Aug 25 · 5:00 PM–8:00 PM ET
First access to the art.
On the night of August 25, Power Up guests get an exclusive pre-opening look at the Femme Art Fair, with select art pieces benefitting Take The Lead available for purchase. Dinner follows, in the same room.
Femme Art Fair
“Not a movement. A market correction.”
70% of the talent. 3.3% of the money.
Inside The Fair · Take The Lead's Space
The 9 Power Tools, told through art.
Inside the fair, Take The Lead has its own space telling the story of the 9 Leadership Power Tools through art, each tool interpreted by a committed artist. Walk the framework you came to learn, rendered in original work.
1. The Visionary
Know Your History
Understand the women and events that paved the way so you can build upon their successes and avoid repeating their mistakes.
Artist
Andrea ArroyoAndrea Arroyo is an award-winning artist whose work is exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Latin Recording Academy, and the Richmond Museum. Arroyo has presented more than 60 solo exhibitions and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York Women’s Foundation, the United Nations, Salon du Dessin de Presse in France, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Puffin Foundation, and Harlem Arts Alliance. She has been recognized as Outstanding Woman of New York, Official Artist of the Grammy Awards, and Groundbreaking Latina in the Arts. Her commissioned art projects include work for the New York City subway system, The International Museum of Women, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Sugar Hill Museum and the Hispanic Society Museum.
The artwork
Ixchel, Goddess of Renewal
Mixed media on canvas integrated with a traditional, handwoven mid-century Mesoamerican textile.
32 × 40 inches · Unframed, hanging from top rod
Aligned with the theme “Know Your History,” this work centers on Ixchel—the Mayan goddess of renewal, weaving, fertility, and rebirth. The canvas is integrated with a mid-century Guatemalan corte, serving as a physical emblem for the ancestral “fabric of time” handed down through women’s hands over generations. Together, these elements pay tribute to the resilience and creative ingenuity of women throughout history, affirming their freedom to define their own legacies.
2. The Trailblazer
Define Your Own Terms
First, before anyone else does: take control of your narrative and establish what success means to you, rather than letting others dictate your value.
Artist
Nina Murashkina
Nina Murashkina is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist based in Spain. Her practice spans painting, ceramics, sculpture, installation, and performance.
Read moreRead less of Nina Murashkina’s biography
Influenced by Ukrainian naive art, ancient mythology, and Eastern visual traditions, Murashkina creates vivid, sensual narratives exploring femininity, desire, power, and identity. Her goddess-like female figures embody the complex duality of womanhood—sensual and innocent, provocative and tender, powerful and mysterious.
Murashkina describes her approach as “Magical Feminism”—a personal mythology in which the woman becomes a powerful, triumphant force. Through symbolism, storytelling, and irony, she creates her own world where femininity becomes both the subject and the source of power.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, Switzerland, France, Spain, Ukraine, Austria, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates. She is the recipient of the A-FAD Award / Best Design of the Year from the Barcelona Design Museum and the Grand Prize Award from Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.
The artwork
Number 1
Ceramic, underglaze drawing, gold, triple fire.
96 × 31 × 31 cm · 37.7 × 12 × 12 inches · 2025
“Number 1” explores the illusion of power and the ways we define our own position in the world. The central male figure sees himself as the ultimate “Number One,” surrounded by women who appear to exist within his imagined universe. Yet the balance of power is not as simple as it seems. The seductive mermaid on the lid ultimately becomes the one who enchants and controls him. Through symbolism and irony, I play with ideas of masculinity, femininity, desire, and self-perception. For me, “Define Your Own Terms” is about questioning who defines the rules of power — and what happens when our own illusions begin to define us.
3. The Maximizer
Use What You've Got
Maximize the resources, relationships, and skills you currently possess rather than waiting for ideal circumstances.
Artist
Tess Duncan
Tess Duncan is a mixed-media artist working primarily in surreal collage and lino cut printmaking. Drawing on her time as a wildland firefighter for the Forest Service throughout most of her 20s, her work is rooted in the natural world — not its polished postcard version, but its grit: the tangled undergrowth, the weathered bark, the small strange lives that make an ecosystem whole. That same decade was also shaped by growing up in a multicultural city and years spent traveling and living abroad, instilling a deep appreciation for diversity that runs through her art alongside her love of the wild. Duncan's pieces celebrate the diversity and unruliness found in nature, reassembling familiar forms into something unexpected.
