Women Artists at VMFA

Daily Devotions, Sara D. November

Dressed in brightly toned, highly fashionable clothing, four women occupy the sacred space of the card table, where they gather with a religious-like solemnity. Only introduced to the United States at the end of the 19th century, by the 1930s bridge had become a wildly popular card game and American phenomena, as celebrity players captured national newspaper headlines. Across the country, women’s clubs formed around the game and routine gatherings became great social events, as seen here in the subjects’ clothing and stylish hairdos. Initially trained as a commercial illustrator, Sara D. November was an active member of Richmond’s art world in the late 1920s and ’30s. She was also acclaimed as a progressive educator who, in 1934, established and taught free art classes for African American students at Richmond’s Phillis Wheatley YWCA. 

Tired, Samella Sanders Lewis

In 1941 Samella Sanders Lewis accompanied her professor and mentor, Elizabeth Catlett, when the two transferred from Dillard University in New Orleans to Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia. Lewis adopted Catlett’s interest in sculptural representations of African American women in everyday life. As a college student herself, the artist likely empathized with the weary expression of the sculpted woman, who slumps sideways while reading a large book. Tired was first displayed at VMFA in 1944 in an exhibition of artwork by Virginia college students, in which the sculpture was singled out for praise. 

Mother and Child, Bessie Potter Vonnoh

Vonnoh, like her colleague Mary Cassatt, cultivated a successful career producing sculptures of upper-class women at different stages of life. Images of mother and child, like this one, were among her most popular works and were reproduced in numerous castings. Here the artist’s modeling skills are revealed in the controlled naturalism of the figures and the graceful treatment of the drapery.

Books and Pottery Vase, Claude Raguet Hirst

At the turn of the 20th century, Hirst’s meticulous still lifes held such public appeal that, as one critic wrote, “they are apt to be hanging crooked…as people take them down so many times to hold them and look at them.” While touching art in galleries was discouraged then, as it is now, close examination was precisely the response that Hirst sought. The painter was one of a handful of Gilded Age artists – and the only female (her first name was shortened from Claudine) – to gain critical acclaim for illusionary imagery.

In this painting, Hirst presents an arrangement of old books and a ceramic pot with Asian motifs. She draws the eye to a brightly lid, opened book rendered with such precision that words can be read from its pages. The worn volume was one of the artist’s favorites: a 1795 English translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s romantic novel, Paul and Virginia. The painting’s frame – contemporary with the canvas but not original – offers its own visual surprise. The beautiful curling grain is actually painted. One trompe-l’oeil triumph supports the other.

Child Picking a Fruit, Mary Cassatt

Child Picking a Fruit merges the subject that made Mary Cassatt famous—a young woman (possibly a mother) and child—with her more ambitious examination of “modern woman,” a topical theme at the turn of the 20th century as the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum. The image derives from the artist’s now-lost Modern Woman mural commission, produced for the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For this prestigious world’s fair, Cassatt presented her allegorical subject in a three-panel lunette. The large central panel, Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge, featured women of different ages, clad in contemporary dress and communally harvesting fruit from an orchard.

Four Directions/Stillness, Kay Walkingstick

In Four Directions/Stillness, Kay WalkingStick uses the diptych format to make clear distinctions between physical and spiritual forms of existence while also conforming their invariable connectedness.  Her landscapes, as well as her abstractions, are a kind of memory documentation. The cross in the center of the abstract panel pays respect to a collective human memory, notably one of the most recognizable motifs in several Native American cultures, signifying the four cardinal directions. The landscape side represent a personal memory of Bandolier National Monument in New Mexico. IT is typical of WalkingStick’s process, in which she creates numerous sketches of a place but ultimately produces an image based largely on her memories and associated emotions. 

Platter, Maria and Julian Martinez

Maria and Julian Martinez, Tewa Indians of San Ildefonso Pueblo, are among the most widely recognized 20th-century American potters. Inspired by archaeologists, Maria led a revival of prehistoric pottery styles among Pueblo artisans. After establishing a national reputation at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, she began collaborating with her husband, Julian. From 1919 to 1943, Maria shaped the pots and Julian painted the designs. They fired them using a specialized technique that produced a distinctive black finish, often part matte, part lustrous. 

