The exhibition invites visitors on a captivating journey through Cassatt’s six-decade career with 30 paintings, pastels and prints, along with the famed artist’s personal correspondence, that offer insight into a woman who was a focused professional, making a living through art. A visually radical artist, she helped shape the Impressionist movement and transformed the course of modern art, using materials and processes that pushed the creative boundaries of her era.

Engaging programming includes an art-making station in the exhibition that allows visitors to experience firsthand a simplified version of her groundbreaking technique of printing in color.

“Mary Cassatt at Work” explores the artist’s activity across media, revealing the daring methods she used to give form to her ideas.

“Work and independence shaped Mary Cassatt’s life,” said Rojas Silva. “She was the most celebrated woman artist of her time—a bold modernist pioneer, a prominent member of the French Impressionist movement and a fiercely professional and aesthetically radical artist.”

Best known as an artist of women and children, this exhibition redefines Cassatt’s exploration of this topic as a serious window into the social, intellectual, domestic, and working lives of women. “Cassatt dared to take the lives of women seriously as a subject matter for great art,” said Emily Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, which previously hosted the exhibition.

The exhibition also delves into issues of class, rarely discussed when examining Cassatt’s work, and brings to light Cassatt’s role in putting at the forefront the “invisible work” of women, making it a perceptible, serious subject of study. Her work highlights roles traditionally assigned to women, including caregiving, nursing, social labor and performing music. Her attention to these tasks also testifies to the artistic work Cassatt herself performed. Viewers can see the intimate marks of her brush, etching needle, pastel stick and fingertips throughout the exhibition.

The show also illustrates Cassatt’s exceptional draftsmanship and her innovative printmaking. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, Cassatt drew from the colors and patterns she saw in Japanese art and used Western technique to pioneer a new method of printing.

HoMA’s exceptional collection of Japanese prints—one of the largest outside of Japan—offers an insightful glimpse into the cross-cultural dialogue that inspired Cassatt’s groundbreaking work in color and printmaking.

In addition to 21 objects on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and 1 from a private collection, the exhibition includes eight works from HoMA’s own collection. HoMA’s relationship with Cassatt dates to the Museum’s founding.

“Mary Cassatt has been a part of the museum since it opened in 1927,” said HoMA director and CEO Halona Norton-Westbrook. “Just as HoMA shares the best of Hawai‘i art with the world, for almost 100 years it has also been bringing the world to Hawai‘i. It is a wonderful parallel to celebrate the work of a groundbreaking female artist at a museum that was founded by an equally forward-thinking woman.”

Cassatt’s “The Banjo Lesson” (1893) was among the core group of works gifted to the museum by founder Anna Rice Cooke. The drypoint, considered modern for that era, reflects the popularity of banjo playing among middle- and upper-class women of that time. In “The Child’s Caress” (1891), a tender moment between mother and child highlights the female role of nurturer and primary caretaker.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that will be available in the HoMA Shop.

Exhibition organization and donors
"Mary Cassatt at Work" is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The organizing curators are Jennifer Thompson, Gloria and Jack Drosdick curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection; and Laurel Garber, Park Family associate curator of Prints and Drawings, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The curators for the Honolulu presentation are Alejandra Rojas Silva, curator of European and American art, and Halona Norton-Westbrook, former director and CEO.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by Prince Waikiki. Additional support is provided by Monica Wrenn Chun and Laura Goo. The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Inside the Exhibition: Mary Cassatt at Work
Friday, June 20, 7-8:30 p.m., Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre
HoMA offers a chance to hear the curators involved with Mary Cassatt at Work talk about what it was like to work on the exhibition. They will share curatorial perspectives and the choices they made, and offer insight into how Cassatt’s life and art practice influenced how they approached the exhibition with respect to their city, museum’s collections, and local audiences.

The speakers are: Jennifer A. Thompson, the Gloria and Jack Drosdick curator of European painting and sculpture and curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Emily Beeny, chief curator at the Legion of Honor of San Francisco; Alejandra Rojas Silva, curator of European and American art at HoMA.

Exhibition on Screen: Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874
June 19, 21, 26 at 2 p.m.; July 3 and 6 at 2 p.m.; July 5 at 7 p.m.
This is the film version of an exhibition organized by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It reexamines the moment in history that changed the course of western art thanks to pioneering artists such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. It also highlights the crucial contributions of women artists to the Impressionist movement, showcasing celebrated works by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. "Dawn of Impressionism" is the perfect cinematic companion to "Mary Cassatt at Work." See the trailer.

Gallery Talk: Mary Cassatt at Work
Sunday, June 29, 2-3:00 p.m., Honolulu Museum of Art, Gallery 28
Curator of European and American art Alejandra Rojas Silva, who curated the HoMA presentation of Mary Cassatt at Work, gives a gallery talk about the artist and her art in the exhibition. 

Accompanying exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints
“A Woman’s Perspective: Prints by Ikeda Shōen,” on view through Aug. 17, includes a selection of prints by one of the first female artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be recognized for her achievements in the field of Japanese painting and traditional printmaking. This accompanying exhibition underscores the contributions by pioneering female artists throughout the world during this time.

About Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was among the leading figures of the French Impressionist movement and the most celebrated woman artist of her time. Born in Pittsburgh to a well to do family, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art when she was just 15. In 1866, chaperoned by her mother, she moved to Paris to study privately. Edgar Degas, with whom she became close friends, invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1879, marking a turning point for Cassatt. She contributed to four of the Impressionists’ famed group exhibitions and became an ambassador for the movement in the United States. Cassatt maintained a professional practice, exhibiting and selling her works. Over the course of her career, she produced approximately 380 pastels, 320 paintings and 215 prints. She painted her final pictures in 1915 and showed a group of them at an exhibition in New York supporting women’s suffrage, a cause she supported in her later years. She was forced to stop painting as she went progressively blind.

​​The Honolulu Museum of Art is Hawai‘i’s premier art institution, inspiring and uplifting the community through transformative art experiences. Founded in 1927 to reflect Hawai‘i’s multicultural makeup, today HoMA’s extraordinary collection of more than 55,000 works of art from across the globe spans 5,000 years.