10 Great Contemporary Female US Painters You Should Know

Explore the latest works from the leading contemporary female painters and pioneers coming out of the United States.

You will learn a thing or two and even get inspiration from these artists, so that next time the article might be about you.

Emily Mae Smith

This visual artist from Austin, Texas creates lively compositions that offer sly social commentary for the attentive eye, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art in occasion.

Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her preferred muse: an anthropomorphic broomstick figure that reminds us of the lively broomsticks in Disney’s “Fantasia”. The figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work and takes the place of mythical figures like “Medusa” or "Oedipus” answering the Sphinx’s riddle; a riff on Jean-Auguste-Dominique’s piece.

Becky Suss

Suss’ work specializes in paintings of domestic interiors where memory, reality, and subjectivity converge. She began her project focusing on her grandparents’ home and the art and décor therein from there she has moved on to train her eye on other interior spaces, most recently the studio and home of Philadelphia sculptor and furniture designer, Wharton Esherick.

Her style features a distinct mixture of twisted perspectives that resemble those of medieval times, and flat colors and textures that accomplishes an uncanny collage look. The simplicity of composition and focus on patterns and fabrics is truly remarcable.

Jesse Mockrin

Jesse Mockrin’s luminous oil paintings extract details from European Old Master paintings, reformulating and re-contextualizing cultural narratives and art historical motifs to speak to the present.

Mockrin plays around with the composition of familiar scenes from the biblical and mythological canon. Adding new layers of significance and subverting established compositional points of emphasis. At turns obscuring and revealing essential details, Mockrin depicts her subjects with an exaggerated androgyny in certain pieces.

This rejection of the masculine and feminine ideals of beauty could be taken as a gesture that defies olden times' values, just like it’s hinted at in the descriptions certain galleries give to Mockrin’s work... But we can’t overlook, for the sake of example, Michelangelo’s depictions of dying slaves and most french royal renaissance and baroque portraits, can we? Mario Equicola, an Italian Renaissance humanist, claimed in 1525 that "the effeminate male and the manly female are graceful in almost every aspect". From which we can only conclude that Mockrin is part of a long tradition.

Jennifer Packer

Her paintings recalibrate art historical approaches, casting them in a political and contemporary light, while rooted in a deeply personal context. On occasion, Packer describes her flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief; these paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans.

My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy.

Hilary Pecis

Hilary was born in 1979 in Fullerton, California and now lives and works not that far away in Los Angeles, California.

Pecis' acrylic paintings explore the space around her. In this she considers the history and medium of the painting, as to depict the traditional motifs of still life and landscapes in her canvas, using energetic and vibrant colors and textures.

Her works can be found in Halsey McKay Gallery, Spurs Gallery, and David Kordansky Gallery. Here's how the last gallery listed depicts her style:

She combines distorted perspectives and surprising juxtapositions of hue, placing her work in dialogue with modernist art historical movements like Fauvism in which subjective and analytical tendencies are synthesized. At the same time, her interest in images sourced from her personal experience allows her to transform recognizable mise-en-scènes into vivid explorations that celebrate the quiet moments of everyday life.

Julie Heffernan

Another Californiac painter whose artwork has been described by the writer Rebecca Solnit as "a new kind of history painting" and by The New Yorker as "ironic rococo surrealism with a social- satirical twist." I on the other hand wouldn’t go as far as calling it “ironic" (this is not a jibe towards The New Yorker though...), it looks to me more like she integrated a baroque aesthetic into a more contemporary meta-narrative landscape, finding the sometimes grotesque or self-involved nature in Rococo styles with an actual lens. Other times she just embraces Rococo lovingly, it seems. (Now, could that have been written in “The New Yorker”...? Again, not a jibe...!).

Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch comes to mind on the more satirical pieces, but a New Age touch distances her from the old timer.

Portraiture is a dominant subject in Heffernan’s painting, even when sometimes the protagonist or main subject of said paintings is lost and found in a complex world that insinuates the whole person.

Anya Kielar

Through uncanny sculptures and theatrical, vignette-like installations, Brooklyn-based artist Anya Kielar investigates the female form. Kieler’s varied works are informed by extensive sources, including surrealist collage, domestic folk crafting techniques, and the decorative arts.

In her subjects, she portrays the female shape in various interpretations, whether it’s her old collages from high school or full on movie stars, like Audrey Hepburn and Veronica Lake, or flat cutout images that stand as free-form mannequins. In Kielar last works she drowns her subjects in seas of patterns reminiscent of 80’s Italian design. We hope is not out of vengeance but rather out of flattery like the quality of the work implies.

Julia Wachtel

Since the late 1970s, Julia Wachtel has sifted through the dregs of the image world. From greeting cards and magazines to the plenum of digital imagery online, Wachtel silkscreens her source materials onto canvases alongside painted panels to construct her rhythmic montages. Her work is touched by a witted sense of humor that utilizes the Pop Art phenomenon to great effect and it seems to be mock it simultaneously. This is what she has to say about her own creative process:

“When I first started appropriating images, the digital world didn’t exist. I limited my search to a few sources: magazines such as People and Der Spiegel, as well as greeting cards. Now with the internet, there’s immediate access to an uncountable number of pictures. So, in that respect, my work has become more complex.”

Jordan Casteel

Casteel creates colossal portraits of the people in her community, rendered in vibrant hues of amber, lavender, and indigo. Casteel’s oil paintings confront traditional notions of gender and race in portraiture, with the expressed purpose of featuring those who might not otherwise be portrayed on museum walls.

Casteel began painting portraits of friends, family members, and classmates, posed in intimate settings and posed to look directly at the viewer. The effect is at once tender and powerful, forcing viewers to contend with their preconceived notions of masculinity and race (whilst holding their breath...). Casteel’s practice expanded to a near-anthropological pursuit, in which the artist meets and photographs subjects on the streets of her neighborhood of Harlem, transforming strangers to close friends and collaborators.

Issy Wood

The painter and budding electronic-pop musician has been courted by big names in both worlds but she is giving it all up consistently by choosing to stay independent at 29 years old.

Her works are populated by an absurdist menagerie of subject matter that seems disconnected, but is distinctly the artist’s own. Wood, who calls herself a “medieval millennial” in reference to her classical style, envisions a dark world in which women have been battered by consumerism, heritage is turned into a transaction, and humor is as trenchant as a pair of gold teeth. I can imagine Ignatius J. Reilly saying something along those lines in "The Confederacy of Dunces" too. Her fate is undoubtedly greater though, as the following paintings demonstrate.

If not appearing in this "top ten" made you jealous, you should consider joining our brush painting courses and the following links:

- 8 incredible women artists who changed History of Art An article by Silvia Laboreo
- How to draw female hair