of the characteristics of Impressionism into a realistic style. The artist died on June 14, 1926 in Paris, France. Today, her works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others.

Artemisia Gentileschi was an important Italian painter of the Baroque era and follower of Caravaggio. She was one of the earliest female painters to enter into the male-dominated artistic community of the time. Using lustrous colors and chiaroscuro, the artist produced dramatic biblical scenes such as Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620). “My illustrious lordship, I’ll show you what a woman can do,” she once proclaimed. Born on July 8, 1593 in Rome, Italy, her father was the painter Orazio Gentileschi with whom she studied as a youth. As a teenager she was raped by one of her father’s friends, the landscape painter Agostino Tassi. In 1612, Tassi was convicted of the rape though only served a year in prison. Moving to Florence with her new husband in 1616, she continued to develop her painting style while staying within the aesthetics expounded by Caravaggio. In the following decades, she lived in Rome, Venice, Naples, and London, where she worked as a painter for the court of Charles I alongside her father. The death of her father in 1639 and the English civil war, led Gentileschi to leave the country. She is thought to have died of the plague in 1653 in Naples, Italy. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, among others.

Yayoi Kusama is a contemporary Japanese artist working across painting, sculpture, film, and installation. She has produced a body of work formally unified by its use of repetitive dots, pumpkins, and mirrors. “With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars,” the artist has mused. “Pursuing the philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition.” Born on March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto City, Japan, she studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in 1958. Kusama proved herself a unique artist amidst the circles of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, producing paintings based upon hallucinations she experienced as a child and installations such as Infinity Mirror Room (1965). Despite this initial success, mental health issues led her to return to Japan in the 1970s. Living in relative obscurity over the following decades, it was not until she represented her country in the 1993 Venice Biennale that Kusama returned to the public eye. 2017 was an eventful year for the artist, it included the inauguration of her museum in Tokyo, the debut of “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., “Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of Rainbow” at the National Gallery Singapore, and the concurrent exhibitions “Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life” and “Yayoi Kusama Infinity Nets” at David Zwirner in New York. Since 1977, Kusama has voluntarily chosen to live at the Seiwa Mental Hospital in Tokyo, Japan. Today, the artist’s works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others.

Louise Bourgeois was a eminent American-French artist of the 20th century, recognized for her abstract sculptures, drawings and prints, and perhaps best know for her arachnid-like Maman sculptures. The artist’s brooding works were culled from childhood memories as well as psychological analyses of sexuality, pain, and fear. “The only access we have to our volcanic unconscious and to the profound motives for our actions and reactions is through shocks of our encounters with specific people,” she once reflected. Born on December 25, 1911 in Paris, France, Bourgeois first studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before changing paths and enrolling in art school. She studied under Fernand Léger at the École des Beaux-Arts and later with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League of New York, having emigrated to the United States in 1938. Largely underappreciated during her early career, she garnered critical and public acclaim after her retrospective debuted at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. The artist died on May 31, 2010 in New York, NY at the age of 98 of a heart attack. Today, Bourgeois’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.

Born in Paris in 1755, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s journey to fame and success was rapid. Having received some training from her portraitist father, who died when she was 12, she was encouraged to continue her artistic studies – although, being a woman, she did not have access to formal training – and by the age of 15 she had already developed a modest clientele for her portraits.

By the age of 19, her works had gained so much attention that her painting materials were seized because she’d been operating as a professional artist without guild or academy membership. She swiftly joined the Académie de St Luc, at a time when very few women were admitted, and by the age of 20, she was established at court.

Her fame skyrocketed in the late 18th century, when she was patronised by Queen Marie-Antoinette; whom she painted some 30 portraits of. It was royal intervention that led to her admittance to the Académie Royale in 1783, having been previously rejected.

Her marriage to the art dealer, Jean Baptiste Le Brun, in 1776 proved less successful – largely due to her husband’s gambling. In 1789, she left her husband and country. Fearing the progress of the Revolution and a slanderous press campaign against her due to her association with the Queen, she fled to Italy with her young daughter, Julie.

Despite living in exile, working and travelling across Europe, and raising her daughter single-handedly, Le Brun was able to maintain a successful career. Her portraits, distinct for their emotional tenor, continued to be commissioned by European nobility and royalty.

Helen Frankenthaler was an American painter and printmaker known for her unique method of staining canvas with thin veils of color. Her practice can be seen as a bridge between the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and the Color Field painters of the 1960s. The techniques employed in works such as Mountains and Sea (1952)—a pastel blend of oil paint and charcoal on unprimed canvas—were influential to both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. “One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it,” she once said of her practice. “It looks as if it were born in a minute.” Born on December 12, 1928 in New York, NY, she studied with Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School and Paul Feeley at Bennington College. During the 1950s, Frankenthaler’s work attracted attention from the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, leading to several exhibitions, including a solo show at the Jewish Museum in 1960. Following her marriage to the painter Robert Motherwell that same year, Frankenthaler continued to push her experimentation painting through using acrylics on unprimed canvas. The artist died on December 27, 2011 in Darien, CT. Today, Frankenthaler’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and filmmaker whose self-portraits offer critiques of gender and identity. What made Sherman famous is the use of her own body in roles or personas in her work, with her seminal series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) being particularly important. These black-and-white photographs feature the artist herself as a model in various costumes and poses, and are her portrayals of female stereotypes found in film, television, and advertising. Similar to Barbara Kruger, Sherman examines and distorts femininity as a social construct.“I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite,” she reflected. “It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.” Born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ, the artist abandoned painting for photography while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1976, moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. In addition to the Untitled Film Stills series, she has continued to explore women as subject matter, often donning elaborate disguises in large-scale color photographs, throughout her career. While her practice has grouped her with the Pictures Generation, along with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo, her distinctive blend of performance and photography stands alone. Her work has been the subject of many museum exhibitions, including those at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019, and at the National Portrait Gallery, in London in 2019. Sherman lives and works in New York, NY.

