“Making Sense of the Body:” A conversation with curator Stefano di Paola

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

By EMMA CIESLIK January 29th, 2026

Gloria Klein: Crisis Management opened at Anat Ebgi gallery’s Tribeca location on January 9th. Gloria Klein was a queer feminist artist whose works explore repetition and systematic order through overlapping diagonal hatch marks, informed by mathematical systems. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein studied at The City University of New York: Brooklyn College, before studying at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Art Students League of New York. In 1970, with a letter of recommendation from Roy Lichtenstein, Klein enrolled in Hunter College, where she completed an MFA and studied with contemporary artists Robert Barry and Robert Swain. 

After the exhibition opened, I sat down with Stefano di Paola, partner and senior director at Anat Ebgi Gallery to learn more about the impact and legacy of Klein’s work. In our conversation, we discussed how Klein’s work draws on her background in mathematics, how her art converses not only with American craft traditions like quilting but also cutting edge pixelation aesthetics, and the importance of oral history to document the lives and work of women and queer artists, both groups historically underrepresented in the art canon. 

Most significantly, di Paola shares how abstraction was a key medium for queer feminist artists, breaking down gendered assumptions and human bodies to their most basic forms. 

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

Emma Cieslik: Can you share a little more about who Gloria Klein is and how you learned about Klein’s work?

Di Paola: Klein is an interesting figure because she is not found in many of the history textbooks if you go to look for her. She’s a bit of a—I would argue—criminally understudied figure of art history for a myriad of reasons that I can delve into throughout our conversation. She was someone whose work was introduced to me by a curator that I know, April Richon Jacobs, who had organized a project to show Klein’s work at Christie’s during the COVID-19 pandemic. April knew the work from Claire Howard, who was Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art for a time, and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Claire had included Klein in an exhibition called Expanding Abstraction (October 4, 2020-January 10, 2021). It was looking at the permanent collection of the Blanton for early figures of abstraction that had been left out of the narratives. Klein's work was gifted to the Blanton in 1979 by the surrealist and abstract painter Buffie Johnson. She was a supporter and believer in Gloria’s work really early on, and donated an incredible work made in 1975 titled Yellow Dawn, which is actually on view at the Blanton right now.

It’s a gorgeous multicolored early work with this electrifying yellow ground. It’s beautiful, sunny, and magnificent. So that’s how I initially got to know the work. Then, because I was really interested in the practice, I was connected to two more people who could show me more. I have a proclivity for these historical women artists who have been overlooked throughout art history for any number of reasons. People kind of know to bring that work to me.

I got connected to Vivien Collens, who is an artist and was a friend of Gloria’s since the 1970s and they had reconnected later in life. Gloria had arranged with Vivian to basically hold control of all of her paintings following her passing in 2021 and while all of her works on paper went to her niece, Janet. Those were my two main contacts that I had worked with to figure out how to build the estate… how to begin the process of making sense of the work and the practice.

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

There has been so much to delve into with archival materials and Klein’s journals and sketchbooks and it’s this ongoing process that continues now. We’re doing a lot of oral histories with different figures trying to figure out who Gloria was in her day, how she thought about her work and being an artist. I didn’t have the chance to know Gloria when she was in her prime, or to see her at her most vigorous, so it’s been fun learning about who she was, connecting with figures I can talk to, who knew the work, who were her friends, who were her community, who were her compatriots, who were her neighbors. That is something that we’ve been doing too– tracking down her neighbors from her studio building and learning from them, which includes artists who were working in the 1970s and are now in their 80s to young artists who are of a different generation, in their 40s and 50s now, who knew her because they were in the same building with her. 

Going through this process, and having the exhibition up right now in New York has been an interesting process with people coming out of the woodwork, saying “Oh, I knew Gloria. I was friends with her, or we lived together. We used to go out to dinner together. She would contact me for advice on grants,” and then we say “great, let’s jump on a call. I want to hear everything you know.” That’s been driving a lot of my progress. It builds a clearer picture.

Cieslik: I love that, and I feel it’s often unconventional or at least not common for oral history to be part of this work which many times foreground archival records. How is oral history a critical part of documenting often underrated figures within the art world, including women and queer artists?

Di Paola: This is the really interesting part of that question. Oral history is really all we have. So many times if you look at the history around women or queer artists, time and time again, the archives are thrown away. Or the family doesn’t care who was there or they had no family. Oftentimes, institutions don’t care. We represent Faith Wilding, and I worked very closely with Faith on reexamining the history of Womanhouse for its 50th anniversary. There’s a famous narrative of CalArts itself literally trashing the archives from Womanhouse. It only still exists because a group of students found it in a dumpster and rescued it. 

If the institutions that hosted these exhibitions, such as Womanhouse, aren’t even going to be the ones to uphold their own legacy and properly document it and make it available for scholars, who will? The answer is: the people who are around them—friends, sometimes their family if their family was involved, their caretakers, the people who wanted to see them succeed in this world, and most often those custodians of legacy are other artists. Sometimes it’s just friends. Or sometimes people they got dinner with on occasion. These are the stories that ultimately tell you more about an artist’s work and their practice because you’ll learn about what the artists were thinking about, what they were talking about, what sort of person they were. I think this is fundamental to understanding an artist and their work. 

