As Americans process and confront the Supreme Court of the United States’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, creatives are using their talents to speak out. When the news broke, Anat Ebgi Gallery director Alex Rojas was moved to help support abortion rights. Thus, she invited more than 40 female Los Angeles-based artists to create posters as a visual protest in solidarity with reproductive rights. Today through July 29, in partnership with Los Angeles’s Anat Ebgi Gallery and Artsy, the works go up for online auction, will all proceeds benefiting the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP)—the largest national, independent and nonprofit abortion fund in the U.S. that provides urgently-needed financial assistance to individuals seeking abortion services or emergency contraception—and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.
Titled “Impact: LA for Choice 2022,” participating artists include Avery Wheless, Becky Kolsrud, Emma Webster, Gwen Hollingsworth and Kate Pincus Whitney. Each utilizes her own figurative style to convey a message about bodily rights. In Kolsrud’s signature peach-and-blue color palette, Protect Choice Protect Women portrays a woman holding a banner featuring this declarative title. Webster paints a colorless profile of a woman hugging herself (Freedom = Body Autonomy) while Wheless’s abstract piece, Reaching as we fall, evokes the feeling of despair. All 44 lots in the auction can be viewed in person at Anat Ebgi Gallery’s Arts District location from July 21 to 23 and bidding will take place exclusively on Artsy until 12:00 p.m. EDT on July 29.
Also on view at the gallery’s location on Fountain Avenue, Rojas has curated “If you forget my name, You will go astray,” an all-female group show of work made in historically male-dominated art styles: abstraction and landscape. The exhibition brings together 20 international artists, including Carmen Neely, Inka Eissenhigh, Jenny Morgan, Julia Jo, Sarah Lee and Soumya Netrabile, whose presences help support a new narrative about the importance of the art that women are making in these genres, and “engage new perspectives on the sublime and the fragility of the natural world,” says Rojas. Works like Blue Flame in the Wind by Erica Mao, Back to daylight/Vissza a napfényhez by Mónika Kárándi and Mother and Child by Soumya Netrabile explore the relationship between nature and the impermanence of life. On view through August 13, the show portrays a uniquely feminine experience and allows a platform for the voices of women in the face of new restrictions on their bodily rights.
