Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era

“Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era” examines how women at the turn of the twentieth century overcame barriers and achieved success within the professional art world. Centered on the career of Susan Watkins (1875–1913), the exhibition offers a look into the environment in which Watkins and other female artists of the time forged their professional identities.

Watkins reached the height of her profession at the turn of the century in the 1900s, regularly exhibiting at the Paris Salon and earning accolades from the American art press before her career was tragically cut short by her early death at the age of thirty-eight. Her portraits and paintings of interiors incorporated a range of influences from academicism and aestheticism, while at the same time revealing a deep understanding of the interplay between figures and their environment. Though Watkins’s career was steeped in the values of her time, her work reveals a distinctly personal vision.

Histories of 20th-century American art have often overlooked the contributions of women such as Watkins, who embraced more traditional artistic styles. Featuring paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Watkins and artists including Lilla Cabot Perry, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Elizabeth Nourse, Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, this exhibition recovers their stories and reasserts their contributions to art history.

The exhibition will be complemented by a companion publication co-published by the Chrysler Museum of Art and Yale University Press with support from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Presented by: Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions
Organized by: Chrysler Museum of Art
Supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts