Ninth Street and Beyond: 70 Years of Women in Abstraction, Part I: The Gestural

Mary Abbott, Rita Ackermann, Lynda Benglis, Ragna Bley, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Wook-Kyung Choi, Elaine de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Lynne Mapp Drexler, Torkwase Dyson, Perle Fine, Louise Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Goldfarb, Grace Hartigan, Eva Hesse, Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, Suzanne Jackson, Kathleen Jacobs, Shirley Jaffe, Mercedes Matter, Joan Mitchell, Maysha Mohamedi, Sabine Moritz, Pat Passlof, Howardena Pindell, Deborah Remington, Jeanne Reynal, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Amy Sillman, Marina Perez Simão, Sylvia Snowden, Joan Snyder, Toshiko Takaezu, Patricia Treib, Mary Weatherford, Michael Corinne West, Brenna Youngblood

Benjamin R. Hunter and Hayden Dunbar are pleased to present Ninth Street and Beyond: 70 Years of Women in Abstraction. This unprecedented exhibition—taking place in two parts over a three-month period—presents a never- before-seen assemblage of major paintings, works on paper, and sculptures created over the last 8 decades by more than 70 groundbreaking artists, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Illuminating new relationships between the pioneering “Ninth Street” painters and their peers of yesterday and today, the exhibition’s sequential iterations each focus on a common thread of abstraction: first, The Gestural, and second, Geometry.

Formal abstraction casts a long shadow across standard accounts of art history despite its relative infancy, at just over 100 years old. Still, abstraction has not always been met with celebration, and even the now-lionized, hyper-masculine abstract expressionists received poor reviews from initial audiences. Their female equals, meanwhile, were often ignored, rendered all but absent in the cultural annals of importance. That all changed with the pivotal 1951 Ninth Street Show, the springboard from a derelict Greenwich Village storefront to international acclaim for five revolutionary women painters: Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Elaine de Kooning. The powerful work of these talented, stereotype-busting artists opened innumerable doors for generations of women to come, and anchored a reconsideration of longstanding art world narratives and hierarchies still unfolding seventy years later.

Today countless women, from abstraction’s earliest practitioners to contemporary titans, are indispensable to understanding the evolution of abstract form. Ninth Street and Beyond juxtaposes important pieces from its namesake artists with exceptional works by later generations of women who have continued to push abstract concepts forward— Rita Ackermann, Jacqueline Humphries, Cecily Brown, Sabine Moritz, Bridget Riley, et.al. The selected works reflect the enduring power of abstract art to uncover the emotional soul of its maker across time, space, and circumstance, and underscore the pivotal role women have played not only in the proliferation of abstraction, but in taking it to its greatest heights.