Featuring more than 100 works from our collection, Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The exhibition’s intersectional feminist framework highlights artworks, in a plurality of voices, that aim to rally support or motivate action on behalf of a cause, or to combat stereotypes and dominant narratives. (This exhibition contains sexually explicit content. Viewer discretion is advised.)
Half the Picture draws its title from a 1989 Guerrilla Girls poster that declares, "You’re seeing less than half the picture without the vision of women artists and artists of color." Spanning almost one hundred years, the exhibition focuses on historical and contemporary work by more than fifty artists who combine message and medium to engage with political and social issues. Often radical and inspiring, these artists advocate for their communities, their beliefs, and their hopes for equality amid popular or state-supported opposition.
The exhibition showcases pointed artworks by Vito Acconci, Beverly Buchanan, Sue Coe, Renee Cox, Nona Faustine, Harmony Hammond, the Guerrilla Girls, Käthe Kollwitz, An-My Lê, Yolanda López, Park McArthur, Zanele Muholi, Philip Pearlstein, Wendy Red Star, Joan Semmel, Dread Scott, Nancy Spero, Betty Tompkins, Andy Warhol, the Artists’ Poster Committee of Art Workers Coalition, and Taller de Gráfica Popular, among many others.
Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, and Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.