Continuing the legacy of Julia Morgan, renowned architect of the RAM building and Hearst Castle, RAM celebrates a 145-year span of artwork from the influential female artists who embody a major constituency of its permanent collection. Originally designed by Morgan as the home of Riverside’s Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), RAM’s historic foundation has long been an instrumental source of support for women in the Riverside community and beyond -- even at times when society at large was not.

Heralding some 40 female artists who have held their own within the still largely male-dominated art world, RAM proudly sheds light on their important contributions and multifaceted concerns from the mid-nineteenth century to present day. The exhibition includes work by such artists as: Kate Greenaway, Corita Kent, Virginia Katz, Doris Rosenthal, Lorna Simpson, Kate Steinitz, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Patssi Valdez and Diane Gamboa of the ASCO art collective. Highlighted are artists central to such historical and contemporary art movements as Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Performance and Activist Art, Identity Politics, Conceptualism, Illustration, California Regionalism, and Muralism.

At times actively engaged with gender politics and the Feminist art movement and at other times uninterested in further classification beside that of “creator,” Women Artists of the Permanent Collection explores a rich spectrum of universally-traversed themes: identity, spirituality, aesthetics, humor, and love.