Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection

Christopher Bedford was appointed the Helen and Charles Schwab Director, SFMOMA in 2022. Bedford is recognized as an innovative and dynamic leader, with a career focused on increasing community engagement and creating programs of national and international impact. During his nearly two decades in the museum field, Bedford has organized or co-organized numerous major exhibitions, commissions, and projects with artists including Mark Bradford, Chris Burden, Mickalene Thomas, Lisa Yuskavage, Jack Whitten, Melvin Edwards, Pipilotti Rist, and Al Loving.

Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis) works in Savannah, Georgia, where she has lived since 1996. She received an MFA in theatre design from Yale University in 1990, and is a recipient of the Jacob Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), an Anonymous Was A Woman grant (2021), NYFA Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2020), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). Recent solo and survey exhibitions include Suzanne Jackson: Listen’ N Home, The Arts Club of Chicago (2022); Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Joan Didion: What She Means, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, Jepson Center/Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019); Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Brooklyn Museum, New York and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2018–20); and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011–13). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She is represented by Ortuzar Projects, New York.

Komal Shah is an avid collector and philanthropist, whose mission-driven work is focused on advancing scholarship about the significant achievements of women. Over the past decade, she has developed an expansive collection that celebrates the work of women artists across generations. She is responsible for establishing the popular talk series, Artists on the Future, at Stanford University and sits on numerous institutional boards, including SFMOMA. This month, she will publish the wide-ranging book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, as part of her ongoing efforts to introduce audiences to the vast contributions of women artists.

Katy Siegel is Research Director, Special Program Initiatives, SFMOMA, and Distinguished Professor, Stony Brook University, SUNY. She has researched, curated exhibitions, and edited volumes for numerous projects including Postwar: Art Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, 1945-1965 (with Okwui Enwezor); “The Heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler; Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day, for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (with Christopher Bedford); Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculptures, 1963–2017 (with Kelly Baum); and Joan Mitchell (with Sarah Roberts). Recent writing includes forthcoming catalog essays on Toshiko Takaezu and Firelei Baez.

Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, California) is recognized as one of the leading painters of her generation and one of the most astute and daring practitioners taking on the legacies of American abstraction. As she explores and expands the medium’s possibilities, she honors its history by seizing opportunities to break with tradition. Over the course of her career, she has posited new directions for the landscape genre and explored the social histories of California. Her notable incorporation of sculptural elements — including the neon lights that have been a presence in her work since 2012 — as well as her fearless and physically embodied approach to painterly gesture, have allowed her to employ abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, highly personal mode of engagement with the world outside the studio.

Weatherford was the subject of the survey exhibition Canyon–Daisy–Eden, on view at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York in 2020; the exhibition traveled to SITE Sante Fe, New Mexico in 2021. Other solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museo di Palazzo Grimani (2022); Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado (2021); Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, California (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, California (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Brooklyn Museum, New York; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2019, Lund Humphries published an in-depth monograph surveying the artist’s oeuvre. Weatherford lives and works in Los Angeles.