For centuries, women artists did not get a lot of support. This was often explained by the alleged inability of women to compete with male creativity. In particular, sculpture was regarded as a masculine form of art since it required physical labor. The disregard for their accomplishments did not stop all women sculptors from creating astonishing and innovative work. Below are eight great names of women sculptors who secured their places in the history of art.

1. Camille Claudel: The Forgotten Woman Sculptor (1864 – 1943)

Born in a well-off family of farmers, Camille Claudel demonstrated an interest in sculpture from an early age. Although her mother, a conservative Christian, objected to Camille’s desire to study, her father moved their family to Paris so that their daughter could become one of the first women to have professional art education in France. A passionate reader, Camille drew her inspiration from myths, legends, popular novels, and publications on philosophy. Her unique artistic talent was quickly noticed by art admirers and collectors.

While Claudel’s career was on the rise, her mental health declined, in large part because of her emotional and abusive relationship with another legendary sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Her mother, still disapproving of Claudel’s career path, decided to take matters into her own hands by forcefully placing her daughter in a psychiatric asylum. The great artist would spend the last thirty years of her life in complete isolation, fading into obscurity for decades after her death. For years she was mentioned solely as Auguste Rodin’s muse and lover. However, in recent decades, art historians started to highlight the uniqueness of Claudel’s style and skill.

2. Edmonia Lewis (1844 – 1907)

Edmonia Lewis was the first artist of African American and Native-American heritage who achieved international fame despite the barriers of race and class. Losing both of her parents early, Lewis was taken care of by her aunts. She also had to work from an early age. She made a living selling embroidered garments. After her brother managed to earn enough money during the Gold Rush, he paid for Edmonia Lewis’ education at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin was well-known as a liberal institution with dominant abolitionist views, which advocated for coeducation instead of segregation.

However, the progressive facade did not help Lewis to finish her education. In 1962, as the American Civil War went on, she was falsely accused of poisoning two of her white classmates. Even proving her innocence in court did not save Edmonia from a violent beating by the angry racist crowd of local residents. This was followed by her expulsion from the college.

Edmonia Lewis kept studying on her own. Her first financial success came to her as she began to create busts of renowned abolitionists lost to war. However, her real accomplishments started in the 1870s when she moved to Europe and settled in Rome. After studying classical sculpture there, she created her most famous works, including the dramatic Death of Cleopatra.

3. Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 – 2002)

Niki de Saint Phalle started her artistic career in the 1950s when the post-war world was particularly hostile towards women who were rejecting traditional roles. She was born in France to a family of French-American bankers, yet the affluent upbringing did not bring many joys into the aspiring artist’s life. From her early years, Niki de Saint Phalle and her siblings suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse from their parents. In order to escape her family, she married a family friend, but soon found herself trapped in the same life of domestic duties and responsibilities that she hated as a child.

Soon after breaking free from her family life, Niki de Saint Phalle found herself in both European and American artistic circles. Her bold experiments with materials, techniques, and formats quickly attracted the attention of both young and established artists, from Robert Rauschenberg to Marcel Duchamp. Niki de Saint Phalle’s naive and playful style was just the cover to make room for conversations on uncomfortable and sensitive topics such as the AIDS crisis, racial and gender inequality, and climate change.

4. Augusta Savage (1892 – 1962)

Augusta Savage, the great American sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance, began experimenting with clay in her early teens, much to the wrath of her father, a Methodist minister who saw making art as something sinful. Despite years of beatings and abuse, she remained persistent, later moving to New York and receiving a scholarship at Cooper Union College. A prestigious art school in France also accepted Savage as their student, but the American side refused to send her there, claiming that other students would feel uncomfortable studying with a black woman.

Still, with the help of her patrons and fellow sculptors, Augusta Savage managed to cross the ocean and settle in Paris for several years. She didn’t just research European art there, but actively presented and sold her own pieces, even winning prestigious rewards. She returned to the US in the early 1930s, when the Great Depression put artistic production on hold. Determined to help her community, she opened an art studio and two art galleries, teaching children and adults to paint and sculpt. Although a relatively small number of her works survived, her influence on the growing African American art scene was evident and lasting.

5. Wangechi Mutu (1972 – )

Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan sculptor exploring cultural identity and femininity through the lens of African culture and history. Often called an Afrofuturist, Mutu creates fantastic sculptures blending science fiction with African tradition, subverting colonial narratives and imagining new futures.

