Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
Introduction
Making Their Mark brings together approximately eighty works from the San Francisco Bay Area-based Shah Garg Collection by an intergenerational and international group of women artists. Featuring a wide variety of artworks from the past eight decades—including painting, sculpture, installation, textile, beadwork, and ceramics—the exhibition emphasizes connections between artists who circumvent and upend conventions in art-making, embracing craft techniques, inventive methods, and alternative materials.
The exhibition is organized within seven sections that illustrate key thematic threads: Gestural Abstraction, Luminous Abstraction, Pixelated Abstraction, Disobedient Bodies, Of Selves and Spirits, The Power of Form, and Craft is Art. Each section juxtaposes works by emerging artists with the pathbreaking contributions of their predecessors, demonstrating how earlier generations anticipated contemporary perspectives on representation, identity, and power. Making Their Mark envisions art history as an interconnected web of influences and affinities among artists who subvert traditional narratives and hierarchies in a historically patriarchal field.
Many of the works on view question rigid and gendered distinctions between art and craft, eroding arbitrary and increasingly obsolete categories and value systems. Making Their Mark assembles significant works by artists whose innovative explorations demonstrate expansive vocabularies of art-making, highlighting the importance of prioritizing diverse perspectives to change the way art histories are told.
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection is curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, New York. Extended labels were written by Lauren O’Neill-Butler.
Presentation of the exhibition at NMWA is made possible by the Sue J. Henry and Carter G. Phillips Exhibition Fund and the Making Their Mark Foundation. Additional support is provided by Marcia Myers Carlucci, the Clara M. Lovett Emerging Artists Fund, San Francisco Advocacy for NMWA, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and the Estate of Lisa Claudy Fleischman.
Making Their Mark Foundation
The Making Their Mark Foundation supports scholarship and public engagement, highlighting the achievements and innovations of women artists. Through a wide range of projects and partnerships with educational institutions, arts organizations, and arts leaders, the Foundation works to bring greater recognition to art by women and to rectify the underrepresentation of women in public collections, exhibitions, and art historical narratives.
For more information about the Making Their Mark Foundation, visit makingtheirmark.org.
Andrea Bowers
b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio
Political Ribbons (Fondazione Furla/GAM Milan), 2022
Silkscreen ink on satin ribbons; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Visitors are invited to take a ribbon from the artwork. Please take only one.
Bowers works through a feminist lens, examining contemporary political issues such as immigration, climate change, labor, and women’s rights within the larger context of American history and feminist activism. Motivated to create a historical record of artistic and political movements through her own art practice, she uses a variety of mediums to approach complex topics through an accessible and direct vocabulary. The participatory work Political Ribbons (Fondazione Furla/GAM Milan) illustrates the aesthetic power of language. The piece consists of hundreds of ribbons printed with phrases such as “Sexism Sucks” and “It Is Not Enough to Be Compassionate.”
Gestural Abstraction
Mary Weatherford
b. 1963 Ojai, California
the Tempest, 2015
Vinyl paint on linen with wired neon tube; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Aria Dean
b. 1993, Los Angeles
Little Island/Gut Punch, 2022
Urethane paint on high-density foam; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Little Island/Gut Punch is painted chroma key green, the same color used for green screens in filmmaking. Formally, the work is a simple, erect rectangular solid, roughly the size of the artist’s body. The center appears to collapse in on itself, almost as if struck forcefully by a gut punch. Little Island/Gut Punch was created through digital processes, including collision simulation and 3D modeling. “The work makes a joke about my own artistic practice—beating up a monolith,” says Dean. “You can take this as beating up monumentality, beating up Minimalism . . . beating up the phallus or phallic gesture. None of these and all of these are right.”
Joan Mitchell
b. 1925, Chicago; d. 1992, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Untitled, 1992
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
A preeminent abstract painter of the postwar period, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, France, beginning in 1968. Mitchell derived great joy from her gardens there, which influenced the emergence of sunflowers in her work—a motif she returned to throughout her career. In one of her final diptychs, these flowers appear as explosions of yellow and orange. Mitchell painted with renewed intensity during her later years, continuing to work on a grandiose scale despite her deteriorating health. Representing the steely determination of her concluding efforts, this work combines two monumental, swirling balls of golden yellow with strokes of green, red, black, and blue that surge among them.
Lynda Benglis
b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana
Baby Planet, 1969
Pigmented latex; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Rosemarie Castoro
b. 1939, Brooklyn; d. 2015, New York City
Gentless (Brushstroke), 1972
Gesso, marble dust, modeling paste, and graphite on high-density fiberboard; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
A self-described “paintersculptor,” Castoro emerged within the context of Minimalist and conceptual art practices that dominated 1960s New York. In 1970 she began producing large-scale, freestanding panels whose textured surfaces she covered in graphite shading. By 1972 these panels had evolved into a body of wall-based reliefs such as Gentless (Brushstroke). To make the works in this “Brushstroke” series, Castoro applied a mixture of gesso, marble dust, and modeling paste to panels and used a mop or brush to create a deep-grained texture. Once the coating had dried, she cut out brushstroke shapes with a jigsaw, preserving the delicately jagged edges, and rubbed graphite over the surfaces.
Lorna Simpson
b. 1960, Brooklyn
Ice 11, 2018
Ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Simpson emerged in the 1980s as part of a generation of photographers developing post-conceptual practices. Through found (or staged) images and text, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture, she explores identity politics, race, and gender. To construct Ice 11, the artist screenprinted enlarged fragments of text from magazines and found imagery of ice and smoke caused by volcanic eruptions onto fiberglass, then overpainted the ensemble with ink. To be “on ice” refers to being imprisoned, and Simpson’s abstracted canvas speaks to the disproportionate numbers of Black youth who have been imprisoned as a result of the racial violence of the U.S. judicial system.
Jadé Fadojutimi
b. 1993, London
Inside My Shell, 2018
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Teeming with swift, haphazard brushstrokes that smolder through skeins of oil paint, Fadojutimi’s canvases typically appear drenched in rapturous hues, marks, and lines. Her large paintings are inspired by an array of source material, ranging from Japanese anime and Victorian furniture to plants, fashion, and video games. She is fascinated by the construction of self, including adornments such as clothing and accessories. Forms inspired by hair bows and hosiery recur in her works. Inside My Shell depicts an enigmatic landscape that toes the line between figuration and abstraction, forming an environment that feels parallel to but separate from reality. The composition recalls lush tropics or underwater kelp.
Julie Mehretu
b. 1970, Addis Ababa
Among the Multitude VI, 2020–22
Ink and acrylic on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection; promised gift to the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
Referencing literature, architecture, activism, music, calligraphy, and art history, Mehretu’s art addresses pressing social and political concerns. Her recent work uses digital manipulation to crop, scale, and blur found media images. Once satisfied with her editing, Mehretu projects the imagery onto a canvas and traces or airbrushes it onto the surface with the guidance of a grid, which she builds up in a labor-intensive process of layering and erasure. Executed with jagged black marks over a blood-red and sea-blue airbrushed ground, Among the Multitude VI draws on images documenting migrant detention centers at U.S. borders and the violence of far-right anti-immigration protests.
Janet Sobel
b. 1894, near Ekaterinoslav, Russia (now Dnipro, Ukraine); d. 1968, Plainfield, New Jersey
Untitled, ca. 1946
Matte paint, enamel paint, and sand on wood panel; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Sobel took up painting at age forty-five, working on any surface she could find, including envelopes, paper scraps, and shells scavenged from the beach. She experimented with enamel paint mixed with sand, producing granulated surfaces, and adapted glass pipettes from her husband’s costume jewelry business to drip, splatter, and blow paint. This work exemplifies her pioneering “allover compositions,” characterized by dense layers of paint coating the entire canvas, including its edges. In 1958, the critic Clement Greenberg acknowledged that Sobel’s innovative work “made an impression” on Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) and other Abstract Expressionist artists of her generation.
Luminous Abstraction
Olga de Amaral
b. 1932, Bogotá
Alquimia Plata 6(B), 1995
Gesso, acrylic, silver leaf, and gold leaf on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Emerging during the height of the fiber art movement in the mid-1960s, Amaral became a key figure in the development of Latin American abstraction, known for her “off-loom” constructions. In the early 1980s, Amaral began her series “Alquimia” (Alchemy), to which Alquimia Plata 6(B)—a wall hanging made of more than one thousand woven linen tiles—belongs. To make the work, the artist secured each tile in place before applying gesso, acrylic paint, and gold and silver leaf. The geometric configuration alludes to the tiled roofs of Bogotá. Here, Amaral considers the formal challenge of how to “turn textile into golden surfaces of light.”
Samia Halaby
b. 1936, Jerusalem
Left to right:
Bird Dog, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 3 min., 40 sec.
Circles, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 1 min., 11 sec.
Fly over Jersey, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 1 min., 17 sec.
All courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
While Halaby is primarily known as an abstract painter, she is also one of the earliest innovators of digital art. In 1986, Halaby began programming and producing digital art on the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer. She taught herself how to code using the programming languages BASIC and C and called her resultant works “kinetic paintings.” These three early examples typify Halaby’s commitment to abstraction, including its sociopolitical history and its relevance to the present moment. “The kind of painting that I want to do is painting that reflects our time,” she has said, adding, “which has the newest language, and includes the newest content of our time.”
Jo Baer
b. 1929, Seattle; d. 2025, Amsterdam
V. Speculum, 1970
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Barbara Kasten
b. 1936, Chicago
Photogenic Painting Untitled 76/7, 1976
Cyanotype, Van Dyke brown print, and ink; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Kasten’s unusual photographic practice incorporates painterly, sculptural, and performative techniques. Her “Photogenic Paintings,” a series of camera-less photograms begun in 1974, marked the beginning of experimental engagement with still life that has remained central to her practice. In this work, abstract patterns appear against a blue ground. To create this work, Kasten brushed the chemical mixture required for the cyanotype process onto a sheet of paper and placed fiberglass mesh over it. After exposure to light and a water rinse, the parts of the paper that had been exposed to light turned blue, while the areas protected by fiberglass remained white.
Helen Pashgian
b. 1934, Pasadena, California
Untitled (orange), 2009
Heat-formed acrylic with additional acrylic elements; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
A member of the Light and Space movement that emerged in Southern California in the 1960s, Pashgian explores perception and the possibilities of light as both medium and subject. Color is fundamental to her practice, and she chooses each hue carefully based on its ability to reflect or refract light. In recent years, Pashgian has produced large-scale freestanding columns, such as Untitled (orange), made by heating acrylic sheets and wrapping them around wood molds to generate a double elliptical form. Each column also encapsulates an additional acrylic element at its center. The glowing columns invite close inspection and rely on the participation of viewers, whose experience of the light changes as they move around the works.
Pat Steir
b. 1940, Newark, New Jersey
For Philadelphia Three, 2013
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
In the 1980s, Steir began to experiment with poured paint, producing the “waterfall” paintings for which she is best known. To create them, she thinned paint with turpentine before pouring it onto unstretched canvases tacked to the studio wall. Over time, her paintings evolved into a series the artist has referred to as “the Split.” These works feature the same pouring technique, but Steir layers the paint in broader swaths and bifurcates the canvases vertically at the center. The luminous yellow and ocher tones of For Philadelphia Three, the third in a trio of works named for the city, seem to evoke the stonework of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Helène Aylon
b. 1931, Brooklyn; d. 2020, New York City
First Coral, 1970
Acrylic and Plexiglas on aluminum; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Aylon, a pioneer of process-based abstraction, was guided by her acute feminist consciousness. She began a body of abstract paintings in the late 1960s, “Elusive Silver” (1969–73), which she produced by spray-painting layers of acrylic onto a piece of Plexiglas backed by an aluminum sheet. First Coral is part of this body of work. The ethereal appearance of the surface changes as the viewer moves: areas of shadow transform into glimmers of light as the aluminum backing shines through gaps in the paint.
Pixelated Abstraction
Mary Heilmann
b. 1940, San Francisco
San Francisco (Night), 1990
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Charline von Heyl
b. 1960, Mainz, Germany
Dunesday, 2016
Acrylic on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Charline von Heyl
b. 1960, Mainz, Germany
Plato’s Pharmacy, 2015
Acrylic on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Known for her eclectic approach to painting, von Heyl resists a signature style. While her work is influenced by the 1980s art scene in Cologne, Germany, her move to New York, away from what she has termed a “heavily male” environment, prompted a wider engagement with art history, material culture, and everyday life. Plato’s Pharmacy and Dunesday each depict a row of bowling pin-shaped forms against a patterned background, envisaged by the artist as a “stage design.” Describing the works as a “goofy take on still life and metaphysical surrealism,” von Heyl likened the bowling pins to “Giorgio de Chirico’s tailor dolls—silent stand-ins for people—and here they are standing on the edge of the canvas in the exact same stupid way in both paintings, waiting for the ball.”
Mary Heilmann
b. 1940, San Francisco
San Francisco (Day), 1990
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Representative of Heilmann’s fascination with visual space, San Francisco (Day) and San Francisco (Night) suggest the same cityscape under different conditions. The windowed façade of a building, colorfully lit from within, appears as six small rectangles of vivid color that shine through a layered background: black overpainted with white in the daytime view, and white overpainted with black for night. Evoking the sensation of watching the world go by at different times of day, these works demonstrate the way in which Heilmann’s practice is inextricably linked to her own experience. She says, “Behind my choices of color, surface and scale, there is always a memory of a place or event.”
Anicka Yi
b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea
̧W†RRñ†0, 2022
Acrylic, UV print, and aluminum artist’s frame; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Howardena Pindell
b. 1943, Philadelphia
Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia, Brazil), 2022
Mixed media on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
For five decades, Pindell has rigorously explored surface, texture, and color. Known for employing unconventional materials, including glitter, talcum powder, and even perfume, she notably began using the hole punch around 1970. Pindell incorporated the by-products of this tool—tiny paper circles known as chads—into her works. After spray-painting and squeegeeing acrylic paint through stencils onto a fixed canvas, she applied confetti-like constellations of chads to the surface, where they adhered to the wet paint. While from a distance this work appears uniformly painted, closer inspection reveals thousands of chads of varying sizes, which emerge as rainbow-colored flecks beneath layers of paint.
Joan Snyder
b. 1940, Highland Park, New Jersey
Untitled, 1974
Oil, acrylic, wax, gauze, and tape on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Laura Owens
b.1970 Euclid, Ohio
Untitled, 2016
Vinyl paint, screenprinting ink, and bicycle wheel on dyed linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Owens’s work takes an idiosyncratic and inclusive approach to source material. Art historical references to Henri Matisse, Color Field painting, and Japanese folding screens appear alongside influences such as folk art, children’s coloring books, tapestries, wallpaper, and clip art. Bulbous shapes nod to image-editing software that allows the user to select a brush shape and width to create marks and erasures. Some of the shapes are packed with colored “pixels” that the artist screenprinted directly onto the dyed linen support; others are traversed by a stenciled lattice pattern. While Owens’s allusions to the everyday are often subtle, at times she physically affixes an object to the surface of the canvas, as with the bicycle wheel in this work.
Sarah Sze
b. 1969, Boston
Crisscross, 2021
Oil, acrylic, acrylic polymer, ink, aluminum, Dibond, and wood; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Known for her complex installations, paintings, drawings, and videos that address temporality, entropy, and materiality, Sze has returned in recent years to painting, the medium in which she first trained. She conceived of the Crisscross paintings in pairs, revealing two versions of a related image. Across the surfaces, images and collages appear to repeat, mirror, and flip back and forth, impressing upon the viewer a sense of continual crosspollination, meticulously arranged yet evoking the chaos of a shattered screen or a kaleidoscopic computer glitch.
Jacqueline Humphries
b. 1960, New Orleans
[II], 2014
Oil on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Humphries engages with the challenges and potentials of new technologies, connecting abstraction to the realm of contemporary digital culture. Using a wide variety of mark-making techniques, she covers her canvases with brushstrokes, drips and pours of paint, and stenciled passages. She also removes paint by smudging, scratching, and sponging. In 2014 she adopted laser-cut stencils to structure her paintings. [II] refers to notations in computer coding languages. Humphries’s goal was to “make a painting and then stencil the canvas over top, as if the whole surface of the painting were inverted or flipped in on itself.”
Kapwani Kiwanga
b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada
Transfer III, 2023
Wood, pernambuco pigment, copper, and glass beads; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Faith Ringgold
b. 1930, New York; d. 2024, Englewood, New Jersey
Left to right:
Window of the Wedding #3: Woman, 1974
Window of the Wedding #4: Man, 1974
Acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Ringgold was an artist, activist, teacher, and author known for her story quilts, which combine narratives drawn from her own experiences as a Black woman with politics and social history. Ringgold’s series “Window of the Wedding” is characterized by vivid abstract patterning inspired by Kuba textiles from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With titles that refer to “man” and “woman,” the works in this series imagine components of a marriage. They were also used as backdrops for soft sculptures depicting couples that Ringgold made around the same time.
Miriam Schapiro
b. 1923, Toronto; d. 2015, Hampton Bays, New York
Double Rose, 1978
Acrylic and fabric on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Melissa Cody
Navajo Nation, b. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona
The Three Rivers, 2021
Wool and aniline dye; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Cody, a fourth-generation textile artist, specializes in the Germantown Revival style, based on a traditional Diné (Navajo) approach. The style dates to the 1860s, the time of the so-called “Long Walk”: the U.S. government’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Diné people. Between 1864 and 1866, the Diné were deported from their land in present-day Arizona and forced to walk to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. Using medium-weight yarn commercially milled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in a range of colors previously unavailable to them through natural dyeing processes, Diné weavers created brightly colored textiles in their own styles. In The Three Rivers, Cody reinterprets established Germantown styles with geometric overlays and plays with scale, asymmetry, and curvature, incorporating patterns reminiscent of the pixelated video games she played growing up in the 1980s.
Nelly Sethna
b. 1932, Mumbai, India; d. 1992, Mumbai, India
Untitled, ca. 1970s
Handwoven wool and cotton; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Jennifer Bartlett
b. 1941, Long Beach, California; d. 2022, Amagansett, New York
At Sea, 1979
Vitreous enamel, silkscreen, and enamel paint on steel (115 parts); oil on canvas (2 parts); Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
In 1968, Bartlett began working with a new process that would become a signature of her practice: she obtained small steel plates and proceeded to cover them in white enamel, bake them, silkscreen grids onto them, and place them in geometric arrangements on a wall of her studio. She then painted dots onto the plates in various colors and sizes. Long inspired by the ocean, Bartlett completed this work—the first in a series devoted entirely to water—in 1979. At Sea, composed of 115 enameled steel plates overlaid with two ovoid canvases, is typically monumental in scale.
Disobedient Bodies
Sheree Hovsepian
b. 1973, Isfahan, Iran
Radio, 2022
Silver gelatin prints, ceramic and wood elements, and velvet in walnut artist’s frame; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Hovsepian’s collages, which feature photographs of cropped human figures, evoke an awareness of the body and physical consciousness. Using handmade macramé, wood carvings, and ceramics, she juxtaposes geometric shapes with photographs. “I feel an urge to work with my hands in an additive process as opposed to the way I see straight photography,” she says. This sensual and fluid approach departs from the precision and control traditionally associated with the photographic medium.
Portia Zvavahera
b. 1985, Harare, Zimbabwe
Crying Belly, 2021
Oil-based ink and oil stick on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
The unconscious realm is a guiding force for Zvavahera, who uses her dreams as a source for the vivid imagery of her expressionistic compositions. Operating between the fantastical and the allegorical, her monumentally scaled works combine gestural painting with intricate printmaking techniques. Densely layered brushstrokes form the backdrop to enigmatic narratives in which figures with female attributes, stand-ins for Zvavahera, appear alongside creatures such as owls and bulls, mediums for interpreting the artist’s visions. Crying Belly depicts an encounter between two beings. The blue hand of the figure at the top hovers menacingly above the head of the lower figure, whose wide-open mouth denotes fear, or anger, and protest.
Judy Chicago
b. 1930, Chicago
Dark Red, Blue, Green Domes (small), 1968
Acrylic spray lacquer on acrylic, with glass-and-Plexiglas base; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Suzanne Jackson
b. 1944, St. Louis, Missouri
Cut/Slip for Flowers, 2020
Acrylic paint and D-rings; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Jackson has worked as a painter, dancer, teacher, curator, and theater designer. Beginning in the early 2010s, she experimented with acrylic gel medium, a thickening agent, and later acrylic paint to create flexible surfaces on which to build multiple layers of paint. Jackson augments and shapes these translucent supports with mesh or plastic netting from produce bags, as seen in Cut/Slip for Flowers. Repurposing is crucial to the artist’s practice, and she incorporates found textural elements such as loquat seeds, beads, and even flakes of dried paint peeled from her own hands. Blurring the boundaries between mediums, these works are meant to be displayed, in her words, “suspended in space as sculpted paintings.”
Rose B. Simpson
Tewa, b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico
Counterculture B, 2022
New Mexico pine, twine, clay, and acrylic; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Simpson descends from a long line of Santa Clara Pueblo potters, from whom she learned customary methods of pottery making. She is known for her hand-carved, commanding androgynous figures adorned with found and manufactured metal embellishments that recall jewelry and armor. The slender, nine-foot-tall figure of Counterculture B represents ancestors acting as witnesses to landscape and history. To create the work, Simpson created clay maquettes as models before carving the full-size figure in wood. The watchful figures have been installed in locations around the U.S., including on ancestral lands of the Indigenous Mohican people, serving as a reminder of those whom colonization aimed to silence.
Senga Nengudi
b. 1943, Chicago
R.S.V.P Untitled, 1978
Nylon mesh and sand; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Nengudi has been challenging the boundaries between sculpture and performance art for more than five decades. In 1974, inspired by her pregnancy and the elasticity of women’s bodies, Nengudi began to experiment with used pantyhose. She suspended pairs from the ceiling, stretched them between walls, and filled them with sand to allow gravity to exert its force. Round, heavy forms, such as those in R.S.V.P. Untitled, evoke breasts and testicles, while the nylon material references women’s bodies. The impermanence of Nengudi’s objects was an important reference for performance art as it developed during the 1970s. “My art is like a butterfly landing on one’s knee. . . . The moment is fleeting—but remembered,” she says.
Amy Sillman
b. 1955, Detroit
Untitled (Little Threesome), 2005
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Sillman draws inspiration from diverse sources including comics, Beat poetry, jazz, and internet memes. The body is an important subject in her work, albeit an often invisible one. Rarely representing the figure in its entirety, the artist instead presents detached limbs or fragmented features emerging from clusters of abstract lines and colors. In Untitled (Little Threesome), she also eroticizes the human body; the proliferation of rounded breast and elongated penile forms subtly suggests an intimate act. Sillman has said, “Making paintings for me is liminal: not-quite-known, coming-into-being, not-yet-seen, being-remembered. It is a material process as much about destruction as construction, about going backwards and forwards.”
Joan Semmel
b. 1932, New York City
Horizons, 1981
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
In the mid-1970s, Semmel turned to her own nude body as subject matter. Horizons is part of the series “Echoing Images,” which sought to “resolve the tension between abstraction and figuration.” Exploring possibilities of representation, Semmel repeats the same composition twice. At the bottom of the canvas, fine brushstrokes and sensitive shading depict details such as the texture of skin and minuscule hairs on the arm of the realistically rendered figure. The same nude is magnified at the top of the composition with intensely colored, gestural brushstrokes. The contours of the form, enlarged and closely cropped, begin to resemble the gradations of a landscape viewed from above.
Maria Lassnig
b. 1919, Kappel am Krappfeld, Austria; d. 2014, Vienna
Die grüne Malerin (The Green Paintress), 2000
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection; promised gift to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Simone Fattal
b. 1942, Damascus, Syria
Young Warrior (The Trophy), 2023
Bronze; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Cecily Brown
b. 1969, London
The Demon Menagerie, 2019–20
Oil on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
While Brown considers herself to be a figurative painter, she is particularly interested in the state of flux in which a figure breaks down into something less recognizable. She says, “The whole figurative/abstract thing is about not wanting to name something, not pin it down. I’ve never wanted to let go of the figure, but it keeps wanting to disappear. It’s always a fight to hold on.” Nature is another recurring theme, as seen in The Demon Menagerie. The work references a motif known as the “concert of birds” (popularized by Flemish painter Frans Snyders [1579–1657]), in which numerous species are depicted perched on trees. In contrast to Snyders’s art, Brown’s jagged brushstrokes, sickly green hues, and skull-like central form create an atmosphere of violent unease.
Of Selves and Spirits
Tschabalala Self
b. 1990, New York City
Sisters, 2021
Velvet, felt, tulle, marbleized cotton, craft paper, fabric and digitally printed, hand-printed, and painted canvas on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
This large multimedia composition depicts two sisters standing side by side, with the elder placing an affectionate and protective arm around the younger. While studying painting and printmaking at Bard College and the Yale School of Art, Self decided that it would be “most sincere to start with a narrative with which I had a lived experience.” The figures that occupy Self’s compositions are treated less as literal subjects than as “avatars,” as she terms them, enabling the artist to reclaim “interpretative authority” over Black women’s bodies.
Emma Amos
b. 1937, Atlanta; d. 2020, Bedford, New Hampshire
Star, 1982
Acrylic, machine-made synthetic fabric, and handwoven synthetic fabric on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Amos was a groundbreaking painter, printmaker, and weaver whose works explore questions of race, gender, power, and Black subjectivity. Seeking depictions of empowerment and strength, she collated images of powerful Black figures from sports magazines and used them to produce figurative acrylic paintings that incorporate her own brightly colored woven fabric. In Star, a leaping body is silhouetted against the textile background, while trailing threads add a sense of movement that was integral to Amos. She explained, “When I make a painting, I am trying to use both the expressiveness of the paint flow and the movement of whatever it is I’m using, so that everything is in flux.”
Françoise Grossen
b. 1943, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Contact III, 1977
Manila rope (abaca); Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Elizabeth Murray
b. 1940, Chicago; d. 2007, Granville, New York
Joanne in the Canyon, 1990–91
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Celebrated for her elaborate three-dimensional, brightly colored canvases, Murray belonged to a cohort of artists focused on process-oriented work who emerged in New York in the 1970s. Joanne in the Canyon has a distinctive, angular canvas built atop more than a dozen pieces of wood. With its undulating surfaces and crater-like formations, the painting evokes the landscapes of the American Southwest, a frequent source of inspiration for the artist. Orange, green, and red hues merge into an abstract portrait of Murray’s friend JoAnne Akalaitis (b. 1937), who would hike through sandstone canyons in the bright red sunlight wearing distinctive green shoes.
Firelei Báez
b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic
For Améthyste and Athénaïre (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), Anacaonas, 2018
Oil on canvas over wood panel, with hand-painted wood frames; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Báez frequently features strong women as protagonists in her projects. Among those who have inspired her are Marie-Louise Coidavid (1778–1851), the first queen of the independent Kingdom of Haiti, and Coidavid’s daughters, Améthyste and Athénaïre. Both daughters are depicted here in imagined portraits within decorative, colonial-style frames. As in many of her works, the artist chose to represent her figures without noses or mouths, features often subject to racial stereotyping.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
b. 1977, London
Afterword, 2019
Oil on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Barbara Chase-Riboud
b. 1939, Philadelphia
Malcolm X #17, 2026
Bronze and silk; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Over five decades, Chase-Riboud has used technical expertise and material experimentation to create abstract sculptures. She is best known for those dedicated to the assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X (1925–1965), which she produced from 1969 to 2016. Envisaged as funerary steles, the works are not intended as a literal representation of the deceased or his political struggle. Instead, Chase-Riboud has said that she made them in memory of an “historical icon whose life radiated far beyond the politics of the temporal.” Malcolm X #17 has a gold patina rather than the black surface of most of the others in this series; it celebrates light, movement, and material union.
