Identity Unknown

'Female creators rise in all their splendor and defiance in Donna Seaman's wonderful new book ... an enchanting biographer.' - Washington Post'Seaman is out to right a grievous wrong [and] she does so ... with stylish, sensitive and deeply researched prose ... a revelatory, engaging and provocative work.' - Chicago Tribune_____________An award-winning writer rescues seven 20th-century women artists from oblivion: their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation.Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male is named.Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins Joan Brown, Bay Area self-portraitist Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar in her heyday but omitted from recent surveys of her eraThese women fought to be treated the same as male artists, to be judged by their work, not their gender or appearance. In brilliant, compassionate prose, Seaman reveals what drove them, how they worked, and how they were perceived by others in a world where women were subjects-not makers-of art. Featuring stunning examples of the artists' work, Identity Unknown speaks to all women about their neglected place in history and the challenges they face to be taken as seriously as men no matter what their chosen field-and to all men interested in women's lives.

Scores of museums across the country hold the works of these seven women in their collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown MA, UC Berkeley, the Whitney, the Milwaukee Art Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the LA County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, etc., etc.