In May 1951, in the heart of Greenwich Village, a group exhibition forever changed the course of American art: the Ninth Street Show. Among the seventy-two artists gathered in that dilapidated building slated for demolition, only eleven women were listed in the catalog. Perle Fine was one of them. Already recognized by her peers and supported by the most prestigious institutions of the time, she occupied a place that art history—often quick to masculinize Abstract Expressionism—had long left in the shadows. Today, an exhibition at the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, titled “Ninth Street Woman,” invites visitors to rediscover this central figure through fifteen rare works that trace her career from the 1940s to the early 1960s.
—Régis Nora, Texture