Marina Abramović is a Serbian artist known for her vanguard performances that use her body both as subject and vehicle. Incorporating performance, sound, video, sculpture, and photography into her practice, Abramović often braves dangerous or grueling situations to investigate sensation and its effects, often with audience participation. “The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind,” she stated. Born on November 30, 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), Abramović met German performance artist Ulay while living in Amsterdam, the couple continued their collaboration until their separation in the late 1980s. Part of a group of avant-garde artists including Vito Acconci and Chris Burden that experimented with using one’s body as a medium in the 1970s, Abramović pushed physical and mental boundaries to explore themes of emotional and spiritual transfiguration. In 2010, her popular retrospective The Artist is Present was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art. That same year the author James Wescott released a comprehensive biography on the artist, When Marina Abramović Dies, to critical acclaim. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Judy Chicago is an American artist and major figure within the early Feminist Art movement of the 1970s, and is considered one of the most prominent voices in ongoing dialogue about women and art. Working alongside peers such as Miriam Schapiro, Chicago consistently challenges the male-dominated art world and sought to draw attention to traditionally dismissed craft, such as needlework and ceramics. Her iconic The Dinner Party (1974–1979—consisting of a large-scale triangular table complete with intricate table settings each laid for a different woman in history—remains her best-known work and an indelible moment in 20th-century cultural criticism. The ambitious piece was completed thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers, and is now housed in the Brooklyn Museum. “I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world,” Chicago once explained. “I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.” Born Judith Sylvia Cohen on July 20, 1939 in Chicago, IL, she was notably influenced by her father’s Marxist activism from an early age. She went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually graduating from UCLA with a BFA in 1962 and an MFA in 1964.

Frida Kahlo was a celebrated Mexican painter known for her complex self-portraits. Inspired by pre-Columbian artifacts and Mexican folk art, Kahlo produced bizarre yet beautiful works which the Surrealist André Breton once described as a “ribbon around a bomb.” “My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently,” she once said of her work. “My painting contains in it the message of pain.” Born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, Mexico to a German-born father and Mexican mother, she studied philosophy and medicine as a youth. At the age of 18, Kahlo was involved in a traumatic bus accident that left her badly injured and confined to a bed for months. During her slow recovery, she took up painting from her bed, and subsequently abandoned her academic pursuits. Able to leave her house once more in 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party and through mutual friends was introduced to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. The two artists married in 1929, maintaining a tumultuous and often combative relationship over the years, in which both were unfaithful. Kahlo’s several lovers included the photographer Nickolas Murray, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. Though Kahlo and Rivera divorced in 1939, they remarried a year later. During the following decade, Kahlo painted prolifically and was the subject exhibitions in both the United States and Europe, despite chronic pain and destabilizing health problems. She died in Mexico City, Mexico on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47. In 1958, her home, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in which she was born and died, was converted into the Museo Frida Kahlo.

Lee Krasner was a renowned American Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with her husband Jackson Pollock and peers Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Arshille Gorky, she helped establish a wholly new painterly language. Krasner’s work fluctuated between mosaic-like shapes and representational images, never comfortable with keeping the same aesthetic for very long. “I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes,” she once remarked. Krasner merged the tonal aspects of Cubism with the bright colors of Fauvism, as well as addressing the contemporary avant-garde. The subject of her work was mainly introspective, and dealt with understanding the individual within both modern society and the natural world. Born Lena Krassner on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, NY to Russian-Jewish immigrants, she went on to attend the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League of New York, and classes with Hans Hofmann. Today, Krasner’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Krasner died on June 19, 1984 in New York, NY at the age of 75.

Bridget Riley is a British artist known for her singular Op Art paintings. Melding clean lines, color arrangements, and geometric precision she creates optically compelling visual effects, as seen in her work Cataract 3 (1967). Riley’s use of gradients and variations in tone stems from her admiration for the Pointillist Georges Seurat. “The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift,” she said of her work. “One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.” Born on April 24, 1931 in London, United Kingdom, she studied at Goldsmiths College from 1949 to 1952 and the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. In the following years, the artist began experimenting with the color effects developed by Georges Seurat in the 19th century, leading her to the practice for which she is now known. Today, Riley is often grouped along with other practitioners of Op Art such as Victor Vasarely and Richard Anuszkiewicz. She currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. Her works are currently held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Joan Mitchell was a leading American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker. Working in an inventive gestural style, Mitchell’s works are characterized by their luminous layers of color and inspiration from nature, as seen in her hallmark work Sunflower (1972). “My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed,” she once reflected. Born on February 12, 1925 in Chicago, IL, Mitchell earned both her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moving to New York in the late 1940s, she was introduced to the ideas espoused by artists like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Hans Hofmann. In 1951, Mitchell was included in the groundbreaking “Ninth Street Show,” curated by Leo Castelli at the Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village. Over the following decades, the artist divided her time between Paris and New York, developing the style of blocky shapes of lyrical color for which she is now known. Mitchell died on October 30, 1992 in Paris, France at the age of 67. In 2018, her painting Blueberry (1969), set an auction record for Mitchell when it sold at Christie’s for $16.6 million. T

