15 badass art world heroines over 70 years old

They came. They created. They conquered.

The Huffington Post | By Priscilla Frank

The following 15 women defeated the odds, inscribing their names in art history and forever changing its course. And what’s crazier is the fact that they kept doing it, over and over again, probably for longer than you’ve been alive. Behold, the art world heroines who inspire us more than we can accurately express. Also, they’re all working and exhibiting at over 70 years old. Because, as Judy Chicago aptly explained to us, “Artists don’t retire.”

1. Joan Jonas “Video has provided a way for me to represent layers of thought, to place one perception against another.”

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Medium: Video and performance
Style: Dreamlike conceptualism
Birthday: 1936
Superpower: Jonas was one of the early pioneers of video art in the 1960s and 1970s, her work aligning rhythm and ritual, identity and disguise, nature and technology to weave visceral visual experiences that linger like memories.

2. Louise Fishman “The activity in the rectangle is very much like the activity on the athletic court. It was athleticism in paint, traversing a very large court. It was so liberating.”

{painting pictured above}

Medium: Painting
Style: Athletic abstract expressionism
Birthday: 1939
Superpower: Fishman is one of the few female artists associated with the boys’ club that is Abstract Expressionism. Her muscular paintings turn color into a vehicle for speed and power, a vehicle that refuses to slow down at any cost.

3. Alice Mackler “I feel more comfortable with my work now, and I know that I am doing the best work in 2104. Keep on working, and tell yourself that you are a better artist than anyone else.”

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Medium: Painting, drawing, sculpture, collage
Style: Playful feminist abstraction
Birthday: 1931
Superpower: Although she’s been making art for most of her life, Mackler didn’t have her first solo show until 2013. It was critically hailed as “nearly perfect,” her playful lumps of women subtly reframing the way we see the female form.

{featured image by Dorothy Iannone, The Next Great Moment In History Is Ours, 1970, Courtesy die Künstlerin, Air de Paris, Paris, und Peres Projects, Berlin, Foto: Joachim Littkemann}

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