150 Years of Championing Women Artists

Dr. Anna O. Marley will introduce PAFA’s audiences to the networks of over 50 talented women artists working professionally in the American art world from PAFA’s founding in 1805 to the end of the World War II—and offers up a sneak peek of a related exhibition opening at PAFA in 2021.

At the turn of the 20th century, the famed Gilded Age American painter and teacher William Merritt Chase exclaimed, “Genius has no sex” in reference to his talented women students, and his near-contemporary Cecilia Beaux, the first female full-time professor of painting at PAFA (and in the United States), expressed the hope that the hour was near “when the term ‘Women in Art’ will be as strange-sounding a topic as ‘Men in Art’ would be now.”

While these two quotes reveal much about the exciting developments of the professional ambitions and accomplishment of women artists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Beaux’s quote, and indeed her very artistic reputation—nowhere near as well know as her contemporary and rival Mary Cassatt—reveal how far scholarship has yet to advance in the study of American women artists.