Restoring the Self Through Abstraction: A New Feminist Vision

Mar 19, 2025 | Art Insights | 1 comment

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 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.
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. All men. All seeking transcendence, all assuming the privilege of escape.
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?
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. In the works of Nasreen Mohamedi, Zarina Hashmi, Gargi Raina, and Purvai Rai, the grid becomes a map of exile, memory, and loss.
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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1 Comment

  1. Chris
    Chris on 03/20/2025 at 12:54 pm

    Wow! This was so well written and is really making me think about the movements in abstraction.