Women are often erased, discredited, and treated unfairly when it comes to jobs or opportunities. This is especially true for women who choose to pursue art as a career. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, women earn 70% of bachelor’s degrees in fine art arts but they only count for 46% of working artists. In honor of International Women’s Day, we will highlight four women artists who have heavily impacted the modern art world.
1.) Kara Walker’s Shadows
Kara Walker is an American contemporary artist best known for her iconic silhouette figures. She earned a MacArthur fellowship at the age of 28 and is regarded as one of the most prominent Black Artist in America. Her works tackles themes of racist and sexist stereotypes as well as gender identity, violence, and desires.
Darkytown Rebellion (2001)
In her work Darkytown Rebellion, She uses over a dozen figures and projected color lights to create a psychedelic dimension to her work. The shadows of visitors can become a part of her world with these silhouettes connecting past with present. Darkytown Rebellion shows how we as individuals interact with stereotypes and invites the viewer to challenge themselves and see how their lives fit in with history’s ongoing progression.
2.) Marlene’s Many Layers
Marlene Dumas is a South African Dutch painter who’s known for her Neo-Expressionism style. Her use of oil paints and watercolor makes the image alternate between sharpness and blurring adds to her signature style. Dumas will begin her process by using references from photographs and newspaper articles to create her painting, and with those layered meanings she probes the viewers own sense of responsibility in society’s darker themes of war, death, sex, and racism.
The Neighbor (2005)
This image first appears to be an ordinary African man that appears calm and peaceful. This is portrait of Mohammed Bouyeri, a man who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh but stabbing him in the chest after shooting him multiple times but there’s yet another layer. She uses the fear of danger and the fearing appearing racist to make the viewer uncomfortable. The artwork itself did not have any identifying information as he looks like he could be someone’s neighbor. Dumas explores the unconscious suspicions portray by the media of Arab bearded men.
3.) Yayoi’s Changing Realities
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installations. Kusama has been creating beautiful, groundbreaking works for over six decades with her signature dot work, soft scupltures, performance and installations.
Fireflies on the Water (2001)
This room sized installation presents a dark room lined with mirrors everywhere and a pool of water in the center. There are 150 small lights that hang and create a beautiful space-like scene that has no beginning or ending. Fireflies captures a hallucinated view of reality inspired by Kusuma’s therapeutic processes, the varied versions of the Narcissus myth and her native Japanese landscape.
4.) Sarah Captures Time
Sarah Sze is an American artist that uses a variety of mediums like print, sculpture, and video to challenge the threshold between digital and physical forms. She takes minutiae, everyday materials and transforms them into fantastical works. Her installations present ecological themes of sustainability that improvises within cities, labor and everyday life.
This exhibit was site specific to the Guggenheim Museum. It started with a trail of flowing images that echoed the city’s traffic movement. Inside the museum is an immersive environment filled with sculptures, paintings, installations, and sounds. This work serves as a reminder about how timelines are built through collective experiences and memories but it’s more than just a collection. Timelapse shows that we as people mark time with those experiences and how it affects us in different ways.
Timelapse
SOURCES
The Art Story. (n.d.). Marlene Dumas paintings, Bio, ideas. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/dumas-marlene/
Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery. (1997, January 1). Kara Walker born 1969. Tate Gallery. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2674
Kusama, Y. (n.d.). Yayoi Kusama: Fireflies on the water. Yayoi Kusama | Fireflies on the Water | Whitney Museum of American Art. https://whitney.org/collection/works/19436
NMWA. (2025, March 5). Get the facts about women in the arts: NMWA. National Museum of Women in the Arts. https://nmwa.org/support/advocacy/get-facts/
Oh, J. (2022, April 1). Kara Walker Paintings, bio, ideas. The Art Story. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/walker-kara/
Sarah Sze. Art21. (n.d.). https://art21.org/artist/sarah-sze/
Sarah Sze: Timelapse. The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. (n.d.). https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/sarah-sze-timelapse
Smithsonian. (n.d.). Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors: Hirshhorn Museum: Smithsonian. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian. https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/yayoi-kusama/
GREENSBORO COLLEGE ART COLUMN 