I love art museums: walking through decorated halls, going back in history to a different culture, feeling like you exist in another time. Despite my passion for art, I am always slightly disappointed leaving museums. After strolling through decorated galleries for hours, I often could count the number of female-made paintings on one hand. The lack of the female gaze in art galleries robs its audience of a valuable female historical perspective. As a woman, I know my life experiences and perspectives are different than that of a man’s. I know past female artists’ viewpoints are different too. That said, I want to tell you about my three favorite female-made pieces in local museums to empower and celebrate the female gaze in art.
Series I-No. I by Georgia O’Keefe
Located at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Series I-No. I demonstrates O’Keefe’s talent for illustrating unexplainable emotions through abstraction. Born in 1887, O’Keefe grew up in a time when women were not supposed to work outside the house, or even aspire to. Societal opinions and social class dictated what dreams a woman could have, limiting female expression through patriarchal expectations. These expectations did not stop O’Keefe. She triumphantly surpassed the barriers of her time, often referred to as the mother of American Modernism.
Luchita Hurtado, a female Venezuelan-born immigrant to the US, challenged societal boundaries throughout her 80-year career as an artist. In this untitled piece, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art features a piece from Hurtado’s ‘I Am’ series where Hurtado paints the female body from a top-down view, gazing downward at her breasts, torso, and legs. Claiming autonomy over her body, Hurtado defies the typical portrayal of nude pieces in Western art, which typically feature the female nude through the male gaze. She takes control of her own body and self-expression, acting as a leading inspiration for the art field to showcase and celebrate the female perspective- and reclaiming the expression of the female body.
Still Life with a Bowl of Strahttps://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-202204wberries, Basket of Cherries, and Branch of Gooseberries by Louise Moillon
Louise Moillon is known for her realistic, still-life paintings, as illustrated in this piece, located at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Moillon was born into a family of artists and had the opportunity to learn to oil paint, becoming an exceptional artist as a young girl. Despite being born to paint, Moillon took a thirty-year break from her art to fulfill all her domestic duties in her marriage in the 1640s. There is little to no information about Moillon’s artistic career, emphasizing the irrelevance placed upon women’s passions outside the domestic role at the time. Moillon’s career and talent are an ode to the women of her time and the future. She had a career she loved while simultaneously being a beautiful mother, eliminating patriarchal barriers that women cannot have both- or even have a choice.
These are just three of my favorite female artists featured at local Fort Worth museums. I highly recommend going to see their work and hope the next time you go to an art museum you take notice of the amount of female-made pieces you can find. I’m sure you will be surprised at how few you can see! Celebrating female-made pieces of the past will continue to pave the way for modern female artists and reclaim the female perspective in art.