Profs & Pints DC: Painting’s Pioneering Women

About this event

Profs and Pints DC (https://www.profsandpints.com/washingtondc) presents: “Painting’s Pioneering Women,” on female artists who overcame barriers and changed their field, with Paloma Vianey, lecturer in George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-painting-women (https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-painting-women) .] Introductory art history courses tend to give short shrift to women, a legacy of the many centuries in which art collections disproportionately featured the works of men. As a studio arts teacher, acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Paloma Vianey has sought to remedy that imbalance, teaching students about the lives and work of inspiring women artists while also encouraging them to observe artwork from the painters’ perspectives. Join Vianey at Washington D.C.’s Penn Social for a look at the struggles and cultural contributions of women artists and how they have used painting as a tool for expression and healing. She’ll discuss why learning about the contributions of women is imperative to understanding the field of painting and movements such as impressionism, surrealism, and conceptual art. She’ll dive into the lives and works of fifteen female artists who have had a huge impact in the last four centuries, describing how they created their images and changed their field. Among the women you’ll learn about: Aurora Reyes, a poet regarded as the first Mexican muralist, who drew upon her impoverished upbringing to give her murals authenticity. Clara Peeters, a seventeenth-century artist who came to be regarded as a master in the nearly all-male field of still-life painting and took the brave step of incorporating self-portraits into her depictions of vases, goblets, and food. Emily Carr, who eschewed the traditional life she’d been expected to lead in the Victorian era to instead spend her life single and using painting to document the lives of Aboriginal villages. Other artists who will be covered in the talk include surrealist Remedios Varo, conceptual artist Agnes Martin, modern artist Hilma af Klint, and Native American collage artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. You’ll learn how the field of Art History is being revised to give female artists their due and how contemporary art museums are emphasizing more of their work. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: A 1787 painting by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun