Anonymous Was a Woman exhibition at Grey Art Museum, NYU, April 1 - July 19, 2025
April 1 - July 19, 2025 This exhibition celebrates Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW), a grant program for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Featuring works by 41 of the 251 artists who received the award in its first quarter century, it provides a timely opportunity to look back at a crucial period of art production by women, and to reflect on the program’s enormous impact. Ganesh was a 2020 AWAW recipient and has a large mixed media work in the
Since its inception, AWAW has helped reshape the landscape of arts funding, filling a vacuum left after the National Endowment for the Arts terminated its grants to individual artists in 1994. Every year between 1996 and 2020, AWAW awarded unrestricted gifts of $25,000 to ten women artists over the age of 40; in recent years, both the amount of the award and the number of awardees have increased. Initiated and still led by photographer and philanthropist Susan Unterberg, who herself remained anonymous until 2018, the groundbreaking program refers to a phrase in Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which drew attention to challenges faced by women writers and artists in a patriarchal society. True to its name, AWAW solicits recommendations from over 200 unnamed nominators and selects awardees via anonymous panels. Over the years, the grant, which provides both financial support and professional recognition, has been truly transformational for a number of the recipients.
Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović. The exhibition is made possible in part by the generous support of the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust.
Svati, Then & Now, 2021, Plastic, pastel, canvas, vinyl, cord, and rose petals on paper, Courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York
Ganesh engages history, myth, and fantasy to create queer and woman-centered narratives. Her work often fuses disparate materials-such as chalk, vinyl, textiles, and embroidery-into complex and highly symbolic images.
Eyes and hands take on particular metaphorical significance in her art, which Ganesh credits in part to her study of classical Indian dance and her interest in hand gestures as "an alternate form of language." Her depiction of visionary experiences also underscores what she says is the "possibility of perceiving something beyond our material world." Svati, Then & Now, dedicated to the artist's partner, incorporates these motifs along with Ganesh's own poetic writings. Made the year after her AWAW award, the dense multimedia composition conveys, as the artist notes, "themes of intimacy, mourning, and transformation."