Mothers of Invention

‘this publication is more than an innovative catalog of artworks. It represents a significant step towards a more inclusive and, therefore, objectively more accurate history of art.’ – Kaëna Daeppen, Daily Art Magazine

‘Mothers of Invention is the third, and most historically capacious, collaborative book project of art curators and writers Heartney, Posner, Princethal, and Scott. Like the artists featured in their book, the writers are “mothers of invention” in their own right; each has significantly contributed to the advancement of women in the visual arts through their writing and curation, and their insistence on coauthorship both echoes feminist practices of the 1970s and provides a useful, multivocal model for current scholarship. […] In the introductory discussion, Scott declares that “feminists gave all artists the freedom to do things,” which serves as the central claim of the work and a rallying call for considering art of the past, the present, and the future.’ – K. Rhodes, CHOICE

Eleanor Heartney is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress. Recent publications include: Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019).

Helaine Posner is Chief Curator Emerita at the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY, Purchase College, New York. She is the author of monographs on the artists Kiki Smith, Louise Fishman, and, most recently, Donna Dennis: A Poet in Three Dimensions (2023).

Nancy Princenthal is a writer whose most recent book Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019) was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times. She is also the author of Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (2015), which won a PEN America award for biography.

Sue Scott is an independent curator and writer. She was Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art from 1989 to 2008 and founder and director of Sue Scott Gallery in New York City.

All four writers are co-authors of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (2013).