Introduction
Hello everyone and welcome to Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco without Men. My name is Katy Hessel. I am an art historian from London, and I’ve made it my mission in life to celebrate the work of women artists.
You may know me from my Instagram and podcast called The Great Women Artists, or my book: The Story of Art Without Men. Now, I want to tackle the gender imbalance in our museums by highlighting some of the best works by women and gender non-conforming artists in permanent collections worldwide.
This is an audio guide featuring collection works at the Legion of Honor and de Young museums. Today, we’ll explore expansive abstract landscapes, immersive sculptural worlds, costume drawings, textiles, art that fights for political and social justice, and a whole lot more. Let’s get going!
Ruth Asawa, multiple works, de Young museum
Ruth Asawa is somewhat of a legend in San Francisco. Her sculptures, often made collaboratively with local communities, populate street corners, parks and schools. But the de Young museum is where you’ll find the largest collection of her sculptures in the world.
Just look at those wired cells cocooning smaller ones, or those radiating out like fireworks frozen in time! Ruth Asawa was an artist who pushed the boundaries of what sculpture could be, but she was also a great educator. Born in 1926, she was subjected to heightened racism after the US government targeted Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Along with her family, she was forcibly removed from their home and sent to a concentration camp.
Against the backdrop of the abhorrent conditions of the camps, those who were incarcerated came together to support each other. Adults used their skills to teach the next generation. And this included professional artists, such as the Disney animator Tom Okamoto, who helped instill a love of art in the young Ruth Asawa. You can see where that love of the line came from — it’s almost like her sculptures are a continuous line, in all shapes and sizes.
Ruth Asawa went on to train at Black Mountain College, a progressive school which emphasized “learning through doing,” making things with your hands, and saw the likes of math, science, art, and dancing all on an equal level.
But it was a trip to Mexico in the late 1940s that really helped Asawa develop her style. Moving to San Francisco in 1949, she set up her studio, and in the ensuing years would loop sculptures at her kitchen table with her six children.
Standing among Ruth Asawa’s artwork here at the de Young is like being in a subterranean universe. I feel enraptured by the sculptures and their shadows. And standing on the threshold between the two makes me feel like I am also part of the installation.
Asawa’s sculptures look like coral, trees, or a macro view of the cells that live inside our bodies. They shift between hard and soft, strong and vulnerable, as they expand and contract, changing their appearance the more you look at them.
This permanent installation at the de Young has been on view since 2005 and was installed under the supervision of Ruth Asawa herself. It’s free to the public, in line with her vision for art for all in this city. Asawa founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in 1968, which enabled children of all backgrounds to make art from accessible materials. In 1982, she founded the first public arts school in the city, which was renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010. And today, Asawa’s teaching philosophies continue to inform the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s free-of-charge school and family programs.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell, 1791
The year is 1791. France is in the throes of the Revolution, and the future of the country is in turmoil. This painting is of a mythological story, but it speaks to the political moment much more than we might at first think. Let’s take a closer look.
On the far right we have Psyche, in a white dress, embracing her mother for the very last time. Their emotions are illustrated by both the stormy sky behind and the crystal-like tears that fall from their eyes. Also in a state of suffering is Psyche’s father, dressed in red on the far left, with his head buried in his hand, while her sisters comfort each other. The figure praying is the oracle of Delphi.
Here’s Emily Beeny, Chief Curator of the Legion of Honor and Barbara Wolf Curator in Charge of European Art, to explain the story.
The story of Cupid and Psyche begins as a tragedy and ends as a comedy. Psyche is the daughter of a king and her father receives a prophecy from the Delphic oracle saying that his daughter will marry a creature of immeasurable destructive power. So in order to save the kingdom from the predations of her anticipated bridegroom, Psyche’s family decides to abandon her on a rock overlooking the sea. And so the moment depicted in Benoist’s painting is that moment of parting, when Psyche’s parents are about to leave her behind to be claimed by her monstrous bridegroom.
Of course, the creature of immeasurable destructive power invoked by the sibyl, was actually Cupid, god of love, who ends up as the spouse of Psyche and the happy ending of the story. And it is that later portion of the story that’s usually represented by artists in the period — the love story bit with the two lovely nudes as opposed to this turbulent, tragic moment of, sort of, wrenching family drama that Benoist has selected.
What makes Benoist’s version interesting — and different to most — is that Cupid is not present, and we see the story from Psyche’s perspective. Benoist makes us feel the agony Psyche experienced leaving her family, and we empathize with the sacrifice she has to make.
