Visionary women: 'Transcendental and Beyond: The Essence of Art' features 100 years of notable female artists

When gallery owner Victoria Addison Rowe traveled to Agnes Pelton’s Florida home recently, she imagined an exhibition of visionary women.

Famous as a symbolist in the largely male New Mexico-based Transcendental Painting Group, Pelton was known for capturing a meditative spirituality in her work.

Addison bought Pelton’s painting “The Being: A Transcendental Vision” and began gathering works by female artists capturing that spirit from across the decades.

Visionary women: 'Transcendental and Beyond: The Essence of Art' features 100 years of notable female artists

The result is “Transcendental and Beyond: The Essence of Art,” open at Santa Fe’s Addison Rowe Fine Art through Oct. 31.

“It’s 100 years of notable women artists, with Pelton being the grande dame,” she said.

Peppered with familiar names such as Florence Miller Pierce, Louise Nevelson, Agnes Martin and Elaine de Kooning, as well as Pelton, the show also includes some less familiar names such as Irene Monat Stern, known for her color field canvases, and Rachel MacFarlane, famed for her immersive environments.

Resembling a glowing female Buddha, the Pelton painting once hung in the artist’s bedroom.

“It’s one of her spiritual guides,” said Addison Rowe. “She used it to meditate and to decide what to paint next.”

Nevelson’s “Diminishing Reflection XX” mirrors her mammoth Cubist geomatic wall sculptures.

The artist was a harbinger of feminist and installation art that rose to prominence in America in the mid-20th century. Nevelson’s sculptures reflect her interior life, women’s roles in society, the urban landscape, personal symbolism and spirituality.

Florence Miller Pierce came to Taos in 1936 to study with the Transcendentalist Emil Bisttram. She returned the next year as the youngest member of the Transcendental Painting Group.

The exhibition features several of Pierce’s resin works.

“These works by her are very rare,” Addison Rowe said.

In 1969, while working on a foam piece, Pierce accidentally spilled some resin onto a piece of aluminum foil. She held the foil to the light, and the effect of the mirror surface reflecting light up through the resin entranced her.

“She was the first resin artist we can really talk about,” Addison Rowe said. “She melted it; she wore a gas mask. She had to liquify it. Sometimes she put tissue paper on top of it to get a ripple effect. It’s very complicated; some of it shimmers.”

The de Kooning print “Taurus II” reflects the artist’s long interest in animal forms. In 1983, she made several excursions to see the prehistoric caves in southern France and northern Spain, making sketches in her hotel room. She translated this material into larger paintings back in the U.S., using the high-keyed colors and vigorous brushwork of the Abstract Expressionism. De Kooning taught at the University of New Mexico in 1967 and traveled to Mexico to see bullfights.

A trio of untitled Agnes Martin lithographs feature her trademark grid patterns. She moved to New Mexico in 1946 to attend graduate school at UNM, finally settling in Galisteo.

Martin tethered her practice to spirituality and drew from a mix of Zen Buddhist and American Transcendentalist ideas.

“All of their work has that undercurrent of spirituality,” Addison Rowe said. “I feel the emotion of an artist comes through in their artwork.”