SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- March happens to be “Women’s History Month,” and The Chloe Gallery is featuring paintings from the visionary Anna Walinska in its exhibit “Women in Art: Great Artists Who Happen to be Women.” The month-long show, in San Francisco, helps celebrate the many vital roles of women in art and feature a selection of artists alongside Walinska including Amy Nelder, Carrie Graber, Isabel Emrich, Cheryl Kline, Paige Bradley, Jennifer Vranes and others. Artists were chosen because of their place in Chloe Gallery’s comprehensive and inclusive look at the last 200 years of Modern and Contemporary Western art history.

“At all the many points in their lives and careers – from 20th century Modernist Anna Walinska to rapidly-emerging painter Isabel Emrich – for Women's History Month especially, Chloe Gallery honors the great creations of our female painters and sculptors,” notes gallery co-founder and exhibit curator Amy Nelder. “Whether with a mural that uplifts a community, a painting that uplifts a family, or a sculpture that heals a loss, our artists change the world based on the quality and merit of their work.”

Born in London and raised in New York City, Anna Walinksa’s life and art spans the century of American modernism, paralleling the history of the New York school and the American Jewish experience. A prolific painter, she created more than 2,000 works on canvas and paper over the course of her lifetime. The selection of works included in “Women in Art” were painted from the 1930's to the 1950's, and celebrate Walinska’s love of abstraction, form and color. They also demonstrate her almost preternatural vision of today’s feminist resistance.

“Anna Walinska often painted images of women – family, friends and self-portraits,” explains Rosina Rubin, Walinska’s niece and the guardian of her impressive body of work. “I find it particularly timely to include her Woman in Pink Hat, 1933, as Walinska was forever ahead of her time.”

Walinska left New York at the age of 19 to study painting in Paris where she lived around the corner from Gertrude Stein, studied under André Lhote and spent time with Poulenc and Schoenberg at the literal center of the modernism movement.

In the 1950s, Walinska traveled around the world, alone, in the era of prop planes – something unheard of at that time. Her diary of this six-month journey now resides in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Works by Walinska are included in numerous public collections, most notably the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The Jewish Museum, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Johnson Museum at Cornell, the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, and Yad Vashem.

A portion of proceeds from the March 2018 "Women in Art" Exhibition will benefit Edgewood Center for Children and Families.

Anna Walinska’s life and art spans the century of American modernism, paralleling the history of the New York school and the American Jewish experience. Known for her exhilarating joie de vivre, the irrepressible adventuress was born in London in 1906, moved to New York with her family in 1914, and by 1918 (at the young age of 12) had begun her education at the Art Students League.

Walinska created thousands of works on canvas and paper over nine decades, with significant influences coming from her extended stays in Paris and Burma. Her body of work also includes several hundred works on the theme of the Holocaust and a series inspired by the 17th century Japanese erotic Shunga prints, which she began at the age of 76. Her work is found in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Since her death in 1997, her work has been showcased in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad.

Her work, Walinska wrote, “sought to convey the spirit of a search without boundaries.”