9 Iconic Artists Discuss What Women’s History Month Means to Them in 2025

The rise of a certain breed of white nationalism accelerated by Trump and his MAGA base has shown how fragile hard-won rights and protections really are. We are not in a post-women’s-rights moment yet, so while it is good to recognize our strides, we should not lose sight of our long-range goals, our vision, and our need to do more. Now is a good time to create and nurture strong infrastructures, encourage dialogue, and inspire the next generation.

In my experience, one must remain fluid, learn what one can, but let go of ideas that do not work for you. It is not for one individual art critic or arts institution to dictate what art is, how it is defined, what is meaningful, or how success in the art world must be. It is important for us to find our own passions and create our own networks. Our survival depends on applying as much creativity to building our institutions as we do to making our art.

Showing in “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art Since 1968,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through May 4.

Trump is not turning back the clock; he’s smashing the clock. Anything can be canceled now, anything that can help people. It’s beyond depression. It’s just so hard to figure out what to do. It has to be through people actually talking to each other, face to face, wherever possible.

Having lived through World War II in England, I think there are so many things that are so incredibly similar. Taking over the press, canceling everything. The current state of the world has made working very, very hard for me because I can’t keep the world at bay. Though a lot of my work doesn’t have any political reference, a lot of it is connected to species decimation, extinction, and I think about that day and night. I have to fight, as many people do, to find what is the point of working at this moment. To try to figure what that is. Or just give up trying to get an answer to that in the work and just work.

Showing in “Other Worldly,” at DC Moore Gallery, New York, through March 29. Frank has been publicly protesting against Trump’s policies and makes posters and $3 TRUTH buttons to raise money for Planned Parenthood.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as a woman having “agency over her own body.” Each new baby that is born can be squashed or leaned on. Each new generation of girls and boys are open to being received and nurtured or mutilated and molested.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, I fought hard, protested, advocated, and supported the right of women to have access to birth control and abortions. And I’ve lived long enough to see that fundamental human right won and then, 50 years later, taken away. How long do you think it will take before they say, “We don’t want to hear from you if you are a woman or have brown skin, or if your ideas differ from our narrow agenda.” Art, poetry, music, and dance are the only articulation in the morass. 

Anything that makes us feel proud, aware of our uniqueness, and celebrates who we are is being suppressed. But I do not believe artists should be lumped together into categories by their shared biology, identities, or orientation. Each artist is a miracle. When an artist walks into her studio, she is making her own unique work that only she, as an individual, is compelled to make. 

Showing in “Queer Histories,” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, through April 13.

We have come a long way since I outlived the very restrictive years of the ’50s through ’90s, but it seems we still have a long way to go. One of the few good things about the madness in the White House is that we will be forced to join together and act collectively to soften the effects of these insane actions and/or to fight the madness. As for being disheartened by what is currently going on—not in the least! Given my history as a Black woman and Black woman artist, there is so much to be disheartened about that I would never have become and remained an artist if I allowed myself to be affected by the politics of America.

In the last four years, I have seen the “art world” exhibit more women artists than I have ever seen. They finally are accepting so-called women’s work (textiles) as the art form it is. The “art world” is not the only game in town. There have always been other spaces where artists have been able to sell work. Thank God, because the “art world” doesn’t let everyone in. Where they could do better is finding and supporting older artists who have not been recognized for the amazing artists they are. Time is not on our side.

Showing in “Acts of Art in Greenwich Village,” at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, New York, through March 29.

Ironically this period of time, for me and many others, particularly women of color, has been an extraordinary renaissance. After 40 to 50 years of working, all of a sudden people started paying attention to the work I was doing, which was never unknown but certainly was not broadly supported. This comes on the tail of people like Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Lorraine O’Grady—a whole bevy of women of color. Their work came into prominence even though it was always known. So as usual, we get inside the door and we’re just about to move forward, and bang, along comes Trump.