In 2019, The Metropolitan Museum in New York commissioned a series of facade sculptures from Wangechi Mutu. The niches facing Fifth Avenue had been empty since the museum’s construction, and Mutu was the first artist who was asked to fill them with new pieces. The artist first thought of caryatides, ancient Greek sculptures of women holding buildings in place of columns. She married that concept with traditional African sculpture of seated women, turning them into alien-like figures greeting the visitors. Among the most remarkable features of the figures were the lip plates, traditionally worn by women belonging to the higher classes in some Ethiopian tribes. Mutu turned them into mirrors, reflecting light and interacting with the viewer as they approached the museum building. After Mutu’s initial involvement, the Met decided to change the facade sculptures annually, commissioning pieces from different contemporary sculptors.

6. Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010)

The French Sculptor Louise Bourgeois built her own mythology throughout her long career. Most of Bourgeois’ work is rooted in her childhood experiences. She documented the comforting yet short-lived presence of her mother by creating spiders. For Bourgeois, a spider is a friendly creature, offering protection from mosquitos that carry diseases. The motif of the spiderweb was just as crucial for the artist since her mother was a tapestry weaver and a restorer.

The treatment of a father figure in Bourgeois’ work reflected feelings of fear, disgust, and distrust. Her father had a series of affairs barely concealed from his wife and daughter. Bourgeois depicted his toxic and depressing presence in her installation Destruction of the Father. The composition originated from a childhood dream in which Bourgeois and her siblings dismembered and ate their father. Her father’s numerous affairs made an impact on Bourgeois’ treatment of sexuality in art, which has been the subject of many research papers and critical essays. Sexuality in her works is not romantic or joyful but distorted, often repulsive, and forever marked by early trauma.

7. Kara Walker (1969 – )

Contemporary artist Kara Walker is one of the leading African American voices in the art world. She is known for her uncompromising treatment of themes concerning slavery, systemic racism, and violence. Although Walker is a multi-disciplinary artist, sculpture remains a significant part of her oeuvre. One of the key characteristics of Walker’s work is her subversion of the prestigious, white-dominated types of art and craft that were popular during colonial times. By blending contexts and symbols, she points at the hypocrisy and cruelty of certain moments in history.

The monumental sculpture A Subtlety, built and subsequently demolished in 2014, showed a 75-foot-long sphinx constructed from sugar blocks in a former sugar factory. Sugar sculptures were popular table decorations in aristocratic Western households. At the same time, sugar production involved slave labor, with slaves barely having any access to the product they were making. The features of the sphinx do not have much in common with the famous Egyptian figure. Her sphinx shows a stereotypical depiction of a Black woman, a mother, and a servant in the era preceding the Civil Rights Movement.

8. Feminist Woman Sculptor: Judy Chicago (1939 – )

The most famous work of Judy Chicago is the monumental Dinner Party. However, there is much more to her sculptural oeuvre than the famous triangular table. Chicago is primarily known as a feminist artist. At the beginning of her career, the artist worked with minimalist sculpture. By simplifying the vocabulary of form, she focused on the nuances of color and tone. The title of the work came from the name of the soul singer Wilson Pickett, who was popular in the 1960s. The critics, including Clement Greenberg, met early minimalist works of Judy Chicago with appraisal, yet her further success outshined these pieces.

What comes to mind when you think of the South? Does it conjure images of wrap-around porches and sweet tea? Or does it summon images of discrimination?

The “Southern/Modern” exhibit at the Georgia Museum of Art presents various paintings of the South through over 100 works created during the first half of the 20th century. The pieces are from both native Southern artists and those who were inspired by the region during their time there.

One piece in particular that stood out to me was “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” by John McGrady. This oil painting depicts a Black family’s rural home. Members of the family surround a dying man while Black angels battle demons and bring a fiery chariot from above. I was drawn to this piece because of its dark color pallet and the vertical movement of the narrative. The biblical story of Elijah and the fiery chariot was the first thing that came to mind, which speaks to the religious beliefs that hold many Black families together.

The exhibit also makes sure to address problematic aspects of certain pieces. Many of the works were created by white painters who included stereotypical depictions of Black people. The juxtaposing artworks reveal the assorted tapestry that is the South, challenging narrow views while inviting the viewer to rediscover the region.

Viewing this collection with my father showed me how each generation’s relationship with the South is different. It gave me a window into the past and how it affects my view of the South today. My only critique would be that the abstract art didn’t seem to hold the same impact as the representational art. 

4/5 stars

A foundational tenet of American culture–of Western civilization–prioritizes the individual. The rugged individual. The do-it-yourselfer. The lone wolf. The lone ranger. The lone genius.

Artist Sonya Clark (b. 1967; Washington, D.C.) rejects this.

Even when working by herself, Clark recognizes she’s part of a collective effort.

“If I make a work with a piece of linen, I know that I’m in collaboration with the Earth that grew the linen, the sun, with nature, and then collaboration with whoever was working at the factory who spun and wove the linen,” Clark told Forbes.com. “It already has passed through nature’s creation and the hands of the people who have made the product.”

