\u201cI ended up falling in love with her and the work\u2014it\u2019s just majestic,\u201d Shah says.<\/p>\n
This story of buying a monumental work that, at the moment (as she says) doesn\u2019t fit in her home, is emblematic of Shah, who, with her husband, tech entrepreneur, Gaurav Garg, has been on a mission since 2014 to correct the historical imbalance of the art world by supporting women artists and artists of color through collecting their work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Shah grew up in Ahmedabad, India, and has lived in the U.S. since 1991. She got a master\u2019s degree at Stanford and an MBA at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, eventually becoming a tech executive at Oracle, Netscape, and Yahoo. She stepped back from this work in 2008 to pursue philanthropy.\u00a0<\/p>\n From Friday through Jan. 27, visitors will get a window into Shah\u2019s vision in \u201cMaking Their Mark,\u201d an exhibition of the Shah Garg Collection curated by Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of High Line Art and curator of Milk of Dreams<\/em>, the 59th international art exhibition at the Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n Nearly 100 striking, colorful, and often provocative paintings, sculptures, textiles, and ceramics\u2014created between the 1940s through to today\u2014are presented on two floors of the former Dia space in Manhattan\u2019s Chelsea neighborhood. It is the first public showing of the work outside of their Atherton, Calif., home, where most of the art had been displayed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Entering the exhibition, visitors see the oldest work in the show\u2014an untitled 1946 abstract painting filled end-to-end with looping drips of color by the late Ukrainian-American artist Janet Sobel. The self-taught artist \u201cmade an impression\u201d on the far more well-known and lauded Jackson Pollock when he saw it in the early 1940s, according to the critic Clement Greenberg as described in the book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection<\/em>, which was edited by art historians and curators Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Learning about Sobel and speaking with Siegel, who is research director of special program initiatives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, \u201cmade me realize that the constraints of how fine art is defined is also set by men based on what they do,\u201d Shah says.\u00a0<\/p>\n The exhibition in Chelsea sets out to show that women have been part of the historical canon all along, and their contributions, whether through quilts and ceramics, or enormous paintings, deserve an elevated place in art history. Its mission, and the mission of the foundation, \u201cis to convince the world that art made by women artists is equal or better than men,\u201d Shah said at a press preview of the show on Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though female artists such as Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, or Judy Chicago appear to be everywhere now, the elevation of such artists in the public consciousness seems to come in short-lived waves.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shah points to the auction market, where Sunflowers<\/em>, a 1990-91 painting by abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, could achieve US$30 million at a Nov. 15 auction at Sotheby\u2019s, and where an untitled work by Mitchell from much earlier in her career\u2014circa 1959\u2014could achieve US$35 million on Thursday at Christie\u2019s. One or both works, each being sold at major New York sales, is likely to break Mitchell\u2019s US$16.6 million auction record set in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Mitchell sales are newsworthy, she says. But if a painting by Willem de Kooning or Pollock fetched US$50 million at an auction, it would be \u201ca regular occurrence,\u201d Shah says. \u201cWe need to be in that world where a Joan Mitchell selling for US$50 million is just considered normal.\u201d<\/p>\n Shah\u2019s clear mission is to make sure that happens.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The exhibition features a 9-foot by 11-foot untitled work by Mitchell in brilliant yellows painted in 1992, the year she died, along a wall of the first gallery. It\u2019s placed adjacent to an enormous, 11-foot by 24-foot gestural abstract by Mary Weatherford, who writes about how her art is informed by Mitchell in an essay in Making Their Mark<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n This entry point to the collection is an apt illustration of what Shah describes as its voice, which \u201cis about boldness, about expressiveness, about going for it.\u201d It also reflects the draw abstraction has for Shah, in part because of her status as an immigrant.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAbstraction does not care about boundaries, and about geographies, and about gender, and I love that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a universal language of ideas. It lets you bring in your thoughts, your perspectives, your context, into the painting.\u201d<\/p>\n Though there are figurative-oriented works in the collection, such as Baez\u2019s Am\u00e9thyste and Ath\u00e9na\u00efre<\/em>, Joan Semmel\u2019s Horizons<\/em>, 1981, and Leigh\u2019s Stick<\/em>, 2022\u2014a striking seven-foot-tall sculpture that anchors a room on artistic expressions of the female body\u2014the collection is dominated by colorful, strong abstraction. It even shows up in fiber works, such as Swiss artist Fran\u00e7oise Grossen\u2019s Contact III<\/em>, a more than 30-foot-wide sculpture made of orange Manila rope, or Sheila Hicks\u2019 royal blue Taxco<\/em>, circa 1970s, made of wool, cotton, and metallic thread.\u00a0<\/p>\n Art that is \u201cimpressive in its visual origins\u201d is important to Shah, but so is work\u00a0 that \u201chas important ways to add to the collective narrative,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n The exhibition is free to encourage more people to come and experience the art. To ensure young people are among the visitors, the foundation is setting up visits by high school and college students, and it will later bring the collection to two campuses: the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.<\/p>\n \u201cOur plan is to be hosting as much of the community as we physically can\u2014every day,\u201d Shah says. \u201cWe want both young men and young women to see these works and form memories that will make a lasting interaction. They will then continue to look at both of these sets of artists with equal respect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
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