By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer | Photographer

When reviewing an art exhibit by all women artists — with the word “women” in the title, no less — it’s tempting to be on the lookout for at least a whisper of uniquely “feminine” perspectives, experiences or content, whatever they might be. But in LuigART Women 2025, the new show at Lexington’s Luigart Studios, it’s hard to come by. 

Aside from perhaps a slightly greater representation of fabric art (a medium in which women are historically predominant) than in other group shows, this one generally finds our city’s female artists engaging with subject matter without obvious reference to gender, theirs or anyone’s. Unlike “The Future Is Female,” a show of feminist art that has been circulating among the various 21c Hotel and Museum locations in recent years (I reviewed the Nashville installment for UnderMain in 2023), the Luigart exhibit’s pointedly themeless approach is conspicuously apolitical. 

What absorbs most of the artists here is what has absorbed most artists from the beginning of human history, emphasizing beauty, light, lines, shapes, color, texture, all that. Has the struggle against sexism been overcome? Obviously not, but this show of 52 artworks, organized by the Luigart Women’s Collective and curated by Mary Rezny from nearly 200 submissions, mostly saves that discussion for another place, another time. More often than not, this is about women celebrating what they love.

That includes flowers, as in works such as Adalhí Aranda’s “Amapolas,” realistically rendered poppies bobbing against an abstract background; the joyful profusion of Dalphna Donnelly’s “Summer Dances — Solstice Promise”; Constance Grayson’s eye-popping fabric collage, “Bold Blue Blossom”; Mariana McDonald’s impressionistic pastel, “Garden Celebration”; Michelle Prosser’s gemlike stained-glass piece, “Poppy #2”; and Helene Steene’s “Blue Ginkgo,” whose floating leaves, perhaps counterintuitively, are white. 

It also includes stylized landscapes, my favorites of which are Marie Waddell Pearson’s ghostly “West Hickman Creek at Belleau Woods Park”; Catherine Llewellyn’s abstract, “Garrett’s Orchard, Shannon Run Road, Versailles, KY”; Tresa Thompson O’Connor’s exquisite, Klimtesque forest scene, “Copse”; Cynthia Ryan Kelly’s collapsed cityscape, “More Than Angles”; and, best of all, Marcia Lamont Hopkins’s brooding “The Dancer,” an augmented photograph in which a misshapen tree is caught in the act of a danse macabre under a darkening, enchanted sky. (If I were picking a Best in Show, “The Dancer” would be it. Rezny will be handing out her own awards at a reception for the artists on Saturday, March 8, 5:30-8 p.m.)

I’m also partial to several of the show’s smattering of three-dimensional works, most of which pack a conceptual punch that few of the 2-D pieces aspire to. These include Crimson Duvall’s witty “Parasomnia,” a hilariously demonic sheep of the sort film director Tim Burton might count on sleepless nights; Stacey R Chinn-Hart’s “Won’t You Come Home, Dear…”, a porcelain sculpture of what might be a deflated punching bag painted with poppies (the closest thing this show has to a recurring image); Laverne Zabielski’s art book, “She Found Her Beat,” seen earlier as part of Arts Connect’s “How to Be Beautiful” exhibition at the Lexington Public Library; Ilona Szekely’s hauntingly prayerful ceramic work, “Mi Shebera”; and Melanie Busic’s “Camel Soft Pack,” in which, as in early Warhol, commonplace commercial design is repurposed as, maybe, cultural critique. Rachel Moser’s mixed-media collage, “Debris Fields Series 3,” made of pulverized copies of the Wall Street Journal, junk mail ash and ephemera from the 1950s, is the show’s most cerebral, most technically accomplished piece, from the artist here most likely to succeed in academic settings.