The artwork
Eat Your Heart Out
Mixed-media collage: dried wildflower, vintage and thrifted magazine clippings, hand-carved lino cut prints on repurposed postcards
14 × 17 inches
This piece is built entirely from what has been gathered, saved, and set aside over time — a single dried wildflower pressed from a past season, pages pulled from vintage and thrifted magazines collected over the years, and original lino cut prints stamped onto old postcards. Nothing here was purchased new for the piece; everything carries its own history before becoming part of this one.
Read moreRead less of Tess Duncan’s statement about Eat Your Heart Out
Made using the “Use What You've Got” approach, “Eat Your Heart Out” is a study in resourcefulness — finding richness in the overlooked and the already-used. The single dried flower holds the trace of the season it was picked in; the magazine scraps carry decades of someone else's discarded print; the postcards, once meant to travel somewhere else entirely, now hold a new image and a new destination. Together, they form a surreal composition with a title that bites back — playful, a little defiant, and full of the grit and unruliness found at the heart of the natural world.
Surrealism is at the core of why this piece works the way it does. By reassembling the familiar into something unexpected, it offers a brief escape from the noise of daily life — a chance to step outside the ordinary and into a space that feels stranger. That escape mirrors the same feeling of being fully present in nature: a quiet dissolving of the everyday self, a sense of becoming part of something larger and wilder.
4. The Disruptor
Embrace Controversy
View disagreements and challenges not as obstacles, but as opportunities for growth and necessary catalysts for change.
Artist
Sophia Wallace
Sophia Wallace is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of bodies and ethics. She is best known for CLITERACY, her project to establish an iconography of the clitoridian through sculpture, installation, street art and performance. Wallace’s artworks are exhibited widely in the US and internationally including Portugal, Spain, Austria, Mexico, Italy, Nigeria, Australia and the UK. Her TED featured talk, A Case For Cliteracy has been viewed over 2 million times. She can be seen on BBC/Hulu’s “Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne”, and in “The Dilemma of Desire” by Maria Finitzo, available on most streaming platforms.
The artwork
Swan Series
Glazed Stoneware and Raw Terracotta Clay
13.5 × 7 × 14.5 inches
The project of CLITERACY embraces controversy, unmasks a dusty, cultural binary that compulsively celebrates the penis and maligns the vulva, resulting in profound ignorance about the genital embodiment of half of the world. CLITERACY establishes that accurate knowledge of the body is a human right; and, that every person, regardless of sex or gender, has a basic right to expect pleasure in their sexual experiences.
Read moreRead less of Sophia Wallace’s statement about Swan Series
To quote law 57 from CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws, “DEMOCRACY WITHOUT CLITERACY? PHALLUSY”
Swan Series is an open edition of cast sculptures in stoneware and terracotta that draw inspiration from the natural world—most notably the fluid grace of swans in motion, the unfolding of orchid buds, and the geometric emergence of succulents. Continuing Wallace’s longstanding project to create a new iconography of the clitoris, the series translates organic gestures of growth and vitality into sculptural form. Through this synthesis of natural morphology and feminist symbolism, Wallace expands upon the aesthetics of sensuality, embodiment, and renewal.
5. The Change Catalyst
Carpe the Chaos
Capitalize on disruption and turbulent environments to innovate and take decisive action.
Artist
Amy Coffey
Amy Coffey is a visual artist and graphic designer based in Columbus, Ohio. She earned her BA in Fine Art from Otterbein University in 2009 and has spent the years since building a practice that moves fluidly between fine art, commercial design, and photography.
Read moreRead less of Amy Coffey’s biography
By day, Amy works as a Creative Director in the women's health industry, shaping brand identity and visual storytelling for products that support people's wellbeing. Since 2009, she has also run her own graphic design and photography business, giving her a foundation in both craft and client-facing creative work.
Amy's commitment to using her artistic skills in service of others extends into her volunteer work with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a nonprofit that provides free remembrance photography to families who have experienced the loss of a baby. As a volunteer photographer and digital retoucher, she uses the same technical eye and compassion that inform her fine art practice to help grieving parents hold on to precious memories.
Across all of her creative work, Amy is drawn to the same idea: that art, in any form, has the power to capture what words alone cannot.
The artwork
She Blooms Anyway
Acrylic, Marker, Reclaimed Wood
19.6 × 16.6 in. · 2026
When I began this piece, I wasn't simply thinking about chaos as an abstract idea. I was thinking about my own life.
