“Nature is obviously the ultimate source of visual experience.” In the exhibition catalogue for Nature in Abstraction, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1958, curator John I. H. Baur distills an essential idea: that not all abstract art is purely about form or color. Although on view more than six decades ago, the exhibition remains relevant for its focus on artists who express nature through abstraction.

In the decades since Nature in Abstraction, major, although imperfect, strides have been made to address and rectify gender inequality in the art world. Whether through revisionist or women-focused exhibitions and scholarship, curators, writers, and gallerists alike have homed in on past and present art movements with a focus on women artists who were often marginalized, overshadowed, or forgotten.

The narrative of Abstract Expressionism largely focuses on male artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, even though several of the female counterparts with whom they were working concurrently made work on the same level and with the same rigor. Notably, artists such as Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler drew inspiration from nature. Absent from the wider discourse, however, were the abstract artists working outside the context of the Western art world.

Today, in the advent of social media and an increasingly globalized art world, abstract art is back in focus at an exceptional scale. Named after Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed memoir, Wild features some of today’s most exciting women abstract artists whose work is inspired by nature, with the idea of nature encompassing environment, cosmos, and body. Several of the artists in the exhibition translate their surroundings through color and form, raising questions about what visual similarities and conceptual differences exist between a group of artists whose practices span East, West, and the diasporic inbetween.

During the pandemic, Christine Ay Tjoe found inspiration in the concealed roots of large plants around her studio. Cecily Brown often uses gardens and landscapes in her work, an homage to her childhood memories growing up in the English countryside. Sara Jimenez, a Filipino-American artist living in New York, creates abstracted landscapes from colonial American photographs of the Philippines. Mary Weatherford began adding neon tubing to her paintings while working in Bakersfield, California, a desert landscape that coexists with oil derricks, neon signs, and other signs of industry. With several women abstract artists now at center stage, we are encouraged to think about a new kind of abstract art that resonates beyond one terrain, region, or plane.