The title for this exhibition references both the use of the collection of the Yale Center for British Art and Lucy Lippard’s influential collection of feminist essays, From the Center (1976). In it, she states that “the self-consciousness of femaleness, has opened the way for a new context within which to think about art by women.” Nearly forty-five years later we are still discovering new frames through which to appreciate the work of women artists. The artists on display span the nineteenth century to the present day and work across a broad spectrum of media, styles, and techniques.

Art in Focus: Women From the Center is comprised of four themes: “Women and Institutions” looks at artists who challenge bodies of knowledge and control that have historically marginalized or oppressed women. “Space and Place” showcases women artists who reimagine urban and pastoral environments and imprint their own subjectivity on these spaces. “Women as Muses” challenges traditional understandings of artist and muse—namely that of an active male artist and a passive female muse—for on this wall women play both roles. Finally, “Beyond the Figure” examines the role that women have played in breaking free from the politics of figuration.

Art in Focus is the annual exhibition curated by members of the Center’s Student Guide Program. The exhibition introduces Yale undergraduates to museology by providing them with curatorial experience. Women From the Center was curated by Emma Gray, SY ’21; Sunnie Liu, JE ’21; Annie Roberts, SY ’21; Christina Robertson, SM ’22; and Olivia Thomas, MC ’20. The students were led by Linda Friedlaender, Head of Education; Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, former Educator, Academic Outreach; and Rachel Stratton, former Postdoctoral Research Associate. The exhibition and accompanying online presentation were generously supported by the Marlene Burston Fund and the Dr. Carolyn M. Kaelin Memorial Fund.

Paula Rego’s lithograph Jane Eyre, from the series The Guardians (2001–2), depicts the literary icon from Charlotte Brontë’s novel about an impoverished orphan who develops a relationship with her wealthy employer. In Brontë’s novel, the protagonist is an agent for social change. Here, Rego’s powerful depiction of her, upright and staring into a dark abyss, conveys her boldness rather than her plain appearance and position of domestic servitude. The piece celebrates an author who challenged the prevailing literary representation of women and a female protagonist who turns her back on societal expectations to forge her own path.

Joscelyn Gardner also uses a faceless female figure in Eryngium foetidum (Prue) (2009) to highlight the association between empire and science. The anonymous enslaved woman, Prue, is presented with an instrument of torture around her neck. In contrast, her elaborate hairstyle recalls one way that enslaved peoples were able to celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim agency. The botanical specimen E. foetidum was used by enslaved women to induce abortion and resist the co-option of their bodies to perpetuate slavery. Gardner problematizes the systems of categorization established by Western science and their exploitation to justify human hierarchies based on race.

Carrie Mae Weems’s defiant stance in front of the British Museum in London also confronts the operations of empire. The British Museum collection contains artifacts sourced, and often stolen, from countries across the globe. Hesitant to enter the museum, Weems considers whether her identity as an African American woman can be reconciled with an institution complicit in Britain’s imperial history. “My work,” she wrote, “endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.” When and Where I Enter the British Museum (2007), along with the other works on this wall, calls into question the bodies of knowledge that shape our identities and invites audiences to reflect on the institution in which it is displayed.

In Meteorite Lands on Wormwood Scrubs (1998), Parker takes on the urban plan of London, using a heated fragment of rock to scorch through well-known but problematic sites on a tourist map of the city. In this piece, Parker targets the infamous men’s prison Wormwood Scrubs, confronting the politics of incarceration and the prison’s history of poor sanitation, overcrowding, and police brutality.

Blunden and Clough both take the industrial cityscape as their subject. "For Only One Short Hour" (1854) presents the seated woman as a victim of industrialization. Inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem about a seamstress living in abject poverty, the painting depicts the figure in a moment of repose from her hard labor, the black smog from the cotton factories rising in the distance. Blunden leads the viewer from the domestic space to the industrial, rendering the private and public spheres equally repressive.

