New York galleries are doing something worth paying attention to this winter: they're making space for artists who should have had it decades ago.
Alma Thomas, who spent her life painting vibrant abstractions that danced between geometry and nature, never quite made it into the mainstream before she died in 1978. Now Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is showing her later works — pieces that prove she never stopped experimenting, never stopped pushing color and form in new directions until the very end.
Howardena Pindell, 79, is still working. At Garth Greenan Gallery, a career-spanning show traces five decades of her punched paper, mixed media, and deeply personal work that's always had something to say about politics, identity, and what it means to document a life.
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Senga Nengudi, 81, took nylon stockings and sand and transformed them into sculptures and performances that asked urgent questions about the body and ritual. Sprüth Magers is showing her influential R.S.V.P. series from the 1970s — work that felt ahead of its time then and still does now.
Betye Saar, 96, has spent her career making art that refuses to look away from race and power. Her 1972 assemblage "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" didn't just challenge racist stereotypes — it opened doors for generations of Black artists who came after her. Roberts Projects is giving her work the stage it deserved all along.
Lorraine O'Grady, 88, has spent decades making conceptual and performance art that cuts straight to questions about who gets to be called an artist, whose voices matter, and what the art world is actually protecting. Alexander Gray Associates is showing her 1983 performance work that's only grown sharper with time.
Why does this matter now. Partly because it's overdue — these artists have been working, creating, pushing boundaries while art history wrote around them. But also because looking back at what was left out teaches us something essential about what we're still leaving out today. Museums and galleries have always had the power to decide who counts. The fact that more of them are using that power to correct old silences suggests something is shifting.
