Chance Encounters, Edition 71
A Celebration of Women's History Month 2026
March is Women’s History Month in the United States, a time to take note of the achievements of our foremothers in the face of stiff opposition, to celebrate how far we have come, and to see what more we need to do to achieve true gender equality.
In the 1980s, the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of women who maintain anonymity by wearing gorilla masks, began to highlight the absence of women artists’ works from museums and art galleries. Over the past 45 years, progress has been made in opening up opportunities for women artists, especially in academic programs in the arts, inclusion in prominent exhibitions, and in gallery representation. In 2024, women comprised 40 percent of artists represented by galleries. Though 40% is an improvement over past years, the percentage of women’s art in auctions, art fairs, and private collections is considerably lower. For more information on these issues, see the National Museum of Women in the Arts advocacy page and the Guerilla Girls website.
In this essay celebrating women artists, I have chosen seven artists whose works are currently being exhibited in American galleries. These artists were chosen to demonstrate a breadth of styles, media, and artistic goals, though they are only a very small sample of what is being created.
Caroline Kent, exhibiting a group of abstract works in New York City, is based in Chicago and is a professor at Northwestern University. The artist considers the work of art an environment in which every viewer begins without the barriers of different languages, an idea that influenced earlier practitioners of abstraction like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. This example, She Kept It Closed And Locked Up, is created from a brown toned, herringbone-weave Belgian linen inset into a custom walnut frame. As can be seen from the detail that opened this edition, the acrylic paint shapes allow the canvas’ weave to remain visible and in some cases edges of overlapped shapes remain visible too. Both the frame and the canvas have indented areas, a small one in the lower left of the frame and a larger polygon within the canvas. One additional material used by Kent is tinted concrete, here, for the vivid red shape attached within the polygonal void. Painted shapes overlap the indented area of the canvas and are not disrupted by it, so that we begin to wonder what is near and what is far and how these compositional elements relate to one another. In this work, the black diamond shapes that are spread across the canvas complicate the sense of depth even further. Seeing this complexity, one isn’t surprised to learn that Kent creates mockups of her paintings by rotating and moving pieces of paper cut into abstract shapes before finalizing the images in paint on the canvas. Knowing this intensifies the sense of looking at a jigsaw puzzle of which some pieces are out of place and others missing all together.
I allow my work to move past conventional boundaries, reaching beyond the confines of the canvas and connecting with other subjects, such as film, writing, and theatre. Painting is not a means to an end but a beginning. – Caroline Kent
Aigana Gali (Kazakh, b. 1982) is another artist for whom unpainted canvas and carefully defined shapes are essential tools of artistic communication. The artist who is based in London, grew up in Kazakhstan and wants to communicate the qualities of light and space on the steppes, as well as the mythologies and history of her culture. While working on this series, Gali was concerned with the proliferation of AI-generated imagery and the isolation of individuals in digital echo chambers, which she believes dulls our ability to experience the real world. To Gali, each work in this series is a separate meditation on harmony between human and environment. Art is a respite from the digital noise which surrounds us and a chance to explore the mysterious forces that shape our lives. In this work and the others currently being exhibited in West Palm Beach, Florida, the artist chose to incorporate two new materials, unprimed canvas and gold leaf, finding the organic quality of the raw canvas balanced the shimmering of the gold. The title of this example incorporates the term for a traditional Kazakh musical form, “küi,” in which a solo instrument presents the melody.
Küi Tas is a stone that remembers song. It speaks of a world where music was etched into matter, and where every rock holds the memory of vibration. It is the material soul of the steppe — where melody becomes fossil, and form becomes echo. – Aigana Gali
A more expressionistic approach to abstraction is taken by Elizabeth Neel (American, 1975) as can be seen in paintings like How to Live currently exhibited in New York City where she lives. The artist, granddaughter of the famed figural painter Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984), shares Gali’s view of art as something that can pull us away from “doom scrolling” and reconnect us to ourselves and something beyond ourselves. Also similar to Gali and Kent, Neel leaves open canvas around the marks in her paintings, especially so in this example. The artist reuses and adapts approaches from the past in search of a means of understanding and expressing our own time. The play of opposites – density and openness, order and chaos – across the canvas is characteristic of the artist’s paintings as seen here. The first impression is of spontaneity but a closer look shows a mix of more relaxed strokes and carefully applied details, like the white forms and lines of repeated shapes. Color, shape, and movement become characters like dancers or actors on stage.
Once I make the work, then it’s a dialogue that goes between you and [the piece]. So whatever I think about it or whatever I think of when I’m making it, I want to trigger that sensibility within a person. But they often bring their whole experience to it — their understanding of art. – Elizabeth Neel
The next artist works in a photorealistic style that contrasts sharply with the abstractions included above. Erin Wright (American, b. 1990) is a painter, designer, and curator based in Los Angeles whose recent paintings are currently being shown there. The paintings are displayed in a midcentury modern house that serves as the exhibition space of albertz benda. The furnishings and architecture of the house are replicated and extended by Wright’s paintings. The combination of the actual objects and the realistic paintings can be disorienting. The artist is especially interested in the uncanny quality of her paintings but also delights in the playfulness of combining the painted and the real things.
The gallery … serves as a conceptual kindergarten, where ideas of the project are tested and explored, fostering a playful environment that encourages innovation and creativity in architectural thought. The boundaries between play and serious inquiry blur. – Erin Wright
The example above depicts a Faye Toogood (British, b. 1977) Roly Poly Stool in lithium barium glass with a satin frosted finish (15.8 x 15.8 x 15.8 in. l 40 x 40 x 40 cm.) The stool is used as a table in the painting with a still life atop it and a dachshund seated alongside, as lifelike a depiction as everything else in Wright’s painting. Using airbrush and drybrush over a carefully hand drawn composition on a gridded canvas, a single work of this size can take 150 hours to complete. The photograph below shows an installation view with the actual stool displayed near the painting.
