BY EMILY RABKIN

Picasso, Matisse, Magrite, Pollack…blah blah blah. Do you ever get the feeling that every artist your art teacher has ever mentioned was a dude? Not to say that all those guys aren’t amazing, but what about the ladies who are shaking things up in contemporary art? Here’s a list of some of the most groundbreaking women artists making work right this instant.

Inka Essenhigh (1969-)
In an visual era obsessed with digital imagery and manipulation, Inka Essenhigh is deeply committed to the craft of painting. Though she works with age-old techniques, her images are strange amorphous creatures that are anything but antique. Somehow Essenhigh’s paintings draw visual references from Disney cartoons, anime, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and computer graphics. Essenhigh studied at the Columbus College of Art & Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her first big foray into the art scene was with her huge perfectly-smooth abstract enamel paintings. Now Essenhigh has pushed both her subject matter to surreal narratives and her medium of choice to oils so as to better experiment with texture.
(www.inka-essenhigh.com)

Lee Bontecou (1931-)
Lee Bontecou’s brilliantly powerful sculptures first became known to the world in the 1960s. Her three-dimensional canvases of stitched together found metal and burlap, her metalwork, and her delicate, yet menacing architectural models made her one of the most talked about artists of the time. Her sculptures were beautiful and disturbed, and seemed to comment on urban-decay, militarism, and the fear of modern society. Yet, for the last two decades, Bontecou has resisted largely showing her work. In 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago held the first major exhibition of her work since 1972. Since that exhibition, Bontecou’s more recent work has become once again some of the most championed contemporary sculptural work in the art world.
(www.leebontecou.com)

Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001)
In spite of her far too early death, Margaret Kilgallen’s body of work stands as some of the most accomplished and original work in contemporary art. Kilgallen studied studio arts and printmaking at Colorado College and Stanford, though her influences seem to have been largely outside of the academic setting. Margaret worked for a number of years restoring old books, which got her interested in antique typeface and printing techniques. This, she credited as the reason for her predilection for flat forms and muted color pallets. Kilgallen was greatly influenced by folk art, hobo train art, cartoons, and murals. Her art engaged naïve or practical street imagery like barbershop signs, hand-painted advertisements, and graffiti. Her installations and murals were populated with hobos, awkward women, surfers, and carnival people, yet she captured their beauty and charming humor. Kilgallen died at 33 of breast cancer, leaving behind her newborn baby and her husband painter, Barry McGee.
(www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kilgallen)

Nan Goldin (1953-)
When Nan Goldin was a teenager she discovered that with photography she could capture the important moments of her life, alter her image, and express her love for her friends. Her teenage snap-shot aesthetic has evolved over the years, particularly as she discovered light and color techniques during her studies at the Boston School of Fine Arts, though the core emotions of her early work is constant. Goldin is known for her often controversial subject matter: sex, drugs, drag, and rock and roll. Her pictures unflinchingly show all the intimate flaws and particulars of her friends in various states of undress, highs, and lows. Often her images seem to be uncalculated as an accidental snapshot, but even that blurry cut-off figure is carefully planned and lit. Goldin began exhibiting her work through a now infamous method of musically accompanied slide-shows in punk rock clubs in New York City. In 1996, Goldin’s work was given a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
(www.artnet.com/artist/7135/nan-goldin.html)

Kara Walker (1969-)
Installation artist Kara Walker’s work addresses issues of society, gender, and race through the antiquated medium of silhouettes. Walker creates spaces of shadow and light, and uses Victorian imagery in exaggeration to confront people with stereotypes of the past and present. With black paper cut-outs and an overhead projector, Walker overwhelms her audience with over-the-top politically incorrect imagery on a huge scale. With ironic humor and strange juxtapositions, Walker’s work is some of the most politically engaging work being made right now. Walker studied at RISD and is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s Achievement Award. She teaches at Columbia University in New York City.
(www.pbs.org/art21/artists/walker/index.html)