Furies, Fairies, Visionaries

Pen + Brush is pleased to present the inaugural exhibition of its 125th anniversary celebration, Furies, Fairies, Visionaries, curated by 21c Chief Curator and Museum Director, Alice Gray Stites.

Curatorial Statement by Alice Gray Stites:Furies, Fairies, Visionaries features works by thirty artists utilizing the visual languages of both fantasy and abstraction to claim and create space. Addressing gender, age, and sexuality; the evolution of urban and natural environments; the impact of technology, and more, these artists articulate profound, incisive, perspectives on current issues and conditions. Inspired by personal experiences, popular culture, concerns about climate change and socio-political inequities, as well as by formal and philosophical explorations of the nature of space and perception, these works demonstrate the vital need for women’s visions and voices to be seen and heard. Whether navigating interior, imaginative realms or exterior, physical reality, women artists are taking and making more space in the struggle to create a more inclusive, equitable world.

From Kate Clark’s haunting animal/human hybrids, Monica Cook’s biomorphic Basket sculpture and Katja Loher’s shaman-inspired video, to Nidaa Badwan’s photographic documentation of her One Hundred Days of Solitude and Laetitia Soulier’s architectural fantasies and more, these works resist and subvert the constraints and binaries defined by patriarchy. Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s painting, Questionable Reputation evokes the terms and technologies used to control and objectify women, while Zoë Buckman uses feminine materials (wedding dresses, lingerie, dishtowels) to confront the denigration of women, simultaneously highlighting the power of the female gender, and inviting us all to assert our strength and our presence. Alyson Shotz, Anne Lindberg, Sharon Louden, and others examine and create new perceptions of both physical and abstract space, challenging traditional, male-centric notions of how the world is designed, on a macro and micro level. As heirs to the work of the Second Wave Women’s movement that transformed art and society in the 1970s, these 21^st-century feminists illuminate how the personal and the public, the narrative and the abstract, are indeed political, today perhaps more than ever.

Furies, Fairies, Visionaries marks the first major New York exhibition curated by 21c’s Alice Gray Stites. Selections for the exhibition were made by special invitation from the curator as well as from portfolio submissions to Pen + Brush. We would like to thank 21c Museum, C24 Gallery, Carolina Nitsch, Claire Oliver Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, Slag Gallery, and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects for their support of this exhibition.

Artists included in the exhibition are:

Nidaa Badwan • Nancy Baker • Heather Brammeier • Zoë Buckman • Kate Clark • Monica Cook • E.V. Day • Ali Deane • Summer J. Hart • Rachel Lee Hovnanian • Rennie Jones • Danni Lin • Anne Linberg • Katja Loher • Sharon Louden • Christine Mace • Laura Magnusson • Paola Martínez Fiterre • Jillian Mayer • Felicita Maynard • Anne Peabody • Lina Puerta • Rowan Renee • Natalia Rivera • Naomi Safran-Hon • Alyson Shotz • Laetitia Soulier • Aleksandra Stone • Alida Wilkinson • Saya Woolfalk