Clough takes the industrial landscape of post-Second World War Britain and transforms it into a series of textured surfaces and abstracted forms. The monochrome palette in Midland Landscape, 1958 (1958) is inspired by the gloomy weather of the English midlands. The granular quality of the paint captures the rough feel of the bricks and grit that dominate these vistas. Clough re-creates the impression of this industrial heartland rather than depicting its likeness.

Wearing reclaims the pastoral space. The title, The Garden (1997), evokes the biblical Eden, where Eve’s curiosity caused the fall of man. The artist reimagines it as a space where women control the narrative. She invites her audience to read the statements on the women’s T-shirts, gaining knowledge about these women instead of making value judgments based on their appearances. She creates a space where the female is powerful, and knowledge is a source of that power.

Julia Margaret Cameron and Joanna Boyce Wells, both wealthy nineteenth-century women, found inspiration in figures marginalized by class or race. The sitter for Irish Mary (1866) came into Cameron’s life when the artist found her begging on a London street and offered her employment as a maid. At the time, photographic technology was hailed for its ability to render a sharp, accurate record of reality, but Cameron used it to construct a fantasy, often blurring the edges of the image. Here, she depicts Mary as a wealthy woman in fashionable attire. In Fanny Eaton (1861) the sitter’s “exotic” beauty is emphasized. Eaton traveled from Jamaica with her mother and became a popular Pre-Raphaelite model to sustain her ten children. Wells underscores her mixed-race features, adorning her with opulent accessories and a virginal shroud, but she also captures Eaton’s psychological complexity, the contemplative expression hinting at the woman beneath the model.

The politics of racial representation is more overt in Neeta Madahar’s Sharon with Peonies (2009). The print is based on Madame Yevonde’s Goddesses, a series of photographs from the 1930s that cast high-society beauties as Roman goddesses. Madahar challenges the portrayal of goddesses in Western visual culture as white, young, and sexualized in her depiction of Sharon Lloyd, a forty-year-old black woman in a powerful pose. Madahar rejects the notion that there is a singular version of femininity. 

Vanessa Bell and Joy Gregory serve as the muses in their self-portraits. In The Artist in her Studio (1952), Bell depicts herself as a painter surrounded by the tools of her trade. Her gray hair and modest clothing convey a lifetime of experience and dedication to her craft. Bell places the viewer in the role of muse, looking out at us as she puts paintbrush to canvas. In Autoportraits (2006), Gregory chooses which parts of her body to reveal and how much the viewer can see of her face, denying the objectifying nature of our gaze. She stands uncomfortably close to the camera and looks out at the viewer, confronting generations of fetishization and subjugation, and refusing to be seen from a “safe” distance. 

Sheila Girling and Sandra Blow broke free from rigid artistic hierarchies by mixing media and introducing collage elements. In Measure of the Day (2015), Girling alternates between brightly colored fragments of paper and dabs of acrylic paint, her fascination with color and texture apparent in the juxtapositions she creates. Blow also used different media to create a collage effect and began experimenting with color around 1960 in works like Red Circle (1960). After a decade spent creating work in response to her partner Alberto Burri, Blow separated from him in the early 1950s to pursue her art free from his influence. Red Circle, with its vibrant swathe of color and simple geometry, exemplifies the bold visual language that Blow developed on her own.

Kim Lim, a prolific sculptor as well as a printmaker, developed her minimalist aesthetic from her appreciation of East and Southeast Asian art and philosophy. Dominated by male personalities, minimalism has been described as a “boorish, masculine aesthetic,” but in Syncopation (1996), Lim injects a fluidity, which she claimed reflected the rhythms of life and the changing qualities of light. As a Singaporean British woman working in Britain, Lim struggled to get noticed, but she is now acclaimed for her mastery of printing processes.

