Five Women Artists Whose Work Stopped Me Cold This Season
In about four days, every arts publication is going to run the same International Women's Day content. You know the drill: slideshows of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, think pieces about why Yayoi Kusama matters, maybe a "rediscovered" Georgia O'Keeffe if they're feeling adventurous. All great artists. All dead. All safely canonized.
I'm not doing that.
Instead, I want to tell you about five women whose work I stood in front of this season and literally couldn't move. Five artists who are alive right now, making work right now, showing in galleries you can walk into without a membership or a degree or knowing the right handshake. Three are emerging. Two are mid-career. All of them made me feel something I can't stop thinking about.
This isn't a history lesson. These are field notes from someone who goes to too many gallery openings. Consider it your anti-roundup.
1. Torkwase Dyson — Geometry as Resistance
Where I saw it: Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1 (Public Art Fund)
What I saw: A 20-foot steel pavilion that you can walk inside, with sound moving across eight speakers like water
The work: Dyson is the "name you might have heard" on this list — she's been getting serious attention for about a decade, had a major show at the New Museum in 2023, and shows with Pace and Gray galleries. But hearing about someone and standing inside their work are different things entirely.
Her installation Akua — open through March 8 — is her first major public soundscape in New York City. It's a large, elliptical pavilion made of powder-coated steel and aluminum slats arranged at oblique angles. You walk in through a triangular opening and suddenly you're surrounded: voices from Black archives, nature field recordings, electronic sounds moving across eight speakers in a continuous loop.
The title comes from the Akan word meaning "born on Wednesday" — it's the name of a family member. Dyson is exploring what she calls "breath as geography" — the idea that the spaces between words, the pauses and ums and silences, can carry memories of specific places. What can the space between words tell us about land, water, infrastructure, migration?
This sounds heavy in description. In person, it's grounding. I visited on a rainy Monday and the sound of water in the recordings seemed to merge with the actual rain, the East River visible through the slats. I stayed for twenty minutes. A jogger passed by, then stopped, then came back and just stood there. That's the correct response.
Where to see her work: Akua is at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1 Bridge View Lawn, through March 8, 2026. It's free, open all day every day, and genuinely unlike anything else in the city right now. Go at sunset. Bring someone who thinks contemporary art is too abstract.
2. Amy Sillman — The Painter's Painter (Who's Actually Fun to Look At)
Where I saw it: Dia Bridgehampton (Long Island)
What I saw: An entire room transformed — paintings on walls, prints layered over them, the gallery itself become a canvas
The work: Sillman is another name you might know — she's been showing since the 1990s, has work in basically every major collection, and just made news by leaving Gladstone Gallery for David Zwirner (her first show with them will be in 2027). But if you've only seen reproductions, you haven't seen Sillman.
Her current show at Dia Bridgehampton, Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32), runs through May 25, 2026. She's taken over the gallery walls, painting and screenprinting directly onto them, then superimposing a series of unique monotypes created during her residency at Two Palms. The result is somewhere between a painting installation and an analog animation — you can trace the sequence of marks, see how forms shift and repeat.
Sillman has described herself as "more of a drawer than a painter," and you can feel that here. The line is always present, even when buried under layers. She moves between improvisational and systematic, hand-drawn and mediated, serious and seriously funny. There's a conceptual rigor that never tips into pretension.
I went with Tomoko, who is not easily impressed by painting (she's a graphic designer, she sees visual stuff all day). She stood in front of one wall piece and said, "I want to live inside this." That's Sillman. She makes work that feels like spaces you could occupy.
Where to see her work: Alternate Side is at Dia Bridgehampton through May 25, 2026. Open Friday-Monday, free admission. If you can't make it out to Long Island, she also has work in the permanent collection at the Whitney and MoMA.
3. Ilana Harris-Babou — When Material Gets Personal
Where I saw it: Times Square (2023) and video installations at various venues
What I saw: Ceramic sculptures that look like luxury home goods that have suffered some kind of emotional trauma
The work: Harris-Babou works in what she calls "messy craft" — ceramics, video, installation — and her subject is the gap between aspiration and reality, particularly for Black women navigating spaces that weren't designed for them.
I first encountered her work in 2023 when she presented Liquid Gold in Times Square for the Midnight Moment series — a video work projected across those massive digital screens, her face and her mother's face interrupting the usual flow of advertisements. It was hilarious and devastating, which is her signature combination.
Her ceramic pieces mimic high-end furniture and kitchenware: Le Creuset-style pots, Herman Miller-esque chairs, marble countertops. Except they're wrong. The glazes are slightly off. The proportions don't quite work. Some pieces have her fingerprints pressed into the surface, permanently. She also makes videos that are part infomercial, part confessional, part art history lecture — often featuring her mother as co-host. I watched one about "wellness" that made me want to throw my yoga mat in the trash. In a good way.
