The Shah Garg Foundation by art collectors Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg will showcase a major exhibition titled “Making Their Mark,” championing the works of over 70 influential women artists, the Art Newspaper reports. The show features female creators from the last eight decades, including Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, and Simone Leigh. The exhibition, which is free to the public, runs from 2 November 2023 to 27 January 2024 at 548 West 22nd Street, New York, and will afterward travel to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in September 2024.
Shah’s journey, from her roots in Ahmedabad, India, to a thriving tech career in California at giants like Oracle and Yahoo, eventually led her and Garg, a tech entrepreneur, to focus on art. Together, they’ve curated nearly 300 pieces, predominantly from women artists, often lending them to museums.
The Shah Garg Foundation actively champions female artists’ accomplishments and pioneering work. By collaborating with educational bodies, art establishments, and industry luminaries, the Foundation aims to amplify the visibility of women’s art and address their limited representation in public displays, art exhibitions, and historical discourses. To fulfill this mission, the Foundation provides crucial financial aid and programmatic backing, with the ultimate goal of ensuring equal representation for female artists in the art world.
“Women are still significantly underrepresented in museum collections and on exhibition rosters, and many women of incredible achievement have not been given the scholarly and public attention they so richly deserve”, says Shah in a statement. “This exhibition is a visually compelling case for a rigorous expansion of the art canon by showcasing works by brilliant and prodigious artists who happen to be women.”
The duo actively commits to women artists beyond just this exhibition. They have also documented their endeavors in a book titled “Making Their Mark,” published in May 2023, that provides an in-depth look at the Shah Garg Collection.
Shah will further highlight her efforts to elevate women artists in an upcoming discussion at the Armory Show in New York, joining fellow collectors Sarah Arison and George Wells. She emphasizes the importance of purposeful art collection, especially as women artists still face underrepresentation in museums.
This news has been created in collaboration with Open AI’s GPT-4.