Contemporary Women Painters

Based in Kansas City, Missouri, Gregor works in traditional media and focuses on young women in ordinary situations. Girls like the one in "Pond Bather" seem caught in personal melodramas. The artist also creates landscape and still life paintings in the same painterly style.

London-based Bono describes her art as expressing afrofemcentrist consciousness, projecting Black women's lived experiences. Her works incorporate patterns from African textiles which are visible around but also through the semi-transparent human forms. The artist's interest in interior and exterior realities is symbolized by the combination of detailed anatomy with silhouetted forms.

Alfonseca, based in the Bronx, New York, emphasizes the experiences of Black and Afro-Latinx women, surrounding her figures with bright colors and patterns and adorning them with glitter and mixed media. Her goal is to demonstrate the grace and beauty of her subjects who appear in a safe space which contrasts with the dangerous world they inhabit in their daily lives.

Armstrong creates candy-colored fantasy worlds by combining portraiture with an atmosphere or sensation she perceives from her subject. This atmosphere or emotion interests the artist more than literal reality. Toronto-based Armstrong was discovered by a New York art dealer through her presentation at a small art fair in her home city.

Cohn creates colorful works focused on women's lives in imagined worlds. The artist's goal is to produce a sense of a familiar space that also feels strange or mysterious. Influenced by the literary tradition of Magical Realism, she often imagines a world governed by a set of rules and then paints women's lives as they respond to that world.

Strongly influenced by masters of Modern art Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Orchard has consciously chosen the female nude as her subject. Her figures engage in familiar activities and poses to encourage viewers to explore the physical and stylistic qualities of the painting first. At the same time, front-facing figures encourage the viewer to consider the internal lives of Orchard's subjects.

Born in Burundi and raised in Belgium, Simoens uses her art to celebrate Black lives and experiences. Largely self-taught, she has created a distinctive artistic persona through her depiction of large-bodied figures with out-of-scale heads. The artist describes this approach as her "love letter to the black body."

Born in Iran and now based in Stamford, Connecticut, Khosravi blends Persian decorative motifs with Surrealist qualities to create works which explore gender, censorship, and cultural change. Her works emphasize multiple levels of space and reality through the use of different wooden panels connected by cords. As in "The Garden," Khosravi often symbolizes the censorship of women's voices by sewing shut the lips of her figures.

Based in Florence, Massachusetts, Emma Kohlmann has created imagery for clothing, zines, artist books, musical album art and magazine illustration as well as traditional paintings and prints. Her work is characterized by abstraction and bright color and enigmatic figures.

Sanyaolu creates extremely painterly images of highly abstract female figures in extremely painterly spaces. Her goal is to express the energy of everyday life and to improve her own mental state and uplift the mindset of those who encounter her works.