Yale Women Artists Star in a New Exhibition

Over 150 years, its art school has trained major talents.

‘S o exquisite, so balanced,” I said, as close to purring as I get, while I assessed the first big gallery of On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale. I see so many exhibitions and, cynic that I’ve become, can smell a manipulative, or, worse, a flabby rat early if not immediately. Most shows are fine enough, with adequate starts, but this gallery had very, very good art presented with just the right touch. Art and placement combined to create a feeling of conversation and refinement, quiet confidence and, here and there, sprezzatura. That’s rare. “There are lots of duchesses and countesses but only one Coco Chanel,” said Coco herself, who knew something about presentation.

Though Yale first admitted women as undergraduates in 1970, its art school, which opened in 1869, taught women from the beginning. The 50th anniversary of one and 150th anniversary of the other occasioned this look at women artists who studied there. The 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote was in 2020. The title of the show draws from the 18th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act’s Title IX, which forbid denying rights “on the basis of sex.”

A Covid-delusional, lockdown-loving Yale kept its museums closed for a year and a half, postponing all its programming, so this anniversary exhibition is not exactly aligned with the events it honors. Yale, overall, is in a state of unreality. I saw the exhibition days before Stalag Boola Boola closed its art gallery again and quarantined all its students, using Covid as an excuse to keep the riffraff public out and its tuition payers locked in. It’s beyond mass hysteria; it’s mass hypnosis. Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews, who makes close to $500,000 a year, and her army of student regulators decreed that Yalies can’t leave campus and can’t gather together for meals. Who died and left her Nurse Ratched?

Back to On the Basis of Art. The exhibition shows some of the best work from about 80 women trained at Yale, so it’s an aesthetic treat, and a various one at that. It’s a history of art pedagogy, too. Art school wasn’t the roughest place for barrier-breaking women. High finance, the construction industry, law, the police, entertainment, politics, and the military were harder nuts to crack. Still, On the Basis of Art is a story of grace and grit.

In arranging art in an exhibition, we want our first big gallery, the one beyond the introductory wall text and hors-d’oeuvres art, to impress, not to stun, since there’s no fainting sofa. A visual sweep showed quality in the work of Sheila Hicks, Jennifer Bartlett, and Sarah Sze on different walls. They’re artists I know well. Then there’s the less tangible but deeply satisfying look of perfect proportion and pacing in grouping the art.

Sze’s Mirror with Landscape Learning, from 2015, juts out, not in an in-your-face assault but with a discreet balance of materials, textures, and dimensions and a quiet palette. Sze, who got her Yale master’s degree in fine arts in 1997, is one of our great sculptors and a hierarchy-busting one at that. The assemblage draws from everyday objects — a stainless-steel ladder against the wall, a beaten-up door, a passage of which Sze has painted in 1970s Color Field style, a minimalist lamp, table, and chair, and splashes of paint on the floor. Sze isn’t re-creating her studio but evoking a space where creativity happens. She doesn’t scatter objects willy-nilly but suggests a state of transition. Something’s in process. It could suggest an artist’s studio, or visualize a messy, inchoate state of thinking.

It’s a great way to start a show about artists and their training. Near Sze’s sculpture, puzzling in every sense of the word, are Sheila Hicks’s Observatoire, from 2018, a wall textile; Nancy Graves’s Calegli, from 1980, a painting; and Howardena Pindell’s Kyoto: Positive/Negative, a print and also from 1980. They’re flat, so not spatially assertive like Sze’s work, but chromatically dazzling.

On the other side of the gallery is Jennifer Bartlett’s Five, from 1971. It’s 25 baked enamel-coated steel plates with a silk-screened and hand-colored grid. At nine feet wide and five feet tall, it holds a wall. There’s great work, too, by Eva Hesse, Sylvia Mangold, and Judy Pfaff. Pfaff’s Straw into Gold from 1990 is the antidote to Sze’s sculpture. It’s a big steel wire thing with tin cans, bedsprings, and blown glass. It doesn’t fight with Sze’s cerebral piece, a model of cryptic deliberation. It balances it, and it tells us that the exhibition is about unique artists with distinctive visions.

The gallery offers an unforced, comfortable rhythm from object to object and from group to group based on palette and medium. There’s no packing, so each work keeps its identity, yet the groupings are good and the entirety is harmonious. A curator simpatico with the art is clearly at work, here and throughout the exhibition.

