At New York University’s Grey Art Museum [...] the current exhibition, Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years [...] organized by critic Nancy Princenthal and curator Vesela Sretenović, features around a fifth of the more than 300 women-identifying artists who’ve received an award from the organization Anonymous Was A Woman since its founding 29 years ago.
The show isn’t comprehensive, which is partly a consequence of the modest size of the Grey, a smallish museum that regularly puts on mighty shows. (Disclosure: I interned there as an undergraduate student over a decade ago.) But even in its partial form, the exhibition persuasively suggests that Anonymous Was A Woman has transformed the US art scene for the better, keeping alive many women’s practices when many institutions wouldn’t. More than simply acting as a boosterish celebration of this beloved organization, the exhibition also spotlights the hard-won struggle for visibility and the perseverance required to weather it.
Many of the works here are somber and striking. There’s Laura Aguilar’s Stillness #25, a 1999 photograph in which the nude artist lies curled up in the Californian desert, her face turned away from her viewer. Yet unlike a fabric blowing above Aguilar, the artist remains there, planted stoically to the ground. Nearby, there’s Janet Biggs’s 2007 video Airs Above the Ground, in which a swimmer writhes around in a pool. This swimmer resists gravity to remain underwater for a prolonged period of time—something that requires training and physical endurance. It’s tough to keep up that kind of work, and tougher still do it when no one is watching.
These two pieces, like many of the others in the show, were made roughly around the same time the artists won their grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, an organization whose name is sometimes affectionally abbreviated as AWAW. Aguilar had not received a major survey at the time (and wouldn’t until 2017, the year the Vincent Prince Art Museum filled that void); Biggs still has not had a retrospective.
