Fifteen More Feminist Artworks, From Edmonia Lewis’s Cleopatra to Mary Cassatt’s “New Woman”
Feminist art history rarely fits neatly into a single list. After spotlighting 15 landmark works last March, ARTnews has expanded its selection with another 15 artworks that sharpen, complicate, and extend feminist arguments across generations — from the first wave of feminism to today’s intersectional movement.
Among the additions is a sculpture that quietly overturns a familiar narrative. African American and Native American artist Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) made “The Death of Cleopatra” (1876) at a moment when Neoclassicism still prized classical, Biblical, and literary subjects. Cleopatra, the Egyptian ruler who reigned from 51–30 BCE, had long been pictured in art as a tragic figure poised on the brink of suicide. Lewis chose a different instant: the aftermath.
Carved in marble, Lewis’s Cleopatra sits enthroned in full regalia, her body slackening into a final, majestic stillness. One hand droops over the chair’s edge; her head tilts to the side. In her right hand, the asp remains — the instrument of her intentional death by snakebite. The work, weighing nearly three tons, was Lewis’s most ambitious undertaking, and its psychological charge lies in its refusal to sentimentalize. Cleopatra is not depicted as a spectacle of ruin, but as a figure who has exercised agency.
That emphasis on self-determination resonates with Lewis’s own life. She was known to obscure details of her childhood and to shape her biography with care, controlling how she would be understood. Whatever the gaps in the record, her achievements were unmistakable: by the end of the 19th century, Lewis was the only Black woman to have participated in — and received recognition from — the American artistic mainstream.
ARTnews notes that Lewis’s sculpture was not explicitly feminist in the way later 20th-century works would be. Still, Lewis and many of her contemporaries supported women’s rights and benefited from the first wave of feminism that began in the 1840s. That era brought expanded access to higher education through newly founded women’s colleges such as Vassar, as well as newly coeducational institutions including the University of Michigan and Oberlin College, which Lewis attended.
If Lewis’s Cleopatra reframes power through historical allegory, American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) did so through the textures of everyday life. Cassatt is closely associated with images of women in social and private spaces, often emphasizing intimate bonds between mothers and children. In contrast to many Impressionists who gravitated toward boulevards and landscapes, Cassatt repeatedly returned to women’s interior worlds — and to what it meant to be seen from a woman’s perspective.
In “The Reader” (1877), a woman reclines in a white armchair, absorbed in a large book. The scene is quiet, but its implications are pointed. Leisure reading, ARTnews observes, was not a given for women before the 19th century. Prior to the 1800s, only some girls received education at home or in informal “dame schools” run by women. Public schooling expanded in the 1900s, when girls were increasingly permitted — often with restrictions — to attend elementary and high schools.
Cassatt herself embodied the era’s “New Woman,” a term linked to 19th-century feminism. Highly trained and professionally successful, she never married and advocated publicly for women’s equality. ARTnews reports that she campaigned with friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s and later supported women’s suffrage in the 1910s.
The expanded ARTnews roster also begins to gesture toward the broader ecosystem that made such work possible, including the slow, uneven opening of art education to women. One example is American artist Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931), who came from a family of arts patrons and shifted from collecting to making after a formative day in 1882 on a New York beach with her sister and Oscar Wilde. Five years later — despite her husband’s objections — she traveled to Paris to study painting with Carolus-Duran, taking advantage of the growing educational opportunities available to women in the late 19th century.
Taken together, these additions underscore a central truth of feminist art: it is not a single style or period, but a persistent reorientation of who gets to speak, who gets to be represented, and what kinds of lives are granted complexity. Lists can only ever be partial, but they can still clarify the through lines — from Lewis’s monumental reimagining of Cleopatra’s final moment to Cassatt’s insistence that a woman reading is a subject worthy of serious painting.