Benoist was 23 years old when she made and exhibited this painting in 1791. That year marked the first time the biannual Salon in Paris was open to those who weren’t members of the Royal Academy. And this opened the door for more women to submit and exhibit their work.
Bisa Butler, All Power To The People, 2023
This giant 3-meter-high tapestry of a man in a flamboyant suit combines African American quilting traditions with contemporary designer labels. His gaze meets ours with poise and nobility.
Bisa Butler’s work starts with an image. Earlier on in her career, it was portraits of people she knew, but recently it’s been images of Black sitters she found in the National Archives. She’s drawn to those who dressed up for staged portraits, women with exuberant dresses or men with sharp suits. But, when she looked at how they’d been described — billed with labels such as “washerwoman,” as opposed to their name or other roles in life — she wanted to repurpose their images with a whole range of personalities.
Through her work, Butler honors and reconfigures the people in these pictures. She elevates them through dazzling colors in giant textile works that give them new life. In All Power To The People, we meet a local man who lived in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s. He was photographed by Leon Borensztein — an instructor from the San Francisco Art Institute known for taking pictures of people in the community.
Let’s now think about the multiple layers of lenses. An image taken through the lens of Borensztein, re-interpreted and responded to by Butler, who imagines the character through vivid textiles, beads, and more. She now invites us to add our interpretation, and for this person to enter our lives. What’s so powerful about Butler’s work is that even if we don’t have the name of this sitter, she keeps their image alive; as if to say, this person matters.
Let’s take a closer look at the details: the dignified gaze; the colors that make up his face in a painterly effect, an afro of glistening stitched beads. My eye is then drawn to his grip. Firm hands show him as in control of his image. And although the background doesn’t situate him in any specific place or time, I love how it vibrates and pulsates, keeping his image in motion.
To my mind, Butler’s works are just as much a portrait as they are a study in fiber, a medium that the artist has said everyone shares and understands. Think about what you’re wearing right now; how does that piece of clothing sit and feel on your body? Sewing has been in Butler’s DNA forever – and she comes from a lineage of women who made their own clothes.
This work came into the de Young museum collection in an unusual way. When Laura Camerlengo, curator in charge of costume and textile arts, expressed her desire to acquire the textile for the Museums’ collection, dozens of (mainly) women and Bay Area artists stepped forward to help. These benefactors included members of the Textile Arts Council, the support group of the Museums’ textile arts department. I love that it is of a figure from the San Francisco community, funded by the San Francisco community.
Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing (La Toilette), 1890–91
I find this scene of a woman bathing full of intimacy. But also privacy, as if we’ve just stumbled into her space, unsure of whether we should be here or not. The woman’s long, smooth, nude back is turned towards us, while her bottom half is covered in striped cloth — a dress undone, with sleeves dangling by her sides…
Her face is concealed — both to us and in her reflection in the mirror — bringing an air of mystery as we catch her in action, dipping her hands into the cerulean water, about to splash her face, and look up…
This is Mary Cassatt’s Woman Bathing (La Toilette) from 1890–91. To me, Cassatt is most notable for her charming paintings of mothers and children, swept up in a loose, feathery style evocative of her Impressionist contemporaries. Here, however, is an example of one of her aquatints — a printmaking method reminiscent of watercolor-like effects.
Aquatints were especially popular in Japan. A year prior to making this work, Cassatt saw an exhibition of more than 700 Japanese prints in Paris. These became popular thanks to new trade links between Japan and the West in the mid-1800s, which hadn’t existed for centuries, owing to Japanese isolationism, which was a response to unfair Western trade practices. The Impressionists were especially influenced by the prints, and would draw from their cropped compositions, flat shapes, and skill with color.
Cassatt herself was a collector of Japanese prints. Looking closely at this work, we can see where she’s drawn inspiration from them. The flat-shaped jug in the foreground, the floral-patterned floor that’s tilted and slightly off-perspective, and the block colors — the dusty pink on the dress, turquoise background, and diluted umber on the cupboard.
Mary Cassatt was born in the US in 1844 to a supportive family who took her on trips to France and encouraged her art making. She arrived in Paris in 1866, and exhibited at four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. These were organized outside of the French Royal Academy and paved the way for a new style of art.
While many male Impressionists painted landscapes or other outdoor subjects, setting up their studios outside (thanks to recent inventions like the paint tube), women were restricted. They often painted indoor scenes featuring other women, capturing the essence of what it was like to be a woman in the 19th century. And it’s this that we see in this work.
