My hot take: of the thirty-odd art museums I’ve been to, the Philadelphia Museum of Art—or PhArt, as locals called it during its brief rebranding—is the best. It does not have the most extensive collection, nor does it boast the most major works. But its permanent collection is well-curated, and its special exhibits are thoughtfully chosen. Also, it holds particular personal significance to me, and we’ve already established the importance of my subjective experience in these rankings.

On my first visit to Philadelphia in high school, I dodged hordes of Rocky imitators while walking up the museum’s monumental steps. As an angsty teenager, I loved the 1976 film Taxi Driver and therefore hated Rocky for the mortal sin of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. After my visit, I wrote a screed on my Xanga about these Rocky-adoring philistines.

When I like a painting, I will scrutinize it for what likely strikes passersby as an uncomfortable amount of time. The first time I did this was at MoMA, standing in front of Magritte’s The Menaced Assassin. In the painting, a murderer calmly listens to a gramophone, unaware of the detectives lying in wait, while his victim—a nude, bloodied woman—lies supine on a chaise behind him. The painting, evocative and enigmatic, sparked my lifelong interest in Surrealism.

The second time this happened was in Philadelphia. After dodging the Rocky impersonators, I wandered through the museum’s collection chronologically, starting with its impressive medieval art collection, before finding the Surrealist wing. Among the Dalis and Mirós, I spotted a relatively modest canvas, a semi-nude portrait of a woman standing in a hallway. But as I walked closer, I was hypnotized. Her skirt, which at a distance looked like plant fibers, was actually composed of writhing human bodies. At her feet was a bizarre winged creature, and behind her was an infinite corridor of doors. She stared straight at me directly, inscrutably, without the come-hither softness I had grown accustomed to seeing in galleries.

I looked at the art plate—Birthday (1942) by Dorothea Tanning—and realized I had seen countless female nudes but none that were self-portraits. Great art was created by great men, the Scorseses and Magrittes of the world. Surrealism’s founding document, André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism, centers entirely on the experience of men; if women are mentioned at all, it is as romantic conquests and Freudian objects of desire.

But in her review of a new translation of Breton’s Surrealist literary work Nadja, Susan Rubin Suleiman writes that “it’s too easy to wax ironic about Breton’s blind spots and self-deceptions, as well as about the ‘all-male club’ that was the Surrealist group in its early days.” Although Surrealism was dominated by male artists in its nascence, as the movement evolved, women played a pivotal role in its development. As art historian Whitney Chadwick writes in her introduction to Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement:

No artistic movement since Romanticism has elevated the image of woman to as significant a role in the creative life of man as Surrealism did; no group or movement has ever defined such a revolutionary role for her. And no other movement has had such a large number of active women participants [...] Yet the actual role, or roles, played by women artists in the Surrealist movement has been more difficult to evaluate, for their own histories have often remained buried.

The body of criticism about the roles women played in Surrealism is extensive and varied. Méret Oppenheim—the only Surrealist artist I studied in college, and the first whose work I encountered in person (her Object at MoMA, an iconic sculpture of a fur-covered teacup) —requested that her work not be reproduced in Chadwick’s book, saying, “Personally I consider the problem of female versus male as solved, although I know many have not arrived at this point.” My intention isn’t to address this “problem,” but I wanted to highlight a few Surrealist artists who played pivotal roles in art history, and who often occupied dual roles as artist and muse.

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012)

I wish you wouldn’t harp on that word, “women.” Women artists. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as “man artist” or “elephant artist.”
– Dorothea Tanning

Many years after I first saw Birthday, I found myself at a swanky work event in Keira Knightley’s old flat in Shoreditch. There, through my abundant charm and charisma, I managed to score a ticket to the Tate Modern’s Dorothea Tanning. (That is, I happened to strike up a conversation with someone whose company gave employees free Tate tickets, and she wasn’t able to attend.) I liked Tanning before I went, and I loved her after.

Like all of the artists I’m highlighting, Dorothea Tanning was long-lived. Born in 1910 in Illinois, Tanning would go on to celebrate 101 birthdays in her life. And across these long lives, there’s another common thread: they refused to be pinned down. Tanning was a multihyphenate: painter, sculptor, costume designer, poet. Many of her paintings—like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943), Maternity, and The Guest Room (1950–2)—transform domestic interiors and scenes into uncanny Gothic dreamscapes. She designed the sets and costumes for La Sonnambula (1946) and other Balanchine ballets. In the 1950s, she moved away from Surrealism, developing an abstract, prismatic style. And in the 1970s, she began creating amorphous sculptures from fabric. Like her paintings, these fleshy soft sculptures explored the human (often female) body and themes of transformation, continuing her refusal to stay confined to a single medium or aesthetic.

