Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Venture

This exhibition studied the key themes that emerged when selecting only images of women by women artists. In this exhibition from the permanent collection, female artists from the seventeenth century to the 1960s frequently communicated the idea of an intimate or sheltered enclosure such as a room, studio, or garden, even though these women participated in a more public arena to show or even make their work. Other women artists relayed the idea of venturing into a public place such as a street or an office, or into the more public, intellectual world of a narrative found in religion, mythology, or social critique.

The exhibition looks at works through these private and public lenses, with the circumstances of the artist, her training, and the content of the work in focus. Portraits and domestic scenes appear often. Home-centered settings and situations, including views of mothers and children, proliferate. Idyllic, invented landscapes, mostly of the here and now, appear, with women inserted into a calm or a fantastic natural world. Mythological, religious, and socially critical works are seen less often, while documentary photography spurred a veritable movement among female artists in the twentieth century, and is represented here with several examples.

The exhibition receives support from The Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund.