46位女性提起画笔：我画我自己！

For decades, women artists have been fighting to get their work on museum gallery walls. Recently, the battle is being won: Various exhibitions across the country feature female's work. Once visitors notice the change, they see that art can be different when women wield the paintbrushes.

Women Painting Women is one of the thematic exhibitions featuring 46 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works. This presentation includes approximately 50 evocative portraits that span the late 1960s to the present. International in scope, Women Painting Women recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. The artists here use painting and women as subject matter as vehicles for change. All place women—their bodies, gestures, and individuality—at the forefront.

The exbition was held between May 15 and September 25, 2022 in The Modern. Chief Curator Andrea Karnes told Forbes.com. “Every artist was excited about it because of the idea that the show is about inclusivity and it is about stretching the boundaries of what it means to be a woman–it's not confined to biology in any way.”

“It's not a feminist exhibition, but I think there's a lot of taking the power back when women paint women,” Karnes said. “The women are still objectified in the images for the most part, of course, but there's a range from abject to beautiful to everything in between.”

Therein lies the greatest difference she notices between how men have traditionally painted women and how women handle the subject.

So, how do women paint women? It's less about seeing them differently from men, than showing them different. For centuries, artists' male gaze saw women as objects of desire, idealized and voluptuous, with luscious white skin and dimpled knees. Women artists in this exhibition show women as differently beautiful: pregnant, overweight, sometimes despondent. As we are, wrapped in our truths.

“Women were bold enough to paint pregnant nudes like Alice Neel did–there's not a big market for pregnant nudes,” Karnes said. “Showing a range of types of women that smash the archetype.”

Today’s women artists are going further in smashing the archetype, exceeding their predecessors in representing a more complete spectrum of women. How so?

“In a word, inclusivity,” Karnes explains. “Seeing a more diverse range of skin tones and cultures being presented, not as exoticized. Queer culture and the idea of shaking loose from strict binary terms the idea of a woman. These things are newer.”

Karnes says it's a salute to "countless displaced women, past and present." Women who have suffered "disfigurement, violence, sexual abuse," standing on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Like so many of artists in this exhibition, Luchita Hurtado had no money to hire models. But she had the wealth of her talent, and the will to make art. Again, like so many of these artists, Hurtado was driven to make art. She had responsibilities: a husband and children. At night, after dinner, when they'd gone to bed, she would go into the closet and paint.

Hurtado said for her painting was a constant — "a need, like brushing your teeth." And when she lacked money for models, her own body became her favorite model. Hurtado didn't idealize herself. But she viewed herself from a perspective no man could share. Looking down toward the geometric Navajo rug, she painted her breast, her belly, hand, leg with clarity and tremendous confidence.

Four themes trend in the works included in Women Painting Women: The Body, Nature Personified, Color as Portrait, and Selfhood. Through these themes, the artists conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness, and joy, the portraits in this exhibition make way for female artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved.

There will be a time when the work of women artists has become so pervasive among museum collections that special exhibitions calling attention to their achievements are no longer necessary to balance the scales between the caliber of their work and the recognition it has received.

Until then, exhibitions exclusively highlighting women artists remain a necessary tool in fighting a patriarchy over 500 years in the making among art museums and collectors, and much longer than that across humanity.