SANTA FE, NM.- Peters Projects of Santa Fe announces RISING TIDE: 12 Women Artists on view through March 15, 2019.

Curated by Art Critic Garth Clark, RISING TIDE explores the growing market for women artists today. As Clark states, “After being becalmed for decades the plight of the woman artist, undervalued in the arts, is finally changing and has become a rising tide. While it has a way to go, new benchmarks are being achieved every day. Jenny Savile has just set an Auction record for a living woman artist at Sotheby’s London of $12.4 million for Propped (1992), on October 5, 2018. It beat out Cady Noland’s Bluewald (1989), which went for $9.8 million at Christie’s New York in May 2015.

Of course skeptics will point to the recent record by David Hockney for a male living artist. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction in New York for $90,312,500, at Christie’s auction house on November 16, 2018. The gap will not be overtaken in a year or two but prices are moving in the right direction. Add to that the two most important art prizes recently went to women: Simone Leigh won this year’s Boss Prize and Lubaina Himid the 2017 Turner Prize.

In the process the canard that works by woman artists do not hold their value is proving false. Indeed Mary Gabriel writing for the New York Times states that if one wants to get rich buying art, ‘Invest in Women, more than ever, female artists are breaking sales records and being recognized for their role in important art movements.’

The exhibition at Peters Projects, RISING TIDE: 12 Women Artists does not promise wealth but it does celebrate a new confidence in the work of women artists with a dozen stunning exemplars. All of the artists on this exhibition: Lynda Benglis, Beth Cavener, Judy Chicago, Nicole Cudzilo, Lesley Dill, Carole Feuerman, Christine Nofchissey McHorse, Cara Romero, Meridel Rubenstein, Kiki Smith, Kukuli Velarde, Beatrice Wood deal with gender issues in one way or another in satire, feminist activism, mythology and assault stereotypes. In the gallery the assembly of photography, resin sculpture, tapestries, works on paper, ceramics and bronze, collectively suggest a new strength and influence of woman artists today.”