The Guerrilla Girls said it first: Does a woman have to be naked to get into the Met? The radical women’s arts advocacy and social justice group pointed to the statistic that only 5% of the Met’s collection was women’s work, but 85% of the nudes were female. Women artists are hugely underrepresented in the art world—only 11% of museum acquisitions in the United States were works by women between 2019-2020. March is Women’s History Month, so we decided to highlight some of the women artists living and working in Pittsburgh. These five artists all approach their mediums differently, but each have a strong voice and an ability to unashamedly take up space, both on and off the canvas.
5 Women Artists to Watch in Pittsburgh
Carolyn Pierotti
One of Carolyn Pierotti’s paintings, pictured above, will stick in my mind forever: Call Me a Cab, a woman with a gaunt, pasty face, her makeup once dolled up for a night out now melted, her eyes a vacant glaze. Most women have been this woman at some point. It’s all the glitz without the audience to admire it. The vacuous sadness of the sidewalk outside of the nightclub as you wrap your coat around yourself and puff on a cigarette to try and take a breather. Call Me A Cab showcases Pierotti’s unique color palette and her stylized use of figuration. She paints women from a woman’s perspective, with the nuances of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Plus, anyone who knows her can also see her bold, do-no-harm-take-no-BS attitude coming through in the starkness of her paintings.
Leah Patgorski
Leah Patgorski is a deeply gifted artist and designer—somebody whose vision of the world is a totally unique one. She uses fabric, cotton, paper, wire, and ethereal homemade pigments to create abstract works that straddle the line between two and three dimensional. (The fabric in the cover image is her work as well). She plays with shadow, light, and scale in how she presents each work, often allowing them to appear as completely different depending on where in a room you approach them. Her work appears in galleries in Chicago, New York, and Texas, among other places. Pittsburgh is lucky to have her in its arts community.
Oreen Cohen
Oreen Cohen’s work has a mystical feeling to it, as if she is drawing from some force beyond herself to find something on the canvas. Cohen is a Fall 2023 graduate of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s residency in New Orleans, where she made large-scale paintings that play with the multitudes that reveal themselves in different textures. But large-scale works aren’t new for her. She’s also made large-scale sculptural installations that show a fearlessness towards thinking big.
Vania Evangelique
Vania Evangelique is both a painter and the steward of a community garden in Garfield. In her paintings, her passion for flora comes through in the dappled light on leaves and the gentle warmth of her brushstrokes. Her work often features the natural world, but with an intimacy in it that only comes from closeness to the subject matter. Under her brush, flowers are not just flowers but living beings. Evangelique is also a photographer and independent curator known in Garfield for her engagement with the local community.
Karen Lue
Photographer Karen Lue captures the body. She doesn’t just take portraits, she has a way of finding the shadows and contours in human anatomy. At times, the images she takes can be confronting or not conventionally beautiful. They challenge us to look at how our conventions of beauty are removed from the messier truth of human sexuality or even just the rawness of human physicality. Her photography explores her sense of self as a queer Chinese-American woman—even in photographs where there are no people, her vision is distinctive. Her most recent body of work, Two Open Mouths, explores show a diagnosis of endometriosis influenced her understanding of her body, embodying the silent frustration and anguish of chronic illness in images.
Cover image courtesy of Leah Patgorski
Story by Emma Riva
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