Margot Norton, chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, says every time she creates an exhibition, she thinks about what young artists can take away from it. But while building Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection (on view until April 20; free admission on International Women’s Day, March 8), an exhibition of Bay Area philanthropist Komal Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg’s collection of works by more than 70 women artists, Norton realized that the show would impact not just young people, but those of all ages.
“There are so many works [in this exhibition] that were pivotal in terms of opening up so much space for so many generations,” said Norton, who prior to coming to BAMPFA was the senior curator at the New Museum and before that, curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum.
“Not just in terms of them being women artists, but how they were understanding artistic traditions, going around and through them, showing all the wealth of knowledge that also exists outside of these kind of traditionally male dominated art historical traditions,” she told 48hills.
The collection’s artists often redefined movements, Norton says. As an example, she points out Dyani White Hawk’s Evening Grand Entry, a glass-bead-and-acrylic representation of the beginning of a powwow. By presenting the scene from her perspective, Norton says, the Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh artist cleared the way for dialogue about Indigenous and geometric abstraction.
Indeed, the show is full of heavy-hitters. Along with White Hawk, there’s Joan Mitchell, Howardena Pindell, Judy Chicago, Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and lots of younger and lesser-well-known artists.
“I feel like this show really starts off with a bang of intergenerational dialogue, like when you walk into that first room and see Joan Mitchell, Mary Weatherford, Aria Dean, and Lorna Simpson, you’re thinking about artistic gesture and so much expansive potential around what that means,” she said. “I mean, the show is called Making Their Mark. And here you go, walking right into the first room of the exhibition, and it’s like, you literally feel how a paint brush can just explode with emotion.”
Janet Sobel’s 1946 Untitled, created with dripped paint mixed with sand, opens the exhibition. Sobel started making art later in life, working with innovative techniques. Her first gallery shows in New York were panned by critics, Norton says, but Jackson Pollack, best known for his own drip paintings, called the show an influence on his work.
“You really see these kinds of situations in which women artists were completely unvalued and completely disregarded,” Norton said. “An artist like Janet Sobel is one that we should all know about, and I’d never heard of her before. I think it’s important that the history be revealed.”
The show is divided into six sections, including one entitled “Craft is Art,” but Norton says when organizing the show, her team made a point of featuring craft technique in every room.
“It wasn’t that we were like, ‘OK, we’re going to put all the craft here.’ It was an important story that I think we wanted to highlight in the show as well, mainly around innovation and thinking through histories of artists that were working in craft that went outside of traditional parameters in their own work,” she said.
“Including artists who are working like in ceramics, like Toshiko Takaezu, who are in weaving, like Kay Sekimachi, or having the mother-and-daughter combination of Elizabeth Talford Scott, who is right next to her daughter, Joyce Scott, who is really influenced by quilting techniques and beading, but actually creating something entirely new.”
The show opened in 2023 at the Shah Garg Foundation in New York. Next September, it will travel to the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. Norton says for the BAMPFA exhibition, the show holds a particular thematic focus, as well as artists with deep ties to the Bay Area such as Etel Adnan, Mary Corse, Elizabeth Murray, and Sekimachi.
Other sections include “Gestural Abstraction,” “Luminous Abstraction,” “Painting and Technology,” “Of Selves and Spirits” and the intriguingly named “Disobedient Bodies.” Norton describes these titles as giving some context, but she says the rooms overlap, with one section flowing into the next.
The exhibition in Berkeley coincides with the launch of the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund, which supports new scholarship among women artists. Norton calls it transformative for the museum. There are more stories like Sobel’s that need to be told, she says, and the fund will allow BAMPFA to help in their telling.
“The Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund will support those exhibitions, publications, public programs—everything we do around scholarship. It’s a five-year gift to the museum,” she said.
MAKING THEIR MARK: WORKS FROM THE SHAH GARG COLLECTION runs through April 20. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Tickets and more information here.
