Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016

Accompanying the most comprehensive exhibition of postwar abstract sculpture by women artists to date, Revolution in the Making traces the ways in which women artists deftly transformed the language of sculpture in the 20th Century. The volume teases out multiple strains of proto-feminist practices, characterized by abstraction and repetition, which rejected the singularity of a so-called 'masterwork'.

Divided into four sections, the book features approximately thirty artists and nearly 100 works in total: the postwar era (the late 1950s) including such historically important predecessors as Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Claire Falkenstein, and Louise Nevelson; the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting a generation of post-minimalist artists who ignited a revolution in their use of process-oriented materials and methods; the 1980s and 1990s, the period that moved beyond three-dimensional objects toward architectonic works characterized by structure and design; and post-2000 works by artists who created installation-based environments, embraced domestic materials and adopted craft as an embedded discourse.

Paul Schimmel is curator and vice president at Hauser & Wirth. He is the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Jenni Sorkin is a curator, art historian, critic, and assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth Smith is executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Anne M. Wagner is an internationally renowned art historian and professor emerita of modern and contemporary art history at the University of California, Berkeley.