Courses

How have women turned combinations of creatives roles into artistic success?  At once daughters, fashion icons, models, mothers, muses, painters, print-makers, sisters, sculptors, and wives, great women artists have brilliantly understood the conditions of creativity in their times. This seminar studies how Impressionist Paris launched the modern woman artist, then traces a history of women’s tactics through mid-twentieth century New York Abstract Expressionism.  The seminar takes advantage of: a major 2026 exhibition about Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay; a burst of 2025-26 scholarship about the women Impressionists; 2025 and 2026 exhibitions about Ruth Asawa and Frida Kahlo; a major 2026 exhibition about Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the creative ecologies of two cultural capitals: Paris and New York.