Anonymous Was A Woman
The First 25 Years
Grey Art Museum, NYU
April 1 – July 19, 2025
Still from Feints and Sleights, 2017
Stop-frame animation, color, silent, 3:00 min
Courtesy the artist, Richmond
Ram's Delhi, 2012
Wood, mild steel rod, melted plastics, black aluminum foil,
and LED and UV Fluorescent light, 70 x 132 x 17 in.
Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Globe Trotter, 2007
Mixed-media assemblage, 32 1/2 x 18 1/4 x 14 1/8 in.
© Betye Saar
Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
The Grey Art Museum at New York University presents Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years, an exhibition celebrating recipients of the titular grant for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. This ambitious exhibition invites reflection on a quarter century of artistic achievement tied to the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant program, which, since 1996, has supported women artists over the age of 40 with unrestricted awards. Six years in the making, Anonymous Was A Woman is organized by the Grey Art Museum at NYU and guest curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović.
Featuring some 50 artworks by 41 of the 251 award recipients from when the grant was inaugurated in 1996 through 2020, the exhibition showcases a range of media and subjects by artists including Jeanne Silverthorne (AWAW 1996), Laura Aguilar (AWAW 2000), Senga Nengudi (AWAW 2005), Mary Heilmann (AWAW 2006), An-My Lê (AWAW 2006), Carrie Mae Weems (AWAW 2007), Ida Applebroog (AWAW 2009), Jungjin Lee (2011), Janine Antoni (AWAW 2014), and Jennifer Wen Ma (AWAW 2019), among others. With each year represented by at least one artist, the exhibition includes works created within a few years of their grant, demonstrating the significance of the award to the artist’s growth.
“Nancy and I sought to create a visually compelling and intellectually stimulating exhibition that balances work by well-established and lesser-known artists. We also wanted to highlight leaps in production that the grant made possible, both practically—many artists were enabled to try new materials and processes—and conceptually,” Vesela Sretenović says.
All 251 artists are represented in a publication accompanying the exhibition, which also includes critical essays about the awardees by Princenthal, Sretenović, and other women scholars.
Visitors to Anonymous Was A Woman are encounter works that trace the development of contemporary art practice over the last twenty-five years, addressing issues of identity and community; the position of women artists in society; the shifting value of craft; the changing possibilities for installation and time-based media; as well as the many uses of anonymity. Flamethrower, for example, a painting by Carrie Moyer (AWAW 2009) demonstrates the artist’s characteristic high-gloss surfaces and curvaceous, colorful forms, and challenges gendered conventions of abstraction. Rona Pondick (AWAW 2016), also featured in the exhibition, has used her own body to create self-portraits in various materials—such as the colored molded resin of Magenta Swimming in Yellow—that are at once deeply personal and anonymizing. Likewise, Elizabeth King (AWAW 2014) often references her own body when creating precisely moveable, half-scale figurative sculptures and combining them with stop-motion animation, as in Feints and Sleights.
Princenthal explains, “Every single one of the artists who received a grant in our target period is remarkable, and it was an enormous challenge to choose among them. Vesela and I embraced the variety of thematic and formal approaches seen in the awardees’ work, as well as the full range of their regional, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, and the several generations they represent.” For example, Betye Saar’s (AWAW 2004) assemblage, Globe Trotter, depicts a worn vintage doll held captive inside of a small birdcage resting atop a globe—a combination of powerful symbols referencing the history of slavery. Claudia Joskowicz’s (AWAW 2020) Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound, like many of her video and installation works, evokes the transformative effect of violent political events on physical spaces and collective memory.
“I think what is astonishing for all of us,” states Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum since 1997, “is to look over this list of amazing artists and realize the impact they have made on the last twenty-five years of the art scene. As of 2019—when we were first conceiving the show—just 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at major American museums over the past decade were of work by female artists, according to the Burns Halperin Report. We know that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
Last year, Susan Unterberg and AWAW launched the Anonymous Was A Woman Artist Survey in collaboration with journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, arts leader Loring Randolph, and SMU Data Arts. A first-of-its-kind study, the survey aims to gain a better understanding of women artists’ lives and careers, and the factors contributing to their successes and challenges. Findings will be made publicly available on April 9, 2025, as part of “Artists Speak: The Anonymous Was A Woman Symposium,” hosted at NYU. Registration will be available on the AWAW website.
About AWAW
Founded by visionary philanthropist and photographer Susan Unterberg, the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant program has provided annual unrestricted gifts of $25,000 each to ten exceptional artists over the age of 40, enabling them to further push boundaries in their creative fields. In 2024 the number of awardees permanently increased to fifteen and the cash prize doubled to $50,000. “Since I am an artist, I knew firsthand that the needs of mid-career artists were generally overlooked,” says Unterberg, who herself remained anonymous until 2018.
The groundbreaking program, inspired by a line from Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” was established in response to the National Endowment for the Arts’s decision to end funding for individual artists. True to its name, AWAW selects artists via anonymous panels based on recommendations proposed each year by a group of anonymous nominators comprising previous awardees, curators, writers, and other art professionals.
Susan Unterberg says, “Women throughout history—and especially women artists—have often remained anonymous. They didn’t sign their work, and of course, they received very little recognition. AWAW has given me an immense amount of joy—and mostly since I’ve gone public. It’s a way to show my activism and advocate that women shouldn’t remain anonymous any longer.”
Over the years, this grant has been transformative for many artists, offering critical financial support and awarding over $8 million to more than 300 recipients to date. In 2022 AWAW partnered with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) to initiate the Environmental Art Grant, a yearly open call for woman-led art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement with the environment.
