Internationally acclaimed artist Louise Fishman (1939–2021) was born in Philadelphia to an artistic family. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BA in 1963, before completing her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965. She immediately moved to New York, eager to engage with the art of her time. As she reflected in a 2016 interview, “I felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate language for me as a queer. It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate.” In the male-dominated New York art world of the mid-1960s, however, she encountered significant barriers and hostility.
Fishman became active in the feminist movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, participating in protest groups such as WITCH—Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. During this period, she temporarily turned from painting to sculptural work, exploring the underrepresented aspects of women’s lives. Her seminal Angry Women series of 1973 featured the names of key figures in the feminist movement in bold, expressive forms. She later returned to gestural abstraction just as postmodernism declared painting “dead,” helping to renew the language of Abstract Expressionism for a new era. Throughout her career, she remained a steadfast advocate for feminist causes and gay and lesbian rights. After traveling to Central Europe in 1988 with a friend who survived the Holocaust, Fishman created a body of work confronting the bitter history of mid-century Judaism. In her final solo exhibitions the luminous, vibrant quality of her late work reflected her enduring love of Venice.
Fishman’s work is represented in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among others. Honors include three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. Fishman’s solo exhibitions include the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (2007), and the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (2009). In 2016, the Neuberger Museum of Art organized her first retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner, with a concurrent exhibition in Philadelphia, Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, curated by Ingrid Schaffner. The retrospective traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A posthumous retrospective of her drawings, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawings, opened in August 2021 at the Krannert Museum of Art, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she had earned her MFA.
