CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/31/2022

Hot book alert: ‘Women Painting Women’ is out now!

Painted in 1965, Faith Ringgold’s “Early Works #25: Self-Portrait” is reproduced from new release Women Painting Women, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Featuring work by rising and established artists from the 1960s through the present—including Somaya Critchlow, Nicole Eisenman, Luchita Hurtado, Alice Neel and Amy Sherald, among many others—this volume features 65 color reproductions and texts by Andrea Karnes, Marla Price, Emma Amos, Lorna Simpson and Ringgold, whose writing on the 1970s women artists’ movement in New York is excerpted. “Artists and other folk, both male and female, were beginning to demand explanations of the women’s art movement. ‘Is there a women’s art, and if so, what is it?’ was the constant question posed to us. The concept of making female images as opposed to male, and black images as opposed to white or abstract, was the crux of the issue. ‘Who needs all this talk about black art and women’s art?’ some artists would say. ‘I’m just an artist who happens to be black or a woman.’ It was a real challenge to try to define oneself and one’s art outside the narrow parameters of the mainstream art world. But we were doing this and it felt good.”