On July 20th a reception for No Man’s Land, an exhibition featuring over 40 artworks spanning from the 1950s to today, will be hosted at Shari Brownfield Fine Art. The show highlights 21 artists from an oft overlooked group who quietly formed the canon of art history; women. View the exhibition online.
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According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2019 data, 89% of museum acquisitions and 85% of museum exhibitions in the US are dedicated to male artists. Even more unbalanced, only 3% of auction sales account for art created by women. These statistics are especially telling when taking into account that approximately half of MFA graduates today are women.
A new exhibition titled No Man’s Land at Shari Brownfield Fine Art assembles a collection of over 20 influential and emerging female artists from the past 70 years. Artists in the exhibition include pioneering abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler and Mary Abbott, famed Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral, avant-garde Fluxus sculptor Mary Bauermeister, self-taught ‘outsider’ artist Nellie Mae Rowe, transcendentalist painter Leila McConnell, artists from throughout Europe, Africa, and Canada, as well as the local Jackson Hole region, such as encaustic painter Pamela Gibson.
“What lens does each artist bring to their artwork,” asks Shari Brownfield, who curated the exhibition. “Do men and women bring the same point of view to their genre and aesthetic? Might a mother and child artwork be painted differently by a male versus female artist? Or perhaps a nude, a landscape, an interior scene, or an abstraction? It seems that the obvious answer is ‘yes,’ however, women artists have typically been omitted from art history. This exhibition aims to be a reminder of the influence women had on art and on their male counterparts.”
The exhibition also reflects the deep personal values of Shari Brownfield Fine Art’s team of supporting and empowering women at all levels of the local community. After serving six years on the board of Jackson Hole’s Community Safety Network, a refuge for people affected by domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, Brownfield has stepped into the role as Board Chair this month. Concurrently, Elisabeth Rohrbach is on the board of Jackson-based nonprofit, Womentum, which is dedicated to inspiring and connecting women as leaders. She joined the board in 2018 and recently concluded two years as Board Chair.
No Man’s Land runs from July 11 to November 27, 2023. A reception to celebrate the exhibition will be held on Thursday, July 20 from 5-8pm at the project space, located at 55 South Glenwood Street.