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

Born to a pious and well-to-do Catholic family in England, Leonora Carrington developed a taste for rebellion early on. When she met the local priest, a fourteen-year-old Carrington lifted up her dress, revealing that she was in commando. “Well,” she asked the priest, “what do you think?” Her rebellious spirit—which resulted in her expulsion from multiple schools in Essex—led her to London (where she briefly studied art; she was mostly self-taught) and Paris. Escaping the Nazi occupation of France, she found herself in Madrid, then an asylum on the coast of Spain, and after a brief stint in New York, Mexico City, where the then-25-year-old artist would spend the rest of her life. This is only scratching the surface of her cinematic biography.

Both a painter and prolific writer, she penned the asylum memoir Down Below, in which she describes being reincarnated as “an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman.” It’s no wonder, then, that her paintings teem with hybrid creatures and androgynous figures, reflections of her untamed spirit. Her first major painting, a self-portrait from the late 1930s, depicts a wild-haired Carrington next to a lactating hyena, and things just get weirder from there.

In Mexico, Carrington developed an interest in the country’s indigenous traditions and spiritual rituals, which informed her artistic vocabulary. Many of her paintings are set in surreal kitchens, combining her interests in cooking and alchemy. Her real-life kitchens were only slightly more normal: as a dinner party host, Carrington would follow archaic recipes from ancient cookbooks, serving guests bizarre, sometimes-inedible dishes, such as omelettes made from their own hair.

Like her life, Carrington’s art and writing refuse to obey boundaries or genres, blurring the distinction between life and art.

Dora Maar (1907–1997)

Born in Paris as Henriette Theodora Markovitch, Dora Maar is a bit of an odd case. She was extensively trained in the fine arts and photography, a medium some Surrealists dabbled in but few dedicated themselves to. She ran in Surrealist circles in the 1930s, exhibiting her photographs in international Surrealist shows across New York and Europe, but her association with the movement was relatively brief.

Unlike Carrington and Tanning, I was familiar with her as a muse and artistic subject before I encountered her work. And her work is, in a word, strange. Before you come at me and say, “But Kristen! Surrealists are strange, that’s kind of their thing,” yes, I’m aware. I don’t just mean she created enigmatic or dreamlike images, though she did often do that. I also mean that she moved between media and straddled styles in ways that defy easy categorization.

Maar got her start as a commercial photographer at a studio she founded with Pierre Kéfer in 1931, finding success in advertising and fashion photography. “Got her start” is perhaps inaccurate here, because even as she developed an interest in Surrealist imagery and techniques—found objects, photomontage, double exposure—she continued to work commercially. She also simultaneously did realist street photography, documenting the struggles of Depression Era-France.

Her work ranged from stylish to grotesque, with her most famous image, Portrait d’Ubu (1936), falling firmly in the latter category. Inspired by Alfred Jarry’s vulgar play Ubu Roi (1896), the photograph depicts a monstrous, fleshy creature (likely an armadillo fetus, though Maar herself refused to identity the object). Other works from this time, like Shell-Hand, used photomontage to create dreamlike imagery.

In later decades, she abandoned photography for painting and, as Chadwick says, “renounced Surrealism and adopted a semimonastic life.” Nevertheless, her involvement with Surrealism resulted in some of the movement’s most iconic photographs. The past decade has seen renewed interest in her work, with a major 2019–20 retrospective of her work organized by the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and Getty Museum.

When I first saw Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I had never heard her name before. I wouldn’t learn about Carrington or Maar until many years later (and in the case of Maar, embarrassingly recently). All I knew was that the woman in that painting stared back at me without apology, and I knew that was the kind of woman I would one day like to become.

Sources and Recommended Reading

• Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Thames and Hudson, 1985)

• Susan Rubin Suleiman, “On The Precipice” (The New York Review of Books, July 23, 2026 Issue)

• Lauren Elkin, “Dorothea Tanning the Shape-shifter” (Tate Etc, Issue 45: Spring 2019)

• The Dorothea Tanning Foundation

• Merve Emre, “How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism” (The New Yorker, December 21, 2020)

• Joanna Moorhead, The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington

• Elizabeth Djinis, “The Strange Surrealist Magic of Dora Maar” (The Smithsonian Magazine, December 5, 2022

• “Love, Friendship and Rivalry: The Women Beside the Men in Early Surrealism” (Tate Gallery)

1. Lee Krasner was a prominent action painter, while Helen Frankenthaler was one of the originators of color field painting. Action painting and color field are subsets of what major postwar American art movement? Other artists associated with this movement include Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

2. French actress Isabelle Adjani received her second Academy Award nomination for playing the title sculptor in what 1988 film?

