Louise Fishman

Renowned abstract painter Louise Fishman graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois in 1965. In the early 1970s, Louise’s paintings began to draw on her experiences in the feminist movement, where she was active in consciousness-raising groups among women artists and writers. In 1973 Louise painted her “Angry Women” series, which reflected on the oppression of women in a patriarchal world using text as image. In her large canvases, her physical and process-driven marks reinvented the abstract expressionist gesture and the minimalist grid into tools that communicated history and emotion centered on her identities as Jewish, feminist, and lesbian. Louise’s profound series of eight paintings titled “Remembrance and Renewal” incorporated ash she had collected at Auschwitz into her paint.

Louise received many awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Louise’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions across the country, including A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing at Krannert Art Museum on view from August 26, 2021, to February 26, 2022. Her work is represented in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and the Jewish Museum in New York.