Little-ton, Big-ideas
Women's Caucus for Art: Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists
Colorado Gallery of the Arts, Arapahoe Community College
5900 S. Santa Fe Drive, Littleton, CO 80120
February 11–March 8, 2025
Gallery Talk: Saturday March 8, 1–3pm
Admission: free
Review by Nina Peterson
There is a persistent and pernicious stereotype that artists working and living in areas outside of major metropolitan centers create art that is backwards, naive, retrograde, or of poor quality. Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists, currently on view at Arapahoe Community College’s Colorado Gallery of the Arts, challenges this misconception. Sponsored by the Colorado Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCACO), the exhibition features works by WCACO members and by women and women-identifying artists in Littleton who submitted work to an open call.
An installation view of Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts, Arapahoe Community College. Image by Nina Peterson.
Created using a wide range of media, techniques, and approaches, the artworks include digital work, embroidery, glasswork and mosaic, paintings and drawings, papermaking, photography, prints, and sculpture. The central claim of the exhibition, as its title suggests, is that these artworks and artists advance important ideas. What, then, are the ideas with which this exhibition concerns itself?
An installation view of Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts, Arapahoe Community College. Image by Nina Peterson.
While the show does not feature text that explains precisely the concepts the artists employ, the artwork labels feature explanatory quotes by select creators. As I viewed the works and read the artists’ words, I noticed the following themes emerge: ecological concerns, questions about futurity and women’s reproductive labor, and the process of making as a mode of honoring and of commemoration.
Indeed, these are some of the very ideas and issues with which women during the 1970s concerned themselves and that prompted art historians and artists to found the Women’s Caucus for Art in 1972. Art historian Mary Garrard, a founding member of WCA, summarizes the significance of the organization: “Still thriving today, the caucus has served as the largest and most continuous feminist political structure in arts professions.” [1]
Alison Flannery, Mills Creek, oil on canvas. Image by Nina Peterson.
Several artworks in the exhibition raise questions about how humans interact with other living things, including the environment. The show includes several landscapes, including Lynne Muth’s A River Runs Over It and Alison Flannery’s Mills Creek. In contrast to a landscape tradition that claims human mastery over the land and enforces colonial relations of power, Flannery and Muth do not deploy what art historian Albert Boime has theorized as a magisterial gaze, a privileged view from up high that “[traces] visual trajectory from the uplands to a scenic panorama below.” [2]
Lynne Muth, A River Runs Over It, acrylic on canvas. Image by Nina Peterson
Instead, Muth and Flannery create intimate views of particular places. Muth shows the effects of light as it passes through water, creating a dazzling pattern out of web-like refractions on the rocky surface of a river bed. Flannery’s painting positions the viewer as if wading in a natural pool, looking up towards a cascade of water as it trickles down from a rocky wall. These landscapes are meditations on human relationships to land and place and how phenomena such as light and weather shape our experience of Colorado’s natural features.
Brinda Lane-Pumphrey, Refuge, oil on canvas. Image by Nina Peterson.
Another intimate view of land, Brinda Lane-Pumphrey’s painting titled Refuge depicts the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah. This time we look through the tight space between two cliff faces, articulated in undulating stripes of reds, oranges, and yellows. A study in color and value, we see the rust- and mauve-colored sandstone of the foreground turning fiery vermillion, juicy clementine, cameo coral, and then subdued yellow as light illuminates the stony crevice. The wall label quotes the artist, who states, “I hope my paintings will make others appreciate and want to protect these wild spaces. Once damaged, they will never be the same for future generations to enjoy.” Indeed, anthropogenic climate crises threaten sites such as this one as well as humanity’s future on Earth.
Teresa Maone, Next Playground?, oil on canvas. Image by Nina Peterson.
Several artists in the show take up this issue of futurity. The title of Teresa Maone’s painting Next Playground?, along with a quote from the artist, asks the question of whether humans will colonize space once we have rendered planet Earth unlivable. [3] The painting itself responds with a vision of Earth from a celestial body. It evokes the images taken from the moon of Earth during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and ‘70s. [4] The view in Next Playground? is from a lunar module or perhaps a more permanent living structure.
In a Pop art gesture of taking ordinary objects and juxtaposing them in surprising ways, Maone places in a deep crater two standard pieces of playground equipment: car spring riders. But there are no signs of the joy and play that normally accompany these sites—there are no tiny moon boot prints in the lunar dust, no children donning puffy space suits, exuberantly bouncing in the reduced gravity of the lunar atmosphere.
This is a scene of utter quietude, stasis, and emptiness. I see it as a dystopian vision, a premonition of the kind of interaction we might expect if techno-imperialist capitalists have their way, exploiting the Earth’s people and resources until only the extremely wealthy can make their way to outer space just to install playgrounds as mere symbols of fun—as covers for the brutal extraction involved in their megalomaniacal, technological projects. [5]
Maggie Stewart, Robin’s Egg Blue Belly Bowl, bronze. Image by Nina Peterson.
