The Prime of Your Life

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Text by Natalie Haddad 

“Years do odd things to identity,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her poem “Leaves.” The passage of years can likewise distort our perception of time, displacing us from the present to an anticipated future, or perhaps a cherished past, what we might call the prime of our life. 

“Prime of life” is a more expansive phrase than its structure suggests. It signifies a circumscribed period, yet it can change, extend, recur, or continue indefinitely. It can be long gone or right now. It traverses joy, nostalgia, and melancholy. It may be one point in time or many, or even a continuum. 

The exhibition Prime of Your Life encompasses these possibilities. Comprising eighteen women artists all over seventy-five years old, it is not a retrospective. It celebrates the artists’ current practices, yet leaves the moment open to evolving creative visions.

This flexibility is due in part to Marc and Livia Strauses’ longstanding attention to many of the participants, whose aesthetics have developed alongside the couple’s. This contemporaneity prevents the mere fact of longevity from historicizing the artists. Instead, older and newer works share space as evidence of a prime unbounded by time.

That those on view are all women is less a strategic decision than a reflection of the reality that a majority of artists active later in life are women. The men who readily come to mind (Jasper Johns, for example) are, by and large, so canonical that their inclusion would alter the exhibition’s dynamics. The paradox of identity-based shows is that they risk reducing multidimensional artists to one facet of their being even as they help balance the art historical record. Because Prime of Your Life is rooted in a longtime appreciation of these artists, it weaves naturally through myriad visual and conceptual landscapes without becoming didactic or reaching for a concise message. If there is a guiding query, maybe it’s this: What does a practice become when it has decades to accumulate experience?

Of course, commonalities emerge. Many of the artists have dealt with art-world sexism or have balanced families with art-making. Some helped shape feminist politics and activism in the arts, while others explored the possibilities offered by abstraction, digital media, or textiles. All have dedicated much of their adult lives to art—as makers, as well as teachers and advocates—no matter how long it’s taken for the establishment to catch on. 

In fact, it didn’t catch on to Rose Wylie until she was 76. The artist, who returned to painting after raising her children, has since amassed a legion of fans enamored of her artworks’ charm, naive style, and incongruent cultural references. Squeak Carnwath likewise draws inspiration from vernacular culture, integrating it with art history and language for her distinctive oil paintings. In “My Umwelt” (2025), her iconography forms her own hieroglyphics, collecting and transmitting disparate information; art critic John Yau has aptly called Carnwath “an archivist of the overheard, the snippet, and the little-known fact.”

Shirley Kaneda takes cues from Pop and digital art for her candy-colored paintings of geometric and biomorphic shapes. Negative and positive space vie for attention and compositions go from dissonance to harmony then back again. She’s honed this style “by inverting the rules” of abstraction, in her words. 

Painting enables Frances Barth to both travel back through art history and remain present in the moment. “My work developed originally from passions that I had, from geometry and color and story telling, from Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and from understanding what was going on in my paintings and asking ‘what if…’ to move forward,” she explained. “In relation to existentialism my beliefs were formed not from making ‘pictures’ but being engaged in the act of painting.” “Red meander” (2026), conveys that engagement through its central snaking red line, which unsettles the geometric elements to activate the pictorial space. 

Mary Heilmann’s bright, luscious canvases share with Barth dynamic compositions and narrative allusions. In “Mecox” (2026), a luminous, textured teal stains the canvas’s surface, overlaid with a lacy coat of black from the left mid-point to the top right edge and streaked with translucent grassy green. The painting evokes an oceanic world where water, algae, and coral come together. 

Barth and Heilmann are among a cohort of artists in Prime of Your Life for whom vivid color, tactility, and everyday materials were initially a means to reject the macho chauvinism beneath minimalism’s impersonal facade. Even as their work has gained (often belated) acclaim and influenced subsequent generations, that defiance is ingrained in their artistic visions.

Lynda Benglis has embodied this attitude since the 1960s, with her poured latex and polyurethane sculptures. In recent years, she’s traded lurid color for more subdued surfaces, for a greater emphasis on touch and sensuality. 

