Modern Women / Modern Vision

Photographs from the Bank of America Collection

Oct. 19, 2024 through Jan. 12, 2025

Members’ preview reception on Thursday, Oct. 17, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Drawn from Bank of America’s extensive photography collection, Modern Women / Modern Vision presents more than 100 images made between 1905 and 2015. Diverse in style, tone, and subject, these images range from spontaneous to composed, detached to empathetic, monumental to intimate. The exhibition reveals the bold and dynamic ways women have contributed to the development and evolution of photography from the early 20th century to the present.

The exhibition unfolds through six categories: Modernist Innovators; Documentary Photography and the New Deal; The Photo League; Modern Masters; Exploring the Environment; and The Global Contemporary Lens. Included are works by Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as legendary portraits by Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus; street photography by Ruth Orkin and Helen Levitt; and edgy appropriation photo-collages by Barbara Kruger.

Women played a vital role in framing the modern experience—the here and now—through the lens of the camera. Histories of photography long ignored or underrepresented women’s contributions to the medium’s development as both fine and applied art. In truth, women embraced photography from its introduction in 1839. 

From 1900 onward, women negotiated waves of social, political, and economic change, increasingly leveraging the camera as a means of creativity, financial independence, and personal freedom. Disrupting longstanding constraints placed on women’s social behavior and roles, these early trailblazers helped establish photography as a vital form of creative expression. They also laid the groundwork and served as role models for subsequent generations of artists. 

This exhibition has been loaned through the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program.