‘Making Their Mark’ at BAMPFA is a call to action to champion women artists

Only 11% of artworks acquired by 31 U.S. museums in the past decade were created by women, despite women comprising over half of the world’s population. Even more sobering, women artists earn just 10 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.

Making Their Mark, on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) until April 20, 2025, hopes to counter that narrative. But it is far more than an exhibition featuring 70 women artists. It is a compelling intergenerational dialogue between women across the globe who have defied conventions and expanded the boundaries of art through innovative formal techniques, material explorations and sociopolitical critique. At its core, this exhibition, alongside its collector, Komal Shah, aims to contribute both to dismantling of gender biases in the art world and the rewriting of the narrative of art history.

Shah, an activist/collector has redefined what it means to champion women artists. Born in India, Shah moved to Northern California to pursue her education, earning degrees from Stanford and Haas Business School. After a successful career in Silicon Valley’s technology and product development sector, Shah transitioned her focus to raising her children. In 2011, she and her husband, venture capitalist Gaurav Garg, began collecting art. By 2014, Shah found her purpose in highlighting the work of women artists. Her decision was sparked by a transformative experience.

Komal Shah, seen in front of *Faith Ringgold Window of the Wedding #3 and #4*, 1974. Credit: Daria Lugina/BAMPFA

“At the Whitney Biennial, I fell in love with works by Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries,” said Shah. “I had no idea that the art I was seeing was created by women; I just loved the work. It was bold, muscular and, in Laura’s case, funny.” Shah was so transfixed by the work at the museum she lost track of time and her group had to come find her. “I started asking questions about who these artists were. Why isn’t the world flocking to see this work? Why isn’t the message about this artwork out yet? That’s when the gender issue in the art world started coming up for me, and I recognized the persistent gender inequity.”

As Shah expanded her collection, she discovered an intricate web of relationships among the artists — a constellation of influences and inspirations that formed a compelling narrative. The work of these trailblazing risk-takers and their interconnectedness became the foundation of Making Their Mark, a collection that seeks to convince — both visually and through rigorous scholarship — that art created by women is equal to, or better than, that made by men.

The journey to bring this vision to life began with a book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, and culminated in a dynamic exhibition. Shah sought a venue that could embrace the show’s vibrant, large-scale and visually arresting works while resonating with its feminist ethos. BAMPFA, with its history of political activism and feminist collectives, was the ideal partner, Shah said. “When I approached Julie [Rodrigues Widholm, BAMPFA’s executive director], she immediately saw the potential,” Shah shared. “It was meant to be.”

Joan Mitchell’s *Untitled* (1992), at right, a diptych created during Mitchell’s final days when she was dying of cancer. Credit: Chris Grunder

The exhibition’s cornerstone is Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (1992), a luminous diptych created during Mitchell’s final days when she was dying of cancer. The swirling yellows, bold greens and sweeping purples of this monumental work embody Mitchell’s artistic essence and influence, inspiring a generation of artists. Writing in the Making Their Mark book, art historian Katy Siegel notes that Mitchell’s unrestrained use of scale and gesture has shaped the practices of artists across all genders.

Many Berkeley connections in the show

Many artists featured in exhibition have deep ties to the Berkeley area, reinforcing the local-global dialogue at the heart of the exhibition. For instance, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, former chair of UC Berkeley’s art practice department, profoundly influenced the program during her tenure. Her mixed-media painting, Kurban, a Sweeter Day to Come (from The Panthers in My Father’s Palace series), a saturation of colors and shifting planes, references the Black Panther Party in Oakland and the role of race in O’Neal’s art practice.

The luminous abstract painter Mary Corse grew up in Berkeley, and Carol Bove, whose pink-limbed stainless-steel sculpture, The Chevaliers, resembles de Kooning’s looping forms in three dimensions, was raised here. Both the fiber artist Kay Sekimachi and the light artist Barbara Kasten studied at the California College of Arts under the Bauhaus-influenced textile artist, Trude Guermonprez. Sekimachi credits Guermonprez with opening her eyes to weaving as an art form and Kasten was inspired by her to expand her photogram practice into hybrid objects. All three are represented in the exhibition, which embraces craft as a discipline rife with abstract potential.

San Francisco native Mary Heilmann contributes geometric abstractions San Francisco Day and San Francisco Night, capturing the cityscape’s rhythm at different times of the day. Fiber sculptor Judith Scott, renowned for her enigmatic, yarn-wrapped found-object sculptures, was an artist at Creative Growth in Oakland. The show also includes Elizabeth Murray’s shaped canvas Joanne in the Canyon, a seemingly abstract piece that reveals a portrait of her friend, and the conceptual artist Jennifer Bartlett, who met Murray when they were both undergraduates at Mills College. Lebanese American artists Etel Adnan and Simone Fatttal lived together in Sausalito for many years and drew inspiration from the iconic Mount Tamalpais.

In addition to highlighting the affiliations and generative connections, the show takes viewers on a journey, from the gestural abstraction of artists like Mitchell and Lovelace O’Neal, through luminous works of Mary Corse and Howardian Pindel, to Faith Ringgold’s quilted abstractions and Barbara Chase Riboud’s magnificent bronze and woven silk sculpture, Malcom X #17. Each section sheds light on the groundbreaking narratives of these artists as they explored themes of representation, identity and power.

Ultimately, Making Their Mark is more than an artistic showcase; it is a call to action, urging institutions and audiences to champion women artists and their transformative contributions. BAMPFA’s partnership with the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund ensures the longevity of this mission by advancing scholarship, research and exhibitions dedicated to art by women.

Reflecting on the exhibition’s goals, Shah said, “Ideally, the collection will one day reside in an institution where discourse, research, and scholarship can continue to tell these artists’ stories.”

With Making Their Mark, Shah and BAMPFA have created a resonant platform for positioning women’s art at the forefront of cultural discourse.

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