Read moreRead less of Amy Coffey’s statement about She Blooms Anyway
I once found myself having to rebuild everything I thought my life was supposed to be. After a deeply painful marriage and divorce, I was left to start over, not only for myself, but for my two daughters. I lost my marriage, my home, my job, and the life we had known. And I had to rebuild it all during a time when the entire world was experiencing its own uncertainty and isolation.
There were moments when starting over felt less like an opportunity and more like standing in the middle of the rubble, lost and hopeless.
But slowly, something happened. I grew.
The cracks in this piece represent the things that broke — the expectations, the trust, the life I thought I would have, and the pieces of myself I had to find again. But those cracks also became openings. Through them came roots, flowers, color, and life.
The woman in this piece isn't emerging from a perfect garden. She is growing from the broken ground itself. Her beauty doesn't come from having avoided hardship; it comes from what she became because she survived it.
Today, my daughters are thriving. I have rebuilt my life, found love again, and created a beautiful home and a life that I once couldn't imagine. Looking back, I don't wish that the cracks had never happened. I wish I hadn't had to experience them, but I recognize now that they became places where something new could take root.
That is what Carpe the Chaos means to me. We don't always get to choose the chaos that finds us. But we can choose what we do with what remains. We can take the broken pieces. We can put down roots. We can grow.
She isn't a woman who survived the storm. She is a woman who learned how to grow in the ruins. She Blooms Anyway.
6. The Truth Seeker
Wear the Shirt
Wear the shirt of your convictions: take clear, visible ownership of your leadership role and responsibility.
Artist
Karen Straight
Karen Straight is a Montana-based fiber artist whose wildlife portraits combine wet and needle felting to create painterly atmosphere, rich texture, and sculptural depth. After a long career teaching sociology at the college level and working in animal welfare, she came to professional art later in life, bringing with her a deep interest in how we perceive and value other animals. Working primarily in wool, Straight pushes against traditional boundaries between fiber craft and fine art while portraying animals as individual, sentient presences worthy of attention and respect. Her work is represented by galleries in Montana and has been featured at prominent Western art and design events including Best of the West, the Out West Art Show, and the Western Design Conference, as well as the High Desert Museum’s annual Art in the West exhibition and auction.
The artwork
Outfoxed
Felted Fine Art
22 × 23 inches framed · Custom frame; museum-quality acrylic glazing
Outfoxed reflects both my artistic practice and the unconventional path that led me to it. I spent much of my career teaching sociology at the college level and working in animal welfare. I came to professional art later in life, carrying with me a long-held conviction that animals are individual, sentient beings worthy of attention and respect.
Read moreRead less of Karen Straight’s statement about Outfoxed
I create my wildlife portraits by building images directly from layers of wool fiber. Wet felting establishes the atmospheric ground and underlying forms, while needle felting allows me to develop expression, texture, and sculptural depth. Because fiber arts are still often categorized as craft rather than fine art, my work also pushes against those conventional boundaries.
For me, Wear the Shirt of Your Convictions means allowing deeply held values to shape both the life I choose and the work I make. Outfoxed presents the animal not simply as subject matter, but as a presence in their own right.
7. The Movement Maker
Create a Movement
Take action; create a movement. Build collaborative networks and rally others around a shared purpose or vision to scale your impact.
Artist
Beth Ames SwartzFor more than sixty years, Beth Ames Swartz (b. 1936) has devoted her art practice to spiritual inquiry and personal evolution, delving into esoteric wisdom traditions and spiritual cosmologies. Primarily working in the idioms of abstraction and semi-abstraction, her paintings and mixed-media works are commonly informed by philosophical and religious concepts shared by people of different cultural worldviews. Her art reflects her ongoing commitment to a tradition of tikkun olam (repairing the world).
Read moreRead less of Beth Ames Swartz’s biography
Swartz enjoys recognition that includes over eighty one-person gallery exhibitions, four traveling museum exhibitions originating at The Jewish Museum, NY (1981-83); Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary (1985-91); a retrospective beginning at Phoenix Art Museum (2002-03) and Arizona State University (2008-11) as well as a survey show entitled Tender Alchemy at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2026). Swartz received the Arizona Governor’s Individual Artist award in 2001. Her art is in many public and museum collections including The Jewish Museum, The Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The artwork
Earth Fragment #22
fire, earth, acrylic, variegated gold leaf and mixed media on layered paper
11.25 × 19 inches (0.29 × 0.48 m) · 1984
This work embodies the Power Tool “Take Action; Create a Movement”. At the heart of my practice is tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing the world”, the idea that we each share a responsibility to help correct, improve, and heal the world around us. Today the term is widely embraced as a call to collective social action, community service, and philanthropy: the belief that meaningful change comes when people join together around a common purpose. That conviction is exactly what animates my art, an invitation to gather others toward a shared vision and, together, mend what is broken.
