Women-Led Galleries Now is Artsy’s curated online showcase centering women shaping contemporary art today, from the studio to the gallery. While women remain underrepresented in the global art market, this initiative spotlights emerging and mid-career women artists represented by leading women gallerists.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, collect exceptional contemporary art including painting, sculpture, and mixed media—created by women artists, presented by women-led galleries, and available to buy online on Artsy.
PLAYGROUND DETROIT’s Women’s History Month exhibition spotlights the strength of women shaping contemporary art, featuring Martyna Alexander, Ijania Cortez, Ellen Rutt, Lois Teicher, Bre’Ann White, and Miriam Uhura, curated by Gallery Director, Paulina Petkoski.
Presented March 6–31, the exhibition highlights the strength and impact of women shaping today’s contemporary art landscape—both as artists and as cultural decision-makers.
I’m honored to work alongside living legends—female artists who are trailblazing paths in their own right. These women represent some of the most talented voices I’ve collaborated with, each bringing a powerful perspective and unmistakable aesthetic.” – curator, Paulina Petkoski
Each artist brings a distinct visual language and conceptual rigor to her practice, reflecting the diversity and innovation defining contemporary art today. From material experimentation to bold explorations of identity, abstraction, narrative, and form, these artists represent the depth of creative leadership emerging from Detroit.
Bre’Ann White
The Detroit-bred fashion and portrait photographer is known for creating and cultivating striking images that draw you into the subject’s world. Throughout Bre’Ann’s work portfolio, you will find a consistent layer of authenticity and imagination.
With confidence in her work and her vision, this transitional phase in Bre’Ann’s career is allowing her to showcase her work and explore art show opportunities to connect to a broader audience.
Lois Teicher
Lois Teicher is a professional sculptor inspired by shape and form, and the seeking of ideas that flow from the visual. Along her journey, awareness of the Time/Space continuum compelled her to use space as a material for her work.
The idea of duality in dynamic tension, and the existence of energy, are themes often expressed, flowing directly from her search to understand and connect to the universal, often creating elaborate structures reflecting tension from objects found in nature.
Ellen Rutt
Ellen Rutt makes bold mixed-media paintings, murals, installations and wearables. Her abstract vocabulary of layered shapes and primary colors is applied to a variety of media to facilitate a conversation between materials and movement, places and process.
As a multidisciplinary artist, her distinct style is recognized internationally through public murals and her studio work; however these facets of her artistic practice remain separate.
Martyna Alexander
Martyna Alexander is a Detroit-based artist and designer. Working in a diverse range of projects in painting and other 2D media, to explore the subconscious world stemming from our innate biological and cultural pasts.
As an artist-designer, Alexander has used her longtime design career as a way to explore more subjective forms of understanding through painting.
Ijania Cortez
Ijania Cortez is a fine artist living and working in Detroit. A self-taught artist, her practice is centralized around painting but also includes murals as well as works of mixed media.
She is known for the color she uses in her portraits as well as the subjects, exclusively depicting black men from the inner city. Influenced by a modest childhood in 90’s Detroit and her love for the residents there, her work serves to create conversations between painting and viewer.
Louise Jones
Louise Jones (neé Chen) is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Los Angeles in 1988. Her artistic practice centers around painting, while her background is in drawing and printmaking at UCSC.
Gaining recognition after moving to Detroit in 2014, she began painting floral murals, which have been displayed in museums and public spaces throughout the US and the world, including the Henry Ford Cancer Pavilion, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Miriam Uhura
Miriam Uhura is a self-taught painter from Highland Park, Michigan. Her work explores themes of cultural significance, family, community, and futurism.
Through vibrant colors and expressive brushstrokes, Miriam breathes life into her subjects, imbuing them with a sense of nostalgia, while simultaneously offering a vision of hope for the future. Her art celebrates the complexity of identity and the power of personal connection.
Together, their work underscores the importance of women not only participating in art history—but actively shaping it in real time.
