Born and raised in New Jersey, Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946) began her career as an iconoclast by skipping school to hang out in the legendary folk music venues in Greenwich Village. By 1968 she had joined the collective of artists, musicians and poets known as Group 212 in Woodstock, New York. She carried that collaborative spirit and irreverence forward in her work and throughout her career, regularly introducing new technologies and media into her practice, imbuing the work with her formal and social justice concerns.

In 1967 and 1968, Nina Yankowitz began developing and exhibiting her series of unstretched, draped paintings. These works reject the conventional tautness of the traditional stretched canvas, embracing instead a sense of looseness and fluidity. By spraying her canvases with fine mists of acrylic paint, Yankowitz enhances this impression of weightlessness, allowing the surface to hang and move like fabric. Through these gestures (highlighting the physical and aesthetic properties of textiles, as well as techniques historically associated with femininity), she at once channels and challenges the boundaries of what is often dismissed as “women’s work.”

Yankowitz also employed non-representational abstraction as a means to explore sociopolitical concerns. Her commitment to abstraction distinguished her from some of her feminist contemporaries who favored overtly figurative or symbolic imagery. Reflecting on this tension, Yankowitz explained: “At the time, I didn’t believe you had to reference female issues only by using female-specific imagery to be a feminist artist. But later, looking back to working with Heresies* (as a founding member,) I recognized the importance of projecting a strong, unified voice—demanding equal acceptance for female imagery—as necessary to make any change.”

While not directly “female-specific imagery,” Nina Yankowitz’s Queen of Stars was rendered as an homage to Hedy Lamarr, a feminist “shero” in Yankowitz's words. Lamarr, who was widely known as a Hollywood star and only later recognized for her contributions to the development of frequency-hopping technology used in a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes; embodied a form of brilliance that exceeded the narrow roles available to women of her time. Rather than framing this duality as a tension between beauty and intellect, Yankowitz’s work honors Lamarr as an emblem of female ingenuity and visibility. Formally, Queen of Stars also reflects Yankowitz’s engagement with unstructured canvas, developed in parallel with artists such as Sam Gilliam, situating the work within broader experiments in post-minimal abstraction while asserting a distinctly feminist point of reference. Like Gilliam, Yankowitz expanded on Abstract Expressionism, pushing the movement to encompass dramatically new forms and modes of presentation. Yet Yankowitz also introduced principles from the Feminist Art Movement into her practice. She incorporated sewing, pleating, and other handicraft techniques maligned as feminine into her painterly process—challenging the notion of “women’s work.”

Nina Yankowitz has been featured in exhibitions or presented installations at institutions such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (1970); Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY (1970); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1972); Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany (1972); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (1973); the Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (1973); Bronx Museum of Art, New York, NY (1978); MoMA PS1, New York, NY (1982); 51st Street Lexington Avenue Subway, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York, NY (1987); Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (1990); The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL (1996); Art in General, New York, NY (1998); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (1998); Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2005; 2014); Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine (2011); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2013); and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA (2016), among many others. She was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, that opened Summer 2025 and is now on view at the Parrish Art Museum, South Hampton.

*Feminist artists and writers that formed the Heresies mother collective, producing Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics from 1977–93. The group sought to challenge patriarchal art institutions and systems.