Women of Abstract Expressionism, an exhibition of paintings and drawings curated from the Rita Blitt Legacy Collection presented alongside works by Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, is on view at the Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, Kansas, through February 2025. Featuring five artists working at different times and places, the show aims to provide a glimpse into the universality of an art movement as it unfolded across the world, revealing how these women navigated the dialect of Abstract Expressionism.
A more complex history of Abstract Expressionism is emerging as art historians, curators, and scholars continue to study it. Far from New York City, artists conversant in abstraction were contemplating post-war political and social environments. Rita Blitt was one such artist working outside the mainstream who explored gesture in her studio practice.
Born in 1931 in Kansas City, Missouri, and currently dividing her time between Kansas City and San Francisco, California, Blitt has been a practicing artist for more than seven decades. Working across a variety of disciplines, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, her art is inspired by the emotional stimuli she experiences from music, dance, poetry, and nature. She translates these cerebral experiences into form with sweeping gestural lines, explosions of bold color, zen-like calligraphic shapes in black floating in white spaces, and soft clouds of gentle pastel circles. Sinuous, often swirling lines inspire her sculptures fabricated into steel towering above the landscape, while others, rendered in resin, dance above us in interior spaces.
Blitt is also a filmmaker and has produced six short documentaries of her work between 1976 and 2011. The award-winning “Caught in Paint” (2003), created in collaboration with choreographer David Parsons and photographer Lois Greenfield, is one of the best-known of her film shorts and has been featured in 130 film festivals. Martin Sherwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, called “Abyss of Time,” her 2013 film with composer Michael Udow, “An experience akin to drifting through MoMA on a cloud of mesmerizing music.”
Art by Rita Blitt belongs to the permanent collection of several museums and institutions, such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the National Museum of Singapore, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Nevada Museum of Art, the John F. Kennedy Library, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2017, she established the Rita Blitt Legacy Collection with a donation of over 2,000 works on paper, paintings, and sculptures to the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University. Altogether, this collection charts the iterative process of her exploration of color, light, and movement through sculptures, paintings, and video work created over 50 years.
To learn more, visit ritablitt.com.