The oldest of seven—six girls and one boy—Anguissola was born into a wealthy family. Like a true Renaissance man, her father, Amilcare Anguissola, was guided by the words of Baldassare Castiglione in Il cortegiano (The Courtier), not least in his consideration regarding the proper education of a young woman. In 1546 both Sofonisba and Elena, his second daughter, were sent to board in the household of Bernardino Campi, a prominent local painter. They remained under instruction with Campi for three years until he moved from Cremona to Milan. Sofonisba continued her training with Bernardino Gatti, through whom she gained an appreciation of the work of Correggio. During this period of her life, through the influence of her father, she also received encouragement from Michelangelo, copying a drawing he sent her and sending it to him for his appraisal. While beginning to earn a living, Sofonisba also taught her sisters Lucia, Europa, and Anna Maria to paint. About 30 of her paintings from this period, including many self-portraits and the well-known Lucia, Minerva, and Europa Anguissola Playing Chess (1555), survived into the 21st century.

Anguissola’s reputation spread, and in 1559 she was invited to Madrid, to the court of Philip II, where, in addition to painting portraits, she was an attendant to the infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (later the archduchess of Austria) and a lady-in-waiting to Philip’s third wife, Elizabeth of Valois. Most of Anguissola’s paintings of this period are no longer extant, having burned in a fire at court during the 17th century. About 1571, while still in Madrid and with a dowry provided by the king, she married a Sicilian, Fabrizio de Moncada. Although she was once thought to have settled with him in Sicily, recent scholarship suggests that she may have remained in Spain after her marriage. She was widowed about 1579.

Agnes Martin was an American-Canadian painter known for her pared-down geometric abstractions. In pale swathes of color lined with pencil, Martin’s art emerged out of the ethos of Abstract Expressionism while preceding Minimalism’s sparse intensity. Despite the formal rigor of Martin’s practice, she was not striving for perfection—rather, influenced by Taoist and other eastern philosophies, she felt her art was a reflection of the patterns of nature. As a result, Martin titled many of her abstract works after natural phenomena, such as White Flower (1960) or Night Sea (1963). “Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this,” she once stated. “My paintings are about merging, about formlessness.” Born on March 22, 1912 in Macklin, Canada, she moved to New York to study art education at the Columbia University Teachers College in the 1940s. Later sharing a studio building with Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, and others in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, she became absorbed in natural phenomena while also suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. She left the city for the relative isolation of New Mexico in 1968, living and working out of a self-made adobe homes for the remainder of her life. Martin died on December 16, 2004 in Taos, NM at the age of 92. A major retrospective exhibition was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016.

Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her poignant works that mine autobiographical details through a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and neon text. She is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s seminal works Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998)—her own unmade, messy bed installed at the Tate Gallery—provocatively contributed to feminist discourse with the raw, confessional nature of her art. There should be something revelatory about art,” she reflected. “It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.” Born on July 3, 1963 in Croydon, United Kingdom, she cites Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele as early inspirations for her expressive style of self-representation. Emin went on to received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Royal Academician and Honorary Doctorate. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.

Elaine de Kooning was a prominent American painter known for her skill as a portraitist. Her energetic figurative works provided an important perspective in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun,” she once said. “An event first and only secondarily an image.” Born Elaine Fried on March 12, 1918 in Brooklyn, NY, she went on to study at Hunter College and the American Artists School. Early on in her career, she gained prominence in the New York art scene, becoming a member of the Eighth Street Club alongside Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann. During her mid-20s, she married her former teacher the painter Willem de Kooning, with whom she maintained a long and often tumultuous relationship. Throughout her career, De Kooning often painted friends and contemporary figures, including a commissioned portrait of President John F. Kennedy. In the next few decades, the artist worked in a style influenced by prehistoric cave paintings and held teaching positions held at institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. De Kooning died on February 1, 1989 in Southampton, NY.

Cecily Brown is a contemporary British painter. Exploring sexual imagery and an Abstract Expressionist gestural style, Brown’s work has emerged some of the most influential of her generation. Her large-scale canvases often feature figures engaging in sexual acts under a veil of color, as seen in Sweetie (2001), which shows a semi-abstracted couple captured mid-coitus and rendered in bright pinks and purples. Brown was born in London, England in 1969 and studied at the Slade School of Art, becoming influenced by the work of early Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. Distancing herself from the emerging Young British Artist scene, Brown moved to New York, NY in 1994 where she quickly gained attention for her paintings. In 2000, she was featured in a photo spread published by New Yorker magazine, and later that same year, The New York Times grouped Brown into a movement of leading contemporary female artists that included Sue Williams and Lisa Yuskavage. Brown was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston in 2006, and a solo show at Gagosian Gallery in London in 2013. She lives and works in New York, NY.