For this bold platter, Julian used one of their favorite motifs, a puname eagle-feather design adapted from the thousand-year-old Mimbres style pottery. 

After Julian’s death in 1943, Maria made pottery with other family members, including daughter-in-law Santana Roybal Martinez; one of their elegant bowls, with a solid lustrous glaze, is also on view. Today, a new generation of the Martinez family continues the tradition of crafting the highly prize blackware.

Portrait of the Comte de Vaudreuil, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun

Vigée-Lebrun, daughter of a Paris pastelist, was a successful portrait painter from the age of fifteen. In 1779 she was called to court to paint Queen Marie-Antoinette’s portrait; she quickly became the queen’s favorite artist. Like the Comte de Vaudreuil, Vigée-Lebrun fled France at the beginning of the revolution, but was later invited to return, which she did briefly in 1802 and permanently in 1810. The Comte de Vaudreuil was a wealthy plantation owner who lived so grandly that he was cited as one of the causes of the French Revolution. A noted art collector, he once owned VMFA’s Finding of the Laocoön by Hubert Robert.

Full-length portrait of William Henry Lambton (1764-1797) in a Van Dyck style costume, Angelica Kauffman

Angelica Kauffman was one of the most influential women artists of the 18th century. After eventually settling in Rome, she became a sought-after portrait painter for the young aristocratic travelers participating in the Grand Tour. This painting presents the quintessential characteristics of the Grand Tour portrait tradition. The sitter, a wealthy member of the British Parliament traveling through Italy at the time, is dressed in a fancy and anachronistic 17th-century costume. He stands on a terrace that opens onto a mountainous landscape. Next to him, a depiction of the Medici Vase, one of the most celebrated pieces still extant from the Greek classical period (AD 1st century), shows his cultural interest as an educated traveler and art connoisseur.

Butterfly Whorl, Susan Point

Susan A. Point is a descendant of the Musqueam/Coast Salish people, who are indigenous to the lower mainland of Vancouver and the southern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and northern Washington State. Coast Salish women had a distinctive weaving style. To spin wool, they used a large spindle shaft with an attached wooden whorl as wide as eight inches in diameter. Point initiated the contemporary use of the spindle whorl form, and her distinct carving style has stimulated a renewed energy and interest in Coast Salish art. She is one of the few women who work on such a large scale in a traditionally male art form. By drawing attention to the artistic contribution of women while working in a medium typically reserved for men, she has broken new ground for future female artists.

Jar with Floral Design, Camille Bernal

Both the design and materials of this jar by Camille Bernal pay homage to New Mexico, particularly the Taos Peublo area where the artist grew up. Twenty-four layers of white slip, polished to a matte finish, create a luminous surface on which to paint graceful abstract flowers. The delicate blossoms are a call for rain, so crucial to life in the arid region. The red micaceous paint on the inside and on some of the flowers is a remembrance of earlier Taos potters, who were known for their own micaceous pottery.

Puttawus, Raven Custalow

Many nations of the Eastern Woodlands made and wore feather cloaks, or mantles. These garments were worn in various ways: draping only one shoulder, covering the entire body, or extending from the shoulder to the ground. Colors and weaving techniques differed based on the feathers used and how they were attached to the backing. Archaeological records show that these mantles are a uniquely Eastern Woodlands art form, documented by early colonizers of North America. However their physical existence is scant, with only fragments surviving in burial sites.

Raven Custalow is a Mattaponi tribal citizen and CEO of Eastern Woodland Revitalization, whose mission is to revitalize cultural practices specific to Eastern Woodland Indigenous people. She is seeking to revitalize the art of feather weaving not only among Mattapoint people but also to other regions in Virginia.

