Joan Mitchell in Women in Abstraction

Women in Abstraction sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with 106 artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s. By reviewing each artists’ specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition brings attention to the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art. For instance, Joan Mitchell’s vast canvases envelop the viewer in their colorful, emotive gestures—generating a powerful sense of intimacy over intellectual abstraction, as advanced by many of her male colleagues. 
 
Transcending the traditional reductionist hierarchies between high and low art, the exhibition presents a history that includes dance, the decorative arts, photography and cinema, with a museography that is punctuated with many documents, including films. The exhibition is multi-discipline with a global approach, including modernities from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, telling a story with multiple voices. 
 
Most exhibitions devoted to the history of abstract art have often downplayed the fundamental role played by women in the development of this important artistic movement. Efforts by recent scholars have aimed to correct this wrong. The many recent monographs and thematic exhibitions devoted to women abstract artists now enable us to re-evaluate the importance of their contribution. This exhibition overturns several historical presuppositions concerning the chronology of abstraction and questions the old historical schemas, without however seeking to re-write a new one. Beginning with the observation that the history of art is constantly rewritten with the help of new narratives, Women in Abstraction presents the opportunity for yet another iteration of the history of art, one where the artists presented are definitively integrated.