I want to believe in Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, that it’s all about just the work itself and that is the only thing that matters, but I think building the holistic picture, understanding the artist as an entity and as a person in the world is really key, especially for these women artists and queer artists. I don’t believe in mythologies. I don’t believe in the stories we’re told about the myth of the white male artist in the studio being a genius. I believe that all of these figures, especially women and queer people, were part of incredible networks. We see that with her inclusion in Harmony Hammond’s A Lesbian Show in 1978. It’s very apparent that Klein was ingrained within a community from the beginning. 

On the other hand, it seems she was a little hermetic in her way of being and oftentimes struggled with a lot of the socialization that was so needed in that era for financial success in the art world. It’s evident that she was close with a number of artists and a very small community of people, so being able to speak with them will fundamentally tell me more than any curator who’s looking 30 years later. They’ll teach me more than any book that I can find because there literally are none.

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

Cieslik: Yes, and a critical part of Klein’s story is the importance of art and specifically abstract art as part of the feminist movement. Can you share more about the impact and legacy of abstraction in the second wave feminist movement?

Di Paola: My knowledge of this really came through West Coast feminism. That was my education. I grew up in Los Angeles and I studied West Coast feminist art since undergrad. It was something that I was particularly interested in, leading me to chase Faith Wilding for four years to come work with the gallery because I was obsessed with her work. But, I think at the time, you have figures like Judy Chicago, who were very much trying to make it in the boys club while still upholding feminist iconography. And then you have other figures who were not interested in that, such as Faith who was really trying to build her own language in her own space completely, unconcerned with the market and galleries.

I suppose my understanding of abstraction from that time comes a lot from Faith’s work. I really have to say here that she is one of the greatest teachers of that history. I look and see the ways in which she evolved through every genre of feminism. Yes, she is part of the second wave movement, then she delves directly into the third wave movement, and into post-modern feminism. She is a key figure of cyber feminism. She is one of the original eco-feminists. She was talking about eco-feminism in 1969 before the term was even coined. For her, and many around her, using abstraction as a language was a way of making sense of the body.

Gloria comes out of a little bit of a different school of thought in this regard. Her abstraction was a way of exercising the emotional stabilities and instabilities that she felt throughout her life and trying to kind of encapsulate or contain them. She is an interesting figure because her particular brand of abstraction is deeply indebted to her early years, which she spent studying math and economics. Her way of working was basically to create systematic painting, yet she’s looking at figures like Agnes Martin and Franz Kline in those years before while she was studying in her programs of math and economics. Those were the artists that she was looking at and seeing before she started working toward a more conceptual end. I don’t know if I would call where her practice ended a “mix” because I don’t think that is quite right, but rather Gloria is an amalgamation of both conceptual practice and a deeply expressive hard edge abstraction.

If we take the idea of abstraction as an expression or an extension of oneself and a way to understand the interiority of the artist, I think everyone goes about it differently. For Faith, it was looking at the feminine form and plant life around her. And for Gloria, it was about understanding systems because that was the way that she perceived the world. 

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

Cieslik: Yes, and I also want to highlight that one of the things that I am curious about as someone who does queer oral history is how queer women were an essential part of the feminist movement, and the feminist art movement. As a queer femme, my mind immediately recalls second wave feminist leaders’ fear surrounding queer women’s involvement in their liberation movement. The term "lavender menace” comes from Betty Friedan, one of the key leaders of the second wave feminist movement and president of The National Organization of Women, who described the threat of feminists associating with lesbians in 1969. 

Di Paola: Yes, the Lavender Menace. This fear of feminism being related to man hating, misandry, and all of these sorts of complications that came with it. Feminists, especially the second wave feminist movement, became so gender essentialist as well, which I think is also a really interesting aspect to second wave feminism, the way that it was largely a heterosexual, white movement. Then there are figures like Faith coming from Latin America, or Gloria as a queer artist. The list goes on and on of all these figures that are only now really getting their dues. 

I think that queer feminists provided an alternative way of looking at feminism because they were a little bit less connected to this language of ‘out of the kitchen and into the streets’ because, as queer people, we don’t have to subscribe to the same entrenched institutions of 1950s America. I mean we can think about Louise Fishman and her series “Angry Women”. She’s speaking about this idea of feminist rage, which I think a lot of second wave feminists would have been terrified to engage with because they didn’t want to be seen as man haters. They didn’t want to be seen as angry women. They wanted to be seen as people who were fighting for equality. 

