Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art – New York, NY

Join us for an evening of conversation celebrating the release of Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art. Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors, Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott, explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the work of pioneering women artists. Tracing these influences over time, Mothers of Invention underscores the enormous impact of feminist ideas on the work of contemporary artists of all genders.

RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required. The program will begin at 6:30 PM.

ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to info@nationalacademy.org.

About the Speakers

Eleanor Heartney is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress. Recent publications include: Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019).

Helaine Posner is Chief Curator Emerita at the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY, Purchase College, New York. She is the author of monographs on the artists Kiki Smith, Louise Fishman, and, most recently, Donna Dennis: A Poet in Three Dimensions (2023).

Nancy Princenthal is a writer whose most recent book Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019) was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times. She is also the author of Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (2015), which won a PEN America award for biography.

Sue Scott is an independent curator and writer. She was Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art from 1989 to 2008 and founder and director of Sue Scott Gallery in New York City.

All four writers are co-authors of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (2013).