page_title: National Association of Women Artists
section_title: The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (1913-1941)
hierarchical_section_title: National Association of Women Artists / History / The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (1913-1941)
caption_attribution_description: English: Painting of hills, building, originally titled The Church on the Hill; now titled The House on the Hill, ca. 1911, shown in the 1913 Armory Show
context_page_description: The National Association of Women Artists, Inc. is a United States organization, founded in 1889 to gain recognition for professional women fine artists in an era when that field was strongly male-oriented. It sponsors exhibitions, awards and prizes, and organizes lectures and special events.
  NAWA’s 1988 Centennial Exhibition stimulated an ongoing debate in the media about female representation in the arts and gender parity in major exhibitions and historical art studies.
context_section_description: In 1913, Club members voted to change the name of the organization to The Association of Women Painters and Sculptors to avoid association with social clubs.
  Also in 1913, the influential 1913 Armory Show featured works by members Josephine Paddock, Mary Wilson Preston, Anne Goldthwaite and Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, among others. The association's name was once again amended in 1917 to The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (NAWPS). By then, the association had 500 members in 40 states. In 1917, Clara Fairfield Perry, an observer for The American Magazine of Art, commented: "One notes with interest the rapid development that marks the growth of this association which is national in its scope, having a membership of over 500 artists located in all parts of the United States and which comprises the most representative artists among women in the professions of painting and sculpture in this country." 
  In 1924, the Association and the American Ambassadors to Argentina organized a traveling exhibition of paintings, sculpture and miniatures, which were shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and the Galeria Jorge in Rio de Janeiro.
  The same year, the NAWPS purchased a building at 17 East 62nd Street to exhibit works. The house was opened in fall of 1925, making it "the first gallery [in the United States] devoted entirely to the work of women artists."  By 1930, the association's growing debt and the advent of the Great Depression forced the sale of the house. The deal, however, was profitable, allowing the association to re-invest the money in equipment and a lease at Argent Galleries in the American Fine Arts Building at 42 West 57th Street, which remained open during the Great Depression. Karen Rosenberg, art critic for The New York Times, reflected on the Association's activity during this period: "The association endured and even thrived during the Depression ... Female artists also benefited during those years from the many anonymous contests for Works Progress Administration murals and other public artworks." 
  Throughout the mid-1920s and 1930s, NAWPS faced criticism for its perceived lack of innovation. In 1925, for example, art critic John Loughery noted that "the image of gentility ... had become attached to the older, more conservative National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors."  Recognizing the ameliorated but ongoing disparity between male and female artists, the association broadened its scope, focusing on extending its support system beyond New York by organizing traveling exhibitions. Responding to the criticism in the association's centennial exhibition catalog (1988), guest curator Ronald G. Pisano wrote: "Over the last 100 year period it was often claimed, even by women, that the Association had accomplished its goals and there was no longer a need for the organization. In the wake of each new achievement, however, the continuing need for the services the Association provides, both to its membership and to American women artists in general, has been demonstrated and recognized."
caption: Anne Goldthwaite, The Church on the Hill, 1913 Armory Show
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