September 23, 2026
Curating, Collaborating, Commemorating:
Culture Change in the Visual Arts
Judith Brodsky
American artist, curator, author, and Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers
Curating, Collaborating, Commemorating:
Culture Change in the Visual Arts
Judith Brodsky
American artist, curator, author, and Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers
Ferris Olin, Introducer, and Judith Brodsky
Minutes of the Third Meeting of the 85th Year
President Micky Weyeneth presided over the meeting. Frances Slade led the invocation. Julie Elward-Berry read the minutes of the September 16 meeting. Attendance at the meeting was 101. There were numerous guests of the speaker and three guests introduced for future membership. Ferris Olin introduced Ruth Koizim, whose membership application has been completed, and Hazel Styx introduced Bill Bikales and Helen Bikales.
Ferris Olin introduced the speaker, Judith K. Brodsky, Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University and a works-on-paper artist with prints and drawings in museum collections worldwide. She was the founder of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, now the Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and co-founder of the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University.
Brodsky has written widely on women artists and printmaking and has curated numerous exhibitions with these themes. Her most recent book is Dismantling the Patriarchy Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism and Digital Technology (2022). A book on the history of the feminist art movement in the United States will be published later this year.
In her lecture, Professor Brodsky provided an informative tour of four art exhibitions currently on display in Princeton. The curators of the four exhibitions, which were launched in honor of the semiquincentennial of 2026, decided that a primary focus would be to celebrate women artists of color and to highlight the presence of Black women artists since colonial times. Professor Brodsky connected this effort to the feminist art-history movement of the early 1970s and Linda Nochlin’s influential essay Why Are There No Great Women Artists? She described discovering how frequently women artists were excluded from art-history textbooks and emphasized the importance of recovering their contributions.
The exhibitions featured in this talk both celebrate the positives of diversity in the arts as well as react against the Federal Government’s anti-DEI ideals. The resulting program is called “ReVisioning America” and the four exhibits, locations and curators are:
Ferris Olin introduced the speaker, Judith K. Brodsky, Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University and a works-on-paper artist with prints and drawings in museum collections worldwide. She was the founder of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, now the Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and co-founder of the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University.
Brodsky has written widely on women artists and printmaking and has curated numerous exhibitions with these themes. Her most recent book is Dismantling the Patriarchy Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism and Digital Technology (2022). A book on the history of the feminist art movement in the United States will be published later this year.
In her lecture, Professor Brodsky provided an informative tour of four art exhibitions currently on display in Princeton. The curators of the four exhibitions, which were launched in honor of the semiquincentennial of 2026, decided that a primary focus would be to celebrate women artists of color and to highlight the presence of Black women artists since colonial times. Professor Brodsky connected this effort to the feminist art-history movement of the early 1970s and Linda Nochlin’s influential essay Why Are There No Great Women Artists? She described discovering how frequently women artists were excluded from art-history textbooks and emphasized the importance of recovering their contributions.
The exhibitions featured in this talk both celebrate the positives of diversity in the arts as well as react against the Federal Government’s anti-DEI ideals. The resulting program is called “ReVisioning America” and the four exhibits, locations and curators are:
- Echoes in Our Bones, Arts Council of Princeton (Judith K. Brodsky & Rhinold Ponder, Curators)
- Voices in Print: New Jersey Black Women Printmakers Shaping the American Narrative, Morven Museum Education Center (Judith K. Brodsky & Rhinold Ponder, Curators)
- What Is an American? Artists Reflect, Princeton University Art Museum (Jun Nakamura, Curator)
- Joyce Scott: Declarations, Bainbridge House (Laura Giles, Curator)
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Overall, the talk argued that expanding American art history to include historically marginalized artists does more than add new names to an existing canon. These artists change the way American history itself can be understood. Through portraiture, photography, collage, abstraction, sculpture, textiles, beadwork, and multimedia, they explore slavery, racism, gender, identity, resilience, cultural memory, and belonging.
The bulk of Professor Brodsky’s talk was a detailed discussion of nearly 40 different pieces of art, with about three-quarters chosen from the two exhibits she co-curated with Rhinold Ponder. These often paired an older piece with a contemporary one, such as the 1915 Laura Wheeler Waring “Silks” –a portrayal of successful and prominent African Americans--with the 2018 Jordan Casteel “MTA”—a portrait of an ordinary contemporary subway worker.
The bulk of Professor Brodsky’s talk was a detailed discussion of nearly 40 different pieces of art, with about three-quarters chosen from the two exhibits she co-curated with Rhinold Ponder. These often paired an older piece with a contemporary one, such as the 1915 Laura Wheeler Waring “Silks” –a portrayal of successful and prominent African Americans--with the 2018 Jordan Casteel “MTA”—a portrait of an ordinary contemporary subway worker.
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Professor Brodsky then analyzed many other pairings, in which the artists gave Black subjects visibility and dignity, staging intimate domestic scenes and documenting family, community, economic hardship, and resilience.
Switching to the art exhibition in the Princeton University Art Museum curated by Jun Nakamura, Professor Brodsky noted that -- in the 1970s and 1980s --Native American artists were not considered “artists” but rather as “craftspersons.” Brodsky noted that over 90 pecent of the art created in Native American culture is by women artists. However, only with the Feminist Art Movement’s relocation of crafts to a higher position in the hierarchy of art disciplines did women’s ceramics, beading and baskets become accepted as fine art, with individual artists so recognized.
The fourth exhibit, at The Bainbridge House, curated by Laura Giles, presents works by Joyce Scott, who transformed traditional beadwork, quilting and glassmaking into vehicles for social commentary. For example, the beaded sculpture, “Mz. Teapot,” wears sunglasses and smokes a cigarette in casual contemplation of the trauma happening around her.
Returning to the Morven Educational Center Gallery, Professor Brodsky provided an abbreviated discussion of the print works of New Jersey artists Nell Painter and Mickalene Thomas.
Professor Brodsky then concluded by encouraging the audience to visit the exhibitions themselves. Visual art, she argued, can capture the complexity of an era because images contain multiple layers of meaning. The exhibitions presented for America's 250th anniversary therefore offer viewers opportunities to reconsider the country's history through a much broader range of American experiences.
Respectfully submitted,
Marlaine Lockheed
Switching to the art exhibition in the Princeton University Art Museum curated by Jun Nakamura, Professor Brodsky noted that -- in the 1970s and 1980s --Native American artists were not considered “artists” but rather as “craftspersons.” Brodsky noted that over 90 pecent of the art created in Native American culture is by women artists. However, only with the Feminist Art Movement’s relocation of crafts to a higher position in the hierarchy of art disciplines did women’s ceramics, beading and baskets become accepted as fine art, with individual artists so recognized.
The fourth exhibit, at The Bainbridge House, curated by Laura Giles, presents works by Joyce Scott, who transformed traditional beadwork, quilting and glassmaking into vehicles for social commentary. For example, the beaded sculpture, “Mz. Teapot,” wears sunglasses and smokes a cigarette in casual contemplation of the trauma happening around her.
Returning to the Morven Educational Center Gallery, Professor Brodsky provided an abbreviated discussion of the print works of New Jersey artists Nell Painter and Mickalene Thomas.
Professor Brodsky then concluded by encouraging the audience to visit the exhibitions themselves. Visual art, she argued, can capture the complexity of an era because images contain multiple layers of meaning. The exhibitions presented for America's 250th anniversary therefore offer viewers opportunities to reconsider the country's history through a much broader range of American experiences.
Respectfully submitted,
Marlaine Lockheed