Allicette Torres
Something happened in a conference room at the Hilton Midtown this February. Not an explosion. Not a protest. But a shift—slight, deliberate, and entirely destabilizing.
The College Art Association (CAA), the largest professional gathering of artists, art historians, and critics in the United States, is not mainly known for revolutions. It is known for hundreds of panels unfolding simultaneously across hotel conference rooms. Scholars present research on everything from medieval iconography to NFTs. But in a quiet session on feminist abstraction, something more radical was taking shape.
 Huile sur toile (1925) de Vassily Kandinsky. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Donation Nina Kandinsky 1976. AM 1976-856 |
For over a century, abstraction has been framed as a flight from representation—a shedding of narrative, a rejection of the body. Kandinsky sought spiritual vibration. Pollock flung paint in existential fury. Rothko collapsed into pure color.But what if abstraction isn’t about escape at all? What if abstraction isn’t a luxury but a necessity for the colonized and the marginalized? Not freedom from the world, but the freedom to remake it? |
All men. All seeking transcendence, all assuming the privilege of escape.
This was the premise of Personal and Global: Current Directions in Feminist Abstract and Abstractionist Art, a panel chaired by Tanya Augsburg (San Francisco State University). Its participants were not interested in abstraction as a retreat. They were interested in what happens when abstraction refuses to let go of the world.
The Colonized Canvas
Wendy Deschene spoke first. The room, full but hushed, seemed to shrink as she described her grandmother’s forced re-education in a government-run boarding school. An entire life ruptured, severed from language, history, and land.
On the screen, her digital work Kawii Otinum (Reclaim) appeared. Colonial landscapes fractured by Indigenous motifs, buffalo flickering like ghosts through 19th-century Eurocentric visions of the land.
Deschene’s abstraction does not erase. It reclaims. It embodies what scholar Gerald Vizenor (1994) calls survivance, not mere survival but active resistance to erasure.
Anna Tom extended this idea, turning to the grid—not as an emblem of modernist purity but as a structure marked by absence. The grid becomes a map of exile, memory, and loss in the works of Nasreen Mohamedi, Zarina Hashmi, Gargi Raina, and Purvai Rai.
Mohamedi’s spare, delicate lines have long been misread through a Western formalist lens. Tom reframes them in the context of Partition, the brutal 1947 division of India and Pakistan that displaced 15 million people. Hashmi, exiled from India that same year, turned architectural blueprints into meditations on lost homes.
The grid, in their hands, is no longer utopian. It’s haunted.
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) articulates this powerfully. Grief is not passive. It lingers. It marks space. It demands recognition. This is what Raina and Rai’s work does. It inscribes absence into abstraction. A refusal to forget.
The Abstraction of the Absent Body
As the discussion continued, abstraction’s relationship to the body came into focus.
Ina Choi’s paper on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha examined the tension between abstraction and erasure. Cha’s work has often been framed as conceptual, ephemeral, pure form. Choi argued otherwise. After all, being formless is not a choice for the colonized. It is a condition imposed upon them.
Cha, a Korean-born American artist, was fascinated by linguistic, bodily, and historical dislocation. Her film Permutations (1976), her fragmented text in Dictee (1982), and her use of silence and absence were not merely aesthetic choices. They were acts of defiance.
Choi connected Cha’s work to Judith Butler’s (1993) concept of precarious embodiment, the idea that certain bodies are systematically made invisible under power structures. Cha’s abstraction resists that disappearance. It demands presence, even in absence.
The same tension between visibility and erasure surfaced in Patricia Ekpo’s discussion of Beverly Buchanan.
Buchanan’s sculptures, Ruins and Rituals (1979) and Marsh Ruins (1981), are made of materials meant to erode: earth, stone, and wood. They decay. They disappear. This impermanence is deliberate.
Ekpo linked Buchanan’s work to the weathering hypothesis (Geronimus, 1992), which describes how systemic racism accelerates physical deterioration in Black communities. Buchanan’s abstraction does not transcend suffering. It materializes it.
Beyond the Medium: Abstraction as Remediation
The final shift in the conversation came through Tanya Augsburg’s analysis of Deanna Sirlin, an artist who refuses to keep abstraction confined to a single medium.
Sirlin moves between painting, translucent window installations, and video projection. Her work immerses entire spaces in color but never loses sight of its history. Her abstraction is not about purity. It is about contamination.
