Featuring Candida Alvarez, Rochelle Feinstein, Carrie Moyer, and Amy Sillman

What can abstraction still do for us today, after many decades of its various applications: as metaphor, as expression, as gesture, as grid?

The exhibition explores the lasting potency of abstraction to address critical issues in both aesthetics and politics through recent work of four female painters, the artists who offer the most consequential proposition for abstract painting today: Candida Alvarez, Rochelle Feinstein, Carrie Moyer, and Amy Sillman. Hailing from the same generation — born between 1947 and 1960, and active since the 1980s — the artists also share decades-long careers as art school professors, with their artistic influence extending beyond gallery space through pedagogy and mentorship.

Operating with deep understanding of — though not necessarily full respect towards — established formats of twentieth-century modernisms, these painters construct their own visual languages for the contemporary moment, grounded in their lived experience of gendered and political beings in American society. In their paintings, material experimentation and a wide variety of techniques go hand in hand with intellectual commitment, demonstrating full dedication to the formal as well as the social. 

This exhibition will be presented simultaneously with Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention, providing contemporary response to Hartigan’s historical works on view. 

Gender, Genre, Generation is organized by Magdalena Moskalewicz, PhD, chief curator and associate director for curatorial affairs at Sheldon Museum of Art.