McNay Art Museum Highlights Women Artists
By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor
March is Women’s History Month and the McNay Art Museum has appropriately decided to honor women artists with an exhibit whose title says a great deal: Womanish, Audacious, Courageous, Willful Art, featuring 80 artists.
Drawn entirely from the museum’s own collection, the exhibit will undoubtedly come as a surprise to many viewers. So, enjoy the surprise!
Inspired by Alice Walker’s In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), the title of the exhibit “reclaims the term ‘womanish’ – often considered derogatory – from a place of empowerment.” According to the press release, Walker defined the term as “usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.”
“This exhibit is a celebration of the legacy of how the McNay has prioritized collecting and supporting women artists, beginning with its founder Marion Koogler McNay and up to the present day,” said the museum new director, Matthew McLendon, at the press preview. “The exhibition draws from all the collecting areas of the McNay: painting, sculpture, works on paper, pieces from our theater arts collection, all coming together in conversation. The exhibit spans about a hundred years.
“I think it’s important to feature women artists in this way because, historically – as we all know – women artists have not been featured or fore-fronted in arts institutions. Yet, they have always been part of the artistic legacy. With our founder being a woman and an artist, I think it made all the sense in the world that the McNay has had this long-standing commitment to really champion women artists. They certainly deserve to have this level of attention.”
As you walk into the galleries, you’ll come face to face with a fairly large piece titled Black Girl with Snakes by Pittsburgh-based artist Vanessa German, a nationally recognized Black artist who has exhibited in prestigious institutions across the country. She’s known for her sculptural assemblages, and the work represents her style well. Through her work, German explores the power of transformation and healing.
McLendon’s face lit up as he talked about her to us.
“I am really excited about the work of citizen-artist Vanessa German,” he noted. “I know what a power Vanessa is in the art world. So, I am glad that San Antonio audiences here will have the opportunity to learn more about her. She is also our Spot Light artist this year.”
By the wall in the same space, you’ll see a very different creation: a female figure, clad in a dress with a long train, the kind royals wore as attendants carried the train. Titled Paris Speaking Dress, it was constructed by artist Lesley Dill from ribbons, plaster, tea, oil on muslin, and maybe a few other things. Dill is a multidisciplinary artist who may have created the dress for a stage performance.
Then as you move from gallery to gallery, the range of styles and media go from minimalist drawing, to abstract paintings, videos, prints, installations, and more.
Included San Antonio artists are Marilyn Lanfear, Ethel Shipton, Katie Pell, Bettie Ward, Leigh Anne Lester, Kelly O’Connor, Antonia Padilla and Eva Marengo Sanchez. Sadly, at least two of these women are no longer with us – Marilyn Lanfear, who explored family narratives, that touched on the themes of place and memory; and Katie Pell who once created “Bitchen” that featured a colorful flame-throwing stove for her residency at Artpace. Her piece in this exhibit is a candy-colored small “clothes dryer,” which was probably part of the Artpace show, too.
All the exhibited pieces have been acquired by the McNay Art Museum since 2010. The exhibition was organized by Lauren Thompson, Assistant Curator; Liz Paris, Collections Manager; Kim Neptune, the Tobin Theater Arts Fund Assistant Curator, and Paula Contreras, the 2022-23 Semmes Foundation Intern in Museum Studies. The exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically “to promote critical thinking about similarities and differences between works of art.”
“Once you leave the Womanish exhibit, you can go into the other galleries of the museum and see women artists throughout,” said McLendon. The other thing I hope people will take away from this exhibition is that their curiosity will be sparked. There are many artists in this exhibition that I know, but there also many artists who are new to me. Now I have this new curiosity to learn about those artists. One of the great things about an art museum is the experience of discovery.”
———————————————————————————–
Womanish will be on view through July 2. Open Wed.-Fri. 10 a.m. -6 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m. – 9 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon -5 p.m.; Family Day April2, 1-4 p.m. (Photos by J.W.)