It’s about time. Web3 is offering unprecedented opportunities for women (and as we’ll see girls) to lead projects which can flourish without being constrained by the historical and gate kept limiting factors of glass ceilings, societal strictures, financial access restrictions, and frameworks (both overt and covert) which have been firmly in place for thousands of years. If 2021 was the “Year of the NFT”, then 2022 is off to a meteoric start as “The Year of Women Run/Focused NFT Projects Entered the Collective Consciousness.” It’s not like there weren’t projects already in place in 2021 that dropped and qualify. It’s that the awareness and mass adoption of these projects put a spotlight on just how exciting the promise of Web3 can be in adoption, deployment, and creation of independent communities, commerce, and creativity itself. And we’re still in January!
When my parents founded The Caldwell Gallery in 1973, one of the hallmarks of their business model was to look for high quality art and artists who were under appreciated and undervalued in relation to the rest of the market. Women artists, who weren’t named Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt, were in general languishing compared to their male peers – despite in many cases being superior in both skill and aesthetics. This willingness to buy, believe in, and educate regarding the merit of women artists continues unabated to this day. The image above shows three major works by (L to R) Irene Rice Pereira (1940), Katherine Dreier (1929), and Agnes Pelton (1938) which we discovered and placed in museum collections.
I’m pleased to say that, here in 2022, nothing has changed regarding our nearly half century of commitment to the art of women. Works in the image above date from c.1910 to to 1996 by such luminary talents as April Gornik, Mimi Gross, Nancy Graves, Jenny Magafan, Nell Blaine, Jane Peterson, Eleanor Parke Custis, Anni Baldaugh, Isabel Bishop, and Beatrice Wose Smith. These works can be viewed on our Caldwell Gallery Hudson website. I love when quiet moments find me at our Warren Street gallery, or our home salon a block away (both in Hudson’s Historic District) – and I can immerse myself in the creative drive, skill, and…soul…one gets by interacting with art from the heart.
In a first for our gallery, we began representing a living artist – Nikolina Kovalenko. Blending “traditional” brick & mortar art world exhibition modalities with blockchain, NFT and Metaverse technology this past Fall was an exhilarating moment in our gallery history. Each painting created by Nika (b.1987) had a limited edition “reflection NFT” – with sales from both benefiting the Coral Reef Alliance. The innovations of the exhibition are something we feel proud to have presented. Eighteen of twenty-four oils have been sold thus far, and the beautiful NFTs are available on Opensea utilizing the environmentally friendly Polygon blockchain.
A logical extension of our core business model which dates to 1973 – that being the importance of recognizing and believing in the work of women – is being reflected by the projects our firm has an interest in supporting, collecting, and collaborating with. It’s an incredibly exciting time for us. Watching the explosion of women lead projects utilizing Web3 technology to build businesses, build communities, support artists, and fuel philanthropic good has been breathtaking, and it’s a no-brainer to put our hearts and our wallet where we can see it doing so much good. The panel above show some of the NFTs in our collection, including Boss Beauties, Crypto Chicks, Women Rise, Alpha Girl Club, Sad Girl Bar, Rebel Society, Girlies NFT, Flower Girls, Meta Woman, and the Medusa Collection. Every one of these projects is making a difference in education, empowerment, social justice, environmental awareness, mental health, and the building of communities without borders, prejudice, and limitations.
Please reach out anytime if you’d like to talk about these projects, or other exciting things happening in the “NFT space”. We’re all just getting started here…
CGH Blockchain 
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