THE THEORETICAL GIRLS Women Artists of The Pictures Generation

Oct 21, 2021

THE THEORETICAL GIRLS
Women Artists of The Pictures Generation

Metro Pictures, Gretchen Bender, Jennifer Bolande, Nancy Dwyer, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Annette Lemieux, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Julie Wachtel, Card, 1986. Size: 7.75 x 5.5 Inches — Card Available

The 1988 announcement card (above) from a Metro Pictures exhibition featuring eleven successful women artists illustrates the gender diversification that was slowly taking hold in the art world in the 1980s. This demographic shift was especially noticeable amongst the artists associated with the then still unnamed “Pictures Generation” art movement which was Metro Pictures’ specialty.

The new movement was named and defined in 2009 by the Metropolitan Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition The Pictures Generation 1974-1984. Curator Douglas Eklund noted in the catalogue how as early as 1978 the moniker “The Theoretical Girls” was applied to the young women artists engaged in this cerebral, post-conceptual direction. While the Pictures Generation movement was far from exclusively female, Eklund appropriately contrasts it to Neo-Expressionism, a contemporaneous movement almost totally dominated by male artists.

Gallery 98 features here a selection of art ephemera spotlighting the women of the Pictures Generation. You can see a fuller sampling of the movement in our special section devoted to the Pictures Generation.