Most of these women are the pioneers who got their degrees in the ’50s (as in Hicks’s case) and ’60s. Almost all are art stars. Yale’s women art students before, say, 1950 are treated in Helen Cooper’s catalogue essay. On the Basis of Art occupies the entire top floors of the museum, so it’s a big exhibition. It’s mostly an art show, though. I wish there were a gallery devoted to the years between the art school’s opening in 1869 to Hicks’s admission as a student in 1954, but space was limited. They’re lots of good artists working today needing to be covered.

Cooper’s essay, though, is important. Augustus Street, the founder and funder of the art school, specifically wanted women admitted as students, and for years after the school opened, most of its students were women. Cooper’s enquiry is two-tiered. She examines the school’s fitful start as fully funded, thanks to Street, with a new, immense, purpose-built, Gothic Revival home and a mission tangential, even obverse, to the university’s. Men went Yale to study the classics, play sports, and foster connections. Taken together, those were the stuff of a good citizen, civic leader, moneymaker, and paterfamilias. Painting in tempera? A distraction, and a frivolous one, at worst, a bonbon at best.

So, as an art school, compared with places such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League, Yale’s art school was a backwater. In its first 50 years, about three-fourths of its students were women. Teaching focused on studies of plaster casts of antique sculpture and Yale’s collection of Gothic and early Renaissance Italian painting and, sometimes, live, clothed models.

Women might be studying at Yale, but they didn’t get degrees. For years, only men were listed in the official roster of students, though women students routinely won art prizes endowed by early donors. Most women finished with certificates of completion, the closest they got to a degree, married, and had families whose portraits they were well trained to make. Some worked as illustrators.

The art school was built with no women’s loo. After a few years of foraging the campus in search of relief, women students rebelled. Yale authorities asked one of the art school’s two instructors to surrender his office closet for what they called a ladies’ retiring room. He refused, then quit when compelled.

A toilet might have been had, but Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and every other style tainted by novelty or irregularity came and went as Yale students sketched from their fig-leafed Apollos and absorbed the palette of their Italian Madonnas. It was not until 1950 that a new sheriff shattered the art school’s conservatism and marginality. The artist Josef Albers, a Bauhaus native and serious Modernist, took charge.

Meaty catalogue essays by Linda Kramer and Marta Kuzma are readable and informative. They’re mostly about the art school’s pedagogy, which served men and women alike, augmented by the experiences of women students from the ’50s to today. Albers imposed a new rigor, toughening standards, as well as new, edgy — for Yale — thinking.

The galleries don’t dictate themes but are, more or less, guided by chronology and media. That said, the curator did what a good curator always does: put things where they look best. An upstairs gallery, which feels like an intimate, private space, treats memory. Rosalyn Richards’s Borderlands, from 1996, is on the wall at the foot of the staircase. That’s a nice touch since that space is a transitional one. Nice, also, since it’s so intriguing, gouache and graphite over gesso and acrylic, with a pastel palette and geometric shapes arranged in a grid. I didn’t know this artist’s work, and that’s good, too. Not everyone in the show is a marquee name.

Maya Lin anchors the upstairs gallery. Technically, she got her bachelor’s degree from Yale and her master’s from Yale’s architecture school, but no matter. She’s Yale through and through. As an undergraduate, she became famous for her design of the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in D.C., and she credits Yale’s faculty for developing her. She got the war-memorial commission in an open competition, so the four drawings she submitted for it are both art and historic documents.

I won’t go into whether or not we can look at a work of art and think “that’s by a woman” since that’s too fraught, and, of course, like so many fraught things, it’s irrelevant. “Women mourn, men replace” is, though, one silly adage about differences between the sexes that’s truer than most. Sadie the Saddest Sadist, a video by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley from 2009, is an animated story about a woman munitions worker during the First World War in Britain and her doggerel chat with a sailor. It’s bizarre but clever and done the year Kelley got her M.F.A.

Ann Hamilton’s Rights, from 2017, is a modello made from an embossed sheet weaving together words from the Declaration of Independence and the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She made it as part of her mosaic decoration for the new Cortlandt Street subway stop in Lower Manhattan, destroyed on September 11. Hamilton got her M.F.A. in 1985. The white sheet is 79 by 21 inches, and the letters are in faint black ink. It looks like the Shroud of Turin.

There are so many good things in the exhibition, but I can’t write about all of them. A long, narrow gallery showcases Marie Watts’s First Teachers Before the Universe. She’s from the Seneca Tribe and got her M.F.A. in 1996. It’s an eleven-foot-long textile, what she calls a blanket canvas, made of dark blue and burgundy plaid fabric on which she sews a big drone, an eagle, planes, hot-air balloons, UFOs, and herons, among other things that fly. It’s part Star Wars, part planetarium sky, and part Seneca creation story in which the mythic Sky Woman falls to earth to create human life.

The early war over a toilet in the art-school building forecast the predictable struggles of women students up to, say, the ’80s, to get quality time and recognition from Yale’s art teachers. The catalogue is discreet in quoting alumnae but does address, here and there, both misogyny and big male egos. Since newspapers ran separate help-wanted sections for men and women until the late 1970s, and since women undergraduates were barred from Yale until 1969, I don’t see what the catalogue reports as particularly scandalous.

Among the many merits of Kramer’s and Kuzma’s meticulous, thoughtful essays is their tracking of how quickly things changed, on the pedagogical level and, for women, in access and opportunity. The marketplace, of course, is another story.

The rest of the exhibition is weighted toward women alumnae from the ’80s to the most recent graduate, 2011’s Njideka Crosby. It’s heavy on photography, but so are the preferences of modern art students. Yale has a distinguished photography program as well. I’d never heard of Lois Connor, Tanya Marcuse, or An-My Lê, but their work is very good. Lê, born in Saigon, photographs battlefield reenactments organized by Vietnam War memorial groups in America. Truly, there’s something for everyone in the USA. She’s given access only on condition that she participate, so it’s performance art, too.

I loved Victoria Sambunaris’s sweeping view of the Fort Knox gold mine in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2003. It’s a Hudson River School landscape, as big as a Bierstadt, and displayed near Mickalene Thomas’s Remember Me, from 2006, almost as big and showing Thomas’s girlfriend self-assuredly lounging on a mustard sofa set against a purple wall decorated with Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder record covers. The subject’s hair is in peak 1970s Afro, and she’s wearing only an orange, unbuttoned lounging dress hiked to her tiny blue panties. Both express confidence and daring, as they should. The artists are superb.

I have no real quibbles with the show. I initially thought a section heavier on pre-1950s artists was missing but now see Cooper’s catalogue essay covers this. The art wouldn’t fare well against, say, Pfaff’s or Hesse’s and, especially, the younger women’s. The early art’s too reticent, as if crabbed and stiffened by the era, and the opportunities for women to make art into careers were limited to the point of illusory. Wangechi Mutu, from the class of 2000, is everywhere because she focused on displacement and persecution, both delights of ponderous limousine liberals. I might have thinned the ranks of artists doing black-and-white scenes of everyday life since some seem derivative. Eighty artists can make for a surfeit of visual stimulation.

Everything’s good, the arrangement is perfect, and abundance just meant a second visit. It’s nice to see curating at its best. I think new curators should look at On the Basis of Art as a tutorial in best practices in arranging art. The show offers scores of artists and themes and a dozen media. As a whole, it challenges, surprises, and gratifies. It’s an aesthetic feast with a landmark book.

Tala Madani’s Chit Chat, from 2007, is a silent stop-motion animated video, 2,000 clips a minute, showing two men in conversation. As they talk, their demeanor becomes more agitated. They’re just not connecting or conversing but each delivering a monologue. Finally, they vomit on each other as a last-ditch way to get the conversation on a single plane. The video, about two minutes, unfolds in a single-occupant viewer station. It’s at the end of the exhibition. At six-foot-three, I found it was set too low for creaky me to comfortably use. The figures in the video want to express something they can’t keep inside, much like vomiting. Art, too, is a form of expulsion dealing with themes or emotions for which everyday life doesn’t often provide an obvious or appropriate setting. “Oh, well,” I thought. I don’t like bodily-function art, yet Madani’s Iranian, and I’m intrigued by living artists in Iran.

It’s a fascist country whose artists, most living on the margins, create very different work in an uneasy climate. Madani’s from the class of 2006, so she’s young, and she grew up in Oregon, which, like Vermont, has lots of eccentrics.

I looked at the credit line. Yale’s art gallery bought it with a fund created by Stephen Clark. A 1903 Yale alum, Clark was a Singer Sewing Machine Co. heir who used his vast fortune to patronize Hopper and Matisse early in their careers. He collected folk art, Winslow Homer, and Van Gogh. He gave Van Gogh’s eerie, high-strung, kinky Night Café to Yale, along with many other great, often idiosyncratic things.

Would he have liked this? After he spun centrifugally in his grave for a minute or two, I think he’d say yes. Art’s about reaching for the stars, and Yale’s art school has made a place for its women students to do just that.