For more information on Anonymous Was A Woman, please visit:
Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years
List of Exhibiting Artists
Laura Aguilar
Born 1959, San Gabriel, CA
Died 2018, Long Beach, CA
Award year: 2000
Elia Alba
Born 1962, Brooklyn, NY
Based in the Bronx, NY
Award year: 2019
Janine Antoni
Born 1964, Freeport, Bahamas
Based in in New York City
Award year: 2014
Polly Apfelbaum
Born 1955, Abington Township, PA
Based in New York City
Award year: 1998
Ida Applebroog
Born 1929, the Bronx, NY
Died 2023, New York City
Award year: 2009
Dotty Attie
Born 1938, Pennsauken, NJ
Based in New York City
Award year: 2018
Uta Barth
Born 1958, Berlin, Germany
Based in Los Angeles, CA
Award year: 2012
Janet Biggs
Born 1959, Harrisburg, PA
Based in New York City
Award year: 2004
Chakaia Booker
Born 1953, Newark, NJ
Based in New York City and Allentown, PA
Award year: 2000
Kathy Butterly
Born 1963, Amityville, NY
Based in New York City
Award year: 2002
Anne Chu
Born 1959, New York City
Died 2016, New York City
Award year: 2001
Sonya Clark
Born 1967, Washington, DC
Based in Amherst, MA
Award year: 2016
Petah Coyne
Born 1953, Oklahoma City
Based in New York City
Award year: 2007
Chitra Ganesh
Born 1975, Brooklyn, NY
Based in Brooklyn, NY
Award year: 2020
Sharon Hayes
Born 1970, Baltimore, MD
Based in Philadelphia, PA
Award year: 2013
Mary Heilmann
Born 1940, San Francisco, CA
Based in New York City and
Bridgehampton, NY
Award year: 2006
Claudia Joskowicz
Born 1968, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
Based in New York City and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
Award year: 2020
Nina Katchcadourian
Born 1968, Stanford, CA
Based in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin, Germany
Award year: 2003
Elizabeth King
Born 1950, Ann Arbor, MI
Based in Richmond, VA
Award year: 2014
An-My Lê
Born 1960, Saigon, Vietnam
Based in Brooklyn, NY
Award year: 2006
Jungjin Lee
Born 1961, Seoul, South Korea
Based in New York City
Award year: 2011
Mary Lucier
Born 1944, Bucyrus, OH
Based in New York City and Cochecton, NY
Award year: 1997
Jennifer Wen Ma
Born 1973, Beijing, China
Based in New York City and Beijing, China
Award year: 2019
Suzanne McClelland
Born 1959, Jacksonville, FL
Based in Brooklyn and Orient, NY
Award year: 2010
Carrie Moyer
Born 1960, Detroit, MI
Based in Brooklyn, NY
Award year: 2009
Senga Nengudi
Born 1943, Chicago, IL
Based in Colorado Springs, CO
Award year: 2005
Judy Pfaff
Born 1946, London, UK
Based in Tivoli, NY
Award year: 2012
Rona Pondick
Born 1952, Brooklyn, NY
Based in New York City
Award year: 2016
Christy Rupp
Born 1949, Rochester, NY
Based in New York City and Hudson Valley, NY
Award year: 2008
Betye Saar
Born 1926, Los Angeles, CA
Based in Los Angeles, CA
Award year: 2004
Joyce J. Scott
Born 1948, Baltimore, MD
Based in Baltimore, MD
Award year: 1997
Beverly Semmes
Born 1958, Washington, DC
Based in New York City
Award year: 2014
Jeanne Silverthorne
Born 1950, Philadelphia, PA
Based in New York City
Award year: 1996
Diane Simpson
Born 1935, Joliet, IL
Based in Chicago, IL
Award year: 2019
Valeska Soares
Born 1957, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Based in São Paulo, Brazil
Award year: 2005
Renée Stout
Born 1958, Junction City, KS
Based in Washington, DC
Award year: 1999
Julianne Swartz
Born 1967, Phoenix, AZ
Based in Stone Ridge, NY
Award year: 2015
Marie Watt
Born 1967, Seattle, WA
Based in Portland, OR
Award year: 2006
Carrie Mae Weems
Born 1953, Portland, OR
Based in Syracuse, NY
Award year: 2007
Lynne Yamamoto
Born 1961, Honolulu, HI
Based in Easthampton, MA
Award year: 1996
Carrie Yamaoka
Born 1957, Glen Cove, NY
Based in New York City
Award year: 2017
The First 25 Years
Courtesy Hirmer Verlag and Grey Art Museum, NYU
Publication
Book cover for "Anonymous Was A Woman." The title is written in black capital letters on a white background, with the word, "Woman" slightly faded.Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years is accompanied by a 392-page volume of the same name, which will be released prior to the opening of the exhibition. Co-published by Hirmer Verlag and the Grey Art Museum at New York University, the publication commemorates all 251 recipients of the award from 1996 through 2020, offering a visual and critical account of their work and careers. Featuring new essays by Nancy Princenthal, Vesela Sretenović, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Alexandra Schwartz, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Jenni Sorkin, and Gaby Collins-Fernández, as well as a roundtable discussion with founder Susan Unterberg, the book also unveils previously untold histories, underscoring the lasting influence of these artists. “The book, unlike the exhibition, functions as kind of a mini-history, which is exciting,” shares Gumpert. Available soon at the Grey Art Museum Bookstore, $55 retail, and online.
Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović.
About the Curators
Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Hannah Wilke (2010) and Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019), and co-author of Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art (2024). Princenthal has taught at Bard, Princeton, Yale, the School of Visual Arts, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.
Vesela Sretenović is an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art with a special interest in cross-disciplinary art practices and in bridging theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience. From 2009–23 she served as Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. She is currently working as an independent curator and educator.
Grey Art Museum, New York University
18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003
