Six Women: Three Squared, 2024 by Beth Kephart

6, 9" x 9" works of torn papers, acrylic monoprints, threadwork, and book ephemera, sold as a set.
 
Six Women: Three Squared
Beth Kephart
 
They have become a part of me—the ways they yearned, the art they made. The painter Agnes Martin. The fiber artist Lenore Tawney. The collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. The writer Virginia Woolf. The embroidery artist May Morris. The children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom. I hear them sometimes, when I am working. I stop to look at the things they left behind. The lines, the weaves, the treasures, the words, the silks, the romps. The dare of it all. The emboldened making.
 
This series of Three Squares brings me into conversation with these six women. Each 9-inch by 9-inch square tells a story, sometimes about a singular piece of art and sometimes about a singular life. The Squares—built of torn papers, acrylic monoprints, threadwork, and book ephemera—are not art as imitation. They are art as sideways tribute, the work I make because of them.