The Rising Voices of Women in Art
The Winner of the 2025 Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters Announced at the Muskegon Museum of Art
The exhibit Rising Voices 4 is slated to travel to the Arnot Art Museum in Elmire, NY (Oct 13-Jan 2), the Customs House at Charlottesville, TN (Feb 6 – April 24) and the Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, GA (Sept 14 – Dec 4).
Steven Bennett was not blessed with a beautiful singing voice— although it does not stop him from breaking into song when emotion swells, particularly when moved to show public affection for his wife Dr. Elaine Schmidt.
Instead, he was gifted a good eye and a love for art that he shares with Schmidt, the two of whom are self-described “full-time art collectors” and who have spent 13 years orchestrating a program of cultural advocacy to propel the careers of women artists, and introduce a new generation of viewers to figurative realism.
On May 15th at the Muskegon Museum of Art, a prize created by Bennett and Schmidt was announced. Since 2019, the Bennett Prize, awarded every two years (now in its fourth iteration) offers $50,000 to an emerging woman figurative realist painter.
Among the 832 applicants for the prize this year, and the 10 finalists, Amy Werntz was chosen as the winner for her series of highly realistic and delicate portraits of elderly people. In Carlyla, a rendering of a photo of her 96-year-old grandmother, Werntz achieves a loving intimacy through the warmth and texture of translucent skin.
Although Werntz, trains by figure-drawing from life, she often paints from photos, sometimes ones that are old and discarded, but captured a moment now forgotten. Many of the subjects of her paintings do not know they have been painted. The same is true of her grandmother, whom she has not told about the headlining portrait.
“Being beautiful was very important to her. So the idea of her being represented older—I don’t know how she would feel about that.” said Werntz.
If you look closely beneath the heavy eyelids, you will sense the cataracts of old age in the most delicate opacity of the eyes. Carlyla is blind. She will never see the work.
It is fascinating to reflect that the portrait does not give away its own illusion in even a single brushstroke; there is nothing to distract our gaze, and yet we also know, in our gut, that we are not looking at a mere photograph. We can feel the warmth of the figure as we caress her with our eyes. Werntz captures something that is not skin-deep; the quiet internal reflection of a woman who has lived.
“You go to a museum and you see all the paintings of people. You don’t know who they are, but those people live on. Snapshots are a way to say to the world: ‘I was here; I existed.’ ” Werntz said.
A second $10,000 prize was given to Nicole Santiago for her interior scenes of family life. In these works, your eye passes from foreground to background as if peering through slices of time, laden with personal meaning for the viewer to discern or invent. These are constructed collages, partially derived from family photos, but woven into a scene to create narrative structure.
Werntz and the other finalists are now part of a traveling exhibition: Rising Voices 4 which is now on display in Muskegon.
The Founders
Bennett was a would-be museum curator. After earning a degree in Art History at Notre Dame, he applied to the MFA program at the Cortauld Institute in London. But he was rejected.
“I’m still mad about that,” Bennett says.
Pivoting, he became a professional photographer before going to law school embarking on a successful career as a corporate attorney, garnering financial success and notoriety. He retired in 2015.
Schmidt earned a doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Temple University and became an expert in special education.
When Schmidt found the walls of his apartment empty, the two began to talk about building an art collection. Their interest was piqued by a blog “Women Painting Women” created in 2009 by Alia El-Bermani, Diane Feissel and Sadie Valeri. The trio would go on to curate numerous group exhibitions of women painters.
“Women were producing great work” Bennett said, “but they weren’t very well represented in the galleries at the time—now you are talking 15 years ago—and their prices weren’t very high, so if you could find the work, you could buy it for significantly less money than what the men were getting.”
The Mission
The plight of a woman figurative realist painter is two-fold: to survive as a realist artist, and to survive as a woman painter.
Since the Italian Renaissance, women have been discouraged from careers as painters and excluded from access to live nude models. As a result there are some notable, but few staggeringly great women painters in history.[1]
Although these restrictions began to relax in the late 19th century, by the mid-20th century, figuration—painting and drawing the nude—was almost extinct with the cultural and intellectual embrace of abstraction. Major universities stopped offering instruction in fine art realism.
