She Who Made Me Curated By Mary Anna Pomonis
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present She Who Made Me, a group exhibition curated by Los Angeles–based artist, curator, and educator Mary Anna Pomonis. The exhibition opens in conjunction with her solo show She Who Holds the Sun at Charlie James Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions form an interrelated dialogue about loss, renewal, and lineage, rooted in Pomonis’s personal experience of the 2025 Eaton Fire, which destroyed an entire body of her paintings. The new works in She Who Holds the Sun were created as acts of reconstruction, rising from the fragments of that loss.
She Who Made Me serves as the conceptual and emotional foundation for this process of recovery. The exhibition brings together artists who have profoundly shaped Pomonis’s artistic practice, including teachers, peers, and collaborators whose work embodies the matrilineal networks of influence and mentorship that sustain creative life.
The curatorial framework takes inspiration from Amelia Jones’s landmark 1996 exhibition Sexual Politics at the Hammer Museum, which positioned Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as both anchor and provocation. In She Who Made Me, Pomonis extends this strategy, placing her own work in conversation with artists who have been central to her understanding of feminist practice, spirituality, and resilience.
Part memory book and part devotional, She Who Made Me is an exhibition about artistic inheritance, connection, and the continuum of care that defines women’s creative histories. It asserts that no artist works alone; every act of creation is sustained by the voices, visions, and labors of those who came before.
Alexandra Grant, Allison Stewart, Carole Caroompas, Carolyn Castaño, Cayce Zavaglia, Daniela Garcia Hamilton, Elise Neal, Judy Chicago, Julie Orser, June Edmonds, Maya Mackrandilal, Paula Wilson, Sabina Ott, and Susan Mogul.
Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist whose work explores communication across languages and cultures through painting, drawing, and sculpture. She is represented by carlier | gebauer in Berlin and Madrid.
Allison Stewart is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work examines American identity through the relics and mythologies of war. Her photographs are held in the Rubell Family Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Carole Caroompas (1946–2022) was a Los Angeles painter and performance artist known for narrative feminist works merging pop culture and classical imagery. The Carole Caroompas Estate is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.
Carolyn Castaño is a Los Angeles artist using ecofeminist frameworks to explore landscape, migration, and identity. She is a 2025 Guggenheim recipient.
Cayce Zavaglia is a St. Louis–based artist known for her hyperreal embroidered portraits that merge painting and textile art. She earned her MFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis and is represented by William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis.
Daniela Garcia Hamilton is a first-generation Mexican American painter whose vibrant works explore ritual, family, and immigrant identity.
Elise Neal is a Chicago-based artist exploring feminism and the body through pierced and modified figures. Originally from Los Angeles, she is completing her BFA in Studio Art with a focus in Painting at Columbia College Chicago.
Judy Chicago is a pioneering feminist artist best known for The Dinner Party. Over six decades she has redefined art history through collaborative, gender-centered practice. She lives in Belen, New Mexico.
Julie Orser is a Los Angeles–based artist who deconstructs popular cinema to explore gender roles, narrative, and identity through video, photography, and installation. Her work is currently on view in Metro Art’s moving image installation at Leimert Park Station.
June Edmonds is a Los Angeles painter whose abstract works explore color, rhythm, and cultural identity. She is a 2022 Guggenheim recipient and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Maya Mackrandilal is a Los Angeles interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose work explores transcultural memory, gender, and labor through performance, sculpture, and writing.
Paula Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Carrizozo, New Mexico, whose vibrant, layered works explore hybridity and embodiment across painting, printmaking, and performance.
Sabina Ott (1955–2018) was a Chicago-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. She was the founder of Terrain Exhibitions and received both NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships.Susan Mogul is a Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist known for autobiographical feminist films and video. The Austrian Film Museum in Vienna presented a survey of her films in 2024. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Mogul’s work is distributed by Video Data Bank.
About the Curator
Mary Anna Pomonis is a Los Angeles–based artist, curator, and educator whose work bridges painting, social practice, and feminist collaboration. She has exhibited at the Western Carolina University Museum of Fine Arts, the Torrance Art Museum, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art. Pomonis is the founder of CSUF Just Arts, a campus-wide initiative fostering social justice through creative collaboration, and the founder of the Association of Hysteric Curators, a feminist collective whose exhibition Goddesses and Monsters (2024–27) is traveling nationally. She is Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Programs at California State University, Fullerton. Her honors include the BlueRoof Firefly Residency (2025), CSUF Faculty Research Grants (2022, 2024), and the Distinguished Legacy Award from the University of Illinois (2022)