In Fargo, a long-overdue spotlight on women artists across 400 years

The work of women artists spanning 400 years is on view at the Plains Arts Museum in Fargo, from an etching by 17th-century Italian Baroque artist Elisabetta Sirani to a contemporary piece by Laura Youngbird of Breckenridge, Minn.

“This exhibition is a celebration of women artists who have historically been excluded,” says Danielle Gravon, the chief curator.

The museum collaborated with the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania to showcase about 80 artworks for “Women Artists: Four Centuries of Creativity,” which runs through March 1.

The show also features works by Dyani White Hawk, of Shakopee, Julie Buffalohead of St. Paul, and art history icons such as Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler and Impressionist Berthe Morisot.

'Collect more women artists'

Gravon says the exhibition's inspiration came in March during Women’s History Month, when she was thinking about the Guerrilla Girls, a national feminist art collective that started in 1985. 

“They've highlighted inequities in the art world since the 1980s, and it was very formative in my education,” Gravon says. 

She points to perhaps their most famous artwork, the 1989 piece, “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?”, which appeared on billboards and buses in New York.

Laura Youngbird’s "No Face Boy/No Face Girl (2004)" appears in “Women Artists: Four Centuries of Creativity,” an exhibition that raises broader questions about visibility and recognition in the art world.

Courtesy of Plains Art Museum

The yellow graphic shows one of the most famous female nudes in Western art — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ 1814 “Grand Odalisque” — altered with the group’s signature gorilla mask, and states, “Less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.”

The Guerrilla Girls updated the piece in 2012 with new data to 4 percent of artists (a decline) and 76 percent of nudes. Gravon decided to do her own audit of the Plains Art Museum collection. 

“Our research showed that only about 10 percent of our 6,000 objects were created by women artists,” Gravon calls the findings “startling.”

“Our assessment also drove our collection policies to collect more women artists,” Gravon says. These include new acquisitions on view by former Minneapolis College of Art and Design faculty Hazel Belvo and Judith Roode, who died in 2018.

Art history in practice

Gravon also worked with assistant professor of art history Noni Brynjolson and the students in her “Women and Art” course this fall at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. The students conducted original research and wrote the gallery texts for many of the regional artists in the show. 

While the texts are not comprehensive, Gravon says, they are “one of the only art historical overviews that are focused on women artists of this region, so we were really lucky to have them contribute that into our collection.”

The exhibition runs through March 1, 2026. There will be a free guided tour on Nov. 13.

Elisabetta Sirani’s 17th-century etching "Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist" is featured in the exhibition — part of a show that also includes newly written interpretive texts by local art history students.

Courtesy of Plains Art Museum