We talked last week about an art exhibit up right now in Memphis that’s introducing everyone who sees it to a group of artists most of us don’t know. The name of the show is “Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era,” and it’s at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens through September 28th.
The museum says the exhibit “situates Watkins within a broader network of artists active during the Progressive Era” and that it traces “the connections and context that shaped women’s artistic lives, illuminating how they thrived within—and resisted—the constraints of their time.”
Alongside Watkins there are paintings, drawings, and sculptures by artists named Lilla Cabot, Meta Warrick, Elizabeth Nourse, Anna Klumpke, Lydia Emmet, Bessie Potter, Mary Fairchild, and many others. If you’ve never heard these names, that’s the point.
All of these artists were born in the United States, many of them studied in New York City, and several of them travelled to Paris to continue their work.
Meta Warrick was born in Philadelphia in 1877 and graduated from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in 1898. She was first and foremost a sculptor and won praise from no less than August Rodin while she was studying in Paris. She was a longtime friend of W.E.B. Dubois and was the first African American woman to receive a U.S. government commission for an artwork. For that commission she created a series of sculptures depicting African-American history and culture for the big Jamestown Tricentennial held in Norfolk, Virginia in 1907.
Like Susan Watkins, Elizabeth Nourse was a student of William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York. She was in Paris when WWI broke out and she stayed there working with war refugees even as she painted. Her work has been called a forerunner of social realist painting and a lot of it today is at the Cincinnati Art Museum, near where she was born.
Many of these artists were featured in the grand “Women’s Building” at the famous 1893 Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. One of them, Mary Fairchild even painted one of the two huge murals depicting women’s history inside the building’s atrium. Mary Cassatt painted the other.
The official guide to the Expo said that “It will be a long time before such an aggregation of woman’s work, as may now be seen in the Woman’s Building, can be gathered from all parts of the world again.” Thanks to this exhibit at in Memphis, we can get a little of that aggregation today.