The message that Bennett received during his BFA was: “Everything that could be said, had been said, as far as representation was concerned.”
After decades of absence, figurative realism is back as a grassroots movement.[2] It is driven by a natural love that artists feel toward drawing, painting, and sculpting from life, and enabled by a burgeoning number of artist-run “ateliers” around the world that teach classical techniques. These have spawned thriving realist art communities in places like Barcelona, Florence, Jerusalem, New York, and Seattle.
Today nearly half of visual artists in the United States are women[3], but by several metrics they still lag behind men. In 2022 only 9.3% of the staggering $11B in art auction sales were by women artists.[4] Only 13.7% of artists represented by galleries are women.[5] However, from 2018 to 2024, high-net worth collectors’ interest in women artists increased 11 percentage points to 44%, showing an increasing draw to their work by those like the Bennetts.[6]
Bennett and Schmidt’s personal collection began one painting at a time. “You never start out as a collector… you buy one thing that you like. And pretty soon, you’ve got more paintings than you have walls. At that point you say, ‘I guess we’ve become collectors.’”
Aside from the Bennett’s mission to collect works “of women by women,” the now impressive Bennett Collection represents a diverse range of styles. Their chief priority is the “oomph” factor, the ability of the work to command the room it is in, a magnetism that prompts you to say—in Bennett’s words—“Hot damn.”
In 2023, the Bennetts collected Wedding by Zoey Frank, a painter in her 30’s. The piece, nearly 12 feet wide, interweaves intimate vignettes of 17 figures—some of whom are passed out on tables—in a multi-layered space that is palpably energetic in its abstract design. The overall sweep of the composition (based on Raft of the Medusa) draws you to the bride seated in a chair and held precariously aloft over the group.
I am convinced that it is a masterwork of our time, and the Bennett’s ownership of the piece proves their sophisticated taste.
Schmidt and Bennett got to know the artists they were collecting. Many were struggling. “After a few years we were trying to think: What could we do to help besides just buying their paintings? That’s great, that’s a lot, to purchase someone’s work and validate them that way and give them income, but we were trying to think of something we could do that would be more broad based than that” Schmidt said.
“What about a prize?” One said to the other while sitting in bed one Saturday morning.
By workshopping the idea with artists, the Bennetts found that coupling a prize with a traveling exhibition and surrounding publicity would deliver the most impact by giving visibility to artists over several years. The prize would be adjudicated by rotating jurors including established women artists (such as Frank) or curators, with one seat to Bennett or Schmidt.
The Team
After a nationwide search, the Bennetts chose the Muskegon Museum of Art to partner on the project, and to receive a bequest of 170 works (with a value of $12M) from the impressive (and growing) Bennett Collection. They also bestowed a $1.7M contribution of the $16M cost to build the new Bennett Schmidt Pavilion, doubling the size of the museum. This was completed last year.
The partnership is built on a shared vision to be inclusive to women painters. Museum Director Kirk Hallman admits Bennett’s spirit of collecting has “gotten into our bloodstream” and “changed the outlook of what we do… and how we collect, present, and curate,” pointing to recent acquisitions of work by Monica Ikegwu, Saheed and Brea by MMA’s own fund.
The work by Bennett Prize finalists are on display at MMA, along with a solo show of work by 2023 prize winner Deng Shiqing, the Cost of Life, a darkly comic series.
The Finalists
The subgenres of realism found in the finalist’s work is a cross-section of realism today.
In Low Tide, A life-size figurative work by finalist Jane Philips shows us a nude woman reclining in a field of straw. We wonder why she is there; the diagonal blades of straw create an anxiety-inducing threat, but there is also a moment of calm in the figure. Philips feels that the straw became a metaphor for her own social anxiety. The physical work of making the piece is therapeutic for her, but the value of figurative art is the ability to emotionally resonate.
“When you see a body, you put yourself in that situation,” Philips said.
Philips also feels a strong personal connection to her models, who are often close friends, and introverts; one of whom said, “I never knew I was this beautiful.”
A common theme this year in works by finalists are renderings of candid family photos with personal meanings, such as those by Nimah Gobir, Audrey Rodriguez, and Abbey Rosko. In Rosko’s Umbrellas, a man and woman are sitting on the sofa with holding umbrellas, an unlucky but whimsical act.
