Art LeadHER Casts the Female Gaze on Contemporary Art

This group show of 15 female artists celebrates female creativity of all shapes, scales, and forms.

May 5, 2016, 2:50pm

Ingrid Baars; all images courtesy of Joseph Gross Gallery.

Art LeadHER is a colorful tribute to the recent rise of female artists in contemporary art. The group show, opening today at Joseph Gross Gallery, is the inaugural annual exhibition for ArtLeadHER, a platform launched by the show's curator Mashonda Tifrere in March of this year for International Women's Day. The platform, like the show, is dedicated to "celebrating and bringing awareness to women in the art world."

The exhibition presents the work of 15 contemporary female artists from all walks of art: photographers and singer/songwriters, handbag designers and comic book writers. As the press release says, this vast range of female artistic expression embodies "the multitudinous forms of female perspective: softness, struggle and pain, and a near-constant grappling with invisible power structures." To bring voice to these works, Art LeadHER will partner with Apple and Beats by Dre to provide iPads and headphones for the show's viewers. With these tools the viewer is guided through an augmented experience of the art with videos of the artists speaking about their work and artistic processes.

Mereditch Marsone

This allows viewers to learn more about Meredith Marsone's dreamscapes, the blending of traditional African sculpture and fashion photography in Ingrid Baars' manipulated portraits, or Kit King's penchant for hyperrealistic oils. This is not to mention the dozen more stories from singer/songwriter Alison Mosshart, artist Anne Faith Nicholls, painter Angie Crabtree, tattoo artist DCM, artist Karmimadeebora McMillan, artist and journalist Kristin Farr, digital and tactile artist Lacy Barry, artist Lala Abaddon, designer and graphic artist Laurel DeWitt, artist Monica Canilao, and comic book writer and artist Sandra Chevrier. All 15 of these artists and stories, and the 25 works they have collectively contributed, comprise what becomes a united, albeit complex, narrative of female creativity.