Eric Firestone Gallery, in its continuing support of underrepresented and female artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, has mounted an ambitious and interesting exhibition on now through July 11 at the gallery’s location on Great Jones Street in NYC. The exhibition is devoted to women who worked in abstraction from 1945 to 1979, thus giving the curators a very specific window within which to work.
The curatorial construct is to highlight women from all over the U.S. who worked within or adjacent to several postwar art movements such as color field, abstract expressionism, and surrealism. These women may not have known each other, but they all were pushing against the boundaries of the male-dominated art world. Many of the artists were new to me, which speaks more to the art world politics of the day than to the quality of the work.
The exhibition is massive for a relatively small space – forty-three works, most of which are paintings with a few sculptures thrown in for garnish. The exhibition is installed not in chronological order but rather by work that shares resonance. We see pairings that are unexpected, such as the lyrical Pink Zinnias and the Wavy Sea by Edith Schloss (1969) and Caged Language by Martha Edelheit (1959), an unlikely pairing that somehow works beautifully together.
There is a spectacular late-era Lee Krasner painting/collage in the front room of the gallery that is unlike any I have seen. I assume this is a collage made from some of Krasner’s earlier paintings, as this is what she was working on broadly speaking in this era. There is subtle drawing and a rich yet subdued palette that is seductive. The graceful swoops of luscious, rounded forms contrast with the strong architectural structure that overlays them to create a tension that is sublime. At 72 x 108 inches, it is one of the largest works in the show and could have easily held an entire wall by itself.
An artist previously unknown to me, Mary Abbott, is represented in the exhibition by a single knockout collage. A postwar painter, she set up a studio in 1946 and was affiliated with the Downtown Group, a loose-knit group of artists all living in downtown Manhattan. Abbott seems to have been somewhat of an outlier in the group and never achieved wide-scale representation or prominence. Time for a retrospective? The collage drawing in this show is bold and assured. Big swaths of black ink and grey wash swirl around bits of flotsam-and-jetsam clippings from magazines of the era.
I wish there had been more sculpture included in the exhibition. The pieces that are included don’t carry the weight of the paintings and drawings. Clearly, this is a rich subject for an exhibition and one that could be expanded upon, either in the gallery or in an institutional setting. The artistic wealth and variety of women working during this era are ripe for further exploration in all media.
Women Across America: 1945-1979. Eric Firestone Gallery 40 Great Jones Street. Through July 31, 2026
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About the Writer: Melissa Stern lives in NYC and the Hudson Valley. Her mixed material sculpture and drawings are in corporate and museum collections throughout the US. Her multi-media project, The Talking Cure, has been touring the United States since 2012. She wrote about art and culture for The New York Press and CityArts for eight years and has been a contributing writer to Hyperallergic and Artcritical. Melissa has joined Art Spiel as a contributing writer.