3. Ana Mendieta used what substance in her performance piece Rape Scene (1973), the film Moffitt Building Piece (1973), and various works in her Silueta series (1973–1985)? This substance also appears in a visual “diary” by Carolee Schneemann and in Judy Chicago’s 1971 photograph Red Flag.

4. Dorothea Tanning’s 1942 surrealist self-portrait shares its title with what kind of occasion? Tanning, who died in 2012, could have painted 101 versions of this occasion.

   

1. What museum hosted a 1964 retrospective for Sonia Delaunay, co-founder of the Orphism movement? It was the institution’s first retrospective devoted to a living female artist in its (then) 171-year history.

2. Eight of Frida Kahlo’s 55 self-portraits feature what animal? The first, painted in 1937, depicts her pet Fulang-Chang.

3. Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World is a current exhibition at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. Münter (1877–1962) was an expressionist painter and a founding member of what Munich-based avant-garde movement?

4. What surrealist painter is depicted in the self-portrait below? Born in England in 1917, she spent most of her career in Mexico City.

9. Alice Prin (1901–1953), a model and performer turned painter, was known by a name derived from what area of Paris? Located on the Left Bank of the Seine, this neighborhood was a center for the city’s artistic community, serving as the hub for groups like the School of Paris and Les Six.

10. Marion Mahony Griffin was instrumental in designing what planned city in the early 20th century? The name of this national capital was chosen through a public competition, with entries including Hopetoun, Union City, Myola, and Wattleton.

The Brooklyn Museum is a 560,000 square-foot monument to squandered potential. Plagued by budget problems for much of its existence, it boasts an impressive collection of half a million objects, which its curators seem determined to exhibit in the most chaotic ways imaginable. When I last visited in the summer of 2025, I was excited to see Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps by my favorite artist, Kehinde Wiley. The museum website describes it as “triumphant” and a “hallmark of our collection.”

So naturally they hid it next to the café bathrooms.

The museum’s crown jewel, Judy Chicago’s iconic 1979 installation The Dinner Party, was similarly impossible to find. I wandered through the labyrinthine fourth floor before spotting a sign for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The first room I entered had no artwork except, inexplicably, Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais. This sculpture is currently paired with Nicole Eisenman’s Three Walkers, but lacking this information, I thought I was in the wrong place.

I meandered through two other rooms with dozens of paintings and photographs, grouped together haphazardly and displayed with minimal contextualization. When looking at a photograph by the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, I wondered aloud why it wasn’t in the feminist art collection. (Only later, when it dawned on me that all the works in the room were by women, did I realize that this was the feminist art collection.)

After all, Mendieta powerfully confronted issues like sexual violence and the female body. She first gained fame for her 1973 performance art piece Untitled (Rape Scene) before embarking on her monumental and multidisciplinary Silueta Series. Over more than a decade, she blended earthworks, performance, photography, and self-portraiture to explore gender and identity.

On the placard, her lifespan jumped out at me: 1948–1985. Having just turned 37, I had outlived Mendieta. She died violently, falling 33 stories from her apartment during an argument with her husband. Several days prior, Mendieta had told her family that she was planning to leave him for his infidelities. In his 911 call, he described their argument:

My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.

After being acquitted of her murder for lack of evidence, he would go on to exhibit his work in the world’s leading museums until his death at 88 two years ago. His statement haunts me: The passiveness in which he describes her death (she went out the window). The alleged subject of their argument (I was more exposed to the public than she was). It was not his infidelities but rather his fame that led to their argument, that led to her death. This sentence distills the trope of a woman artist being eclipsed by her successful husband into its most sinister form.

Creatives are naturally drawn to each other, but it is always the woman who is “an artist in her own right.” Frida Kahlo’s Encyclopedia Britannica entry begins with her marriage, declaring in the first paragraph that “her work was often overshadowed by the murals of Rivera.” Meanwhile, the entry for Diego Rivera doesn’t mention Kahlo until the eighth paragraph. By the time his relationship with Kahlo comes up in passing, we have already learned about his socialist ideology, early life, education, creative influences, style, and political activities.

While Rivera may have had more success in his lifetime, Kahlo is objectively the more famous artist now. So why do we continue to frame her life and work around her husband’s?