While Maone’s image is darkly ironic, Maggie Stewart’s Robin’s Egg Blue Belly Bowl presents an appreciative tone towards the processes of making future generations. A bronze, basin-shaped sculpture sits atop a silken pillow, and the bowl’s interior is mottled with shimmering metallics of varying shades. Gold lines the rim of the vessel, highlighting its irregular, jagged edge. The exterior body of the work is inscribed with the phrase, “Mama’s Belly Founded 1999.”
Maggie Stewart, Robin’s Egg Blue Belly Bowl (detail), bronze. Image by Nina Peterson.
The sculpture is part of a series of artworks in which Stewart makes casts of women’s abdomens during pregnancy and casts them in bronze. Robin’s Egg Blue Belly Bowl commemorates an ephemeral biological state using the same material as traditional portraits of male leaders of war—arguably monuments to death and destruction. But in Stewart’s sculptures, bronze honors the corporeal work involved in ensuring generational continuity. As the artist puts it, “They celebrate the strength and beauty of pregnancy.” [6]
Bala Thiagarajan, Mahagauri, textured acrylic, fabric, and costume jewelry. Image by Nina Peterson.
Bala Thiagarajan’s Mahagauri also celebrates the strength and beauty involved in social reproduction—the work involved in sustaining human lives and societal structures.
Thiagarajan’s work depicts the eponymous flower seller against a background of patterned drapery, framed by a luscious abundance of flowers. [7] Made from acrylic paint, fabric, and jewelry, this is a painting and an assemblage. The flower seller wears a sari created with fabric adhered to the surface of the canvas in diagonal folds that suggest her body underneath. Thiagarajan appears to have used cake decorating tips to create the luscious, impasto texture of petals in paint.
Bala Thiagarajan, Mahagauri (detail), textured acrylic, fabric, and costume jewelry. Image by Nina Peterson.
Thiagarajan’s attention to detail—the meticulous application of so many frosting-like buds and the addition of glimmering jewelry to adorn the woman’s clavicle, ears, and nose—elevates the status of this figure. The artist, quoted in wall text, explains, “This portrait invites contemplation, encouraging the viewer to behold the sacred in the ordinary and honor the unsung women who weave strength and beauty into the fabric of everyday life.”
Bala Thiagarajan, Mahagauri (detail), textured acrylic, fabric, and costume jewelry. Image by Nina Peterson.
Thiagarajan’s artwork pays homage to a woman who plays a key social role. Historically, women have borne the burden of the work involved in social reproduction, most often without pay or adequate compensation. Capitalism, as feminists Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser argue, instrumentalizes and invisibilizes the work of women who make our lives run. They write, “Far from being valued in its own right, the making of people is treated as a mere means to the making of profit.” [8] This hierarchy of valuation, in which economic production is superior to social reproduction, maintains gender, racial, and sexual oppression. In opposition to this, Mahagauri celebrates the work of the flower seller, showing how integral her labor is to sustaining life and making it joyful.
An installation view of Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts, Arapahoe Community College. Image by Nina Peterson.
The artworks included in Little-ton, Big-ideas foreground some of the most urgent issues of today using techniques and visual languages that argue for feminist approaches to addressing them. Not trivial, quaint, or narrow-minded, the ideas that animate the exhibition are BIG.
Nina Peterson (she/her) is a 2024-2025 Harold Leonard Memorial Fellow in Film Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MA in art history and museum studies from the University of Denver. She researches histories of photography, film, and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
[1] Mary Garrard, “Building a Network: Feminist Activism in the Arts,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Harry Abrams, 1994), 93.
[2] Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1.
[3] The wall text includes the following statement from the artist: “Our Earth has nurtured our species for hundreds of thousands of years. Where will future generations play, work, learn, and love if we do not nurture our Earth in return?”
[4] For examples, see astronaut William Anders’s photograph taken during the Apollo 8 mission, an image from the Apollo 11 mission, and an image from the Apollo 17 mission. Monika Luabeya, “‘Earthrise’ by NASA Astronaut Bill Anders,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), June 10, 2024, https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthrise-by-nasa-astronaut-bill-anders/; EROS History Project, “1969 Earth Rise from Moon Apollo 11,” The United States Geological Survey, accessed February 21, 2025, https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/1969-earth-rise-moon-apollo-11; “Blue Marble – Image of the Earth from Apollo 17” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Nov. 30, 2007, https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/blue-marble-image-of-earth-from-apollo-17/.
[5] For a discussion of techno-imperialism as it is perpetrated by tech giants, see Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Is Artificial Intelligence Racist?: The Ethics of AI and the Future of Humanity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). See also Jill Lepore, “Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/elon-musk-capitalism.html.
[6] Maggie Stewart, interviewed in “Meet Maggie Stewart–Artist,” Shoutout Colorado, December 27, 2023, https://shoutoutcolorado.com/meet-maggie-stewart-artist/.
[7] Quoted in the wall text, the artist explains the iconography of this figure: “‘Mahagauri,’ a flower seller in India, is elevated to a sacred presence, embodying the benevolent spirit of Goddess Durga’s Mahagauri form. Amidst a vibrant tapestry of flowers, she radiates quiet strength, serenity, and compassion, illuminating the divine feminine qualities that nurture and sustain life.”
[8] Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), 22.