Eva Hesse was a German-born American artist whose innovative sculptural installations composed of textiles, latex, and fiberglass ushered in a new conceptual era of sculpture in the 1960s. Considered one the founders of Post-Minimalism, Hesse was inspired by her peers Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys and worked tirelessly to reject the status quo definitions of form and spatial relationships. “Chaos can be structured as non-chaos,” she once declared. Among her most important works is Hang Up (1966), a seminal exploration of space in the form of a long metal loop attached to an empty stretcher frame that broke the traditionally sacred picture plane. The artist was born on January 11, 1936 in Hamburg, Germany and fled World War II due to her family's Jewish heritage, settling in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood by 1939. Hesse studied at Cooper Union until 1957, and later pursued her BFA from Yale University, where she studied under then-head Josef Albers and graduated in 1959. She emerged from the avant-garde scene in 1966 with her inclusion in Lucy Lippard’s landmark “Eccentric Abstraction” exhibition. Tragically, Hesse died on May 29, 1970 in New York, NY from a brain tumor at the age of 34, ending a brief but luminous career that only spanned ten years.

Jenny Holzer is an American Conceptual artist best known for her text-based public art projects. Exploring how language is used both as a form of communication and as a means of concealment and control, Holzer has employed a variety of media throughout her career, including large-scale projections, LED displays, T-shirts, and posters. “I used language because I wanted to offer content that people—not necessarily art people—could understand,” she explained. Born on July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, OH, Holzer received her BFA from Ohio University in 1972 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. Her popular series Truisms began in 1977, when she started pasting ambiguous quotes such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” throughout New York, while enrolled in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, among others. in 1990 Holzer was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale She currently lives and works in Hoosick Falls, NY.

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist known for her combination of type and image that conveys a direct feminist cultural critique. Her works examine stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism with text layered over mass-media images. Rendered with black-and-white, red accented, Futura Bold Oblique font, inspired by the Constructivist Alexander Rodechenko, Kruger's works offer up short phrases such as “Thinking of You,” “You are a captive audience,” and “I shop therefore I am.” Like multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, Kruger uses language to broadcast her ideas in a myriad of ways, including through prints, T-shirts, posters, photographs, electronic signs, and billboards. “I'm fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy,” she explained of her work. Born on January 26, 1945 in Newark, NJ, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and art director after studying at both Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design (where she studied under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel) in the 1960s. Her early career path directly influenced the style her art would eventually take. She currently lives and works between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA.

Barbara Hepworth was a British artist. Achieving international acclaim, Hepworth is perhaps best known for her “pierced” Modernist sculpture: constructed using a variety of materials such as alabaster, marble, bronze, wood, and aluminum, Hepworth’s abstractions were often ovular and organic in shape, exploring the shifting contours of the interior and exterior. Born on January 10, 1903 in Yorkshire, England, she began her artistic life by studying at the Leeds School of Art in 1920 and proceeded to graduate from the Royal College of Art in London. Thereafter she enjoyed a period of international travel to Italy, Greece, and France, notably visiting the studios of Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. Before and after her death in an accidental fire at her Trewyn studio on May 20, 1975, Hepworth's work achieved wide levels of success. Her work was featured in the British Pavilion of the 1950 Venice Biennale, and she received a commission for Single Form, a monumental sculpture installed at the plaza of the United Nations building in New York. A large-scale retrospective exhibition of her work was held at Tate Britain in London in 2015.

Rosa Bonheur was a French artist working in the animalier style. Creating both sculptures and paintings, Bonheur is best known for her realist depictions of animals and is widely lauded as one of the most famous female painters of the 19th century. Born on March 16, 1822 in Bordeaux, France into a family of artists, her mother taught her to read by asking Bonheur to sketch a different creature for each letter of the alphabet—fostering an early love of drawing animals that would fuel her later work. Bonheur’s paintings, consisting of adept depictions of endemic and exotic animals, would garner considerable critical and commercial success throughout her lifetime. This granted her freedoms not usually available to female artists at the time, such as her inclusion in prominent exhibitions like the Paris Salon of 1848. After her death on May 25, 1899, she has been discussed as an important figure in art history, especially for her role as a female painter, and her works are held in the collections of important institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Lee Bontecou is an American artist best known for her abstract sculptural wall works. Built using canvas, conveyer belts, and mail sacks attached to welded steel frames, Bontecou’s sculptures feature dark openings that evoke bodily orifices. Despite their accepted vaginal symbolism, these works primarily address materiality as a conceptual gesture, thereby linking Bontecou to both the Minimalist Donald Judd and feminist artists like Judy Chicago. “The natural world and its visual wonders and horrors—man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences—to me are all one,” the artist has explained. Born on January 15, 1931 in Providence, RI, she studied at the Art Students League in New York under William Zorach before attending the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned to weld. Bontecou exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York during the 1960s alongside prominent artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Today, her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. Bontecou lives and works in Orbisonia, PA.

