Drawn exclusively from the Museum collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history—one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.

This presentation highlights the affinity between Klee’s compositional approach and Asawa’s explorations of line and shape in works she created at Black Mountain College and in her first years in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949.

Women in Abstraction aims to trace a lesser-told history of art primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries by focusing on the contribution of women artists to abstraction. The exhibition includes over 100 artists working across disciplines, such as dance, applied arts, photography, film, and performance art from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, Europe, and the United States in order to tell an expansive and complex story with many voices.