Elise Asher’s (1912–2004) paintings of the 1950s and 1960s blend calligraphic handwriting with color and brushwork. The personal style of these linear abstractions was Asher’s unique contribution to the Abstract Expressionism movement. In addition to her visual oeuvre, Asher also published three volumes of poetry in 1955, 1994, and 2000. 

Asher’s calligraphic paintings are suggestive, rather than literal and legible. However, Asher did cite from a variety of sources, including her own poetry, that of her husband, Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, and Yeats, Keats, and Blake. The words blend into atmospheric clouds of brushwork. Critic Brian O’Doherty, reviewing a 1964 exhibition, wrote of her paintings: “In a Rimbaud type of association of color and symbol, words flick in and out of recognition, briefly suggesting a thought or image.” Asher described her artistic pursuit as a search for a condition of “otherness” and “a concrete universe of my own, a mythic land of my own making.” 

Lauren dela Roche (b. 1983) is a self-taught artist living in St Louis, MO. Nude female figures are the central subjects of her work. The female body is elongated and duplicated across her surfaces. They are set in decorative interiors that reference classical Greek mythology, domesticity, and dreamworlds. 

Dela Roche is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2018). She was selected for the Jerome Emerging Artists Fellowship at the Jerome Foundation in Minneapolis, MN (2012–13) and the Bed Stuy Art Residency in Brooklyn, NY (2021). Dela Roche’s work is found in the collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, and the Jasper Hotel in Fargo, ND.

Susan Fortgang is an artist whose work reflects her early experiences with craft practices, including weaving, sewing, knitting, crochet, embroidery, needlepoint, macrame, and bargello. These techniques were learned from the women in her family and would eventually be incorporated into her painting practice.

In the late 1950s, Fortgang attended Queens College and the Yale School of Art, where she was influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and studied with artists such as Louis Finkelstein, Al Held, Jack Tworkov, Bernard Chaet, Elias Friedensohn, and John Ferren. Fortgang's work of the 1960s is defined by broad gestures and attention to the physical qualities of paint. She used oil paint to build up surfaces and evoke an intensity of movement across the canvas.

In the early 1970s, Fortgang gave up oil paint for acrylic paint. Acrylic's unique quality of drying in layers changed the artist's process entirely—rejecting “performance based” art and the drips and gestural activity of action painting, Fortgang became fascinated with her own system of applying horizontal and vertical bands to the canvas. She attributes this style to her early involvement in knitting, crocheting, and bargello, all of which depended on "specific choices and logical conclusions."

Born in 1941 in New York, Pat Lipsky became associated with the Lyrical Abstraction movement in the late 1960s and ‘70s. The artist moved beyond that style over the course of her career, exploring color field painting and venturing into what Clement Greenberg—the legendary critic and her longtime friend—described as “close-value color.” Throughout her five-decade practice, Lipsky has remained dedicated to the primacy of color and abstraction to the medium of painting. 

After receiving a BFA from Cornell University in 1963, Lipsky earned an MFA from Hunter College (1968) where she studied with canonical artist Tony Smith. Lipsky spent the summer of 1969 only ten minutes down the road from the home of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in East Hampton, where she met Krasner. A formative moment, it was during this period that Lipsky conceived her first “wave” paintings. Soaking raw canvas with water, the artist then applied paint by “dancing and playing” (in her words). Drips, splatters, and smears define this early body of work, in which the gesture is paramount. The edges of each canvas in particular pay homage to Pollock’s drip paintings. These vibrant, sinuous paintings are imbued with the energy with which they were made.

In the summer of 1948 Pat Passlof (1928–2011) studied painting with Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College, and continued to study with him privately after they returned to New York. That fall, de Kooning introduced her to Milton Resnick. She and Resnick began to live together in the mid-1950s and married in 1962.

Passlof’s early work was influenced by de Kooning and utilized the kinds of biomorphic forms explored also by de Kooning and Gorky; as well as the existentialist ideology which informed Abstract Expressionism. However, Passlof was always very individualistic and her work was constantly varied in terms of touch, form, and palette. She was never content to repeat herself.

By the 1960s her palette was beginning to lighten. She used repeated patterns and marks across the canvas to create dynamic rhythms. She drew upon experiences and memories, as noted by titles referring to people and places. However, she never believed in narrative in painting, even when, in later years, her work became populated by centaurs, nymphs, and horses. 

Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is widely known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement and a leading force in American post-World War II art. Following her formal training at the University of Iowa, she moved to New York and integrated into the New York School. Recognized for her colorful and sensuous abstractions of this period, Schapiro showed regularly at André Emmerich Gallery, where in 1958, she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition. Despite considerable success, she felt an outsider to the male-dominated Abstract Expressionism scene and her work of this period explores themes of feminine interiority. 

In 1972, Schapiro came to CalArts where, along with Judy Chicago, she formed the Feminist Art Program, a radical curriculum for women art students. The program’s first class produced the landmark exhibition, Womanhouse, an installation and performance space that gained international attention and remains a landmark for feminist art. Upon returning to her studio practice, Schapiro incorporated collage into her formal compositions using gendered materials to create her signature femmages. Continuing in this vein, Schapiro became a founder of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the mid-1970s.

Thomas Sills (1914–2000) was born and raised in Castalia, North Carolina. He began painting in 1952, inspired by his wife Jeanne Reynal’s work, and her collection of abstract art. He did not have formal training as an artist, but through Reynal he met a wide range of artists: from Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst to Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Sills’s earliest paintings were experimental: he used a variety of tools to apply paint, along with a variety of materials on the surface. He also used an automatist approach. By the late 1950s, he began working with an idea of equivalence between figure and ground, so that each form is both the positive and the negative of the form next to it. He also frequently used a balance of two main colors in each painting. Often the compositions form radiating, optical sensations.

Throughout the last six decades, Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946) has created daring and dynamic works of abstraction imbued with her formal and social justice concerns. A founding member of the iconic feminist collective Heresies, Yankowitz since the 1960s has worked across and beyond traditional art forms. Whether taking radical approaches to painting or mounting ambitious multimedia installations, Yankowitz has probed the material, political, and even sonic nature of abstract art. 

In the 1970s, Yankowitz’s works were exhibited and reviewed alongside contemporaries such as the late Sam Gilliam. Like Gilliam, Yankowitz expanded on Abstract Expressionism, pushing the movement to encompass dramatically new forms and modes of presentation. Yet Yankowitz also introduced principles from the Feminist Art Movement into her practice. Leaving behind painting’s drum-taut support, her Draped Paintings are unstretched canvases sprayed with mists of acrylic paint and hung in loose folds that cascade vertically down or horizontally across the wall. By eschewing the historical precedent of wood stretcher bars, these adaptable paintings assume various forms and identities each time they are installed. The artist created Dilated Grain Readings and Dilated Paint Readings by squeezing paint from plastic bottles onto unstretched raw linen – the markings read like color notation sound scores. She incorporated sewing, pleating, and other handicraft techniques maligned as feminine into her painterly process—challenging the notion of “women’s work.”