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The gender nonconforming painter Gluck, who refused categorization in all things, was known for her spare, evocative paintings of flowers, prizefighters, landscapes, and even rotting fish.
Resisting the idea that serious artists were single, poor, and above all, male, expressionist painter Broncia Koller-Pinell insisted her work be taken on its merits.
In crafting sculptures that incorporate concepts of weaponry, armor, and the female form, Linda Stein has found new ways to consider issues of power, violence, and protection.
Chloe Wise uses her art to comment on consumer culture, most famously through her Bread Bags series, which creates purses made of realistic-looking bakery items, adorned with the straps, logos, and hardware of designer bags.
Inspired by Dutch masters and by the quality of light she found in the natural world on trips to Holland and Italy, Tina Blau became the only Jewish woman artist of her generation to be recognized by her peers.
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for young female comedians, Abbi Jacobson teamed up with fellow comedian Ilana Glazer to create the immensely popular Broad City.
Florine Stettheimer asked her sister Ettie to destroy her work after her death, but Ettie’s refusal saved dozens of Florine’s exquisite paintings and celebrated poems for the public to enjoy.
Rejecting postwar trends towards Pop art and abstract impressionism, figurative artist Nancy Spero instead drew inspiration from tribal totems in Chicago’s Field Museum.
Miriam Schapiro helped pioneer the feminist art movement, both through her own pushing of creative boundaries and by creating opportunities for other women artists.
Colette Roberts helped shape our understanding of modern art both through her art criticism and through her unconventional teaching methods, bringing students into artists’ studios to talk with them about their work.
Lucie Porges brought a combination of elegance and a relaxed sensibility to her long and fruitful collaboration with top fashion designer Pauline Trigère.
Virginia Morris Pollak’s artistic career and her longtime community service collided in WWII when she used her deep understanding of clay, plaster, and metal to revolutionize reconstructive surgery for wounded servicemen.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb helped reshape the role of women in comics with autobiographical stories that challenged both the conventional image of women as trophies and the feminist image of women as idealized heroines.
Actress Lilli Palmer fled Nazi Germany to make a place for herself in Hollywood, but chose to return after the war, becoming celebrated once again in her home country.
Isadora Newman’s creativity defied categorization, spilling across the boundaries of poetry, fiction, painting, and playwriting, but always returned to the African American and Creole influences of her New Orleans heritage.
Ceramicist Gertrud Amon Natzler and her husband Otto created thousands of stunning ceramics together, an exquisite collaboration that continued even after her death.
Barbara Kruger used her classical training in design and her experience in the fashion industry to create conceptual art that pushed audiences to question assumptions about gender, violence, patriotism, and their relationship to the media.
Doris Barsky Kreindler’s use of palette knives to scrape and carve thick paint on her canvasses gave her paintings a sculptural quality and physical presence not usually associated with women’s art.
Despite putting her own career on hold for years to aid her famous husband, Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner eventually achieved recognition in her own right as a gifted abstract painter.