Woman Bathing (La Toilette) earned Cassatt widespread acclaim. So much so that in 1976, it set the record for the highest price paid at auction for a print by an American artist, regardless of gender.
Elizabeth Catlett, Stepping Out, 2000
Elizabeth Catlett was a trailblazer. Born in Washington, DC, in 1915, she spent her childhood hearing stories of enslavement and resistance told to her by her grandmother. Fueled by her history and heritage, Catlett dedicated seven decades to a career that saw her sculpt, draw, and print dignified and uplifting portraits of African American people. The sculpture Stepping Out from the year 2000 is one such example.
Let’s go back to Catlett’s beginnings. A student of Howard University, a historically Black research university in Washington, DC, in the 1930s, Catlett was taught by Lois Mailou Jones, a key painter and figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Later, she would study with the American Realist Grant Wood, and it was he who encouraged her to make art about what she knew best: her own story.
Catlett made prints of sharecroppers, mother and child sculptures, and drawings of men and women to inspire people at a time of political and social unrest. Through her art, she advocated for social change with key political messaging.
She based herself in the US, but due to growing suspicions of Communist leanings, in the 1940s, Catlett relocated to Mexico City. She joined the radical printmaking collective the Taller de Gráfica Popular and remained in Mexico for the rest of her life.
Stepping Out is a near life-size sculpture of a woman and was completed towards the end of her career. Positioned with one foot forward, as if moving — or perhaps “stepping out” — into the future, she wears a formfitting dress and low heeled shoes on her feet, as if to show and own her femininity.
When I first saw this work at the de Young, I looked around me at the other works displayed here. In the modern and contemporary art gallery, we see paintings of workers, stories exploring American Realism and urbanization, and the tensions between city and rural life. Many of these artists in the space grew up at a similar time to Catlett, but I love how the curators made Stepping Out the room’s focal point — as if punctuating it with the voice and image of a woman going about her day with poise and elegance.
So many of our museums are populated with sculptures of Grecian-style women — such as the nude or seminude Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex. But here, Catlett shows us a new icon: the everyday woman, an icon for a more hopeful, and more real, liberated world.
Just as Catlett wrote of her art: “It must answer a question, or wake somebody up, or give a shove in the right direction — our liberation.”
Camille Claudel, Rêve au coin du feu (Dreaming by the Fireside), 1899
This sculpture may be smaller than most of the statues and portrait busts in the Legion of Honor’s galleries, but to me, it’s just as powerful.
This sculpture was made by Claudel in 1899, at the cusp of a new century. Its title translates to “dreaming by the fireside.” And it’s an introspective work, what Claudel called “sketches from nature” of a woman resting by a fire, engaged in an intimate — almost dreamlike — act, free from the burdens of the outside world, and on her own terms.
Claudel was often inspired by what she called the “small incidents of life.” She was known to walk through the streets and promenades of Paris, catching moments that would spark endless ideas for future compositions.
She was born in 1864 and was one of the first women to complete her training at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Claudel, famously, worked as a studio assistant for Auguste Rodin, and the pair had a passionate love affair. Both used each other as their subjects and muses — immortalizing their love in sensual compositions, intertwined and dancing, but also in subjects that reflected their complicated relationship, from loss to abandonment.
Despite her influence on him, critics continued to position her as his follower — and, to a degree, they still do to this day, with his name towering over hers. Her frustration at this injustice led to her distancing herself from him, and taking her work in a new direction. But following this departure, Rodin and his community largely cut her off, cementing her outcast status in a tight-knit art world.
The piece you’re looking at now was made on both practical and commercial grounds and reflects Claudel’s financial struggles. Like many of her pieces, this work was reproduced numerous times, in this case, 65. Due to its small scale, it could double as a nightlight. Looking closely, you can see the thinness of the marble — when lit from behind, the logs illuminate.
Only a matter of years later, in 1913, Claudel entered an asylum, where she remained until her death in 1943. Although her brother staged a posthumous exhibition of her work eight years after her death, it was derided and dismissed. Her work was not taken seriously again until after the feminist era of the 1970s, and much of it is only coming to light now.
Leonor Fini, Le Rêve de Léonor (The Dream of Leonor), 1949
This is a double-sided drawing by the great Surrealist Leonor Fini. It is a study for a costume design for two characters in the ballet Le Rêve de Léonor, translating to “the dream of Leonor.”
The ballet premiered at London’s Royal Opera House in 1949. It was inspired by a dream Fini had and was a highly imaginative production.
Set to music by Benjamin Britten, with choreography by Sir Frederick Ashton — who was known for Cinderella and Fini’s favorite, the Tales of Beatrix Potter — the ballet follows the story of a young bald girl who chases a beautiful blond wig.
