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.

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.

For nearly six decades, Dotty Attie (b. 1938) has rigorously engaged the grid as a formal and conceptual tool, masterfully rendering her small-scale drawings and canvases to create cadenced arrangements that disrupt the accepted art historical canon. A presence in the New York art scene since the late 1960s, Attie co-founded A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-female cooperative artists’ gallery and presented seven solo exhibitions with the pioneering cooperative between 1972 and 1986, exhibiting works exclusively in graphite. Departing from her early drawing practice, Attie’s first solo exhibition at P·P·O·W in 1988 marked a shift to working exclusively in series of 6 x 6-inch canvases, a scale she continues to use to this day. From her early graphite works to her more recent paintings, Attie’s lifelong dedication to recontextualizing sourced images with unique text has resulted in a profoundly original body of work that questions societal conventions and reveals to the viewer “the parts of ourselves that we don’t really share with anybody else.” Attie was born in Pennsauken, New Jersey and lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art (1959), a Beckmann Fellowship at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, New York (1960) and attended the Art Students League, New York (1967). She was awarded a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1976; National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1976 and 1983; and was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2013. Her work is in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum, New York, NY; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; among others. Attie’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; the New Museum, New York, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including The Grid and the Curve, JTT, New York, NY; Rage, Resist, Rise!, Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, CA; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, curated by Helen Molesworth, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, curated by Maura Reilly and Nicole Caruth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY. In summer 2023, P·P·O·W presented What Surprised Them Most, Attie’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Attie’s first solo exhibition in the UK, 40 Years, will be presented this spring at Public Gallery, London.