This two-session course is based on the book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, by Mary Gabriel. We will discuss and view the work of these five women who, despite being ostracized by much of the official art world, dared to enter the male-dominated environment of 20th century abstract painting – not as muses, but as artists who tore up the prevailing social code and replaced it with a doctrine of liberation. This narrative is not only about the individual lives of five artists, it is also a biography of a place and time, an art movement, a way of life, and a community.