Sarah Lucas is a contemporary British artist known for her kinesthetic photographs, performances, and sculpture. Appropriating commonplace materials, the artist creates crude and often inflammatory comments on sexuality, death, and gender. She is recognized as among the most prominent members of the Young British Artists alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Gary Hume. Born in 1962 in London, United Kingdom, she studied at the Working Men's College, the London College of Printing, and Goldsmith's College where she received her BFA in 1987. The artist rose to prominence and critical acclaim during the late 1980s. Her work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Tate Liverpool. In 2015, Lucas represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale, where she exhibited her controversial installation I SCREAM DADDIO. The artist currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Rachel Whiteread is an influential contemporary English sculptor known for her concrete casts of domestic spaces, architecture, and objects. Whiteread’s sculptures are concerned with the negative space present between humans and the places they inhabit. “I make all this stuff in the studio, but I also work on these white elephants—like House or Untitled Monument—things that are incredibly ambitious, take an awful long time to do, involve a lot of controversy, an awful lot of people, and don't make any money particularly, but it's just because I need to make them,” she has said. Born on April 20, 1963 in Ilford, United Kingdom, Whiteread went on to study painting at Brighton Polytechnic and later sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. It was during this time that she was included in the group known as the Young British Artists alongside Tracey Emin and Gary Hume, and began working with concrete casts. Over the years that followed, the artist’s work has continued to grow in scale, as evidenced in her Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1997) and House (1993), a life-size concrete interior of a Victorian-era house. The artist continues to live and work in London, United Kingdom. Today, Whiteread’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter whose stylized nude portraits of voluminous female bodies have brought her international acclaim. Among her best-known works is the large-scale self-portrait Branded (1992), in which the artist distorts her own torso and breasts through painting, making both body parts pendulous and imposing. Saville’s luscious yet grotesque treatment of painted bodies have elicited comparisons to Lucian Freud. “I paint flesh because I’m human,” she has said. “If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.” Born on May 7, 1970 in Cambridge, United Kingdom, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art during the late 1980s. During her time at school, the artist was granted a six-month travel scholarship to the University of Cincinnati in the United States. It was while she was in America that Saville recounts seeing many overweight women and becoming interested in their bodies as subject matter. After graduating from school in 1992, with her entire senior thesis show having been purchased by Charles Saatchi, she emerged as a part of the Young British Artists group, alongside Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Over the following years, the artist’s has complicated her imagery by layering multiple figures within the same composition. In 2018, a self-portrait of the artist titled Propped sold for $12.5 million at auction—$3.5 million above her last auction record for SHIFT. This painting is what first brought the artist international acclaim when Saatchi exhibited it in his 1997 blockbuster show “Sensation: Young British Arts from the Saatchi Gallery” along with Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, and other YBA artists. Saville currently lives and works in Oxford, United Kingdom. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.

Helen Levitt was an American photographer best known for her iconic New York street photography. Born on August 31, 1913 in Brooklyn, NY to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, she left high school to work for a commercial photographer, where she learned how to process film. Inspired by earlier masters such as Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, she took her 35-milimeter camera to the streets, intimately capturing the daily activities of women, children, and minority communities. Levitt’s talent for the medium proved to be extraordinary: The New York Times described her images as “fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery, and quiet drama.” In 1939, her works were included in the inaugural exhibition of The Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, where her 1939 image of children trick-or-treating received especially high praise. Levitt went on to receive two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1960, and today, her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Levitt died on March 29, 2009 in New York, NY at the age of 95.

Vivian Maier was an American street photographer whose body of work was only discovered after her death. Maier took over 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, capturing the people and architecture of Chicago on a Rolleiflex camera as she walked the city on her days off. Born on February 1, 1926 in New York, she moved to Chicago in 1956, working as a nanny for wealthy families in the North Shore neighborhood. Her work has been compared to Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, both for her spontaneous shooting style and for her fascination with human behavior. She died in Chicago on April 21, 2009, and two years before her death, a storage unit with her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film was auctioned to three separate buyers. One of them, John Maloof, began sharing a selection of Maier's images in 2009 on his blog, generating significant public and critical interest. Maloof went on to produce an award-winning 2013 documentary about the elusive photographer, Finding Vivian Maier, as well as authoring the 2014 monograph Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer best known for her intimate black-and-white portraits. Arbus often photographed people on the fringes of society, including the mentally ill, transgender people, and circus performers. Interested in probing questions of identity, Arbus’s Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967), simultaneously captured the underlying differences and physical resemblance of twin sisters. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” she once mused. Born Diane Nemerov on March 24, 1923 in New York, NY, she was raised in a wealthy family, which enabled her to pursue artistic interests from an early age. She first saw the photographs of Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, and Eugène Atget while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery with her husband Allan Arbus in 1941. During the mid-1940s, the married couple began a commercial photography venture that contributed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Burned out on commercial work by the 1950s, Arbus began roaming the streets of New York with her camera, documenting the city through its citizens. These images were later shown alongside those of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “New Documents” (1967). Having struggled with depressive episodes throughout her life, Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of 48. In 1972, a year after her death, the first major retrospective of Arbus’ work took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Francesca Woodman was an American photographer known for her black-and-white self-portraits. Despite her short career, which ended with her suicide at the age of 22, Woodman produced over 800 untitled prints. Influenced by Surrealism and Conceptual Art, her work often featured recurring symbolic motifs such as birds, mirrors, and skulls. The artist’s exploration of sexuality and the body is often compared to both Hans Bellmer and Man Ray. Woodman’s work is also characterized by her use of long shutter speed and double exposure, the blurred image creating a sense of movement and urgency, “Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …?” Woodman once stated. Born on April 3, 1958 in Boulder, CO to the artists George and Betty Woodman, she went on to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and traveled to Rome as part of its honors program in 1977. While in Rome, she made some of her most poetic and provocative works. Moving to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in photography, the next two years proved to be troubled for the artist. A lackluster response to her photography and a failed relationship pushed her into a deep depression. The artist jumped to her death from a loft window on January 19, 1981 in New York, NY. Though she had few opportunities to show work during her life, Woodman has been the subject of numerous posthumous solo exhibitions, including “Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel,” which opened in 2016 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and 2018s Life in Motion: Egon Schiele/ Francesca Woodman at Tate Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Dorothea Lange was a seminal American documentary photographer. Best known for her Depression-era pictures, she compassionately captured the squalid conditions of the people most effected by poverty and displacement. Born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, NJ, Lange survived polio during childhood that left her with a permanent limp in her right leg, an event which she cited as shaping her worldview and career. She went on to study photography at Columbia University in New York, eventually settling in San Francisco. Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the effects of the Depression on sharecroppers and other farm workers, and her indelible images—such as the instantly iconic Migrant Mother (1936)—shaped both public perception and government policy. Lange was also integral in helping Edward Steichen recruit photographers for his landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” at The Museum of Modern Art. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others. Lange died on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco, CA.

Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer best known for her documentary images of 1960’s counterculture. Her work highlighted Vietnam War protesters and societal outcasts in order to underscore their importance to contemporary society. “I’d rather pull up things from another culture that are universal that we can all relate to,” she has said of her approach to photography. Mark is most commonly associated with her 1983 spread Streetwise, published in Life Magazine, and the 2015 series “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,” which both documented the lives of homeless youths over the course of 30 years. Born on March 20, 1940 in Philadelphia, PA, she earned a BA in painting and art history and an MA in photojournalism from the University of Pennsylvania. Upon receiving her degrees, the artist moved to New York, where she created photo-essays for major publications, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. Mark died on May 25, 2015 in New York, NY. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art among others.

Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the heroin-addicted subculture. Her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year. “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody—it's a caress,” she said of the medium. “I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” Born Nancy Goldin on September 12, 1953 in Washington, D.C., the artist began taking photographs as a teenager to cherish her relationships with those she photographed, as well as a political tool to inform the public of issues that were important to her. Influenced both by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin she saw in magazines, as well as the revelatory portraits of Diane Arbus and August Sander, Goldin captured herself and her friends at their most vulnerable moments, as seen in her seminal photobook Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996). In 2018, she collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme by including three of her photographs, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC (1991), Kim in Rhinestones, Paris (1991), and Nan as a dominatrix, Cambridge, MA (1978) on their spring/summer collection. The artist currently lives and works between New York, NY, and Paris, France. Today, Goldin’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.

Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer whose intimate portraits and floral still lifes are characterized by their evocative light and attention to detail. “One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter,” she said of portrait photography. Born on April 12, 1883 in Portland, OR, she moved to Seattle with her family at a young age. At 18, Cunningham began experimenting with photography after purchasing a 4x5 inch view camera from a mail order catalogue. In 1907, after receiving a degree in chemistry from the University of Washington, she traveled to Dresden to study fine art at the Technische Hochschule. After studying in Europe, the artist moved to San Francisco where she worked alongside Maynard Dixon, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston. It was in the presence of these artists that Cunningham explored new photographic methods, including double exposure and montage printing. Cunningham was an influential member of the renowned f/64 group alongside Ansel Adams and Willard van Dyke. She would go on to have solo exhibitions at the Dallas Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist died in San Francisco, CA on June 23, 1976 at the age of 93.

Margaret Bourke-White was a landmark American photojournalist. Remembered as the first female war correspondent and the first foreign photographer permitted to document Soviet industry, she captured countless iconic images of 20th-century life, conflict, and the politicians at its center. “Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject,” she once reflected. Born Margaret White on June 14, 1904 in Bronx, NY, she attended several universities in her pursuit of a degree in herpetology. Although Bourke-White did not pursue a degree in photography in college, her father introduced her to the medium as a young woman. She turned her hobby into a career by opening a studio in Cleveland, where she specialized in architectural and industrial photography. She changed her name to include Bourke, her mother’s maiden name, in order to seem more professional, beginning her career in photojournalism for Fortune magazine in 1929. Over the following decades, she worked for Life magazine, documenting the Dust Bowl in the American heartland and later the concentration camps left by the Nazi regime. One of her most iconic pictures came after the World War II, when she visited India and captured Mahatma Gandhi reading peacefully in his home, mere hours before his assassination in 1948. Bourke-White died on August 27, 1971 in Stamford, CT. Today,

Sally Mann is an American photographer known for her black-and-white portraits of her family and documentation of the landscape of the American South. Since the 1970s, she produced a series of photographic portraits, landscapes, and still life’s and is best known for her intimate portraits of her family, including her three young children and husband. Similarly to David Hamilton, Mann has caused controversy with her nude photographs causing repeated outcries and calls for censorship. The complexity of her photographs, including her most famous series Immediate Family (1984–1994), which depicts her three children, who were then all under the age of 10, explores the time between childhood and adolescence. “As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs,” she reflected. “And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.” Born Sally Turner Munger on May 1, 1951 in Lexington, VA, she received her BA and later her MA from Hollins College in Virginia before working as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University during the mid-1970s. Throughout the following decade, the artist’s career grew as she began producing books of photography, including At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), which captures developing identities of 12-year-old-girls from her hometown and includes her notable work, Candy Cigarette (1989). From 1999 until his death in 2011, Mann photographed Cy Twombly’s studio in her hometown of Lexington, VA. Using large-format cameras to capture fine details, Mann’s images appear antique due to her interest in early photographic technology, as well as revisiting the 19th-century process of wet collodion.

