In the velvet-roped corridors of this year’s Art Basel, amid the usual suspects commanding seven-figure price tags, something unexpected occurred. Tucked between the marquee names and the bright young things were a number of older women. Some had been painting – and waiting – for decades.
The Basel Phenomenon
Walking through Art Basel’s 2024 edition, seasoned observers noted an interesting shift. While emerging artist booths drew their usual crowds of young collectors taking selfies, the steady flow of serious money seemed to move towards works by artists in their 60s, 70s and beyond. The fair’s new data reveals that while sales under $5,000 grew both in value (up 7%) and volume (up 13%), the most interesting growth came in the middle market – where these rediscovered artists tend to land.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than at Art Basel Miami Beach, where the year’s most significant revelation wasn’t a rising star but an 82-year-old feminist pioneer named Mimi Smith. Her solo presentation through Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in the Survey section represented both personal triumph and broader institutional reckoning. Smith, who was creating clothing as sculpture in the 1960s – decades before such work became fashionable – finally found herself with the kind of international platform that can reshape artistic legacies.
Against Miami Beach’s glittering backdrop, where collectors hunt for the next big thing, Smith’s Breaking Newsexhibition offered something rarer: decades of sustained vision finally receiving its due. Her signature clock sculptures transform timepieces into urgent social manifestos, each hour marker addressing women’s issues from domestic violence to reproductive rights. Her Television Drawings, created while watching the news and caring for children in the 1970s and ’80s, capture working motherhood’s fractured attention span with documentary precision that feels startlingly contemporary.
Most powerful was Slave Ready: Corporate (1991–93), featuring a “dress for success” women’s suit embedded with steel wool – professional armour that literally wounds the wearer. In Miami’s luxury-focused art scene, the piece’s meditation on professional success and its hidden costs struck particularly deep. As one dealer noted, Smith’s inclusion signals that Art Basel’s evolving curatorial consciousness now actively corrects art history’s gaps rather than simply acknowledging them.
The trend reflects broader market dynamics. As contemporary art prices reach stratospheric levels for the usual suspects, collectors are discovering that exceptional work by under-recognised artists offers both artistic satisfaction and financial logic. Why pay millions for a work by an artist whose career peaked at 25 when you can acquire something equally compelling by someone whose vision has been refined over decades?
The Unexpected Stars of the Fair Circuit
At last year’s Frieze London, Isabella Bortolozzi’s booth drew consistent crowds not for the latest art school graduate, but for works by Carol Rama – an Italian artist who died penniless in 2015, despite having won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
The Berlin gallerist, who first met Rama in the 1990s through mutual friends, had been quietly championing her work for years, organising a major retrospective that toured from MACBA Barcelona to Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Now, Rama’s pieces regularly fetch between €300,000 and €600,000 at fairs.
The numbers tell their own story. According to the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, gallery representation of women artists rose to 41% in 2024, with the most notable growth in primary market galleries, where women artist representation increased from 42% in 2022 to 46% in 2024.
The Collectors Leading the Charge
The movement has found its champions in an unexpected alliance of collectors who’ve made it their mission to seek out female painters who have remained under the radar. Valeria Napoleone, the London-based collector whose Kensington home houses works exclusively by women artists, has become a leading voice in righting a wrong.
“Right now I’m really focusing on mid-career artists – those who have been working for 20 or 30 years,” she explains. “I see so many established artists who are being a bit overlooked.”
Napoleone’s influence extends far beyond her personal collection of nearly 500 works. Through her platform Valeria Napoleone XX, she’s been placing works in public institutions, creating what she describes as “a choir of female voices”.
Her interests align closely with those of Isabella Bortolozzi, who felt that Carol Rama should be given greater prominence. That retrospective, featuring over 200 works spanning seven decades, became the catalyst for Rama’s posthumous recognition in the American market. (If only that recognition had come sooner.)
When Time Becomes the Medium
Carmen Herrera stands as perhaps the most extraordinary example of patience rewarded. The Cuban-American geometric abstractionist, now 102, sold her first painting at 89. Her precise, architectural works had been sitting in her East 19th Street studio for over half a century, occasionally catching the attention of peers like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, but consistently overlooked by a market that couldn’t quite see her vision.
Today, Herrera’s paintings sell for mid-to-high six figures. But it’s not just about the money – it’s about vindication. Her 2016 Whitney retrospective drew record crowds, proving that quality has its own timeline, one that rarely coincides with market cycles or cultural trends.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to painting. Several sculptors are also breaking through the art glass – and price – ceiling. Louise Bourgeois didn’t create her iconic spider sculpture Maman until she was 87, yet it became one of the most recognisable artworks of the early 21st century, dominating the Tate Modern’s inaugural exhibition. Louise Nevelson was in her late 50s when she achieved her breakthrough with the wooden wall sculptures assembled from found objects – works that now define her legacy.
The Late Comers
Amy Sherald was 43 when Michelle Obama’s portrait commission changed everything, proving that recognition may depend not only on the quality of the work but on who acknowledges that quality.
Similarly, Howardena Pindell didn’t have her first museum survey until 2018, when she was 74 – yet the exhibition revealed an artist at the height of her powers.
