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Making Their Mark assembles the work of more than eighty artists in the Shah Garg Collection, bringing into vibrant relief their intergenerational relationships, formal and material breakthroughs, and historical impacts.

Featuring works that span almost eight decades, from 1946 to today, the exhibition juxtaposes a multitude of emerging artists who are exploring abstraction in innovative ways with a group of their significant predecessors who often anticipated the current discussions around representation, identity, and power. Placing the work of contemporary artists in dialogue with that of major historical figures—many of whom were unjustly marginalized in the past—the exhibition traces a network of influences and correspondences across time, envisioning art history as a field of sympathies and attractions that subvert traditional narratives and accepted hierarchies. In particular, many of the works on view question rigid distinctions between art and craft, or lyricism and decoration, as well as between the presumed major and minor, eroding obsolete categories that many women artists have long been challenging.

Making Their Mark follows several threads through the Shah Garg Collection, inviting reorientation amid constantly shifting landscapes of forms and significations. Many artists in the show are reimagining abstraction, refracting its language through an intersectional perspective that intercalates issues of gender, race, desire, and performativity within the presumed purity of nonobjective forms. This queering of abstraction—as it has been termed—imagines new relationships between form and content and between the self and others, imbuing the seemingly neutral languages of abstract art with political and personal narratives.

The exhibition includes exquisite examples of textile works in which artists have traced irregular geometries and eccentric abstractions, finding joyfully intricate ways to reconfigure the physical and the conceptual. The computational logic of fiber art resurfaces in the works of often younger artists who engage in the exploration of data and digital information as the defining features of contemporary culture. Many of the works on view establish a rich dialogue among the handmade, the mechanical, and the digital, forging new forms of subjectivity in a hyper- mediated reality: these works, depicting screens, vectors, pixels, and net- works, visualize a pulsating space between the carnal and the artificial.

In other works, artists look at the body through the lens of abstraction, capturing physicality as an outgrowth of subjective experience. Many artists in the show complicate the idea of figuration from a feminist perspective, subverting conventional notions of beauty and taste and reinventing traditional genres such as portraiture and landscape painting. Works in this vein and others on view reinterpret ancient mythologies and hidden histories, intersecting them with contemporary visions.