Seachange: Contemporary Highlights

During the four-and-a-half decades between 1935 and 1979, American artists developed dynamic approaches to abstract art. This installation uses work from PAFA's permanent collection to illustrate how the American art world witnessed great transformations that resulted in more expressive options than ever before for artists in the mid-20th century.

Artists drew from a wide range of sources in order to reject realism and attempt a new vocabulary of form and content. Seachange: Contemporary Highlights brings together a broad range of abstract art from the 1930s through about 1990.

Seachange: Contemporary Highlights includes 57 paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from artists including Julius T. Bloch, George Tooker, Lee Krasner, Stuart Davis, Thomas Chimes, Dorothea Tanning, Loren MacIver, Mark Rothko, Miyoko Ito, Raymond Saunders, Robert Keyser, Warren Rohrer, Sonia Sekula, Clarence Morgan, Grace Hartigan, and many others.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Women of Abstract Expressionism highlights the women who played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts.

Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole.

Women of Abstract Expressionism