Alma Thomas, who held a fine arts degree from Howard University, couldn’t fully devote herself to painting until she neared 70 and retired from decades of teaching. Within just a few years, she had developed her signature style of luminous colour patches. By 1972, she had become the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
Nor, of course, is it just about women. Noah Purifoy’s story shows that outsiders are less likely to get early recognition. A Black activist, at 72, he moved his studio from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert, where over the remaining 15 years of his life he created more than 100 works across a 10-acre tract that now serves as an outdoor museum. His massive assemblages and building-sized installations carry the resonance of a man who had encountered and fought exclusion.
The French Institutional Awakening
France’s major institutions have been notably active in this rediscovery movement. While the Musée d’Orsay has long championed forgotten 19th-century women artists – with Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle not acquired until 1930, thirty-five years after the artist’s death – contemporary institutions are now scouring 20th- and 21st-century practitioners.
The most striking example is Nil Yalter, the Turkish-born video artist who moved to Paris in 1965 and became a pioneer of feminist video art. Despite creating groundbreaking works like The Headless Woman (The Belly Dance) in 1974, Yalter had to wait until 2016 for her first French retrospective at the 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine in Metz. Now 86, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Venice Biennale – a recognition that arrived nearly fifty years after her most radical early works.
Yalter’s trajectory perfectly embodies the French art world’s complex relationship with experimental work by women. Her videos exploring immigration, feminism and cultural identity were prescient examinations of themes that have become central to contemporary discourse, yet they languished in relative obscurity for decades. The FRAC Lorraine retrospective, her first major institutional recognition in France, finally positioned her alongside other pioneers of video art and feminist practice.
Another touching case is the renaissance of Odile Mir, the 96-year-old sculptor and designer. Her extraordinary furniture pieces from the 1960s and ’70s have suddenly become the talk of collectors worldwide. Working initially as the only female designer at the Delmas lighting factory in Montauban, Mir created sculptural furniture that bridged her training as a sculptor with industrial design. Her chrome and leather pieces, originally sold at Prisunic for modest sums, now command upwards of €10,000 at auction.
What makes Mir’s story particularly compelling is how her granddaughter, interior designer Léonie Alma Mason, has helped bring her work back into production – proving that sometimes family provides the perfect bridge between forgotten genius and contemporary appreciation.
A Market in Transition
The art world’s embrace of these seasoned practitioners reflects broader cultural shifts. In an era when youth is fetishised across all industries, there’s something deeply satisfying about celebrating voices refined through decades of practice. These artists offer collectors what the market often lacks: depth, vision and a stylistic confidence born of sustained creative practice. This is purer art – untouched by the distortions of instant fame.
The commercial mechanics are increasingly sophisticated. Thaddaeus Ropac, whose blue-chip galleries span London, Paris and Salzburg, has strategically added two older women to his roster in recent years: Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth (born 1940), who spent most of her career exhibiting only in Austria before receiving a solo show in Venice and a retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao this summer; and American painter Joan Snyder (born 1940), whose first show at Ropac’s London gallery opened in November.
Snyder, now 85, offers a refreshingly candid perspective on the phenomenon. “Galleries want older women artists because they want to get their estates,” she observes with characteristic directness, acknowledging the commercial realities underlying the cultural moment. Yet she’s also adamant that she’s “making the best work she’s ever made” at 85 – raising the central question that defines this market: is recognition arriving because the work has reached its peak, or because the artists have reached a certain age? “No one can possibly give the answer as to why something did or didn’t happen,” Snyder notes, “at least not in the subjective, fickle and opaque world of art.”
As one prominent London dealer put it: “The collectors buying these works aren’t looking for the next big thing – they’re looking for the thing that should have been big all along.” It’s a subtle but important distinction, suggesting a maturing market that values substance over speculation.
The Long View
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about this quiet revolution is how unremarkable it feels to the artists themselves. Most have simply continued working, decade after decade, driven by internal necessity rather than external validation. Their persistence suggests something profound about the nature of artistic calling – that it operates on its own schedule, independent of market cycles or critical fashion.
Yet the broader cultural moment cannot be ignored. Women artists are, quite simply, in vogue – and even the most established figures are experiencing unprecedented market validation. Marlene Dumas, the South African painter whose career spans decades, exemplifies this phenomenon at its most elevated level. Her trajectory from selling works for around £50,000 to achieving record-breaking prices illustrates how the rising tide lifts all boats. When Jule-die Vrou(1985) sold for over $1 million in 2004, it placed her among only three living female artists to achieve that milestone. By 2008, The Visitor reached $6.3 million, and The Schoolboys fetched $9 million at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023. This May, Miss January (1997) shattered expectations entirely, selling for $13.6 million – setting a new record for the most expensive painting by a living female artist at auction.
Dumas’s ascension from respected artist to market titan reflects more than individual recognition – it signals a fundamental recalibration of value systems within the art world. When collectors are willing to pay eight figures for work by living women artists, it creates space for the broader re-evaluation that has lifted voices like Herrera, Bourgeois and countless others from historical footnotes to centre stage.
In their studios – whether in Manhattan walk-ups, Berlin lofts or Mojave compounds – these artists have created a parallel art world, one that values consistency over novelty, depth over surface appeal. That this world is finally receiving recognition says as much about the collectors and institutions embracing it as it does about the artists themselves.
