Filling an entire wall of the four-story brick warehouse that once housed the Dia Center for the Arts in New York is a 21-foot wide, 10-foot tall oil painting of two Haitian princesses of the 1800s on what appears to be a deteriorating colonial-era palace wall.
California collector Komal Shah was visiting the New York studio of Dominican Republic-born Firelei Báez in 2018 when the artist was working on the painting, Améthyste and Athénaïre (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), Anacaonas. It was installed later that year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a window that faced the street.
“I ended up falling in love with her and the work—it’s just majestic,” Shah says.
This story of buying a monumental work that, at the moment (as she says) doesn’t fit in her home, is emblematic of Shah, who, with her husband, tech entrepreneur, Gaurav Garg, has been on a mission since 2014 to correct the historical imbalance of the art world by supporting women artists and artists of color through collecting their work.
Shah grew up in Ahmedabad, India, and has lived in the U.S. since 1991. She got a master’s degree at Stanford and an MBA at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, eventually becoming a tech executive at Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo. She stepped back from this work in 2008 to pursue philanthropy.
From Friday through Jan. 27, visitors will get a window into Shah’s vision in “Making Their Mark,” an exhibition of the Shah Garg Collection curated by Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of High Line Art and curator of Milk of Dreams, the 59th international art exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
Nearly 100 striking, colorful, and often provocative paintings, sculptures, textiles, and ceramics—created between the 1940s through to today—are presented on two floors of the former Dia space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. It is the first public showing of the work outside of their Atherton, Calif., home, where most of the art had been displayed.
Entering the exhibition, visitors see the oldest work in the show—an untitled 1946 abstract painting filled end-to-end with looping drips of color by the late Ukrainian-American artist Janet Sobel. The self-taught artist “made an impression” on the far more well-known and lauded Jackson Pollock when he saw it in the early 1940s, according to the critic Clement Greenberg as described in the book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, which was edited by art historians and curators Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel.
Learning about Sobel and speaking with Siegel, who is research director of special program initiatives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “made me realize that the constraints of how fine art is defined is also set by men based on what they do,” Shah says.
The exhibition in Chelsea sets out to show that women have been part of the historical canon all along, and their contributions, whether through quilts and ceramics, or enormous paintings, deserve an elevated place in art history. Its mission, and the mission of the foundation, “is to convince the world that art made by women artists is equal or better than men,” Shah said at a press preview of the show on Thursday.
Though female artists such as Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, or Judy Chicago appear to be everywhere now, the elevation of such artists in the public consciousness seems to come in short-lived waves.
Shah points to the auction market, where Sunflowers, a 1990-91 painting by abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, could achieve US$30 million at a Nov. 15 auction at Sotheby’s, and where an untitled work by Mitchell from much earlier in her career—circa 1959—could achieve US$35 million on Thursday at Christie’s. One or both works, each being sold at major New York sales, is likely to break Mitchell’s US$16.6 million auction record set in 2018.
The Mitchell sales are newsworthy, she says. But if a painting by Willem de Kooning or Pollock fetched US$50 million at an auction, it would be “a regular occurrence,” Shah says. “We need to be in that world where a Joan Mitchell selling for US$50 million is just considered normal.”
Shah’s clear mission is to make sure that happens.
The exhibition features a 9-foot by 11-foot untitled work by Mitchell in brilliant yellows painted in 1992, the year she died, along a wall of the first gallery. It’s placed adjacent to an enormous, 11-foot by 24-foot gestural abstract by Mary Weatherford, who writes about how her art is informed by Mitchell in an essay in Making Their Mark.
This entry point to the collection is an apt illustration of what Shah describes as its voice, which “is about boldness, about expressiveness, about going for it.” It also reflects the draw abstraction has for Shah, in part because of her status as an immigrant.
“Abstraction does not care about boundaries, and about geographies, and about gender, and I love that,” she says. “It’s a universal language of ideas. It lets you bring in your thoughts, your perspectives, your context, into the painting.”
Though there are figurative-oriented works in the collection, such as Baez’s Améthyste and Athénaïre, Joan Semmel’s Horizons, 1981, and Leigh’s Stick, 2022—a striking seven-foot-tall sculpture that anchors a room on artistic expressions of the female body—the collection is dominated by colorful, strong abstraction. It even shows up in fiber works, such as Swiss artist Françoise Grossen’s Contact III, a more than 30-foot-wide sculpture made of orange Manila rope, or Sheila Hicks’ royal blue Taxco, circa 1970s, made of wool, cotton, and metallic thread.
Art that is “impressive in its visual origins” is important to Shah, but so is work that “has important ways to add to the collective narrative,” she says.
The exhibition is free to encourage more people to come and experience the art. To ensure young people are among the visitors, the foundation is setting up visits by high school and college students, and it will later bring the collection to two campuses: the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.
“Our plan is to be hosting as much of the community as we physically can—every day,” Shah says. “We want both young men and young women to see these works and form memories that will make a lasting interaction. They will then continue to look at both of these sets of artists with equal respect.”
The Shah Garg Foundation’s Making Their Mark exhibition will be at 548 West 22nd St., New York through Jan. 27.
Read the full article here
