#NotJustMarch: Women Artists from the American Collection

Born into a family of painters in Philadelphia, as a child Sarah Miriam Peale worked in her father’s studio, which was at the center of family life. Her father, James Peale, trained his daughters as makers and businesswomen. Sarah and three of her six sisters became professional artists. She and her sister Anna were the first two women to be elected academicians of the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824.

Peale relocated to Baltimore (at a time when she wasn’t even allowed to travel alone) and later St. Louis, establishing studios in each city. She made her living painting portraits of men in public and political life, including Dixon Hall Lewis, the Alabama congressman represented in the Museum’s spontaneous, light-filled portrait from the early 1840s. She was among the most successful portraitists of her era, receiving more commissions than her famous male counterparts.

To learn more about Sarah Miriam Peale’s portrait of Dixon Hall Lewis, watch BMA Director Graham Boettcher’s “Director’s Cut” on this painting.

Members of the Mt. Hebron community in Greene County, Alabama, stitched this quilt around 1858. The Sardis Methodist Church was a social center for people in Mt. Hebron in this period, and this quilt was possibly created for the minister of that church or to raise money for a church project.

The makers of this quilt remain something of a mystery, but they were likely women from Mt. Hebron. Each block is signed. Of the 41 named blocks, 21 contain men’s names and 12 contain women’s. The men identified on the quilt probably didn’t stitch their blocks; it is likely that they gave money to the project in return for someone making their block.

The quilt is a portrait of the community’s location in the Deep South, picturing plants including pecan, pear, fig, sassafras, sweet gum, and watermelon.

Cole thought all Americans should appreciate their country’s landscape, but in his writing, the Americans he addressed were men. Artists Mary Josephine Walters and Josephine Chamberlain Ellis were two 19th-century women who also captured this landscape and shaped the Hudson River school’s vision.

A leafy canopy becomes an arched entry to the forest in Josephine Walters’ In the Woods. In her technique, subject, and the vertical orientation of her canvas, Walters pays homage to her teacher, Hudson River school artist Asher B. Durand. This canvas even shares a title with Durand’s In the Woods. Yet Walters departs from the decaying trees in Durand’s canvas, emphasizing the vitality of the natural world.

There is no information about Josephine Chamberlain Ellis receiving formal artistic training, but her mother may have taught her. This clearly accomplished artist’s painting career was likely constrained by the demands of her daily life. Yet she had the chance to visit the Natural Bridge while living in Washington, DC, a visit that resulted in this light-filled painting of a towering natural wonder in the American landscape. This is her only known surviving work.

Edmonia Lewis created her pair of marble sculptures Minnehaha and Hiawatha while living in Rome, Italy, in the mid-19th century. She represented common neoclassical themes in her works, but also captured Native American and African American subjects, possibly in part because she was of Native and African American descent. In Minnehaha and Hiawatha, she represents a pair of thwarted Native (Anishinaabe and Dakota) lovers, written about in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha.

After training in Europe, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller returned to America in 1903 and, again facing the country’s oppression of African Americans, turned her attention to African American subjects. Water Boy was completed later, in 1930, after she had realized a series of large public commissions. Here she works on a more intimate scale, imagining the boy from the folk song after which the piece is named, representing him with both of his arms wrapped around the weight of a large water jug.

Both Lewis and Fuller created work informed by their gender and race, but this work has also suffered from being primarily considered through these lenses.

Read artist Wendy Red Star’s take on Edmonia Lewis’s Hiawatha and Minnehaha.

Listen to Rhiannon Giddens sing Waterboy, the song that inspired Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller.

Mavis Pusey’s Dejygea evokes a dancing cityscape, despite being painted with geometric fields of white, red, blue, green, gray, and black paint. The energy of construction and demolition in urban spaces resonates across her body of work. Of the city, she said “The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction.” Pusey created an extensive body of abstract paintings and prints in the mid-20th century. Even as Black abstract artists were overlooked or rejected in favor of artists working in representational styles, Pusey maintained her stylistic and conceptual identity.

While Mavis Pusey translated the movement of the city into two-dimensional space, Louise Nevelson assembled wooden boxes and found objects—often painted black, as in Open Zag X to simultaneously evoke architecture and nature. There is a tension between the manmade and natural worlds both in Nevelson’s materials—wood and Formica—and in her composition, with the cylinder and varied wood at the left evoking industry even as the undulating Formica cut outs at the right suggest the outdoors. This work also straddles the space between sculpture and painting, existing as a low relief mounted to a wall, protruding into space. Nevelson achieved great acclaim in the art world during her lifetime, countering sexism by proclaiming, “I’m an artist who happens to be a woman.”