8. The Influencer
Employ Every Medium
Use all available channels, from face-to-face meetings to social media and public speaking, to communicate your message.
Artist
Helen DannellyInstagramI am interested in metamorphosis as a natural phenomenon as well as an interpersonal phenomenon. This interest is reflected in my work, whether in my paintings or abstract organic sculpture. My work is inspired by the natural world: light, shadow, color, plant life, sea life, water, earth, pods, seeds, cocoons, coral, sea anemones. “Nests” were inspired by seeing images of swallows nests in corners of barns.
Read moreRead less of Helen Dannelly’s biography
An award-winning artist, Helen Dannelly is a formally trained painter and sculptor raised in California. She studied painting with renowned Bay Area Photorealists Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean at San Francisco State University in the 1990’s. She then studied sculpture, including bronze casting and metal arts, at the University of Minnesota. She has worked in encaustic both two- and three-dimensionally which she enjoys because of its versatility.
Dannelly’s work has been shown at Slate Contemporary in Oakland, CA, Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, CA, Conrad Wilde Gallery, in Tucson, AZ, Adam Peck Gallery and Julie Heller Gallery in Provincetown, MA, Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA, Kolman & Pryor Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, WI, Grove Gallery in Evanston, CSI Project Space, Christopher Art Gallery, ARC Gallery, Stola Contemporary Art, Bridgeport Art Center, Addington Gallery, and Alma Gallery in Chicago, IL, and the Ballenglen Art Museum in County Mayo, Ireland, amongst other venues.
Her work in included in Encaustic Art in the 21st Century, by E. Ashley Rooney and Anne Lee (Schiffer, 2016). She is the winner of sculpture awards at Phipps Center for the Arts (Juror: Erica Spitzer Rasmussen) and Sanchez Center for the Arts (Juror: William Theophilus Brown).
The artwork
Nests I
Wire mesh, plaster gauze, joint compound, oil paint, and raffia
16 × 10 × 4 inches
The reason I decided to submit this piece, “Nests I” under the Power Tool “Employ Every Medium” was because I used several different media in this sculpture; I employ wire mesh, plaster gauze, joint compound, oil paint, and raffia in order to construct an abstracted sculpture inspired by the clustered birds nests of swallows. Nests imply cocooning in a dark, secluded, warm, safe space in order to grow and birth new life.
9. The Activator
Tell Your Story
Craft a compelling narrative that inspires others, connects with your audience, and motivates action.
Artist
Heather FlorioThe artwork
We Were Never Theirs To Name
Mixed-media collage on canvas with photographic transfers, printed imagery, and handwritten text under layered resin/varnish
72 × 36 inches
This is the first piece of art I have ever made to sell, and it holds the oldest story I carry.
Read moreRead less of Heather Florio’s statement about We Were Never Theirs To Name
My 2x great-grandmother, Magdalena Matula, was born in Moravia in 1842, a Roma woman on a road no country would let her call home. She fell in love with John, a Bohemian nobleman from Prague, a love their world forbade for one reason only: because of the blood she was born with. Rather than surrender it, they left everything they knew and crossed an ocean to America, simply so they could be together.
I built this work by layering her own words, the diary of that crossing, from Moravia to the road to Bremen to the belly of a ship to the light of a new harbor, through the images that haunt and hold them: the faces of my lineage, the sacred feminine, the wagon and the crown, and fire. Fire runs through all of it, because fire is the truest thing she left me. It is the refusal that would not bow, and it still lives and breathes in me today.
I'm offering this piece, the most personal thing I've ever made, to raise funds for Take The Lead, because the whole purpose of telling a story like this is to hand it forward. My grandmother's courage was never meant to end with her. If her fire can light even one other woman's refusal to be made small, it has done exactly what fire is for.
Tell your story. It was never theirs to name.
Femme Art Fair
The public fair: August 27–30, 2026, at The Square DC, 1850 K St NW, Washington, DC. femmeartfair.com (opens in a new tab)