Her collective perspective runs deeper than her artwork.

“I myself am a collaboration,” Clark said. “I wasn’t born into this world without a collaboration. Literally, my mother and father had to get together for probably 20 minutes–hopefully longer. I’m built like my father who had long fingers. When I look at my hands working, I see my father’s hands in my own hands, collaboration. I’m a composite of all the ancestors who have come before me.”

Clark’s chosen profession rarely celebrates, or even acknowledges, this.

“Selfhood, especially when it comes to artistic practice, especially when we think about it through a Western mode, which I resist, is this self-identity, the artist as genius–I’m not calling myself a genius, but this solo person who makes this thing,” Clark said.

The icon. The maverick.

Michelangelo toiling away in solitude, suffering for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his genius and his genius alone being responsible for its creation.

“We know he couldn’t do that by himself, it’s not possible, but we name it for one genius to hold up the genius trope,” Clark said.

Further rejecting the solitary artist mythology, Clark routinely welcomes public participation into her largest pieces.

“I’m inviting all of those other people to come in and make the work with me because that helps me understand the work better,” she explained. “As they are making the work themselves, they are bringing their own stories in a way that makes the work theirs. As an artist, I want the artwork to resonate with people, if you’re part of it, it literally resonates through your body.”

Clark’s large-scale, community-centered, and participatory projects are brought together for the first time during the exhibition “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other” on view now at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through February 18, 2024.

‘We Are Each Other’

There is a danger in the extreme individualism currently popular in America. It promotes narcissism. Those figures then become demigods in their chosen fields of politics, business or tech. Rarely do their self-interests, which they’ve been rewarded for placing above any other interest, serve a greater good.

Extreme individualism is anti-social. Dog eat dog.

“It separates us from one another and holds up one and says, ‘this one is special,’” Clark said. “Anything that is special about me–because I do think there’s special things about me, I’m not egoless–but anything that is special about me is something about my upbringing. It’s something about a positive or negative lesson that I’ve learned from my community, about how to be and how not to be. I am those lessons.”

The narcissist, the individual run amuck, doesn’t recognize the influence of community. Doesn’t recognize influence at all. He or she believes they are a singular creation, their “greatness” resulting solely from within, perhaps divinely inspired.

The ethos of Clark’s participatory works is embedded in the exhibition title, which is inspired by the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “Paul Robeson” (1970), about the civil rights activist, which closes with, “we are each other’s harvest/we are each other’s business/we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

We are each other.

Forgetting we are each other results in the pandemic hoarding of toilet paper, a vicious application of capitalism resulting in a second Gilded Age, haves and have nots, justification of bombing civilians in Gaza and a rise in antisemitism.

When we forget we are each other, we create “others.” And others are easier to abuse.

“When we remember that we are each other–you are me, I am you–we’re not the same person, but we are both human beings, and if I acknowledge your humanity and you acknowledge mine, the fullness of your humanity and the fullness of mine… (it) allows us to say we’re complicated,” Clark said. “There’s goodness in there, but there’s all the range of all the other things in there as well. If we focus on one thing over the other, then we’ve flattened ourselves and when we flatten ourselves, we also potentially can dehumanize each other.”

Individuals don’t dialogue, they monologue. They are not open, they are closed. Clark’s community-centered projects on view in “We Are Each Other” facilitate open dialogue, new collective encounters across racial, gender and socioeconomic divisions.

The Cradle of the Confederacy

Clark is acclaimed for using everyday fiber materials such as hair, flags and found fabric, along with a range of textile techniques including weaving, braiding, quilting and beading, to examine issues of history, racial injustice, cultural legacies and reconciliation.

The exhibition features six of Clark’s projects created through mass participation, two directly addressing the Civil War, a theme common to her artmaking.

Unraveling (2015-present) is an ongoing performance whereby Clark works alongside individual gallery and museum visitors to unravel a Confederate battle flag thread by thread. The performance is slow and toilsome, meant to symbolize the collective work involved in the dismantling of the ideas of the Confederacy, white supremacy and racism in the United States.

Monumental Cloth (2019) is a series of artworks and activations based on the historic repurposed dish towel that was used to signal a truce by Confederate forces at Appomattox in 1865. Visitors are invited to weave recreations of the flag on looms in the galleries and make tracings of the flag’s waffle-weave surface pattern to take home.

On view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, one-time Confederate stronghold, 15-miles as the crow flies from the most prominent monument to the Confederacy and the white supremacy and white nationalism it stood for, Stone Mountain, these pieces hit differently than they did at Cranbrook outside of Detroit where the show opened or the Museum of Arts and Design in New York where it goes next.