Rina Banerjee’s paintings bring together the four themes explored in this exhibition: “Women as Muses,” “Beyond the Figure,” “Space and Place,” and “Women and Institutions.” The world she creates is unfixed and multivalent. Her pictures of powerful female characters from mythology, religion, and everyday life are muses enhanced by pattern, texture, and color. The two paintings on display collapse global commerce and colonial legacies into a single space, equally inspired by Indian court painting, Persian miniatures, and Pre-Raphaelite painting, as well as the fast fashion and cheap commodities readily available to her in New York City. Placed alongside work from the Center’s collection, Banerjee’s paintings confront colonial histories.

The empty chair is stripped of all context and suspended in an expanse of blue paint—a pointed challenge to another institution that women have struggled against: the medical establishment. In its US context, this work draws attention to the politicization of women’s reproductive rights and reflects the sterility of the debates surrounding this very personal issue. The dark blue background evokes the isolation many women feel when tackling the stigmas surrounding women’s health. Like the artists in Women From the Center, Roberts reflects on what it means to be a woman in society.

Art in Focus: Women From the Center celebrates the struggles and triumphs of women artists from the nineteenth century to the present day. We urge you to explore our collections with fresh eyes and a greater awareness of the ways that women have defined their bodies, their environments, and the history of art.

Images (top to bottom)

Joy Gregory, Autoportrait (detail), 2006, giclée print on rag paper, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Joy Gregory

Carrie Mae Weems, When and Where I Enter the British Museum, 2007, digital print on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Joscelyn Gardner, Eryngium foetidum (Prue), 2009, hand-colored lithograph on frosted mylar, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Joscelyn Gardner

Carrie Mae Weems, When and Where I Enter the British Museum (detail), 2007, digital print on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist

Cornelia Parker, Meteorite Lands on Wormwood Scrubs, 1998, maple boxed framed map of London revealing burn mark left by a meteorite on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Cornelia Parker, Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Prunella Clough, Midland Landscape, 1958, 1958, oil on board, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of the Libra Foundation, from the family of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker, © 2021 Artists Rights Society, NY / DACS, London

Gillian Wearing, The Garden, 1997, screen print on Somerset Satin paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, © Gillian Wearing / Artists Rights Society, NY / DACS, London

Cornelia Parker, Meteorite Lands on Wormwood Scrubs (detail), 1998, maple boxed framed map of London revealing burn mark left by a meteorite on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, © Cornelia Parker, Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Neeta Madahar, Sharon with Peonies, 2009, chromogenic print on photographic paper, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc., © Neeta Madahar

Julia Margaret Cameron, Irish Mary, 1866, albumen print on paper mounted to board, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Melville Chapin, Yale Center for British Art, transfer from the Yale University Art Gallery

Vanessa Bell, The Artist in her Studio, 1952, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Louise Wheatley Collection, Gift of Alison, Kit, and Christopher Wheatley, © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS, London 2021

Neeta Madahar, Sharon with Peonies (detail), 2009, chromogenic print on photographic paper, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc., © Neeta Madahar

Kim Lim, Syncopation, 1996, screen print on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of the Kasser / Mochary Family Foundation, © Estate of Kim Lim, Artists Rights Society, NY / DACS, London

Sandra Blow, Red Circle, 1960, mixed media on board, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Professor Carl Djerassi in homage to Diane Wood Middlebrook, Yale PhD, 1968, © The Sandra Blow Estate Partnership. All Rights Reserved, Artists Rights Society, NY / DACS, London

Kim Lim, Syncopation (detail), 1996, screen print on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of the Kasser / Mochary Family Foundation, © Estate of Kim Lim, Artists Rights Society, NY / DACS, London

Rina Banerjee, Upon first Myth and empirical observation the hero, her angel leaps in cry, opens the moon to urge on a rain that may cleanse all the sweat of her jealous man, 2013–20, acrylic, ink, and gold leaf on panel, Collection of the Artist, © Rina Banerjee

Rina Banerjee, Upon first Myth and empirical observation the hero, her angel leaps in cry, opens the moon to urge on a rain that may cleanse all the sweat of her jealous man (detail), 2013–20, acrylic, ink, and gold leaf on panel, Collection of the Artist, © Rina Banerjee