Michele Oka Doner and Mia Westerlund Roosen also engage with the senses, through the natural world and embodied materiality, respectively. The former, who began her career as a ceramicist, uses organic materials, such as stone, wood, and shells, to encapsulate the eternal relationship between humans and the Earth. The latter emerged from a minimalist milieu with a desire to breathe life back into the movement’s reductive forms. Her sculptures transform materials with industrial connotations (e.g., concrete, asphalt, metal) into haptic, visceral suggestions of bodies.

Few artists of the past half century have flouted the tenets of minimalism as wildly as Judy Pfaff. In a conversation with art historian Jen Samet, Pfaff noted that she worked with aluminum foil for a year to “exorcise Richard Serra out of the loft I had, which used to be his studio.” Pfaff’s assemblages, some incorporating items including plastic flowers and carpets, along with squiggling neon lights, follow their own internal logic and resonances. 

Organic and commonplace materials are not as charged with gender politics today as they were in the 1960s and ’70s, but they still wield the power to subvert hierarchical notions of what “fine art” can be and who’s allowed to decide. Sonia Gomes’s vibrant multimedia pieces carry traces of her native Brazil’s folk festivals and Carnival and her grandmother’s Candomblé practice. The found and donated fabrics that compose her pendulous, knotted objects also bespeak the sewers and makers (most, if not all, women) from Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, a textile center in Brazil where she was born, and larger histories of Afro-Brazilian life and oppression.

Similarly, Dingda McCannon’s textile pieces embed her experiences of racism and sexism in a medium once exclusively associated with “women’s work.” The collaged quilt “The Brown Sisters – Shades of the Rainbow” (2024) depicts thirteen women with different skin tones standing together in two rows. The figures, clothed in and backed by saturated hues, form a beautifully chromatic portrait of solidarity at a time of emboldened discrimination. 

While Prime of Your Life’s artists have shaped and reshaped post-minimalist and conceptual art, many have also been instrumental in creating space for intimacy and vulnerability in the art world. Marina Abramović and Judy Chicago have, crucially, extended conversations about feminism and the femme body to a broader general public. In terms of laying one’s physical and psychical self bare, however, Brenda Goodman is the exhibition’s nerve center. As she put it, “I will never have a wall between me and the viewer; I will always be honest, real, and paint from my heart.” Goodman’s often harrowing paintings manage the difficult task of giving visual form to pain and trauma, both her own and that of others. “I worked with symbols for many years and then later made very intense self-portraits, all dealing with myself, my pain, my sadness, and all my internal complexities. But as time went on, my work has opened more to the universe around me.”

For Jeanne Silverthorne, the boundaries between oneself and the world are porous. In her cast rubber sculpture “You and Me” (2026), a gray baby lies at the center of a large white platform that appears to be melting. The child is a tiny presence atop the expansive, skin-like surface, suggesting an inchoate being on the threshold of physical existence.

Martha Rosler investigates the intersection of the subject and the world as well, though from a vastly different perspective. For nearly six decades, Rosler has collapsed the separation between American domestic life and geopolitical violence with her photomontage series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Her periodic return to the series marks the recurrence of global warfare while exposing how the culture of self-fashioning alternately exacerbates the distance between worlds and exploits international strife as part of our image-based mediascape.

In other words, as things change they stay the same—a cynical take on history, but one that Rosler seeks to disrupt with her jarring juxtapositions, while Jenny Holzer compresses depth and vacuity in her text-based Truisms. “Truisms: A sincere effort is all you can ask…” (2001–24) follows the title with more banal phrases that are endlessly regurgitated in books, products, and the media until they’re internalized as wisdom.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s entry on the Museum of Modern Art website notes that “reducing Hershman Leeson to an oracle of the future would be to miss the way her art prompts us to look backwards as well as forwards.” In a sense, Hershman Leeson exemplifies the idea of an unfolding “prime.” Throughout her career she’s been described as prescient in her explorations of technology, identity, and gender, but her practice can only unfold in the present, where the past’s accumulated lessons meet the future’s imaginative possibilities. The same might be said about all the artists in Prime of Your Life. 

Years do odd things to identity. They change us. Ideally, they heighten our openness to change, so that every present has the potential to be the prime of your life.