Anonymous Was a Woman : The First 25 Years

A comprehensive account of remarkable artwork and accomplishments by over 250 contemporary women recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman award.

Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years celebrates the transformative impact of women artists on contemporary art since the founding of the titular grant. In addition to new essays, the book offers a biographical description with selected artworks of each artist who received the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) award from its founding in 1996 through 2020, a period in which the accomplishments of women have thoroughly transformed contemporary art.

In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the AWAW award, this landmark publication commemorates 251 recipients. Surveying their careers offers a wealth of previously untold histories. Anonymous Was A Woman also includes contributions by coeditors Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenovic, along with commentaries by other women scholars and a roundtable discussion featuring founder Susan Unterberg.

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s and Hannah Wilke. Princenthal has taught at Bard, Princeton, Yale, the School of Visual Arts, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.

Vesela Sretenović is visiting faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University and works as an independent curator of modern and contemporary art.

Alexandra Schwartz is curator of modern and contemporary art, craft, and design at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Her exhibitions and catalogs include Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art and Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s, and her books include Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles and Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a professor of art history and museum studies at Arizona State University and director of Northlight Gallery at ASU.