Many second wave feminists stepped quietly and nicely around particular societal issues. Of course, many queer feminists pushed it much further than that. That being said, it’s possible that we should applaud all of these early feminist figures; many queer and women artists now walk on the paths they paved. They did absolutely important work, but there’s an interesting factor to the queerness of it, where they weren’t caught up in this idea of essentialist roles, where as a woman you had to be in the kitchen, you had to be a mother. For queer women, you could be if you wanted to, but it wasn’t a social prescription, and I think that’s a key difference that the queer feminists brought to the movement. 

Cieslik: And in bringing our conversation to a close, what do you hope people walk away with when they encounter Klein’s art for perhaps the first time in their lives?

Di Paola: There’s a tiny piece, in fact, it’s the smallest work in the show titled, Awe. That is what I hope people take away. I hope that they come in and they see an artist whose work they more than likely have never seen before. This was the reason we selected to feature 1990s work for this exhibition. It is our second show of Klein’s work; the first was in Los Angeles and it focused primarily on works from the 1970s and drifted a bit into the early 1980s. It was the familiar period, which is the golden era that everyone looks into first because those are the few works that are in museums or that people know about. Her projects begin, and her mature language starts in the 1970s, so it’s an easy era to point to.

The 1990s is a complicated era; she’s condensing 30 years of work and development in a single canvas. When we look at these works from 1986 to 1996, the main spread of the show, Klein is merging the systematic work (the hatch marks) of the 1970s, she’s incorporating textile and quilting and American craft traditions that she looked at in the 1980s, she is involving far more complicated mathematical systems that were creating pixel-like presentations long before anyone was thinking about digital art. She was already doing that in the 1980s because she was relating it back to American quilting patterns. It’s not in this exhibition, but she literally has a work from 1981 called Pixels. I don't know of any other artist who was literally referencing the language of pixels in 1981 and doing it by hand, not using any digital technology. This was the case with all her systems, they were designed through mathematics that she was working out on paper. And there are these incredible drawings that show her working out the math.

Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

This sort of algorithmic approach to the work is something that I come back to over and over again. She was fundamentally human. She was fundamentally a mathematician, but she made mistakes, and within her works, and she leaves those mistakes. She allows things to be wrong sometimes. So, in her systems that are structured left to right and top to bottom, there are fundamental places in which they will fail. Systems will come into conflict, and it’s in those empty squares that she permits herself an element of choice. It’s only there that she allows herself to choose a different color. I relate this back to Jack Halberstam’s iconic book The Queer Art of Failure. 

I think so much about this idea that Gloria and all of her cantankerous and outwardly intense personality, which I have heard many stories about… this point of her personality. She was a tough, tough woman, which I love because I know it would not have been an easy world to be a tough woman in, and yet still may be. She wanted to assert her humanness in these paintings. She still wanted her mistakes to be there. She still wanted people to see her within the real world that wasn’t just about the Sol LeWitt pureness of concept, the pureness of the system. In fact, it’s almost completely not about that. While using the auspices of it, while using the visual language of it, while using the mathematics of it, she’s pushing beyond that. 

She’s allowing for these slips, these little moments of personhood and individuality to shine through in the work. So to go back to your question of what I want people to take away from the show, I want them to see a career and a life well lived. I want them to see that across more than 30 years, she is reinvigorating every system that she has developed up to that point. The works of the 1990s, while they read very 1990s, the colors, with their bold reds and instant yellows and the rich blues, these intense primaries, while somewhat “dated” in their colors, are the culmination of 30 years of research. I hope the viewers see that and they’re dizzied and walk away with a sense of awe, that they see something that they never thought they would see. 

Cieslik: Is there anything else that is essential or helpful for people to know about Klein and her work before viewing the exhibition?

Di Paola: The first thing that drew me to her work were these four black sketchbooks which are not on view in the show. In these journals, she’s doing something akin to creating concrete poetry. It’s very diaristic. She’ll write out what happened in her day in one kind of paragraph and then for the next paragraph, she turns the book and writes in the other direction, and she turns the book to write in another direction. So these books are layers of excavations over time and that’s what really helped me to understand who Gloria was and the way that her mind worked. Pondering the idea of layering experiences on top of one another. 

One of Klein’s journals from 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

This brings it back to why I think her 1990s work is so interesting because it is the visual implementation of her early desire to layer upon layer upon layer. The 1970s works are phenomenal and I do really love them. They are iconically hers with the hatch marks and beautiful color systems, but what you see is exactly what you get. You can get as much as you want into the math systems. You can get as much as you want into the way that she was literally mixing the ground color from the exact ratios in that the hatches appear on the canvas. But they lack the layering that I originally fell in love with. So understanding the relationship between language and thought and the way that she built up her surfaces through many, many strata is tantamount to the 1990s work. 

One of Klein’s journals from 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Gloria Klein and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.

Everything in the 1990s works is about seeing all of these different systems simultaneously, almost as if we think about them as different stanzas in a poem that are overlapping with one another. I think that’s something that deserves to be seen and understood… the play between the ground and the foreground, the ways in which you can never really tell which system lays on top. And how she is constantly, for lack of a better word, absolutely fucking with your eyes. 

Gloria Klein: Crisis Management will remain on display until February 28, 2026.