Set in a nocturnal landscape, with monsters and dragons, the story goes that the bald girl chasing the wig was captured by “voluptuous and mocking figures covered with long hair.” I wonder if this could be the character on the left…
Sent by a pomegranate to the Underworld, where she is tempted by gluttony in the form of King Nougat and his whipped creams, the girl dreams she has become a white owl and plays with beautiful feathered beings. Then dawn arrives and she awakes…
Leonor Fini had a penchant for the fantastical. Born in Argentina in 1907, as a child she fled to Italy with her mother to escape her domineering Catholic father. After suffering from conjunctivitis, she had her eyes bandaged for months. According to her, this let her look deep inside her imagination.
Exposed to books and Renaissance art, she taught herself to paint, and landed in Paris in the 1920s, where she mixed with the Surrealists. She has been described by art historian Whitney Chadwick as “tall and striking, with jet-black hair and piercing eyes … possessing a strange combination of feline grace.” Qualities, which I think, are evident in these characters.
The purpose for this study is one of function: to show the dancers how they can embody the personality of their characters. On the front side, we see figures dancing en pointe, and on the reverse we see the story play out: the bald girl chasing that beautiful blond wig…
Dance and theater is steeped in the history of the Legion of Honor. When the museum was established in 1924, cofounder Alma Spreckles — a huge fan of music and ballet — began a collection focusing on drawings of costumes and set designs, which the museum continues to pursue. This history is something to keep in mind when looking around the museum.
Functional and full of imagination, for me, this drawing captures the spirit of Fini, an artist who spanned artforms, defied genres, and was constantly pushing the boundaries of art — translating the worlds that exist deep in our head!
Helen Frankenthaler, Crusades, 1976
Helen Frankenthaler once described the act of painting as having “the landscape in my arms [when] I painted it.” I like to think this is what we see in Crusades, a giant orange abyss that immerses you from the top to the bottom. Oranges are interspersed with greens, and the reds subtly and silently sail throughout the canvas.
Frankenthaler gives us an education in looking. She tests our vision and the shapes and forms that we might be witnessing. As I stand in front of this work, I ask myself: Am I looking at something from afar . . . or at the minutiae of something up close . . . and, from what angle?
I like to look at this painting as though I have my back to the floor, looking up to the sky on a blazing hot day in California. My eyes sore from aftervision — when you’ve been looking at sunlight for too long and everything is tainted with that glowing orange color. That red mark on the lower right-hand side is just about visible, as if subbing in for a plane cruising through the sky, leaving behind a glimmer of its contrails.
Or, flip it, and it’s as if I am on that plane, looking down onto a desert flooded with dry arid colors. It’s known that she made this work after a visit to Arizona.
Helen Frankenthaler was born in 1928 and raised in New York City. She was taught by the great Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo and, in the early 1950s, joined the Abstract Expressionists in Downtown Manhattan. It’s a style known for both heavy, action-like brushstrokes and calming fields of color, and Frankenthaler carved out her own language. She called this her “soak-stain” technique. She removed the canvas from the easel and placed it on the floor, thinned down oil paint, and poured and brushed it onto raw canvas, creating surfaces flooded with spontaneous, multilayered shapes and forms.
As Frankenthaler stated, “What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is — did I make a beautiful picture?” Frakenthaler’s works are an invitation to see what we want in them, immerse ourselves in color, and feel transported to wherever they might take us.
Tamara de Lempicka, Étude pour une jeune fille dessinant (study for Young Girl Drawing), 1932
Nicknamed the Baroness with the Brush, Lempicka was famed for her jazz-age style that fused the meticulousness of the Renaissance with the hard-edges of Art Deco.
Her figures are often tightly cropped within the four corners of the frame, and I find they have a metallic quality to them — or perhaps a magic magnetism — drawing you in with their sharp gazes and angular cheekbones.
Born in Poland at the end of the 19th century, Lempicka was raised in Russia, but escaped at the outbreak of the revolution. From there, she settled in Paris, the center of the avant-garde, where she thrived. She painted celebrated characters in the highest fashions of the day and embraced sexual liberation.
She epitomized the modern woman and was apparently known to break for only “baths and champagne.” This was, of course, in her modernist apartment-slash-studio, designed by her equally successful sister, Adrienne Górska.