Large Pot, Christine Custalow

Christine Custalow is descended from both Rappahannock and Mattaponi peoples. She learned pottery making from her mother and continues to create works with the same traditional methods. Her low-fire “baking” process results in rich, luminous surfaces with organic tonal variation. Custalow uses the pinch-pot building process for smaller vessels and the coil method for larger ones. Most of her pots are burnished to a high shine using a smooth rock or a small piece of deer antler as a polishing tool. Custalow also employs other methods of surface embellishment. This example uses decorative elements such as feathers and beads attached to the vessel after it has been fully fired.

ibala leSindebele (Ndebele Design), Esther Mahlangu

In 2014 VMFA commissioned Esther Mahlangu to create two large-scale paintings to form a vibrant gateway for the African Art Galleries. The most renowned contemporary artist among South Africa’s Ndebele people, Mahlangu has transformed the art of mural painting from its historic tradition of designs on the exterior of rural houses to projects created in a global contemporary art context. Her career was propelled in 1989 when she was invited to participate in the landmark Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris. In 1991 BMW commissioned her to paint a car for their Art Car program; to date, she is the only African and only female artist included in this project. 

Painted on linen, these works will survive indefinitely, whereas murals painted directly on building surfaces can be imperiled by renovation, overpainting, or degeneration from weather. Indeed, some of Esther Mahlangu’s most significant international mural projects now exist only through photographic documentation. 

"Lazy Gal" - "Bars", Louella Pettway

One of the famed Carson sisters, Louella Pettway began making quilts as an adult. As a child she worked the land, farming with her father and siblings. Once married, Pettway began using scraps of clothing and cloth remnants in constructing her quilts, drawing on her sense of color and favoring her own artistic leanings over known patterns. While she often spoke to the hardship of life in rural Alabama, she reveled in her ability to make beautiful and useful wors of art. Pettway’s bold use of color and geometric form offers a great visual exchange with the works featured in the minimalist gallery. 

Untitled, Howardena Pindell

This stenciled painting is one of Pindell’s first large-scale works to include hole-punched circles directly on the surface. The few scattered dots foreshadow a significant change in her work—hole-punched circles that cover entire surfaces of her canvases.

No. 3 - 1957, Hedda Sterne

“New York seemed to me at the time like a giant carousel in continuous motion—on many levels—lines approaching swiftly and curving back again forming an intricate ballet of reflections and sounds.”—Hedda Sterne

Sterne grew up in the midst of the Romanian avant-garde in the 1920s. She traveled to Paris frequently in the 1930s, immersing herself in Surrealism before relocating to New York in 1941. There she quickly became active in the circle of exiled European artists and the younger generation of American artists who later became Abstract Expressionists. In the early 1950s, Sterne began painting with the newly invented aerosol spray, discovering that its speed and ease of movement paired with the paint’s diffuse, blurred edges effectively translated the sensation of the pulsating city environments she depicted.

Untitled (No. 25), Lee Bontecou

“My concern is to build things that express our relationship to this country—to other countries—to this world—to other worlds . . . to glimpse some of the fear, hope, ugliness, beauty, and mystery that exist in us all.”—Lee Bontecou

Between 1959 and 1967, Bontecou made works using canvas wired to a welded-steel framework. These wall-mounted constructions questioned the boundary between painting and sculpture, an issue the artist explored further by using raw canvas as a sculptural material. Bontecou meant her works to defy easy interpretation. Their gaping voids, backed with black, simultaneously invite and repel.

The canvases call to mind army fatigues, laundry bags, or tarps; the wire that attached them suggests sutures closing a wound. Bontecou’s use of common materials allies her with the Assemblage approach of artists like Robert Rauschenberg, and her pared-down materials and interest in geometry hint at Minimalism. But her works’ strong emotions and political and cosmic allusions set her apart from both these movements.

Forsythia and Pussy Willows Begin Spring, Alma Thomas

Forsythia and Pussy Willows Begin Spring provides an iconic example of Alma Thomas’s widely acclaimed painting style of the 1960s and 1970s. An avid gardener, Thomas frequently painted the flowers from her colorful backyard. Here, she included the bright yellow forsythia blossoms and pussy willow catkins that serve as early signs of spring. Although abstracted, Thomas’s work evokes the beauty of nature through her precise dabs of vibrant color placed in a successive vertical grid.