The Power of Form
Kara Walker
b. 1969, Stockton, California
A Judgement on Paris, 2024
Gansai watercolor on cut paper on mulberry paper; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Walker employs cut-paper silhouettes to explore race, sexuality, and violence in the United States. Her imagery is often characterized by unconstrained pandemonium and menacingly comical wit. While her iconic silhouettes are typically made with black paper, in 2024 Walker began to work with sumi-e ink and Gansai watercolors, enriching her figures through vivid hues and textures. Many of Walker’s titles allude to grand and sometimes ancient narratives. With its intersecting body parts, A Judgement on Paris references a famous episode in Greek mythology: the beauty contest that essentially launched the Trojan War. In this work, Walker depicts a legacy of violence and the ongoing relevance of that famed saga.
Jenny Holzer
b. 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio
TOP SECRET ENDGAME, 2019
Oil, moon gold leaf, and palladium leaf on linen; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Uman
b. 1980, Mogadishu, Somalia
Amapiano Dance, 2022–23
Acrylic, oil, and oil stick on canvas in artist’s frame; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Color, texture, and illustration fascinated self-taught artist Uman from an early age. When she was nine, her family fled the Somali Civil War and moved to Kenya, before relocating to Denmark when she was thirteen. Arriving in New York in the 2000s, Uman embraced an intuitive approach to painting by using saturated, bright hues. She gained attention for her paintings, sculptures, and assemblage works that layer references from art history, textiles, pop culture, the natural world, her own experiences, and the cultures in which she has lived. Amapiano Dance evokes a well-known genre of South African music that is beloved by the artist.
Kay WalkingStick
Cherokee Nation, b. 1935, Syracuse, New York
Red Painting/Red Person, 1976
Acrylic, saponified wax, and ink on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
WalkingStick explores the landscapes and iconography of the American West in the context of Native terrain and concerns. While her earliest works, a series of self-portraits from the late 1960s, were informed by the feminist art she encountered in New York, her Cherokee heritage became the focus of her art from the beginning of the next decade. Red Painting/Red Person features incised, abstract symbols that echo aspects of Native American iconography, including a bow or a canoe. Here, four of these forms appear across a burgundy-hued square. This red field and matching outer border contrast with the ink-streaked, yellowish inner border, evoking a duality that has occupied WalkingStick throughout her practice.
Joyce J. Scott
b. 1948, Baltimore
Harriet’s Quilt, 2016–22
Plastic and glass beads, yarn, and knotted fabric; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Harriet’s Quilt is one of several works made by Scott in homage to the formerly enslaved abolitionist Harriet Tubman (1822–1913). Originally envisioned as a draped quilt, the organically shaped assemblage of glass beads, found plastic beads, and yarn incorporates fabric knotted by Elizabeth Talford Scott (1916–2011), the artist’s late mother, with whom Scott exchanged creative ideas. This work was completed with contributions from other Baltimore-based creative workers, including Lowery Stokes Sims, Amy Eva Raehse, Paul Daniel, Leslie King Hammond, Oletha DeVane, Coby Green-Rifkin, Grayce Johnson, and Karen Fitchett.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, b. 1940, St. Ignatius, Montana; d. 2025, Corrales, New Mexico
In the Future Map, 2021
Mixed media on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Artist, curator, educator, and activist Smith created politically resonant works dealing with the dispossession of Native lands. This work, one of twelve from the series “Indigenizing the Colonized U.S. Map,” features a map of the forty-eight contiguous states, rotated and embellished with paint and collaged elements. Newspaper clippings referencing global warming sit alongside a reproduction of a stop-motion sequence of a buffalo by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), poignantly evoking the historical fate of many Native Americans. Smith understood maps to be political documents as much as topological ones. She said, “A map is not an empty form for me. . . . It’s about real land—stolen land, polluted land.”
Craft is Art
Sonia Gomes
b. 1948, Caetanópolis, Brazil
Sol maior, 2023
Sequins, beads, and fabrics on galvanized wire and iron rebar; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Gomes grew up in a small Brazilian town once known as an industrial hub for textiles. As a child, she enjoyed deconstructing and reassembling her clothes. She also used leftover fabric and found materials to make her own jewelry. She enrolled in the Guignard School of Art in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais at age forty-five. Her innovative sculptural and painting practice involves stretching, wrapping, stuffing, and sewing multicolored fabrics into varying shapes. “Art, for me, was born through this necessity for expression,” she says. “Now, I feel like I have a voice.” Sol maior exemplifies Gomes’s sculptural experimentation with biomorphic and coiled arrangements of fabrics, sequins, and beads on a wire and iron support.