Augsburg argued that Sirlin dismantles one of abstraction’s most sacred rules: medium specificity. Her work aligns with Rosalind Krauss’s (1999) post-medium condition, where materials, histories, and identities blur.
In Sirlin’s hands, abstraction is not an escape. It is expansion.
The Freedom Beyond Freedom
As the panel wrapped up, the conversation felt unfinished—in the best way. The ideas in the room weren’t meant to stay there. They would carry forward into studios, galleries, and classrooms, reshaping how we think about abstraction.
The panelists gathered their notes, and the audience slowly filtered out. Outside, the city moved as it always did, unaware that, in a quiet conference room, something had shifted.
The history of abstraction is still being written.
And this time, it looks different.
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Book suggestions for further reading on this topic.
Why These Books?
- They expand on key themes from the essay: Feminist abstraction, decolonial critique, racialized embodiment, and the politics of materiality.
- They connect to the artists and theorists mentioned: Many books provide a deeper context for Mohamedi, Hashmi, Buchanan, and Sirlin’s work.
- They situate abstraction in a larger political and historical framework.
Core Books Cited in the Essay (Available on Amazon):
- The Cultural Politics of Emotion – Sara Ahmed (2004)
Explores how emotions shape individual and collective bodies, particularly about race, feminism, and political belonging. - Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative – Judith Butler (1997)
Examines how language constructs identities and how speech acts can be empowering and oppressive. - Grids – Rosalind Krauss
A foundational text for understanding abstraction in modern and contemporary art, focusing on the grid as a structure of meaning. - Dictee – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
A genre-defying experimental text that blends poetry, prose, and imagery to explore themes of migration, gender, and displacement. - Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence – Gerald Vizenor
This article introduces “survivance,” a concept of active resistance against colonial erasure in Native American narratives and cultural production.
Books to Expand on this Essay’s Themes | Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Abstraction:
- Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender – David J. Getsy (2015)
Examines how abstraction in sculpture intersects with gender, identity, and embodiment, challenging the traditional male-dominated histories of modernism. - Reckoning with the Rise of the Right: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis – Gabriella Beckles-Raymond (2021)
Looks at the intersection of decolonial feminism, race, and contemporary global politics, which helps contextualize the political stakes of feminist abstraction. - Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility – Ashon T. Crawley (2017)
It explores the role of breath, movement, and non-representational aesthetics in radical Black thought, deeply relevant to Buchanan’s environmental sculpture. - New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics – Edited by Diana Coole & Samantha Frost (2010)
Explores how materials themselves have agency, making it a crucial read for understanding abstraction as an embodied feminist practice.
Indigenous, Black, and Global Feminist Art Histories:
- As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017)
A powerful Indigenous feminist critique of colonialism, discussing art, activism, and self-determination. - We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85– Brooklyn Museum (2017)
A significant art history book featuring Black feminist artists—including Beverly Buchanan—who worked with abstraction and installation as forms of radical protest. - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study – Stefano Harney & Fred Moten (2013)
Discusses radical Black aesthetics and non-representational artistic strategies highly relevant to Buchanan’s work. - Zarina: Paper Like Skin – Alka Pande & others (2012)
A monograph on Zarina Hashmi focuses on her use of abstraction, exile, and memory.
Materiality, Decay, and Abstraction in Contemporary Art:
- Materiality – Edited by Petra Lange-Berndt (2015)
A collection of essays on how materiality shapes contemporary art, including abstraction, decay, and ephemerality discussions. - Object Lessons: Thinking Feminist at the Museum – Joanna Inglot & Joan Kee (2022)
Focuses on feminist curatorial strategies and the politics of art objects, including feminist abstraction. - Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century – New Museum of Contemporary Art (2007)
This exhibition examines artists working with ephemeral, degraded materials, including Black and Indigenous artists who reject the permanence of modernist abstraction.
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Allicette Torres is a New York-based artist, curator, and arts writer investigating memory, perception, and the shifting architecture of visual culture. She is the founder of Clear Nude Magazine and Revolú Gallery, an experimental platform fostering global dialogue and showcasing boundary-defying work by emerging and underrepresented artists. As Northeast Regional Chair and UN Caucus Chair for the Women’s Caucus for Art, she builds spaces that challenge convention and amplify bold, diverse voices. |
Wow! This was so well written and is really making me think about the movements in abstraction.