Esphyr Slobodkina was known in the New York art world for her resolute sense of independence, her innovative creativity in a wide range of material, and her continuing eschewal of prevailing artistic fashions and conventions. A pioneer of abstract art in America in the 1930s and 1940s, Esphyr Slobodkina was one of the few women who gained public recognition within American modern art during that time. Over the course of a highly acclaimed six-decade career, Slobodkina created dynamic works in painting, drawing, collage, and assemblage sculpture. A Russian immigrant to the United States subsequent to the Russian Revolution, Slobodkina was known in the New York art world for her resolute sense of independence, her innovative creativity in a wide range of material, and her continuing eschewal of prevailing artistic fashions and conventions.In the early 20th century, while various modernist threads progressed in Europe, the sentiment within America (and particularly that of art critics) viewed modernism with derision, instead favoring contemporary American trends in regionalist or social realist art. Ignoring that atmosphere, in 1936 Slobodkina co-founded the American Abstract Artists, a group of professional artists who met and exhibited together at noncommercial galleries and museums in New York. Slobodkina was a leader within the group, seeking to translate aspects of European modernism into a distinctly American idiom. The group’s influence served to shape the development of abstraction in the United States through the rest of the 20th century.Slobodkina’s works in 1942 were the subject of a one-person exhibition at America’s first Modern Art museum, A.E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art in New York City. She was the first American artist whose works were collected by the museum. The following year, at the recommendation of Alfred Barr, who was the first Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy Guggenheim included Slobodkina’s work at her legendary gallery, Art of this Century, in a show called Exhibition by 31 Women.Having had work exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, among others, and with work now in the permanent collections of such major museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Slobodkina is acknowledged today as a groundbreaking innovator of American abstract art—one who was resolutely committed to her own personal vision and whose works influenced subsequent generations.