25 yrs ago: EM curates "Artist's Choice" at MoMA
I wanted, for myself, to explore what being a woman in the art world has meant. I wanted to weave together a sense of the genuine and profound contribution women’s work has made to the art of our time.
—Elizabeth Murray
25 yrs ago: Elizabeth Murray curates “Modern Women” at MoMA
by Jason Andrew
25 years ago this week the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Elizabeth Murray. Murray’s exhibition was a dense, informative and highly charged exhibition of 100 works by over 70 women, most of whom were in the museum's permanent collection and a few that were not, but all rarely if ever publicly shown.
The aim of the Artist’s Choice Series, wrote Kirk Varnedoe, then Chief Curator, was to “see the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in a fresh way, outside the normal patterns of chronological installations, departmental divisions, and curatorial thinking.” Yet the series had been a boys’ club until Varnedoe invited Murray. Hers was the fifth in the series and she was the first woman to be invited—Scott Burton, Ellsworth Kelly, Chuck Close, and John Baldessari preceded her. Murray would spend over a year organizing the exhibition—making her selection strategically. Unlike her Artist’s Choice predecessors, who were allotted just one gallery, Murray took over three rooms in the museum’s third-floor contemporary and painting and sculpture galleries.
The first coherent idea about the MoMA show was to do a woman’s show—women from the collection. I never intended it to be a political statement about women or a critique of the museum’s collection.
—Elizabeth Murray
———
After all these years trying to sort out the politics —whose toes I’m stepping on—I think that’s why I do work. Because whatever it is I am making, God knows if it’s art or not, it's the one instance when I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.
—Elizabeth Murray
Download copy of the original brochure here. Courtesy Archives at the Murray Holman Family Trust, New York
Knowing very well her position as a woman painter, she had great concerns about presenting an exhibition featuring solely work by women. “The misgivings were really the idea, primarily, of ghettoizing women, of separating them out,” she said in the documentary Everyone Knows… Elizabeth Murray, “So that was a very big issue for me. And I don't feel that I have resolved it inside myself. I still don't know if it's the right thing to do. But I still just went ahead and did it anyway.”
For Murray, all her heroes as a student were men. She was not familiar with many women artists, and as a result had few women as role models. Modern Women functioned as a project of historical recuperation as she disclosed to Edith Newhall in New York Magazine, June 19, 1995, “I want it to be about the women I knew and the women I didn’t know.”
She wrote about her process of discovery in her journal on February 5, 1995:
Working on the Women’s show. Now I’m committed. It looks strong. Lots of interesting work. But fragmented too—like stabs at things and then no follow through. [Louise] Nevelson like a kids playroom painted black… a nursery in a Beatnik basement while the Stones’ “Paint It Black” is rocking on the stereo […] But [Lee] Bontecou, ooh there’s another story—it is like giving into death. Marisol—almost outsider, but too cool, informed and intended.
Murray’s subtle and keen selection didn’t go unnoticed. The New York Times ran a review on the show by Holland Cotter with the headline: 100 Works by Women, Not Intended for Women Only. “The painter Elizabeth Murray is the first woman to participate in the Artist’s Choice exhibition series,” Cotter wrote, “the show she has compiled from the museum’s collection—a sprawling, episodic roundup of art by 70 women dating from 1910 to the mid-1970s—is so logical and obvious in concept that it feels positively daring.” (The New York Times, Friday, July 21, 1995, C15)
Installation view: Painting far right is Helen Frankenthaler’s Mauve District (1966). Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Installation view: Center wall Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1959). Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Installation view: Grace Hartigan’s Shinnecock Canal (1957) and Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1959). Murray said of Hartigan “She was as good as the guys.” Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Murray began with a selection of artists who were her role models at a time when women in the mainstream art world were hard to find: Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Bontecou. This was followed by the work of her peers, most of whom she met when she first arrived in New York City in 1967: Jennifer Bartlett, Louise Fishman, Jan Hashey, and Jenny Snider (none of whom was part of the museum’s permanent collection).