Mother Goose Melody, Helen Frankenthaler

“The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes a painting unique and necessary. Painting, in many ways, is a glorious illusion.”—Helen Frankenthaler

In Mother Goose Melody, Frankenthaler combines the gestural splashes and drips of Abstract Expressionist painting with the innovative stained-canvas technique she helped pioneer in 1952. The array of colors, shapes, and lines makes this composition rhythmic and dynamic. The spiraling red form on the right counters the dense area of color on the left, while the broad yellow band stretching across the bottom unites both. The artist noted that the three brown shapes could refer to herself and her two sisters, and that the red and black lines “made a sort of stork figure—the whole thing had a nursery-rhyme feeling.”

Chill, Candida Alvarez

“Having run away from seemingly inadequate definitions for abstract painting, I find myself immersed in a relationship that tracks, exchanges . . . there is no more picture; there is only painting.”—Candida Alvarez

Alvarez is an abstract painter whose works integrate pop art, color theory, and memory. The artist draws upon her Puerto Rican heritage through her use of complex, vibrantly layered compositions. Moving between abstract and figurative forms, she often cites pop culture, historical and modern art references, current affairs, and personal memories.

In Chill, Alvarez employs silhouettes of white and a gray against pops of bold, bright colors. The work is as much about the wintery landscape of Chicago, where the artist resides, as it is about a fascination with the aesthetics of cartoons, kitsch, and hand-crafted objects. The painting evokes the monochrome, rich with texture, yet disrupted with pops of color. Alvarez discusses the work as one in which shape and color dominate. The process of how paint is applied to the canvas becomes focal to the viewer’s eye. For the artist, notions about abstractions being devoid of figuration is debunked in this gestural wintery landscape.

Untitled (from the Crossroads installation), Alison Saar

Alison Saar is a contemporary sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist and her work Untitled (from the Crossroads installation) has taken on various meanings over the years, depending on the context of its surroundings.  Despite the different interpretations, one very consistent observation about Saar’s sculpture is its strong connection to African sources, specifically minkisi figures (power figures that are typically found in parts of central Africa).  Many of Saar’s artistic choices reflect her desire to honor these sacred ancient traditions from Africa.  For example, Saar’s decision to use metal cladding, nails, and the industrial debris at the figure’s feet not only points to minkisi, but is also a nod to Ogun, the Yoruba orisa (deity) of iron (Yoruba Culture, Nigeria & Republic of Benin).  Saar’s figure is elevated from the ground, standing on a metal platform, as if it were a statue on an altar.  Interestingly, altars are considered spaces where this world and the spirit realm coincide, for the purpose of offering guidance, similar to minkisi.

Wood Picture, Mildred Thompson

Mildred Thompson began experimenting with the elasticity of painting as early as the late 1950s. Her series Wood Pictures expanded ideas around the general practice of painting but also the specific genre of landscape painting. Working with pieces of found wood, Thompson combined and assembled wooden fragments, using each piece as a gesture of the brush. Drawing upon her material’s natural grain, she punctuated the picture frame with her compositions that placed one grain strategically against the other. Her work also comments on the notion of place, with each piece of wood representative not only of its original source but also its connectedness to the larger whole. Thompson’s view on life was metaphysical, and she drew upon the principles of interconnectedness throughout her practice.

Stadia III, Julie Mehretu

“I’m interested in describing this as a system. . . a whole cosmos, and that is the overall painting, while the little minute detail marks act more like characters, individual stories. Each mark has agency in that sense—individual agency.”—Julie Mehretu

Mehretu’s monumental paintings address contemporary themes of power, colonialism, and globalism with dramatic flair. She adopts imagery from architecture, city planning, mapping, and the media. At the same time, her bold use of color, line, and gesture makes her works feel like personal expression.