Kiki Smith is a contemporary American artist best known for her figural representations of mortality, abjection, and sexuality. With a special fascination with the body and bodily fluids, Smith often examines excreta such as blood, semen, and bile in carefully crafted sculptures that bear the influence of Surrealism. “I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” Smith has said. The multidisciplinary artist employs tattooing, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and photography, to engage with a range of themes that relate to the human condition. Born on January 18, 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany, she moved with her father the sculptor Tony Smith and mother the singer Jane Lawrence to South Orange, NJ while she was still a baby. The largely self-taught Smith enrolled in the Hartford Art School for a brief period of time before moving to New York in 1976. In New York, she quickly became a fixture of the Downtown arts scene of the time which included artists like David Hammons and Jenny Holzer. Today, Smith’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY.

Nanas. Colorful, patterned, and crafted in a variety of shapes and sizes, these sculpted women embody the feminist spirit of de Saint Phalle’s work. Born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle on October 29, 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the self-taught artist first began making art as a form of therapy. She went on to become a part of the Nouveau Réalisme movement that included Christo, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely. Early in her career, de Saint Phalle became inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí while on vacation in Spain, and planned to make a piece on par with his famed public park design, Parc Güell. Realized over two decades, de Saint Phalle’s Il Giardino dei Tarocchi (The Tarot Garden) was filled with 22 of her signature monuments and is located in Tuscany. “It's my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy,” she once mused. The artist died on May 21, 2002 in La Jolla, CA at the age of 71. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée d’Art Moderne d’Art Contemporain in Nice, among others.

Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish painter known for her distinctive Art Deco style. In her self-portraits and depictions of chic figures, Lempicka simplified volume and space into tubular and crystalline forms. “My goal is never to copy, but to create a new style, clear luminous colors and feel the elegance of the models,” she once explained. Born on May 16, 1898 in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) to a wealthy family, she spent much of her childhood in Switzerland and Italy where she was influenced by the works of Renaissance and Mannerist masters. Living in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution, she and her husband fled to France to escape the Bolsheviks. During the 1920s, Lempicka became an integral part of the Parisian avant-garde scene and was acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. It was here that she is said to have reinvented herself, while studying under both Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her striking portrait of her curly-haired, blonde daughter, Kizette on the Balcony, notably earned the first-place prize the Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in 1927.In 1939, the artist fled the impending threat of World War II for the United States, settling in Los Angeles and later New York. A renewed interest in her works during the mid-1960s led to an exhibition of Art Deco movement was held in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and a major retrospective of Lempicka's art at the Galerie du Luxembourg in 1972. Lempicka died on March 18, 1980 in Cuernavaca, Mexico

Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor best known for her monochromatic wooden assemblages. During the 1950s, she began to create unique arrangements contained in wooden frames amassed from a range of found objects—usually woodcuts or bits of furniture—that were then painted a uniform black, white, or gold, as seen in her seminal work Royal Tide I (1960). “I think most artists create out of despair,” Nevelson observed. “The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.” Born Leah Berliawsky on September 23, 1899 in Pereyaslav, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Her family emigrated to the United States a few years after her birth, Nevelson moved to New York in 1920 and enrolled in the Art Students League in 1929. She went on to study with Hans Hofmann and worked as an assistant for Diego Rivera before her first solo at Nierendorf Gallery in 1941. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York gave the artist her first retrospective in 1967. Nevelson died on April 17, 1988 in New York, NY at the age of 88

Lynda Benglis is an American artist best known for her use of poured sculptural forms made from wax, latex, metal, and foam. From the 1960s onwards, Benglis’ work has engaged with both the physicality and process of material-based practices while simultaneously confronting femininity in the context of a male-dominated art world. "My work is an expression of space. What is the experience of moving? Is it pictorial? Is it an object? Is it a feeling?” she has said. “It all comes from my body.” In addition to her sculptural work, she has produced both video and photographs—including the controversial and iconic advertisement in a 1974 issue of Artforum, depicting herself nude and posing with a large dildo. Born on October 25, 1941 in Lake Charles, LA, she received her BFA from Newcomb College in New Orleans in 1964 before moving to New York where she met artists like Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Barnett Newman. Today, Benglis’ works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. The artist lives and works between New York, NY, Santa Fe, NM, and Ahmedabad, India

Ellen Gallagher is a contemporary American artist whose work often probes her biracial ethnicity through formal means. In the series Watery Ecstatic (2004), Gallagher examined the history of the West African slave trade and the myth of an aquatic world populated by the children of slaves dropped at sea on their way to the United States. “This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process-this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries,” she has explained. Born on December 16, 1965 in Providence, RI, she is of Cape Verdean and Caucasian descent. Gallagher went on to study at Oberlin College and later received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1992. The artist’s work is influenced from a variety of sources, including Agnes Martin’s paintings, African American-focused publications such as Ebony, and the writings of Gertrude Stein. Gallagher currently lives and works between New York, NY and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, among others.

Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist whose Expressionistic prints, woodcuts, and sculptures empathetically portrayed human suffering. Capturing the anguish and plight of the impoverished and injured in a country torn apart by armed conflict, Kollwitz herself suffered numerous losses during the wars—including the death of her youngest son in World War I. “It is my duty to voice the sufferings of humankind, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain high,” she once stated. “This is my task, but it is not an easy one to fulfill.” Born on July 8, 1867 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Prussia, Kollwitz showed a high aptitude for drawing at an early age, and studied at the Women’s Academy in both Berlin and Munich, where she became captivated by the work of Peter Paul Rubens. Her series of etchings The Weavers (1898) first brought her critical attention, and she joined the Berlin Secession from 1901 until 1913 alongside its notable members Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckmann. A lifelong pacifist, the artist’s work served as a pointed social and political critique of nationalism. Later in life, she faced persecution at the hands of the Nazi Regime, but was undaunted in her creative output. Kollwitz died on April 22, 1945 in Moritzburg, Germany at the age of 77.

Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist known for her political photomontages. Made from newspaper clippings and found objects, her work often engaged with the early 20th-century ideal of the “New Woman”—one who challenged the traditional domestic role of females. The artist is most commonly associated with her photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife through a Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic (1919-1920), which critiqued the male-dominated political apparatus, a system the artist believed resulted in the failure of the Weimar Republic and the increasing militarization in post-World War I Germany. Born November 1, 1889 in Gotha, Germany, she studied at the Berlin’s College of Arts and Crafts, training that was not available to many European women at the time. In 1915, Höch formed a romantic relationship with artist Raoul Haussman, who introduced her to Dadaism—an artistic movement that began in Zurich in response to World War I. In 1926, she split from Haussman and moved to the Netherlands, where she worked alongside several influential artists including Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters. Later in her career, the artist lived in Berlin and was forced to stop showing her work in public after her art was deemed degenerate by the Nazi regime. Höch died on May 31, 1978 in Berlin, Germany.

Meret Oppenheim was a German-born Swiss artist and photographer known as a key figure in the Surrealist movement. Her work focused on the subjugation of women, explored throughout her paintings, as well as her sculptures, using everyday objects posed as women. Her most famous work—the result of a joking conversation with Pablo Picasso—is Object (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure) (1936), a teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in Chinese gazelle fur, creating an arresting meld of the domestic with the erotic. She was born on October 6, 1913, in Berlin, Germany and moved to Paris, France at the age of 18 where she sporadically attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1936, she had her first solo exhibition in Basel, Switzerland and began developing her signature investigation of the female perspective and exploitation. In 1996, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, her first major show in the United States. She died on November 15, 1985, in Basel, Switzerland, and much of her archive is held at the the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern and at the National Library.

Raised among artists, Hong received her B.F.A. from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before moving to the United States in 1996 to pursue an M.A. from California State University, Sacramento in 2002 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis in 2004. Hong currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas and has been represented by Haw Contemporary Gallery in the Kansas region since 2015.

For over twenty years, Hong's studio practice has evolved from explorations of self to broader themes of gender and cross-culture and more recently the social justice of equity, diversity and unity. Hong combines traditional skills with new concepts and draws from her own experiences in China as well as the United States. Both in form and in process, her work is richly layered with fine details in a massive scale, weaving together the history of Chinese ink painting and new modes of expression that she first encountered in the United States. The trademark of Hong's work has been developed during graduate school in America with large black and white charcoal drawings of long hair. She has used black hair to explore her identity as a woman, a mother and a Chinese.

Sarah Sze is a contemporary American installation artist. Her large-scale sculptures often employs found objects, plants, photographs, wiring, and food detritus. Sze constructs her work by hand, building intricate and often gravity-defying towers that fill entire exhibition spaces. The organic and transitional state of her work suggests something in the process of growth and decay. “I am aware people might dismiss my art, but I'm interested in getting them to stop and look; for no other reason than that is what I do,” she has reflected. Born in 1969 in Boston, MA, she completed her BA in architecture and painting at Yale University before receiving her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. Sze is the recipient of the 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, as well as representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale with her work Triple Point. In 2017, her mural Blueprint for a Landscape was completed for the 96th Street 2nd avenue subway platform in New York. She currently lives and works with her husband the famed surgeon and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee in New York, NY. Today, Sze’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.

Tara Donovan is a contemporary American artist best known for her site-specific installations. Employing disposable materials such as Scotch tape, toothpicks, drinking straws, and Styrofoam cups, she creates forms resembling biological masses. "It is not like I'm trying to simulate nature. It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow,” the artist’s said. Born in 1969 in Queens, NY, Donovan received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Donovan has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Alexander Calder Foundation's first annual Calder Prize in 2005, and the MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. She participated in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and her works have been exhibited at Pace Gallery in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Elizabeth Peyton is a contemporary American painter best known for her intimate, small-scale portraits of celebrities, friends, and historical figures. Characterized by transparent washes of pigment and a jewel-tone palette, Peyton’s works address notions of idolatry and obsession. “A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture—the feelings, the brushstrokes—more than describing somebody,” she has said. Notable figures she has painted include Kurt Cobain, Barack Obama, and David Bowie. Born in 1965 in Danbury, CT, Peyton went on to study at the School of Visual Arts. In 1993, she held a solo show of drawings in room 828 of the historic Chelsea Hotel, launching her career in the art world. By her second solo exhibition in 1995 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, she had achieved widespread acclaim, and has since held major exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the Royal Academy in London, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, among others. For her interest in portraiture, her work has been compared to Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as to other contemporary figurative painters such as John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. She lives and works in New York, NY.