When curating Grove Gallery’s latest exhibition, gallery director Sarah Kaiser-Amaral said she didn’t just want “pretty” works of art. She wanted art that elevated women.
Kaiser-Amaral said she noticed that in art collections around the world, women’s art tends to be marginalized. Artwork by women accounts for less than half of gallery sales, and female artists on average earn $0.80 for every dollar male artists make, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.
This was something Kaiser-Amaral wanted to change, especially for Women’s History Month in March. So, Grove Gallery’s “Women Painting Women” exhibition aims to do just that.
“As a female artist, I’m always trying to elevate women’s voices and also my own,” Kaiser-Amaral said.
The exhibition opened Saturday and will run through April 25. On April 4, the gallery will host a talk led by local artist Joanna Pinsky. She already knew many of the other featured artists, so Kaiser-Amaral asked her to lead a talk.
With “Women Painting Women,” Kaiser-Amaral said she wanted to find an alternative to the male gaze and overly sexualized images of women. Works in the exhibition range from portraits of family members to self-portraits.
Some pieces were also painted in memory of women who have passed, such as portraits of Ida B. Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt and local voice teacher Fay Kaiser.
“We don’t have a lot of necessarily pretty, attractive pictures,” Kaiser-Amaral said. “Some of them are beautiful, but they’re also beautiful on the inside. It’s more about what’s under the surface.”
Winnetka-based artist Nancy Behles painted a portrait of herself with her two daughters for the exhibition. The painting, titled “The Fates,” was inspired by a photograph of the three women sitting outside on a sunny day.
Behles said the strong light and dark values in the photograph piqued her interest, and she painted the piece in just one session. As an alla prima painter who practices the painting technique in which artwork is completed in a single sitting, Behles said she typically does everything she can in a couple of hours before returning later to fine-tune the details.
She was impressed by the community-minded aspect of Grove Gallery, she said, which made her want to participate in “Women Painting Women.”
Behles doubts anyone will purchase her painting, since she said people don’t typically purchase portraits of strangers. However, a sale wasn’t her intention.
“I just wanted to paint something that I would be proud to show,” she said.
Several works in “Women Painting Women” are not for sale, according to Kaiser-Amaral.
Although she traditionally wants everything in an exhibition to be for sale, she said she was flexible this time around.
“These are more than just products,” Kaiser-Amaral said. “There’s a cultural component. It’s about promoting women and talking about their legacies and their histories.”
Some of the paintings were created as gifts, such as the painting of Kaiser. Local artist Lea Pinsky painted the portrait of voice teacher and studio artist Kaiser, who passed away earlier this year, as a gift for her family.
Kaiser-Amaral said she was intentional about selecting art that depicted women doing intellectual activities.
“All of the women in these paintings are doing things,” she said. “They’re not just being looked at. They’re thinking, they’re reading, they’re singing. They’re doers.”
In local artist Muriel Christensen’s exhibition work, she painted a portrait of her great-niece reading, based on a photograph the girl’s mother took of her.
Christensen said she had bought several outfits for her great-niece and offered suggestions for how to pose in the photograph. The portrait is a part of a series by Christensen focused on heritage, she said.
She has been drawing and sketching since a young age, but she said she stopped art completely for about 10 years while she was working. Then, she got back into it as a hobby and now tries to create some piece of art every day.
“I don’t want to do it just for the sake of doing it,” Christensen said. “I want to make sure that I want to do it and I have a purpose to do it, and only then I’ll paint.”
Kaiser-Amaral said she wanted all of the work in “Women Painting Women” to have a purpose. For her, art is meant to access real human emotions, she said.
“My image isn’t, ‘Let’s just sell pretty pictures of flowers,’” she said. “I think it’s important for there to be substance, and I think it’s important to tell a story that’s not always a happy story.”
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