The Untitled Space Founder on Building a Feminist Gallery in New York and Making Art About Power
In a New York art market that still too often treats feminist work as a category rather than a core conversation, The Untitled Space has spent the past decade insisting on the opposite. Founded in 2015, the gallery has positioned itself as a platform where contemporary art and activism meet head-on, with programming centered on women artists and feminist discourse.
The gallery’s founder, a multidisciplinary artist who previously spent 15 years working internationally as a photographer, describes her studio practice as beginning with personal experience and widening into shared political reality. Across photography, sculpture, neon, painting, and public art, she returns to questions of identity, particularly female identity, and the ways it is shaped by history, culture, politics, and entrenched power structures.
At the center of her work is a deliberate reversal of what she characterizes as a long-standing patriarchal lens. For centuries, women’s bodies and narratives have been interpreted through frameworks that prioritize objectification over agency. Her aim, she says, is to reclaim that visual territory and build images and objects that foreground autonomy, symbolism, and self-determination.
That approach is informed by her background in art history and women’s studies, as well as by references drawn from history, mythology, and philosophy. She also points to her Latinx heritage as a key influence on how she thinks about cultural memory and layered identity, and how personal biography can intersect with collective struggle.
Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, as the youngest of five children, she credits her mother’s career with shaping her early understanding of justice. Her mother is described as a Mexican American attorney who was among the first women to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School and who continues to run her own law firm while working extensively in human rights. Listening to her speak about inequities she faced, the founder says, helped clarify how systems of power operate and how they can be challenged.
In her view, art can confront those systems differently than law does: through metaphor, emotion, and what she calls a collective imagination. That belief also guides her curatorial work. Before opening the gallery, she launched The Untitled Magazine in 2009 as a platform for art, fashion, and culture presented through a feminist lens. The publication’s editorial mission eventually expanded into exhibition-making.
One early curatorial project, “The ‘F’ Word: Feminism in Art,” proved pivotal. The response, she has said, made clear there was an audience for programming that placed feminist discourse at the center rather than at the margins. The Untitled Space was conceived to meet that demand, with a mission to mount exhibitions that respond to the cultural and political climate in real time.
That ethos has continued in recent initiatives, including “UPRISE 2025: The Art of Resistance,” a large-scale exhibition featuring 100 artists. The show brought together work addressing gender equality, reproductive rights, democracy, and social justice, reflecting the founder’s view that the political climate of the past decade has only intensified the need for socially engaged art.
Among the participating artists were Rose McGowan, Natalie White, Alison Jackson, Victoria de Lesseps, and Jemima Kirke. The gallery has also presented projects under its Art4Equality umbrella, launched in response to systemic inequities in representation and sales for marginalized artists.
The founder has been candid about the realities of sustaining a brick-and-mortar gallery in New York City, describing it as an ongoing challenge, with the pandemic serving as a major stress test. Still, she frames the gallery’s longevity as part of its argument: that feminist-driven programming is not a niche, but a durable, necessary infrastructure within contemporary culture.
As debates around bodily autonomy, democratic norms, and gendered power continue to shape public life, The Untitled Space’s model suggests a future in which exhibitions do more than mirror the moment. They can also help organize it — visually, emotionally, and politically — into something viewers can name, argue with, and carry forward.
