‘Bold Women’ coming to Spencer Art Museum

On February 18, 2025, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas will open Bold Women, an expansive exhibition that presents the visionary—and still too often unsung—work of women artists. The show emphasizes the essential contributions of artists from diverse backgrounds, especially women of color, LGBTQ+ artists, and artists of intersecting identities.

With approximately 75 works in an array of mediums by primarily contemporary artists, Bold Women explores the myriad ways that women have pushed the boundaries of art and spurred critical social and cultural change across generations and geographies. The exhibition also features several historical touchstone artworks that highlight women’s artistic innovations within the last 100 years.

Bold Women will be on view at the Spencer through July 6, 2025. It is curated by Susan Earle, the Spencer’s Curator of European and American Art, in collaboration with a diverse group of advisors, including Lawrence-based textile artist and educator Marla A. Jackson, whose work will be included in the show; Kansas City community arts advocate Rose Bryant; Dr. Kimberli Gant, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Toronto-based Anishinaabe-kwe Indigenous art curator and artist Wanda Nanibush; and graduate level interns and other students at KU.

At the heart of the exhibition is the idea of boldness, presented as a defining attribute of the works created by the featured artists and as an indicator of the artists’ fearless efforts to challenge institutional systems and dominant historical narratives. This concept is considered through a spectrum of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, videos, and other distinct visual forms, organized within several overlapping themes that speak to intersectional feminist efforts and formal experimentations. The exhibition boldly places women at the center of discourses about art and social change.

Bold Women considers uses of portraiture as a form of resistance and reclamation, featuring works that give agency to both the artist and the sitter—as they refuse to be “imaged” by others—and illuminate under-told, hidden, and forgotten narratives. The works also highlight a depth of aesthetic, material, and conceptual innovation, pushing the boundaries of portraiture in its ability to convey a range of experiences and expand discussions of identities.

Here, Sandra Brewster’s Blur 23 (2021/2024), a deliberately blurred, black-and-white gel-transfer photograph, along with several related works, re-tells the migration histories of the Caribbean diaspora, while Shelley Niro (Mohawk) confronts stereotypes of Indigenous identity and represents women as visionary change-makers in several photographs, including 500 Year Itch from the series This Land is Mime Land (1992). Hong Chun Zhang’s drawing, Twister #2 (2012), depicts a large-scale tornado of hair, referencing both Chinese scroll paintings and the confines of conventional gender roles. 

Zhang is also creating a commission for Bold Women, titled Fenced In (2024). The work, a two-sided, 20-foot-wide ink painting on fabric, continues her interest in leveraging imagery of hair to explore the policing of women and broader social controls.

Another theme in the exhibition emphasizes the preservation, healing, and liberation of communities across generations. This is encapsulated in Mary Sibande’s sculptural work Sophie-Ntombikayise (2009), which is comprised of a cast of the artist’s body dressed in a voluminous gown. The work is part of a series that positions clothing as space for imagination and interrogates the legacy of domestic servitude. Sibande will also be showing a work newly commissioned by the Spencer—and created during a campus residency—that features a dozen miniature “toy soldiers” modeled on her body and displayed in a case as if marching—an imagined “battalion for the future.”

Andrea Chung’s sculpture Untitled (2022) is part of a body of work that evokes the mythical underwater community Drexciya, an Afrofuturist utopia under the Atlantic Ocean created by descendants of pregnant African women who jumped from or were thrown overboard on slave ships. The body of work both honors these women and conjures the possibilities of an alternative history. In her drawing, BX Third World Liberation Mixtape No. 4, Caminos (Slow and Steady) (2022), artist Shellyne Rodriguez considers the survival of marginalized communities in the Bronx and their trans-cultural relationships to broader global experiences and dialogues.  

In a related theme, Bold Women also examines the significance and power of matriarchy and women as keepers of knowledge.

In her floor-to-ceiling thread-based textile installation blood (2004), Faye HeavyShield (Blackfoot Confederacy and Kainaiwa Nation) explores the potency of ancestry, blood ties to family and land, and memory. In the photograph Our Lady of theIguanas (1979), the artist Graciela Iturbide alludes to the town in which the image was taken, reflecting on its matriarchal economy. Mimi Smith’s feminist work Steel Wool Peignoir (1966) features a full-length negligée graced with prickly steel wool to convey hidden labor and the potential hazards of domesticity. Additional artists exploring ideas of knowledge-keeping, matriarchy, and the perseverance of communities include Viola Burley Leak, Rose B. Simpson (Tewa, Santa Clara Pueblo), and Lisa Reihana from New Zealand, who envisions a bold Māori goddess of night and the underworld in a photograph newly created in print form for this exhibition.

Lastly, Bold Women considers issues of erasure.

Afghani artist Lida Abdul contemplates the ruins of war and the eradication of culture in her video work White House (2005), in which bombed structures and toppled pillars are slowly being painted white by a woman in a long, dark robe. In another work, titled Emancipation Day (2018), artist Ingrid Pollard manipulates an archival, Imperialist photograph from 1890s Jamaica to highlight how British slave-owners sought to portray beauty and prosperity to justify their enslavement of Jamaicans and to explore the ongoing ramifications of colonialization.

“Bold Women reveals and celebrates the depth and range of work produced by women of diverse cultural backgrounds, introducing audiences to their visionary practices and enriching our understanding of their distinct contributions to the global artistic landscape,” Earle said. “Bold Women also recognizes that women have long been at the forefront of both artistic innovation and social and cultural progress, even if their work might have gone under-recognized within institutional contexts in dominant art historical narratives. With this show, we are proud to bring greater scholarly recognition and public awareness to these compelling artists and works.”  

About the Spencer Museum of Art

The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents.

The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free.