Rooted Resistance: The Politics of Beauty in Women’s Art

    Beauty has long been treated with suspicion in the art world — especially when it comes from the hands of women. Dismissed as decorative, domestic, or indulgent, beauty has often been seen as something to look at, not to look into. Rooted Resistance challenges that narrative. This exhibition brings together women artists across centuries who have used beauty not as retreat, but as resistance. Flowers, fabrics, still lifes, and self-portraits become sites of assertion — where care is radical, softness is subversive, and ornament becomes strategy. Beginning with Margareta Haverman’s A Vase of Flowers — a luminous, meticulous still life signed by a woman whose career was almost erased — the show traces how the “feminine” has been wielded to disrupt silence, demand visibility, and rewrite the rules of who and what gets remembered. What emerges is not a linear history, but a network of rebellions: quiet and loud, tactile and towering, personal and political. These works do not shout, but they do not hide. They dazzle, seduce, unravel, and resist — often all at once. This is not an exhibition about being marginalized. It’s about taking up space. With precision. With care. With beauty that bites back. Rooted Resistance challenges the notion that beauty is apolitical. It asks: what happens when beauty is wielded as a weapon? When care, detail, softness, and sensuality become tools for control, for commentary, for carving space in silence? From Haverman’s vanishing petals to Nevelson’s towering wood fragments, from O’Keeffe’s flowers to Ringgold’s fabric, the women in this exhibition transform the “feminine” into the formidable. They weren’t just making art — they were planting flags.

Margareta Haverman

A Vase of Flowers, 1716

Oil on Wood

31 1/4 x 23 3/4 in.

The MET, Object Number: 71.6

    Margareta Haverman’s only surviving signed work is a quiet revolution. On its surface, this is a still life of carefully observed blooms — lush, textured, luminous. But look closer: insects crawl across petals, some flowers wilt, edges fray. Beauty isn’t flawless; it’s alive, and vulnerable. Haverman signed her name at a time when women weren’t meant to. She was briefly accepted into the Académie Royale in Paris, then quickly expelled under accusations of copying — a claim never levied at her male counterparts who studied under the same master. This painting resists forgetting. It is precise, intuitive, and emotionally charged — a visual poem of what it means to create beauty in a world that sees you as ornamental.

Florine Stettheimer Self-Portrait, 1923 40 3/8 × 26 3/8 in | 102.6 × 67 cm Oil on canvas laid on board Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

    Florine Stettheimer’s self-portrait sparkles — a woman cloaked in flowers, draped in drapery, lounging in her own myth. Often dismissed as frivolous or decorative, Stettheimer’s art was in fact a performance of power: she designed her world to be as rich, strange, and independent as she was. She did not seek approval from the art world. She built her own salon, painted her friends, and never apologized for using lace, light, or luxury. Stettheimer’s work asks: why is femininity mistaken for weakness? Why is beauty assumed to be shallow? Here, the decorative becomes defiant — an armor of glitter and grace.

Georgia O’Keeffe Black Iris, 1926 36 in. × 29 7/8 in. Oil on canvas The MET, Object Number: 69.278.1

    Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers are enormous. They take up the whole frame. They demand to be seen — not in passing, but fully, up close, on their own terms. In Black Iris, folds of petals become monumental, abstract, sensual, stark. Critics, mostly male, insisted these were sexualized images. O’Keeffe pushed back — the flowers, she said, were exactly what they appeared to be. Still, the conversation around her work reveals how quickly “beauty” becomes gendered, how often women’s creations are reduced to projections. Here, the flower is no longer delicate, it is defiant.

Louise Nevelson Sky Cathedral, 1958 11' 3 1/2" x 10' 1/4" x 18" Painted wood The Museum of Modern Art, Object number: 136.1958.1-59

    Louise Nevelson’s towering, monochrome sculpture feels architectural, sacred, and infinite. She made it from discarded furniture, crate pieces, chair legs — the forgotten leftovers of domestic life — and turned them into a monumental shrine. Where Haverman painted with softness, Nevelson carved from shadow. Both labored in spaces associated with femininity — the floral and the domestic — and transformed them into arenas of power. Sky Cathedral is not beautiful in a conventional sense. It is austere, dense, and unapologetically heavy. It reminds us that the act of constructing beauty from the overlooked is a kind of resurrection.

Faith Ringgold

Tar Beach 2, 1990

65 3/4 x 65 1/4 in.

Silkscreen on silk and pieced printed cotton, ed. 13/24

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Accession Number: 1999.17.2

        Faith Ringgold stitches memory into fabric. Her “story quilts” blur the line between art and craft, reclaiming domestic handiwork as a tool for political storytelling. Tar Beach 2 depicts a young girl soaring above a Harlem rooftop — free, defiant, joyful. Ringgold’s medium — quilting — was long considered women’s work, not fine art. By integrating visual narrative, text, and traditional textile patterns, she reclaims that space and turns it radical. Like Haverman’s careful floral compositions, Ringgold uses intimacy and care as forms of resistance. Her softness is not submission — it’s strategy.

Rachel Ruysch Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase , 1716 65 cm x 53.5 cm Oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Object Number: SK-A-354

    A contemporary of Haverman, Rachel Ruysch painted with scientific detail and emotional resonance. Her compositions are more than botanical showcases — they’re symphonies of rhythm, decay, light, and motion. Ruysch worked continuously for over 60 years, painting while raising ten children and gaining international acclaim. Still, like Haverman, she has often been treated as a footnote to the men in her field. This still life, as rich and complex as any by her male peers, insists otherwise. Her precision is a form of authorship. Her flowers, like her career, are cultivated with control and brilliance.

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 7 3/8 × 9 7/16 in. Gelatin silver print The MET, Object Number: 1992.5147

    Cindy Sherman stages herself as a woman we think we know — the starlet, the ingénue, the girl on the verge. But this is no autobiography. Sherman’s “film stills” are constructions — images that expose how femininity is scripted, framed, and consumed. Where Haverman’s flowers were made to be admired, Sherman’s self is made to question the act of admiration itself. She turns the camera on the viewer: What are you really looking at? Who gets to control the image? Sherman’s beauty is masked, mediated, and strategic. Like every woman in this exhibition, she’s not asking to be seen — she’s making sure you see what she wants.