Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

A celebration of the creativity and innovation of an intergenerational, international group of women artists, many of whom are featured in St. Louis for the first time.

In the Kemper Art Museum’s largest seasonal exhibi­tion to date, Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection highlights more than eighty works created by pioneering women artists in the last eight decades, including Andrea Bowers, Suzanne Jackson, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell, Joan Mitchell, Lorna Simpson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Sarah Sze, Kay WalkingStick, and Mary Weatherford, among many others. Featuring a wide spectrum of artworks—including painting, sculpture, installation, textile, beadwork, and ceramics—the exhibition emphasizes dialogues between artists who have circumvented and broken conventions in art-making by embracing craft techniques, new technologies, conceptual inquiries, inventive methods, and uncommon materials.

Making Their Mark is organized into six sections that illustrate key thematic threads: Gestural Abstraction, Painting and Technology, Craft Is Art, Of Selves and Spirits, Disobedient Bodies, and Luminous Abstraction. Each section juxtaposes works by emerging artists with the pathbreaking contributions of their predecessors, demonstrating how earlier generations anticipated current discussions around abstraction and representation, identity and power, and hybridity and performativity.

The exhibition envisions art history as an interconnected web of influences and affinities between artists who subvert traditional narratives and hierarchies established within 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 that many women artists have long challenged. 

Previously organized for venues in both New York and California, Making Their Mark will be transformed for its St. Louis presentation, enabled by the breadth and depth of the Shah Garg Collection. At the Kemper Art Museum, Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, has emphasized connections with artists who are currently represented in the Museum’s renowned permanent collection, such as Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Rose B. Simpson. St. Louis audiences will also have the opportunity to view works by a number of important artists for the first time, including the paintings of Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries. Other notable highlights will be the side-by-side presentation of works by Elizabeth Talford Scott and Joyce Scott, a mother and daughter. Through these unique juxtapositions, Making Their Mark enables viewers to expand their understandings of abstraction and reconceive of the expansive histories of art-making.

The exhibition is organized by the Shah Garg Foundation and its visionary founder, Komal Shah, a leader in the support and amplification of women’s voices in the arts.

The exhibition is curated by Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, and Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at the Kemper Art Museum.

Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection (edited by Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel), a richly illustrated volume on the collection, will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop.

Support
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection is made possible through the lead support of the Shah Garg Foundation and the leadership support of the William T. Kemper Foundation. All exhibitions at the Kemper Art Museum are supported by members of the Director’s Circle, with major annual support provided by Emily and Teddy Greenspan and additional generous annual support from Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei, Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice, Julie Kemper Foyer, Joanne Gold and Andrew Stern, David and Dorothy Kemper, Ron and Pamela Mass, and Kim and Bruce Olson. Further support is provided by the Hortense Lewin Art Fund, the Ken and Nancy Kranzberg Fund, and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Shah Garg Foundation
The Shah Garg 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 Shah Garg 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.