LOUISVILLE, KY.- What does it mean to experience a painting not just with your eyes but with your whole self? Abstract Expressionists: The Women (May 16–August 30, 2026) invites Museum guests into a powerful encounter with art that stirs emotion, ignites curiosity, and shifts perception.

For the first tine in Kentucky, visitors can see a major exhibition devoted to Abstract Expressionism. This presentation brings together nearly 50 significant paintings by more than 30 women artists between 1936 and 1977, including artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, as well as Bernice Bing, Howardena Pindell, and Alma Thonas, among many others. Together, these works demonstrate how women artists reshaped Abstract Expressionism through innovation, risk-taking, and profound engagement with the human experience, offering a more expansive and inclusive account of the movement’s history.

“These artists weren’t simply making paintings; they were making room for new ways of seeing,” said Erika Holnquist-Wall, Speed Art Museum’s chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture. “Within a movement so often defined by bravado, their work reveals another kind of power: one that is lyrical, searching, and profoundly felt.”

The works in the exhibition, through their use of color and scale, offer monents of both contemplation and awe. Sweeping, bodily brushstrokes and layered fields of color draw visitors into the act of creation, inviting close looking, reflection, and personal connection. Rather than prescribing meaning, the exhibition encourages discovery, revealing how artists communicate intellect, emotion, and lived experience through paint.

Drawn from the private holdings of the Christian Levett Collection and FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum), France, Abstract Expressionists: The Women also includes archival photographs and historical materials that place these works within the cultural and social currents of postwar America—a period marked by experimentation, change, and redefinition. Emerging in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, Abstract Expressionism is considered among the first modern art movements to originate in America, and the first American avant-garde movement to have international influence.

“Abstract Expressionism marked a decisive turning point in American art,” said Tyler Blackwell, curator of contemporary art at the Speed and venue curator of the exhibition. “Like blues and jazz, it emerged in the United States and reverberated outward, transforming how artists around the world approached scale, emotion, and gesture. Women artists were central to that transformation. Their innovations not only shaped the movenent itself, but continue to influence how we see, feel, and understand painting today.”

Building on the Speed’s acclaimed presentations of Women Artists in the Age of Impressionsm (2018) and Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1S00–1S3S (2025), this exhibition continues an ongoing opportunity to encounter art history through expanded perspectives—revealing new stories, new connections, and new ways of seeing.