14 Women Challenging How Art is Defined

“In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I’m determined to find new models to live by.” Those are the words of Carrie Mae Weems, who has defied expectations as both an artist and an African American woman throughout her illustrious career.

Over the years, we have supported Weems and a number of distinguished women writers, artists, filmmakers and storytellers. They are not just finding—and creating—new models to live by but breaking down barriers, forging new paths, and expanding possibilities for generations of women to come. They are women like Wangechi Mutu, who is harnessing the power of art and creativity to radically shift the narratives around Africa, and Alice Wong, who is unstoppable in her efforts to bring visibility to the work of disability activists.

This piece is part of our featured series, The Future Is Hers, celebrating the power of women and girls around the world.

Explore the stories

Laura Poitras

After filmmaker Laura Poitras received encrypted emails with classified information on the United States National Security Agency (NSA), she and journalist Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet the sender: Edward Snowden. Her journey to unearth the NSA’s mass indiscriminate and illegal surveillance is thrillingly chronicled in Citizenfour. The film ushered in a new era of understanding of state surveillance in America and earned Poitras an Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Documentary. A MacArthur Fellow and Ford Art of Change Fellow, Poitras has continued to take on controversial subjects in her investigative films as well as her work as co-founder of The Intercept, the online news organization focused on holding the powerful accountable, and co-founder of Field of Vision, the visual journalism unit of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media that produces short films with fresh perspectives.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

A renowned American dancer, teacher and choreographer of modern dance, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founder of Urban Bush Women, a Brooklyn-based dance company that brings to light the untold and overlooked stories of disenfranchised communities through dance, all from the perspective of a black woman and a member of the African diaspora. Since the company’s creation in 1984, Zollar has demonstrated the power of performance and cultural expression to catalyze social change and drive conversation around controversial topics such as racism, sexism, abortion and homelessness. By using dance as both the message and medium, she has created a highly innovative way for a diverse mix of communities to connect and engage with one another. Most recently, she established the Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center, a 10-year initiative to address issues of equity for women, particularly women of color, in the field of dance.

Carrie Mae Weems

When Carrie Mae Weems was first teaching photography in the 1980s in Massachusetts, she was struck by the difference in how men and women in her class presented themselves in pictures. While the men squared themselves to face the camera, the women were always in profile, turned away from the lens. At night, she would return to her studio to work on her own photographs that told a different story. The result was “The Kitchen Table Series,” an iconic collection of meticulously composed vignettes that offer a meditation on identity and the relationships a black woman has with her partner, her friends and herself. Since then, Weems has defined her 30-year career as an artist by examining questions of love, power and the greater issues of humanity, creating spaces for contemplation, and removing the cloud of invisibility around African Americans and their complex history in the United States. By contesting assumptions about her largely black subjects and unabashedly insisting on their worth, particularly black women, she has created a multidimensional portrait of African American history and reset expectations about what’s possible with art. Today, she is one of America’s most influential artists and the only black woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York.

Lynn Nottage

An American playwright and screenwriter, Lynn Nottage is the first and only woman to date to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, the first for 2009’s Ruined and the second for 2017’s Sweat, a fascinating examination of race and the working class in Reading, Pennsylvania funded by Ford. In Sweat and in much of her work, Nottage explores difficult themes such as identity, alienation, politics, war and industrialization with empathy and humanity by creating authentic, often invisible characters like an African American seamstress or a steelworker living on the poverty line. The Tony-winning Sweat debuted on Broadway in 2017 as President Trump took office, and its timely message led to a tour across America’s Rust Belt before making its way to London’s West End. Nottage—whose accolades range from being named a MacArthur Fellow to one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People—continues to develop original projects for the stage as well as HBO, Showtime and Netflix.

Emily Ramshaw Hartstein

A century ago, the 19th amendment of the US Constitution made voting, America’s most fundamental mode of civic participation, a right regardless of gender. While a watershed moment, it excluded millions of women, including women of color, from the ballot box and kept them from being seen as equal for generations. To Emily Ramshaw Hartstein, the 19th amendment is unfinished business, and it’s that very reason it’s the name of her new venture: a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. The mission of The 19th, which launches this summer, is to bring a gender lens to the media. With women underrepresented in politics, policy journalism and newsroom leadership, Hartstein believes women haven’t had the opportunity to influence which stories are told, how the news is covered and whose voices are elevated. Supported by Ford, The 19th aims to empower women—particularly those historically underserved by American media—with the information, community and resources they need to be equal participants in society.