We’re seriously fighting, as women of color, for the continued support of our work and how it reveals unknown stories and untold visions of our own communities. I feel even more strongly now—and I’ve been involved in resistance since the ’60s—that this is a time when we have to really stand up and fight. This is a time of counternarrative, where magazines like ARTnews have to speak up and speak back about what we’ve done and why our work is important and allow it to inspire people on a more working-class level, who are being hit so hard by this. I don’t like to think of us acknowledging going backwards. I don’t accept that. I feel like, we are the only ones to make the decision in which direction we are going, and we know where we are going. And it’s forward.

Because my own parents were undocumented, when I see these ICE sweeps, it makes me want to make more work.

Many of us never had children, but we are still co-mothers to each other, because we bore part of a movement. Even though we have aged and our lives have changed, and many of us are not well, and many of us have now died, we keep at it because having community and solidarity is what keeps you going when the art world doesn’t want to pay attention to you.

Showing in “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory,” at The Cheech in Riverside, California, through August 3.

Women’s liberation has gone from the accelerator to hitting the brakes, and now we’re backing up. It is the same with civil rights. We are back in the dark again with abortion. Women will die, but the powers that be do not notice or care. Will the Women’s Museum in Washington, D.C., have problems because their focus is on women? What about the Museum of African American History and Culture? Will the funding be only for male artists who are white? That is exactly how it was in the late 1960s, when I first moved to New York after graduate school. But I feel there are more open-minded people than there were in the 1960s and ’70s. There are far more exhibitions of work by women than there were back then. The A.I.R. gallery, the first women’s cooperative, is still alive and thriving in Brooklyn after over 40 years.

We should go on celebrating Women’s History Month, Native American History Month, Black History Month. There are people now who are trying to stop us—it makes them look bad, not us. It is an inspiration for younger artists to see what their forerunners have achieved or gone through. Do not hide your light under a rock, do not hide your accomplishments. At 82, I wish I had written down more of what I accomplished and my dreams for the future. We need to be more of an inspiration for future generations, especially in this time of turmoil and chaos.

Showing in “(Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell Amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection,” at Asia Society, New York, through August 10.

Two years ago, I wrote in a tiny notebook, “Everything that must be granted can be taken away.” Photos taken in Afghanistan in 1973 show women in Western dress enjoying careers as doctors, journalists, and politicians. Today women’s voices may not be heard even emanating from the windows of their own homes. One can legitimately fear that in a few years women in America will be back to something like the 1950s version in the United States of Hitler’s Kinder, Küche, Kirche—“children, kitchen, church” for white women, and foreclosed opportunities for the rest. Meanwhile we haven’t yet seen how culture itself, the arts, will be affected by the threatened repression.

Given the hard-fought but steady progress of women’s rights, it may be hard to believe that women could be set back. But the declarations and closures of the past three weeks signal how fast authority can repress anything. That will blur what has been accomplished and preempt what more could be accomplished now, and it will all have to be rediscovered and rebuilt by yet another generation.

Showing in “Corps et Âmes,” at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, through August 25.

At the moment, I’m worrying about everyone. The attacks on people of color, on women, on gays, on the trans world. The taking away of the HIV medication that has literally been keeping millions of people alive all over the world. The suspension of anything to do with global warming and climate change. Shall I go on?

What’s terrifying, more than anything, is [what this means] for our kids and our grandchildren. We’re at the end of our lives, but these kids have to face all of this. These kinds of things can take decades to undo. Also, these days I feel just as deeply for men who are being affected by all this as I do for women.

I listened to a show about the documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here, about Faith Ringgold’s Rikers Island mural and how it affected her and the lives of incarcerated women. About what a meaningful role poetry and painting play in the lives of these jailed women. It reminded me that art does matter in times like these. And that women do matter and women’s stories and history need to be told. It all matters.

I remember the ’40s and ’50s very well. Women were raised to understand that they weren’t expected to be anything important nor do anything of major value with their lives. We were thought of as second-class citizens by many men. I was lucky to be told often to make something of myself by my mother, but that was not what most little girls heard. Today, thanks largely to the women’s movement, little girls grow up to believe that they can do anything, make anything of their lives they wish, and expect themselves to succeed. This change of viewpoint is the most important change that the women’s movement has made. The art world has opened to women in a remarkably short time. One lifetime. And I believe that strong women can counteract any regression in our society.