Zarina
b. 1937, Aligarh, India; d. 2020, London
Tasbih, 2008
Maple wood stained with sumi ink (500 units), dusted with aluminum powder and strung with black leather cord; ed. 3/3; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Zarina is acclaimed for her lifelong exploration of the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of paper, as well as for her tactile sculptures in metal and wood. Articulated through her geometric forms and Minimalist language is a complex emotional record of her itinerant life, addressing themes of displacement, memory, and home. In later years, Zarina created a number of sculptures based on tasbih, sets of beads used in Muslim prayer. While a functional tasbih needs only ninety-nine beads, or even thirty-three, this work includes five hundred. The artist’s repetitive act of stringing each wood disk onto the leather cord evokes her dedication to identity and home.
Pacita Abad
b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines; d. 2004, Singapore
Liquid Experience, 1985
Oil on stitched and padded canvas with mirrors; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Abad began her formal art training at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1976. Around 1981 she developed a signature technique that she called trapunto, in reference to a five-hundred-year-old Italian quilting style in which designs are “stuffed” from underneath to create relief effects. To make these paintings, Abad stitched and padded large pieces of canvas by hand. She then painted and embellished them with colorful materials. The surface of Liquid Experience glimmers with tiny reflective disks that imply a familiarity with shisha, or mirror embroidery, from India. One of the artist’s earliest abstractions, this work demonstrates Abad’s fearlessness as a colorist.
Sheila Hicks
b. 1934, Hastings, Nebraska
Taxco, ca. 1970s
Wool, cotton, and metallic thread; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Hicks is known for her innovative approach to textiles, placing her at the center of the burgeoning fiber art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She has described herself as “thread conscious” from an early age, and in 1959 she set up a weaving studio in the town of Taxco el Viejo, Mexico, for which this work is named. Taxco was fabricated from wool and cotton, materials readily available in Mexico, and dyed a deep, electric blue. Vibrant red threads pulsate against the blue, illustrating the importance of color to the artist.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
b. 1930, Falenty, Poland; d. 2017 Warsaw
Roussée, 1970/80
Sisal; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Abakanowicz is best known for her freestanding, monumental woven sculptures from the 1960s that draw upon her childhood memories, including the traumas of the Second World War. They are made with dyed sisal from discarded ships’ ropes. While living in Poland under the Communist regime, she crossed the Iron Curtain to mount exhibitions that brought natural fibers to the attention of the art world. Abakanowicz undermined longstanding notions of textiles as a mere utilitarian craft while adding to a long tradition of fiber art in Eastern Europe. Her smaller sculptural reliefs, such as Roussée, exude a tender sensuality, and she frequently used the color red to evoke themes of suffering and violence, war and displacement, and socialism.
Toshiko Takaezu
b. 1922, Pepe’ekeo, Hawaii; d. 2011, Honolulu
1 Tree, ca. 1980
Glazed stoneware
2 Pink Lady with Rattle, 1987
Glazed porcelain
3 Untitled Moon, ca. 1990
Glazed stoneware
4 Untitled, ca. 1985
Glazed porcelain
5 Closed Form with Rattle, ca. 1998
Glazed porcelain
6 Closed Form, ca. 1960
Glazed stoneware
7 Anagama Hearts, 1992
Anagama-fired and glazed porcelain
8 Untitled (Makaha Blue), ca. 1990s
Glazed stoneware
All courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Kay Sekimachi
b. 1926, San Francisco
9 Amiyose, 1965
Nylon monofilament; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Magdalene Odundo
b. 1950, Nairobi
10 Untitled Vessel, Symmetrical Series, 2020
Ceramic; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Judith Scott
b. 1943, Columbus, Ohio; d. 2005, Dutch Flat, California
11 Untitled, 1992
Wool, acrylic, and cotton yarn with rattan and wood; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Trude Guermonprez
b. 1910, Danzig, Germany (now Gdańsk, Poland); d. 1976, San Francisco
12 Untitled (Space Hanging), ca. 1965
Silk (double weave) and brass; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Etel Adnan
b. 1925, Beirut; d. 2021, Paris
13 Untitled, 2014
Oil on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Harmony Hammond
b. 1944, Chicago
14 Letting the Weather Get In, 1977
Oil and wax-resin compound on canvas; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Elizabeth Talford Scott
b. 1916, Enoree, South Carolina; d. 2011, Baltimore
Save the Babies, 1992
Cotton and synthetic fabric, embroidery thread, metallic embroidery thread, beads, shells, sequins, buttons, and cotton on polyester canvas backing; Courtesy of the Shah Garg Collection
Known for her quilts and mixed-media compositions, fiber artist Talford Scott was born at Blackstock Plantation in South Carolina, where her family lived as sharecroppers. She and her family learned techniques of needlework, knitting, basketry, pottery, and metalwork, which were passed down through generations. Save the Babies is part of a series of works made in the loosely defined shape of a shield. This shape, symbolizing protection and healing, represents the work’s spiritual and talismanic qualities.
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