Stadia III belongs to a series of three Stadia paintings dealing with the theme of mass spectacle. Conceived in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the series reflects Mehretu’s fascination with television coverage that transformed the war into a kind of video game—as many at the time commented—and in the spectrum of nationalistic responses that she witnessed during travels to Mexico, Australia, Turkey, and Germany. The series also reflects her interest in the international buildup to the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Lamp, Eileen Gray

In 1923 Eileen Gray designed a “Bedroom-boudoir for Monte Carlo” as part of the 14th Salon of the Society of Artists-Decorators. Among the carpets, tables, sofas, screen, and lighting fixtures was this floor lamp. It shows Gray’s skill in lacquer work as well as her ability to design furniture that was advanced for its time. The lamp, influenced by both South Sea Islands and African art, also exhibits futuristic qualities. It was acquired by the fashion designer Madame Mathieu Levy from Gray’s gallery called Jean Desert in Paris.

Table (For Jacques Doucet residence, Paris, France), Rose Adler

Known for her talent in bookbinding, Rose Adler also created furniture for French fashion designer, art collector, and patron Jacques Doucet using rare materials in geometric patterns. For the top of this table, Adler created a fantasy cityscape of stairs, arches, and street lights using shagreen (sharkskin). This table appears prominently in a period photograph of Doucet’s house in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. An example of Adler’s bookbinding can be seen in a nearby wall case. 

Covered Jar, Lucia K. Matthews

The Furniture Shop in San Francisco was a unique partnership between husband-and-wife Arthur and Lucia Mathews. Arthur was the chief designer of the shop and dealt with mural decoration, furniture, and interiors. Lucia carved, decorated, and painted furniture and other objects, such as this covered jar that she gave to her sister as a wedding gift. Although there are several versions of this jar, each one has a slightly different appearance. 

Dragonfly Lamp, Clara Driscoll

After starting work for Tiffany in 1888, Clara Driscoll became head of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department in 1892 and designed the majority of Tiffany’s lamps. Her design for the dragonfly shade was among Tiffany’s most popular lamps. An article in The New York Daily News (April 1904) profiled Driscoll as one of a group of American women who earned $10,000 or more annually. Although Louis Comfort Tiffany kept all the names of his workers anonymous, that article identifies Driscoll as the designer of one of the most iconic lamps for Tiffany Studios. A variant of VMFA’s dragonfly shade was first publicly shown in French art dealer Siegfried Bing’s exhibition L’Art Nouveau at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1899. A year later, another version of Driscoll’s dragonfly lamp shade won a prize at the World’s Fair in Paris. A third example of Driscoll’s dragonfly lamp shade was on display at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin, Italy, in 1902.

Queen of Hearts (for Hous'hill, Catherine Cranston's residence, Glasgow, Scotland), Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, wife of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, created numerous stenciled and gessoed pictures for the tearooms that her husband designed for Catherine Cranston in Glasgow. Later Macdonald Mackintosh assisted her husband in the interior decoration of Hous’hill, Miss Cranston’s Glasgow residence. These four panels, originally set into the walls of the Card Room in Cranston’s house, depict the queens of the four card suits flanked by two court pages. Macdonald Mackintosh’s use of gesso to create a high-relief linear style was characteristic of her work during the period.

Fire Screen, Laure Lacombe

In order to create the central images for this screen, Paul Ransom first drew the designs on paper. Artist Laure Lacombe, his close friend and mother of the French painter Georges Lacombe, then executed these designs in silk embroidery on the screen. The two female figures, a cat, and perhaps a swan are all intertwined with various sensuous arabesque motifs. This unusual screen was displayed at the 21st Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1899. 

High as the Listening Skies and The Edges of Heaven, Rest, Jennie C. Jones

This immersive installation at VMFA features two sound works. The first composition, High as the Listening Skies, features three gospel choirs from Houston, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, performing the song “A City Called Heaven.” The song was popularized by gospel icon and civil rights activist Mahalia Jackson. The second featured work, The Edges of Heaven, Rest, is primarily tonal and associated with the concept of music as having healing energy. Jones layers audio samples—effectively collaging composition from Black composer Alvin Singleton.

The two works, which can be experienced together in the chapel located in the museum’s Sculpture Garden, create a striking balance between the crescendo of a spiritual ecstatic and a meditative calm. Interwoven, they emit a sonic framing that bridges the physical world to the ethereal realm, offering the transcendent and transformational possibilities of sound. 

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