Work on the outskirts of the realism genre include Ambrin Ling, whose works are multi-layered weavings of fleeting glimpses of faces, hands, objects, and environments, that cause the eye to circulate through the work. The narrative is not spoon-fed, you must piece it together from a constellation of feelings. These are successful both as abstract works, which play with flat space, and as figurative works that can only be made by a trained realist painter.
2023 Winner Solo Exhibition
The winner of the Bennett Prize receives a solo exhibition of work at the announcement of the subsequent prize. Deng Shiquing’s exhibition The Cost of Life is also on view at the MMA.
For her solo exhibition, Shiquing has painted a series of eight works that together become a multi-scene narrative experienced by a main character—perhaps avatar—of Shiquing. Although this form was historically used for biblical scenes, in Shiquing’s work, unlike illustrations of a story, the events the avatar experiences are thematically related but not entirely linear. It is a concept for narration that could offer figurative painters a powerful new tool for producing connected bodies of work.
The theme of the series is “surrogacy as commerce.” The artist was drawn to the topic after hearing a tell-all in which the inside details of the industry were revealed—such as a client who wished to order 100 babies.
The paintings show the avatar in various moments: lonely and surrounded by children’s toys, perhaps longing for children; agonizing, with arms crossed, over the design of her future child; placing her hands on an image of the surrogate, scrutinizing the child in utero as an exploded anatomical model, and unwrapping a baby from an industrial bag one might expect to hold rice. The final scene shows the avatar cradling a monstrously fat baby—which has a produce sticker on its ass—while a house of cards stands precariously on its back, through which we catch a dream-like glimpse of classical beauty.
Stylistically, Shiquing is a very good realist painter who moves without hesitation between compelling realism, dream-like surrealism, and gestural abstraction. The work Baby Maker shows her talents best; the two-dimensional space of the canvas is busy and alive; forms that shoot into the distance become less real and more gestural, until they become caricatures.
Shiquing’s approach to the life-like figure of the avatar and complexion of her skin is beautiful, though she has painted this figure dozens of times in prior work.
Most virtuosic in this series of works are the hands, which are shown reaching, grasping, folding, holding, pointing, working, sometimes gnarled to unrecognizable ribbons, sometimes grotesquely enlarged. Two of the works are almost entirely paintings of hands.
“The hands are really important” Shiquing said, “because it is about selection, selecting people; you are selecting what you want, like a God, with your own hands.”
The works have clear didactic value. We ought to expect that they have “mixed emotions,”—as was Shiquing’s goal—like an episode of Black Mirror. Such a series cannot, however, avoid speaking more widely about parenthood. In House of Cards, when the avatar is cradling the child, she appears depressed and exhausted. Perhaps she did not want a child, or not this child, or didn’t want to be a mother in this particular circumstance.
Society expects women to be good parents, and to want to be parents, and to be supremely capable of summoning the ability to be so despite hardships often placed upon them. Caregiving is not always fulfilling; perhaps this piece reveals a fortitude to continue caregiving despite the grotesque struggle.
These works by Shiquing show that the new figuration can be beautiful and horrific, conceptual and relevant to both the world and the individual soul.
So long as the tradition of figurative realism lives, artists will learn from the achievements of those past and elevate them to new heights. The best is yet to come. The next artist of staggering genius is increasingly likely to be a woman painter.
This article first appeared in the Epoch Times. With permission, I have reposted it in expanded form. Special thanks to Steven Bennet and Elaine Schmidt for facilitating my participation in the event in Muskegon.
[1] For a discussion see Women, Art and Power and Other Essays by Linda Nochlin.
[2] In a NY Times article about an Alice Neel retrospective at the MET, Roberta Smith described figurative painting as again “ascendant, arguably more prominent than it has been in over 70 years.”
[3] Artists and Other Cultural Workers: A Statistical Portrait, NEA, April 2019
[4] The State of the Market for Women Artists’ Work. Artsy. Arunk Kakar, Casey Lesser.
[5] The 4 Glass Ceilings: How Women Artists Get Stiffed at Every Stage of Their Careers. Artnet.
[6] The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024. Arts Economics.