On the whole, the show was shaped by thematic groupings rather than installed chronologically. Frankenthaler’s large Mauve District (1966) was hung alongside paintings by Hartigan and Mitchell and sculpture by Bontecou, in an exploration of material and technique. Murray placed Sky Cathedral (1958) by Louise Nevelson with work by Bourgeois, Kahlo, and Marisol as she felt their work dealt “openly with sexuality and with intense self-exploration.” Cooler, more distant were works such as Friendship (1963) by Agnes Martin and others by Mary Bauermeister, Chryssa, and Bridget Riley. An enigmatic charcoal drawing of draped cloth by Barbara Chase Riboud traced a “taut introspection,” wrote Holland Cotter in his review.
Installation view: Far right is Agnes Martin’s Friendship (1963). “Martin is refined in her brand of spirituality,” Murray said. Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Installation view: Joan Mitchell’s Grandes Carrières (1961-62) with Janet Sobel’s Milky Way (1945). Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Install view: Louise Bourgeois’ plaster Torso: Self Portrait (1963-64) with Georgia O’Keefe’s Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace (1934), Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) and in the opposite room Dorothea Rockburne’s Scalar (1971). Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Holland Cotter recognized another theme: the merging of art and craft. “These motifs, apparent in work as diverse as Ms. Bontecou’s stitched-canvas-and-steel sculptures, Anni Albers’ tablecloth fabric sample, Meret Oppenheim’s iconic fur-covered teacup, and six wonderful cloth-and-paper collages by Anne Ryan.”
The exhibition also debuted several recent acquisitions including Lake George, Coat and Red (1919) by Georgia O’Keeffe and three untitled drawings by Bourgeois. Murray included a work of her own in the installation, a single work titled A Mirror (1963-64), which was painted while in graduate school at Mills College.
“It’s about the museum collection up until the ‘50s,” Murray wrote in her journal. “There is no collecting of women, because in this country I do not think there were very many. Some of them have gone on to big careers and some not—but they were there for me when I needed them. I didn’t know I needed them of course. I thought I could just be a person; that the pursuit of my art and a career had no gender hierarchies; it was about making great art.”
Installation view: Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral (1958). “Nevelson is the most formal,” Murray said, “but looking at Sky Cathedral I hear Mick Jagger's raucous Paint It Black and think of a dark nursery.” Department of Public Information Records, II.A.1705. MoMA Archives, NY. Photo: Mali Olatunji
Organized a decade after the Guerrilla Girls began distributing posters criticizing museums for their inadequate representation of art by women, Murray’s show revealed the profound contributions of women to the history of modern art. Guerrilla Girl, Frida Kahlo recalled, “She looked at her condition of being a woman artist, and she wanted to look at all of those women artists that the Museum of Modern Art collected but never showed.”
“The misgivings were really the idea, primarily, of ghettoizing women, of separating them out,” Murray wrote in her journal, “So that was a very big issue for me. And I don't feel that I have resolved it inside myself. I still don't know if it's the right thing to do. But I still just went ahead and did it anyway.” Despite her aversion to exhibitions that ghettoize women, Murray regarded the premise of the show, writing in her statement that accompanied it, as “inevitable.”
Durring the curation and run of the MoMA show, Murray was represented in eight solo exhibitions of her own work and included in six group exhibitions in 1994-95.
As one the more successful women in the art world at that time, Murray embraced the opportunity to curate Modern Women to illuminate exquisite and important works by undersung women. In a strong and stern self-realizing entry, she wrote in her journal about being a woman in the art world:
I think there is a deep way where men do resent women artists—that can hardly be articulated—a deep resentment that is hard to name. After all, if we can give birth to real babies—why should we also be able to create artifices—isn’t the real thing enough? After all these years trying to sort out the politics —whose toes I’m stepping on—I think that’s why I do work. Because whatever it is I am making, God knows if it’s art or not, it's the one instance when I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.
Modern Women, was curated by Elizabeth Murray as part of the Artist’s Choice Series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 20-August 22, 1995. A panel discussion with Elizabeth Murray and guests Linda Nochlin, and Marcia Tucker was held at the museum on June 26. Learn more about this historic exhibition here.
The impact of the exhibition continued to reverberate. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art published an anthology acknowledging the contributions of women artists to the history of modern art. The title of the anthology paid tribute to Murray’s seminal exhibition by adopting the title.