Women With Vision: Masterworks from the Permanent Collection

Paintings, drawings, works on paper and sculptures ranging across four centuries, from 1660 to 2017, are featured in Women with Vision: Masterworks from the Permanent Collection. The selection presents works by more than thirty women artists including such renowned names as Marguerite Gerard (1761 -1837), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 -1879), Rosa Bonheur (1822 -1899), Mary Cassatt (1844 -1926) and such twentieth-century leaders as Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Miriam Schapiro, Cindy Sherman, and Kiki Smith. 

Among the numerous highlights is White Flower, a captivating close-up and large still life by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 -1986). White Flower, gifted to the College by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller), remains the most significant modern painting in the Muscarelle collection. In 1938- just twenty years after the arrival of the first women students at the College-William & Mary granted O'Keeffe an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. 

Women with Vision also offers the opportunity to see art by cutting-edge contemporary artists, including Carole A. Feuerman, Kay Jackson, Ana Maria Pacheco, and Tania Brassesco (and her partner Lazio Passi Norberto). Notable recent acquisitions include Barbara Holtz' s allegorical painting Prospects, Sue Johnson's digital perspectives on Duchamp, and Maria Larsson's abstract photo collage. 

Women with Vision: Masterworks from the Permanent Collection is a special exhibition organized in anticipation of the official commemoration by the College of William & Mary of the 100th anniversary of the first women admitted as undergraduate students at the College during the Fall semester of 1918. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website