“I am cautious to demonize the South,” Clark, who spent 12 years living in Richmond, VA and now teaches at Amherst College in Amherst, MA, said. “When (my family) moved from Richmond to western Massachusetts, the number of people who said, ‘oh, you must be so happy to be out of the South, that very racist place,’ and I was like, ‘have you spent much time in Boston?’ People migrate, ideas migrate, and the North is implicated in the business of slavery.”

Clark has staged the Unraveling project in the North and South.

“I’ve found the responses, regardless of where I am, to be as wide ranging as people are,” she said. “I came because my uncles are part of the KKK and I’m doing this in opposition to them.”

She heard that in New York.

She remembers a pregnant woman telling her, “I came because my partner is a Black man and I’m carrying a Black male child and that is making me think about racism and my privilege in this country in a whole different way–literally carrying a Black body within my white body and what does that mean to protect this child?”

She remembers participants sufficiently triggered by the Confederate flag they didn’t even want to touch it for its representation of white supremacy and white terrorism.

“I came because my wife made me do it, my wife dragged me to the museum,” Clark remembers hearing. “She’s next in line. And then the next word out of this white man’s mouth was, ‘I guess whoever loses is the bad guy.’ That’s what he said. I was like, ‘okay, now we’re gonna’ have to unpack that.’”

It is the Confederate dishrag of surrender, not the occasional Confederate battle flag, Clark wishes were better known. That is the intention behind Monumental Cloth.

“That was the cloth that was used by (Confederate General Robert E.) Lee to call for surrender and truce at Appomattox and it was half a dish cloth that was pressed into service. It was a white linen cloth with three minimal red stripes on either side because they couldn’t find a pure white cloth, and they used this to signal surrender of the Confederate army,” Clark said. “That’s the cloth we should be focusing on rather than the way that we hold one of the many Confederate battle flags, the one that has been come to known as the Confederate flag, that got used by Confederate armies, but the reason we know it is because of the rise of white terrorism around the KKK and then its infusion into popular culture.”

Clark first saw what is now recognized as the Confederate flag–the “stars and bars”–as a child on “The Dukes of Hazzard.” From 1979 through 1985, the CBS comedy featuring the Confederate battle flag painted on Bo and Luke Duke’s souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, lovingly referred to as “the General Lee,” was one of the top-rated shows on television.

Hazzard, incidentally, was a fictional county in Georgia, how far from Atlanta, who’s to say?

“(It was used passively) really as propaganda,” Clark said. “Like, ‘this flag isn’t so bad; this flag of white terrorism isn’t so bad, right?’”

As Waylon Jennings sang in the theme song, “just some good ‘ole boys, never meanin’ no harm.”

Bo and Luke may have just been “some good ‘ole boys, never meanin’ no harm,” but millions of other Southerners, and non-Southerners, who carried that flag in the 20^th century and continue doing so today, do mean harm.

“(Monumental Cloth) becomes a pushback of that,” Clark said. “What about the flag that is saying the end of white supremacy, the end of slavery, the end of this war? What would that mean if we focus on that?”

Around the ‘A’

Atlanta, in no small measure because of its devastation during the Civil War and the reduction in Southern wealth and then Jim Crow racism which followed, has lagged other American cities its size when it comes to the arts. That’s finally changing in a major way.

The Atlanta arts scene has never been as robust as it is today.

Visitors to town arriving through the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, should make time for “This Land Calls Us Home: Indigenous Relationships with Southeastern Homelands,” an exhibition on view in the gallery space on Concourse T between gates T13 and T14 through fall of 2024.

“This Land Calls Us Home” highlights contemporary Native American artists and designers as they display how ancestral homelands are integral to their present lives through visuals and literature. The works express the visions and voices of Cherokee, Mvskoke, and other Native Americans living within, near, and beyond the Southeastern homelands.

Two presentations celebrating the work of Benny Andrews (b. Plainville, GA; 1930 – 2006) can be seen at Emory University, four miles from The High.

Celebrated international artist Yinka Shonibare, CBE’s (b. 1962, London) 20-foot-tall Wind Sculpture (IV) was unveiled in the Centennial Yards development downtown in the fall of 2023.

Visiting art lovers looking for a place to crash will enjoy Buckhead’s Hotel Colee or Midtown’s The Kimpton Shane. The boutique Hotel Colee partnered with The Print Shop by The FreeMarket Gallery to showcase prints from local female artists in their lobby art gallery. The Kimpton Shane opened its doors in September of 2022 with an art program curated by Atlanta-based art consultant Soho Myriad featuring works from numerous local artists.

The first global art fair to be held in Atlanta was announced this October, with the debut event being held in October of 2024.

Sadly, amongst this energy, the Atlanta arts community lost a giant on November 14, 2023. Radcliffe Bailey was only 55.