Sono Osato (American, b. 1960) creates paintings and drawing but we are looking at one of the sculptures from her most series “Middens.” Osato, who decided she wanted to be an artist at the age of seven, has long been inspired by geology and archeology. The drawings and painting from the series are layered images created from thinly applied materials which won’t obscure the outlines of objects. The title “Midden” refers to the trash heaps excavated by archeologists which yield numerous artifacts and reveal important cultural information about diet, clothing, craft, and technology. Osato’s works in this series are the imaginary middens of our own society, comprised of recently abandoned or soon-to-be obsolete technologies, broken apart and discarded but still recognizable. The sculptures have the appearance of just uncovered sections of a future archeological dig. As inhabitants of the culture that has produced these castoffs we recognize pull-tabs, a die, pencil stubs, wires, buttons, electronics components and many more but what will future archeologists make of the stuff we leave behind?
Making unique work often means that it demands more from the viewer than something they immediately recognize or understand, beckoning them to look more deeply and spend more time contemplating what’s before them. – Sono Osato
Berenice Olmedo (Mexican, b. 1987) also uses reclaimed objects in her sculptures, but of a much different kind. The artist creates sculptures and kinetic installations integrating prosthetics and orthoses, often acquired from and named in honor of the former user. In a sense, this is a sentimental choice but it is also political since it gives visibility to the individual whose illness or disability commonly renders them disregarded or invisible in society. Nabila is her recent work, currently exhibited in Los Angeles; an anthropomorphic assemblage, transparent cords connect the device to an operator switch on the wall. When activated, the device moves, spins, rises and returns to the ground in a predetermined choreography (see video).
Video showing Berenice Olmedo’s Nabila (2025) in action, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles.
Other sculptures and installations by Olmedo stress the controlling, confining aspects of medical devices, but the butterfly-covered, translucent lavender plastics of this device might suggest a less negative connotation. The artist, who was once a volunteer at a children’s rehabilitation hospital in Mexico City, rejects the duality of able and disabled which characterizes many societies in history and today. Her works challenge the standardized view of human wholeness, suggesting that the human body always requires some form of technology to be fully functional.
… there is no stigma of disability in the world I propose, but only variations of existence, variations of movement, variations on slowness and speed. – Berenice Olmedo
The final artist in this short survey is Judith Schaechter (American, b. 1961). Based in Philadelphia, the artist is a widely exhibited and highly acclaimed glass artist whose work is currently exhibited in New York City. The centerpiece and namesake of the exhibition is Super/Natural, an eight foot tall stained glass dome designed to be entered by one person at a time, creating an experience of wonder and beauty. The installation was developed during Schaechter’s time as artist-in-residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics where she worked with scientists and researchers studying the neural and biological basis of aesthetic experience.
The stained and painted glass panels of Super/Natural continue the artist’s use of imagined insects, flora, and birds to create an environment of wonder and curiosity. Some of the details seem similar to what we might find in the garden or woods, but others might as easily be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510).
The interior of the structure begins at the floor with deep red glass filled with shadowy forms. The majority of the glass walls teems with large flowers among which insects can be found crawling and flying. The dome is occupied by a swirl of flying creatures, insects and birds, against a deep blue sky. This progression from earth to sky is reminiscent of the iconography of the great Medieval cathedrals, which sought to lift the believer’s thoughts from the earthly realm to Heaven. Schaechter’s work is secular but also intends the viewer to be uplifted by her artistic vision.
My goal is to invite viewers into a deeply personal, immersive experience that explores the connections between self, nature, and imagination. We are ultimately connected to, not just observing, nature. – Judith Schaechter
I found so many wonderful examples of women artists working today that it was very difficult to narrow them down to this small group. If you are fortunate enough to be near one of the exhibitions listed below, I hope you’ll visit. If not, I hope you’ll look nearby for an exhibition or some individual works by one of the women artists working hard to share her vision, whether it’s Women’s history Month or not.
Exhibitions (listed in the order in which the artists are discussed above)
“Caroline Kent: A Light Left On In the Hallway” through April 18, 2026 at Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th Street, New York, New York, USA https://caseykaplangallery.com/?exhibitions=a-light-left-on-in-the-hallway
“Ünes l Resonance – Aigana Gali” through April 11, 2026 at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 2414 Florida Avenue, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA https://kristinhjellegjerde.com/exhibitions/551/overview/
“Elizabeth Neel: In the Guts of Living” through April 4, 2026 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York, New York, USA https://jackshainman.com/exhibitions/elizabeth_neel_in_the_guts
“Erin Wright: Fever Dream” through March 28 at albertz benda, 8260 Marmont Lane, Los Angeles, California, USA https://www.albertzbenda.com/exhibitions/146-erin-wright-fever-dream/
“Sono Osato l Midden” through April 4, 2026 at Ivester Contemporary, 916 Springdale Road, Building 2. Suit 107, Austin, Texas, USA https://ivestercontemporary.com/show/ivester-contemporary-sono-osato-midden
“Berenice Olmedo: Nabila” until March 28, at François Ghebaly, 2245 East Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, USA https://ghebaly.com/exhibitions/berenice-olmedo-nabila/
“Judith Schaechter: Super/Natural” through May 23, at Claire Oliver Gallery, 2288 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard, New York, New York, USA https://www.claireoliver.com/exhibitions/63/overview/
Thanks for joining me to celebrate Women’s History Month 2026 with this short survey of women artists. Thank you for subscribing and reading. Please like, share, and comment. I’ll be back with more art soon.