Here we meet her in 1932, through an intimate study of her daughter, Kizette. With a typical ’30s hairdo, Kizette clutches a sketchbook and looks out, slightly ominously, into the distance. She appears on the CUSP of adulthood; although her face is mature, her collar and polka-dot dress give away her youthful age. Lempicka was only in her teens when she had Kizette, and often told people they were sisters. Although their relationship was close, it came with complications.
Hailed for her exuberantly colored portraits, Lempicka is to my mind just as important a draftsperson as she is a painter. And it’s through this exquisite drawing, rendered in black chalk, that we see these skills executed in her distinctive Art Deco aesthetic.
It’s also historically important to note that this is the first work by Lempicka to have ever been actively purchased by a North American museum. All other works in museums were either given or bequeathed. The Legion of Honor is also the first museum in the US to stage a solo exhibition by Lempicka, in 2024.
Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral’s Presence I, 1959–1962
“It’s not the medium that counts. It is what you see in it and what you do with it,” said Louise Nevelson. She was one of the most inventive sculptors working in the mid-20th century, and is hailed for her monochromatic, architectural wall sculptures, amassed from recycled objects and painted black, gold, or white.
Sky Cathedral’s Presence I, made from 1959 to 1962, is one of her more monumental works. Let’s take a look.
While at first you might see painted boxes stacked on top of each other, get up close and you’ll find much more.
On the right-hand side, we see bits of banisters framed in a box, or a circle that creates harmony against the broken planks of wood underneath it. You question whether you are looking at a fruit basket, a bedside table, or a filing cabinet that held important documents. By showing them as defunct, Nevelson gets you to think about the past lives of these objects, and beyond that, how they were made from wood that was once a tree. Nevelson’s Ukrainian Jewish family worked as woodcutters before emigrating to the US at the turn of the 20th century.
Now try standing back, and look around you. Perhaps there’s a monochromatic painting by Robert Motherwell, or another work of abstracted shapes. Suddenly, to me, these paintings appear different. By looking closely at Nevelson’s sculpture, she gets us to look beyond these abstracted marks and to the historical context in which they were made; the emotion that was bound up in them, and the empty void that artists of the post–World War II era had to fill — to comprehend a broken world that was in need of rebuilding.
Let’s think about the title: Sky Cathedral. When Nevelson was making this work, the city of New York was being built up around her with skyscrapers that soared upwards towards the clouds. This work gives the feeling of infinite building blocks, but the idea that it’s a cathedral also makes me think about what it could represent: respite and reprieve in a time of devastation and darkness.
By amassing her work from scraps found on the street, Nevelson shows us how we can physically reformulate detritus and turn it into something new. A reminder of the possibilities of making new dialogues, forming new communities, and finding beauty in something that has been thrown away.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, I Live in a Black Marble Palace with Black Panthers and White Doves #8, ca. 1990
I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the energy and dynamism of this painting. Made up of thick impasto, with layers upon layers of reds, yellows, greens, and blues, blazing across the canvas, this work is an explosion of paint. Filled with images that morph in and out of abstraction — like the two red panthers in the foreground — it’s almost as though we are watching a scene play out that can’t quite be distilled. It’s full of motion; it layers both paint and stories.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal is a beloved Bay Area artist who taught at Berkeley for many years. Born in 1942 in Jackson, Mississippi, she was the daughter of a music director at the University of Arkansas and Tougaloo College, something that connects to the content of this painting. Because “I live in a black marble palace with black panthers and white doves” is a line from the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, sung by King Balthazar, representing Africa. This was a production which her father staged every year and that Lovelace O’Neal starred in.
Painted in 1990, the artwork was also made in reaction to a trip she took to Morocco, a place she has described as “the biblical presence of North Africa.” Looking at it now, you get a sense of the heat and atmosphere of a place that clearly had such an effect on her.
A loaded and politically charged symbol, the panthers speeding through the canvas could allude to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, founded nearby in Oakland, California.
I love reading this work like an altarpiece, in three sections, with the lighter yellow panel in the center differentiating itself from the others. Architectural in style, to me it feels like we’re walking into the Black Marble Palace.
Thank yous
Thank you so much for listening to Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco without Men, written and presented by me, Katy Hessel.
And thank you to everyone who helped make this possible . . .
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco curators
Emma Acker
Emily Beeny
Tim Burgard
Laura Camerlengo
Jeffrey Fraiman
Isabella Holland
Isabella Lores-Chavez
Sarah Mackay
Hillary Olcott
Lauren Palmor
Furio Rinaldi
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco production team
Patricia Buffa
Abram Jackson
Magnolia Molcan
Lexi Paulson
Sheila Pressley
Antonia Smith
Audio production and editing
Nada Smiljanic
