Our 6 Favorite Artworks from Women-Led Galleries Now | Artsy

Women-Led Galleries Now: Two Works That Reward Close Looking

In a moment when the art world is reexamining who gets to shape taste, Artsy’s Women-Led Galleries Now series has been quietly making a persuasive case: attention is a form of power, and women-led programs are directing it toward work that asks for time.

Among the selections highlighted in the series are two pieces that hinge on looking closely, then looking again. One is tied to Anna Freeman Bentley and was singled out by New York copywriter Sydney Gelman for the way it holds tension inside an interior scene. Gelman described the work as the kind of image she could “inspect for ages,” searching for visual clues that might unlock its title and the psychological charge of the room it depicts. The response is telling: the artwork’s pull is not immediate spectacle, but the slow accrual of meaning.

A different kind of intensity appears in a 2025 painting by Nicolina Morra, discussed by Casey Lesser, Artsy’s senior director of content, also based in New York. Lesser’s entry point is scale and proximity. She notes a “soft spot for small works,” emphasizing their intimacy and the way they compel a viewer to move in close. Morra’s painting, she writes, is strikingly vertical, with a canvas so narrow that the central eye feels compressed by the frame itself.

That formal constraint becomes part of the subject. Lesser reads the title as a signal that the image may be drawn from John Waters’s 1972 film “Pink Flamingos,” specifically a close-up of its star, Divine. With that reference, the painting gathers a particular cultural voltage: camp as strategy, glamour as provocation, and performance as both freedom and discipline.

Even without the filmic backstory, Lesser describes the eye as “pretty and unsettling in equal measure,” made up in glittering pale blue shadow with a dramatically arched brow. The details matter: the palette is “dreamy,” but the cropping is “severe,” creating a push and pull between seduction and control. Lesser suggests the work can be revisited repeatedly, each viewing yielding a new reading.

Together, the two picks underscore what Women-Led Galleries Now is foregrounding: not a single aesthetic, but a shared commitment to artworks that reward sustained attention. Whether through the unresolved tension of an interior or the charged intimacy of a tightly framed gaze, these selections argue for looking as an active, interpretive act — and for the curatorial ecosystems that make that kind of looking possible.

Organizations associated with the feature include ART FOR CHANGE, Harsh Collective, and The Artsy Vanguard, with the selections presented under Artsy Editorial’s Women-Led Galleries Now umbrella.