The Women to Watch exhibition series is a collaboration between the museum and the national and international committees that increases the visibility of emerging and underrepresented artists from each committees’ respective region.
Since the first exhibition of the series in 2008, the Women to Watch program has increased the visibility of and critical response to promising women artists who are deserving of national and international attention.
In addition, the program is aimed at involving high quality art professionals, with diverse areas of expertise, in the committees’ activities. All active committees are invited to participate in this program. Women to Watch provides an excellent opportunity to highlight the range and vibrancy of women artists working throughout the country, and the world at large, and bring them more visibility at NMWA. Each exhibition focuses on a specific medium and/or theme chosen by the museum’s curators.
Members of each committee work with NMWA staff to locate a contemporary art curator in their region to identify artists who are working in the medium or theme designated for each exhibition. The curator then creates a shortlist of artists, and NMWA’s curators select from the shortlist the artist whose work will be featured in the exhibition at the museum.
New Worlds:
Women to Watch 2024
-
Kat Mustatea is a playwright, technologist, and imagination engine whose tech-native storytelling stretches theater into the digital age. She has written plays in which people turn into lizards, a woman has a sexual relationship with a swan, and a one-eyed cyclops tries to fit into Manhattan society by getting a second eye surgically implanted in his head. Her TED talk originates a wholly new thesis about the meaning of machines making art as society shifts radically toward autonomous, algorithmic systems. She speaks frequently about the intersection of cutting edge technology and art (most recently at SXSW, The Pompidou Center in Paris, and Creative Tech Week in NYC), and is writing a book about art in the age of autonomous machines. She studied philosophy at Columbia University and fine art at Pratt Institute, worked as a software engineer and product manager, and founded a theater company in Berlin. Over the last decade, she has developed cross-disciplinary works for the stage that combine music, dance, and highly emotional theater. Her plays have been performed in New York, Chicago, Berlin, and Oslo. Her essays appear in Forbes, The Week, and Hyperallergic. https://www.newinc.org/year-6-members/kat-mustatea
-
Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Amanda studied neuroscience at Columbia and worked at an Alzheimer’s research lab before becoming a full-time artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her explorations of feminism, science, and community have reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, highway tunnels, and subway corridors, as well as on the mainstage of two TED conferences. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, and on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2020-2021, she was artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights and her work has been acquired into the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum & the Library of Congress.
Official Site
-
Eternity
2021-present
ceramic
installation - dimensions variableAt first thought, anything becoming “extinct” sounds like an undesirable outcome - the magnitude of something ceasing to exist, for all eternity, is overwhelming. However, the approach I have taken is to consider the genesis and extinction of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses, as part of the life cycle of this planet, with inevitable change over time. My work references an interest in the artificial differentiation of humans and other life forms. In this case and at this time, there is much to be said about humans and the impact of their life on the planet. We are, unequivocally, the dominant species, for now. But this has not always been the case, and therefore it is reasonable to consider future circumstances in which we must face our own, inevitable, demise. Humans are directly implicated in both the accidental and deliberate extinction of other species on this planet. We are not the only life form to have this ability. Historically, there is a theory that centers gas from certain bacteria as a source of one mass extinction of 90% of creatures on this planet prior to the arrival of humans around 250 million years ago. I have created these ceramic works drawing on vast and varied types of life forms. My works are fragments only, impressions of things of which I will never have first-hand experience. We have limited material remains, fragments upon which construct imaginary impressions about things we have not seen, smelt, tasted, touched or heard. My work is not intended to be literal replications of specimens, but deliberated abstracted forms, each with a point to make about how we can think about the concept of extinction.
Official Site
-
The immigrant home rests precariously in that space between memories of a mythical past and the chimeric dreams of possible futures. Raised by immigrant Iranian parents in America, the artist Negar Ahkami's sensibilities have been colored by this vivid, cacophonous space inbetween. Her artistic response is at once embracing and angry, celebratory and sardonically derisive, humorous and touchingly painful. -I embrace the fantastical sensibility of orientalist art to create psychological spaces that grapple with my own nostalgia and sense of loss for Iran. Yet, in many works, I subvert the exoticism of orientalism by emphasizing humanity and interconnectedness. My reference to Iranian consumerist fetishes for the West challenges the one-way gaze of orientalism, and suggests thatexotic escapism occurs in both directions.
