After all, expressive freedom has never been distributed evenly. This is Shinnecock land, freighted with histories older than the studios that later made the region famous. Likewise, Abstract Expressionism proclaimed radical individuality while its legend hardened around heroic men, cigarettes and exquisitely marketed anguish. Women were present in ateliers, salons, galleries and arguments from the beginning; recognition, mysteriously, kept losing their addresses.
Here, thankfully, those painters reemerge with authority. Mary Abbott, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Gertrude Greene, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner appear not as corrective footnotes but as architects of the upheaval. More revealingly, their canvases prove that gesture was never inherently male, scale required no testosterone and emotional power had no obligation to arrive wearing work boots.
— Avalon Ashley Bellos, AMNY
