Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington co-founded the P.P.O.W Gallery in 1983 without any discernible agenda, says Olsoff. While they received the award for fostering women’s art, she says that they simply set out to find the best art, and much of it happened to have been done by women. “We were not looking for specific artists but chose according to what we felt in our hearts,” she says.
Still, she acknowledges that often they felt as if they were working in a vacuum. Citing the current “Hollywoodization” of art, she says that making money usually precedes recognition. P.P.O.W’s artists include Julie Heffernan, Judy Fox, Sarah Oppenheimer, Melanie Bonajo, Bill Smith, Thomas Woodruff and Sandow Birk, to name a few.