When Komal Shah, collector of the Making Their Mark art exhibition and co-founder of the Shah Garg Foundation alongside husband Gaurav Garg, first introduced her own mother to the collection of works by an intergenerational and international group of women artists, there were tears.
Shah’s mother traveled all the way from India to Berkeley, California, expecting to bear witness to what she assumed was her daughter’s silly “art-buying spree,” laughs Shah. However, after laying eyes on Joan Mitchell’s untitled 1992 diptych, the matron Shah finally understood Komal’s vision—to empower women not just as creators, but as equals to men in a world that says otherwise.
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Shah notes that this sort of emotional reaction is not out of the ordinary for viewers. “By the second day of the [New York] preview, I started noticing journalists bringing their sisters, friends, and spouses to the show. And to me that was sort of a moment where I felt that we had done something right,” Shah says.
Shah’s vision will be on display at the Kemper Art Museum beginning September 12, where it will hold the distinction of the museum’s largest-ever exhibition. Making Their Mark runs through January 5, 2026.
St. Louis will be the third stop for Making Their Mark, with the collection having spent time in its New York gallery, and then with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Sixty-eight works (many of which are quite sizable) by women artists will be on display under six different themes, including “Painting is Technology” and “Luminous Abstraction.”
“I like strength, and I like power and muscular works,” Shah says. In addition to the Mitchell diptych, visitors can expect to be awed by the genius of Charline von Heyl, Judy Chicago, and even St. Louis–born artist Suzanne Jackson.
The exhibition’s success would not be possible without the keen eye of curators Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen Jr. director and chief curator of High Line Art, and Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum. Alemani was the sole curator for the inaugural New York installation, joined by Eckmann for this iteration to add a local perspective. “We want to tell the story that’s appropriate for the venue,” Shah says. “That’s where I leave it to the local curator to really hone the show in that way.”
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Alemani and Eckmann have been pivotal players, but Shah gives credit to many others who helped her transition from the world of corporate technology to the world of fine art as well. Scholars such as Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel have been a part of Shah’s education and inspiration. “I found all these incredible curators that became my allies and would speak for me. You have to find great allies. Men and women, not just women,” she says.
In fact, it was Siegel who helped Shah first realize that “the critics who defined fine art were all male. So all of those rules around what fine art would be were all based on what men would do,” she says. This realization gave way to Shah adding fiber arts and ceramics into her collection, an act of pushback against the gendered stereotype that craft is inherently feminine and holds less value than other media. Shah views this perspective shift as a turning point in her maturation as a collector, and its result is the “Craft is Art” section seen in the exhibition today.
Now, Shah believes that the outside world is more responsible for perpetuating such stereotypical impositions than the artists themselves. “Artisits do what they like without thinking about those boundaries,” she says. This spirit of freedom is embodied by all of the talented women of Making Their Mark, who Shah feels called to support.
“Women are 100 percent capable of excellence,” she says. “We have conquered scale, power, and masculinity. It is uplifting for women, certainly, but also for men to recognize that women have been doing all this.”
Making Their Mark runs September 12 through January 5. 2026 at the Kemper Art Museum. The exhibition’s opening reception will be held on September 12 beginning at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
