Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women opened on January 5, 1943 at Art of This Century, her Frederick Kiesler-designed New York gallery. Conceived with Marcel Duchamp and juried by a group that included Duchamp, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, James Johnson Sweeney, Howard Putzel, and Guggenheim, it gathered artists from sixteen nationalities, among them Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, Louise Nevelson, Kay Sage, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Dorothea Tanning. Sources identify it as the first documented exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to women artists, and Vogue notes its later reputation as the first U.S. art show dedicated to female artists. Although commercially weak and sometimes dismissed through sexist criticism, the exhibition made visible women surrealists and abstractionists in a gallery that was central to wartime modernism in New York.
It became a touchstone for later histories of women artists and feminist exhibition-making.
