In celebration of the Phaidon publication Great (Women) Painters, the DMA, Phaidon, and Kering present Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, in conversation with four artists featured in the book, Jennifer Guidi, Tschabalala Self, Genesis Tramaine, and Lisa Yuskavage. Together they will discuss their practices and reflect on great women painters, artists, and mentors—past, present, and future.
Great (Women) Painters is a sumptuous survey of over 300 women painters and their work spanning almost five centuries. This groundbreaking book champions a more diverse history of art, showcasing both well-known women painters from history—Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning—and today's most exciting rising stars, including Tamara de Lempicka and Yayoi Kusama.
Featured Artists:
Jennifer Guidi was born in 1972 in Redondo Beach, California. She received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is included in many important public and private collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jennifer Guidi’s work is an in-depth exploration of ritual and the passing of time. She is known for mixing sand into her paints and creating mandala-like patterns in her compositions, and her artworks radiate with light, color, and energy. Selected solo exhibitions include Visible Light/Luce Visibile, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy (2017); More Life, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Heliocentric, Gagosian, Hong Kong (2018); Eclipse, Massimo De Carlo, Belgioioso, Milan, Italy (2019); Gemini, Gagosian, New York (2020); Points of Harmony, Massimo De Carlo, Piece Unique, Paris (2021); Full Moon, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2022); and In the Heart of the Sun, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). Photo credit: Brica Wilcox
Tschabalala Self was born in 1990 in Harlem and lives and works in the New York Tri-State area. Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the Black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial New York City, New York (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); ICA, Boston (2020); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019). Photo credit: Daniel Gurton
Genesis Tramaine's striking, near-abstract portraits of Black subjects take inspiration from biblical hymns and the scrawling figuration of 1980s New York graffiti art. The Brooklyn-born artist has exhibited at galleries in New York, Paris, Brussels, London, and Shanghai. In 2020 she was an artist-in-residence at the Rubell Museum in Miami. Tramaine's religious upbringing informs the devotional aesthetic of her portraiture—which aims to capture the spiritual essence of her Black sitters—as well as her materials; Tramaine often lists "Yeshua," in reference to the Hebrew word for Jesus, alongside "oil sticks" and "acrylic." "Yeshua is the source!" she told Artsy in 2020. "The sauce! The magic! . . . Without Yeshua, it's just paint."
Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) is a figurative painter known for her bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters cast in fantastical compositions where the realistic and abstract coexist, and color determines meaning. While her painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, and her oeuvre compellingly resists categorization. Yuskavage received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1984 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1986. Represented by David Zwirner since 2005, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at worldwide institutions from Geneva to Mexico City. Yuskavage lives and works in New York. Photo credit: EJ Camp