Some artists and designers—Ray Eames, Jeanne-Claude, Sonia Delaunay—collaborated so closely with their partners that it is impossible to disentangle their work. And in rare instances, the reverse is true. You’d be hard-pressed to find an article about Ulay, for instance, that doesn’t discuss his romantic and professional partnership with Marina Abramović. Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the few true household names in American art, whereas the average non-art enthusiast knows little (if anything) about Alfred Stieglitz.

But these exceptions are few and far between. More often, a woman artist is the supporting character in her husband’s story: a muse and dutiful wife who supports his creative endeavors. This kind of framing reinforces long-standing biases about whose stories are worth telling.

I have been guilty of doing this in trivia questions I’ve written, so I conceived of the first series for the Trivia Underground as a challenge to myself. Over the next few months, you’ll find articles and quizzes that cover women’s artistic contributions without mentioning their romantic relationships (with a few exceptions to establish context).

Writing these articles has reshaped how I think about art history, and I hope it will do the same for you.

After my failure on Millionaire, I immersed myself in my career. Five years later, hoping to rekindle my love of trivia, I joined a pub quiz meetup in New York. There, the leader tried to explain women’s breasts and the Japanese language (my college minor) to me. Then came a question about the periodic table: What chemical element takes its name from the Latin word stannum?

Having studied Latin for six years, I answered tin. He overruled me, claiming that “tin isn’t an element,” going with bronze instead. I did not return.

This is just one in a long line of similar stories. A high school quiz bowl colleague gave me an unsolicited back rub, while my coach called me a floozy. My ill-fated attempts at game show glory produced paltry paydays, but they did yield a treasure trove of unsettling DMs. Did you know there’s a Subreddit dedicated to discussing the “hotness” of female Jeopardy! contestants? I wish I didn’t (and I can’t say that I’m surprised).

As I’ve learned from other women in the community, my experience is far from unique. In a meticulously researched paper on sexuality and gender in quiz bowl, Chloe Emma White Levine documents gender disparity and systemic problems in quiz bowl. When she became the first female quiz bowler in years to compete in the NAQT High School National Championship Tournament, “things quickly turned ugly” after the match streamed online. “Many misogynistic and sexually explicit remarks flooded the site,” she writes. “While I was not the only one of my teammates targeted, I was the player targeted the most frequently, andI was the only one targeted for an immutable demographic characteristic rather than a specific action or behavior.” History repeated itself when Beavercreek High School became the first HSNCT winners ever with gender parity.

Gender disparity is painfully obvious not only in the demographics of quizzing but also in its canon. The vast body of “things worth knowing” is neither fixed nor neutral, shifting over time and across formats. A Jeopardy! contestant ought to recognize the 17th-century fishing manual The Compleat Angler, while an academic quizzer might study Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment. Neither subject would help you win a pub quiz, where you would be better served by memorizing Super Bowl winners. Each venue has its own hierarchy of significance.

In academic quiz bowl, “You Gotta Know” lists published by the National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) provide a snapshot of the canon. These lists reveal imbalances that reinforce the broader gender disparities within the activity itself. Take the list of sculptors. Is Daniel Chester French more notable than Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, or Louise Nevelson? Should we care more about him than non-white artists like Isamu Noguchi, Anish Kapoor, Augusta Savage, or Yayoi Kusama?

If you dive deeper, you will find that there are, apparently, no female architects, no female mathematicians, no female linguists, no female physicists, no female Jewish-American authors, no female sculptors, no female composers, and no female psychologists “you gotta know.” Of the nineteen notable 20th-century paintings and ten Irish books, none were created by women.

Some lists (Revolutionary War generals, twenty-first-century quarterbacks, popes) are exclusionary by nature. But when half the population is absent across disciplines and historical periods, it becomes a structural problem. It is no coincidence that of the 183 NAQT lists, just five were written by women.

The further I’ve journeyed into the world of quizzing, the more I’ve realized that trivia is far from trivial. The canon shapes which stories get amplified and which get erased. And by excluding these stories, we also exclude people who don’t see themselves reflected in the questions we choose to ask.

But the canon is mutable, and in The Trivia Underground, I hope to do my small part to expand it. I’ll be sharing newsletters and quizzes that highlight achievements of underrepresented groups and contributions from the Global South. That doesn’t mean I’ll ignore the canon entirely. Certain topics are, after all, canonical for a reason. “Mystery themes” are my favorite quizzes to write, and these quizzes will mix common knowledge with lesser-known topics.

Trivia—whether you’re doing it on television, over Zoom, or in a dive bar—should be fun. But it should also be bigger.

Welcome to the underground.