Harris-Babou was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Kunsthaus Hamburg. She has this way of making you laugh, then making you sit with why you laughed.
Where to see her work: She'll be part of Between Tides, a Public Art Fund group exhibition opening in June 2026 at Rockaway Beach in Queens — sculptural ping-pong tables designed by various artists. Her video work is also available on her website. This is an artist on the rise; catch her early.
4. Julia Rooney — A Discovery Worth Making
Where I saw it: Below Grand, Lower East Side (2024) and her current show at Yale Divinity School
What I saw: Paintings on found fabric that felt like looking at someone else's dream
The work: Rooney is the true emerging artist on this list — MFA from Yale in 2018 (not 2021), which means she's been building her practice quietly for several years. I first saw her work at Below Grand in 2024 and have been following her since.
She works on fabric sourced from thrift stores, estate sales, eBay lots — old bedsheets, tablecloths, curtains. The fabric already has a history: stains, wear patterns, the ghost of previous owners. She paints over it, around it, sometimes incorporating the existing marks into the composition. The result feels collaborative, like she's in conversation with whoever owned this cloth before.
Her current solo show Tilt at Yale Divinity School (through May 2026) features cyanotypes — she exposed chemically coated linen directly to the daylight coming through Marquand Chapel's windows. The works are "analog photographs made with and of the light passing through the Chapel." It's a different side of her practice but retains that quality of making the personal feel universal.
The paintings I saw at Below Grand were mostly interiors — rooms, windows, doorways — but rendered in a way that makes space feel unstable. Perspective shifts halfway through a canvas. It's technically rigorous but conceptually light; she's not hitting you over the head with "meaning."
Where to see her work: Tilt is at Yale Divinity School's Croll Family Entrance Hall through the end of the academic year (May 2026). If you're in New Haven, it's worth the trip. She also has work with Freight+Volume gallery in New York.
5. Genesis Belanger — Surrealism for the Present Moment
Where I saw it: Various venues; represented by Perrotin
What I saw: Sculptural vignettes that feel like Magritte paintings you can walk around
The work: Belanger is a Brooklyn-based artist who makes ceramic and bronze sculptures that look like they escaped from a surrealist dream — or maybe a very expensive department store display gone slightly wrong. Her subjects are everyday objects: cigarettes, handbags, flowers, body parts, but rendered at odd scales and in unexpected combinations.
I first saw Belanger's work at a group show a few years back and have been tracking her rise since. She has this way of taking the familiar — a tube of lipstick, a glove, a potted plant — and making it strange without making it alienating. There's humor in her work, but also a kind of melancholy. These objects seem to have internal lives, desires, disappointments.
Belanger's work has been shown at the Whitney, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Her sculptures often reference consumer culture and the aesthetics of femininity, but not in a heavy-handed way. She's more interested in the poetry of objects than in making overt political statements.
What's striking about Belanger's work is how precisely it's made. These are labor-intensive sculptures — hand-built ceramics, carefully patinated bronzes — that retain a sense of the artist's touch while also feeling almost manufactured. It's a difficult balance to strike.
Where to see her work: Belanger will have a major Public Art Fund installation at City Hall Park from June 2 through November 15, 2026. The exhibition will consist of three sculptural vignettes exploring the architecture of justice and value — including pigmented cast cement birds extracting pennies from the City Hall Park Fountain. It's free, open to the public, and promises to be one of the highlights of the summer public art season in New York.
How to Actually Look at Work by Living Artists
I want to close with something practical. If you're inspired to go see any of these artists — or any living artist, anywhere — here's what I do:
Don't read the wall text first. I know this sounds wrong. But trust me: look first. Let the work hit you without preface. Notice what you notice. Feel what you feel. Spend at least 30 seconds just looking.
Then move closer. Then step back. Notice how the piece changes at different distances. Look for details — brushstrokes, seams, evidence of the hand that made it.
Then read the label. Now the context will land differently. You'll be filling in gaps rather than receiving instruction.
Ask what it's doing, not what it means. Art isn't a puzzle with a solution. It's an experience with effects. Does this piece slow you down? Make you laugh? Piss you off? That's the work.
Come back. If something stays with you, go back and see it again. Living artists are still making work. This show will close, another will open. Follow the ones who move you.
That's it. Five artists. Five reasons to leave your house. Five alternatives to the IWD slideshows you're about to be inundated with.
The art world will always try to convince you that the important stuff happened in the past, that the canon is closed, that you need a graduate degree to have an opinion. All of that is garbage. The important stuff is happening right now, in galleries you can walk into for free, made by people who are probably younger than you think and hungrier than you know.
Go see them before everyone else does.
Got a tip about a woman artist I should see? Email me at nadia@artandabout.blog or DM me @artandabout. I'm always looking for the next thing that stops me cold.