Joan Snyder in 'Making Their Mark' Komal Shah’s Exhibition of Women Artists to Travel to US Museums

By Sarah Douglas

“Making Their Mark,” an exhibition of women artists from the Shah Garg Foundation, has seen some 50,000 visitors since it opened at the former Dia Foundation building in New York in November. Now, it will see more when it goes on a planned tour.

The show will stop first at California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in October, then the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in September 2025. While those venues were originally slated for the exhibition, the American Federation of Arts, which travels exhibitions to institutions throughout the United States, has taken on the show and is now set to put it on an extended tour.

The exhibition was born as a book. Collector Komal Shah, who has been on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list with her husband Gaurav Garg since 2018, had steadily been collecting work by postwar and contemporary women artists like Joan Mitchell, Suzanne Jackson, Joan Semmel, and Kay WalkingStick when she decided to make a book from the collection in order to bring more visibility to the artists.

The book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. last year, and includes essays by curators like Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel. Shah then organized an exhibition, curated by High Line Park curator Cecilia Alemani, who was the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, an edition notable for its high percentage of artworks by women. The show that resulted from the book runs in New York through March 23.