It's International Women's Day and here at Huff Post Arts & Culture we're expressing endless gratitude for the dazzling female artists who've inspired us with their bravery, creativity and fierce dedication to art.
Last year we assembled playing cards for some of our favorite "key players" in the art world -- we know, bad joke -- and because our love for them hasn't waned, we're revisiting the creative forces today. From Artemisia Gentileschi's 17th century boldness to Cindy Sherman's endless contemporary influence, these are 15 of the artists we're sending mad love to on this holiest of days. Enjoy and happy International Women's Day everyone!
Jeanne-Claude
Together with her lover and partner Christo, Jeanne created ephemeral installations that melded urban planning, architecture, engineering, performance and sculpture. The husband-and-wife team are famed for their magical and massive-scale projects, from wrapping a valley of the Rocky Mountains with 14,000 square meters of cloth to installing bubble-gum pink skirts to 11 islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay. Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009 at 74 years old, but we celebrate her today.
Marilyn Minter
Minter's hyperrealistic paintings ooze with glamor, closeness and desire, turning a stiletto splashing in the rain or a mysterious tongue pressed up against a glass pane into a precise moment of visual ecstasy.
Tracey Emin
Emin made waves with her controversial work "My Bed" (1999), an installation showcasing a mattress with rumpled sheets hosting scattered condoms and blood-stained undies. The Young British Artist was nominated for a Turner Prize for the piece that year.
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Eva & Adele
Eva & Adele are a living museum piece, involved in a lifelong partnership and performance piece that involves the married couple eating the same food, dressing exactly the same, and spending every day together since they can remember.
Judy Chicago
Chicago's most famed work is "The Dinner Party," a large table with 39 place settings, each honoring a historical female who kicked ass, from activists to goddesses. The multimedia artist also works intimately with "macho" art forms like pyrotechnics and boat building, minimalist painting and colorful textiles. For this reason, she's our King of Hearts.
Marlene Dumas
The South African artist paints melting close-ups of pale forms, almost human but not quite. Her canvasses oscillate between sexuality and violence, lightness and darkness, birth and death, making them as immediate to feel as they are impossible to forget.
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Artemisia Gentileschi
Gentileschi created dramatic, fierce and incredibly masterful Baroque paintings in the era following Caravaggio. Most well-known for "Judith Slaying Holofernes" (1614), Gentileschi often portrayed strong and suffering women.
Mickalene Thomas
Thomas paints popping portraits of black women, incorporating fashion, accessories, makeup and domestic interiors into their collaged selves. With her sexual yet powerful portrayals of naked women, Thomas, a queer artist, subverts the trope of the "male gaze," suggesting women too can gain pleasure from the female nude form.
Cindy Sherman
The photogenic chameleon serves as model and photographer in her artworks, which capture the many (and yet still limited) roles women often play in film and life. From film noir femme fatales to aging socialites, Sherman's many masks show the fluid nature of identity itself.
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Betye Saar
The 87-year-old artist is known for her assemblages incorporating imagery from her heritage (African, Native American, Irish and Creole) as well as stereotypical African-American figures including Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom and Little Black Sambo. Her later works explore the relationship between the technological and the mystical, incorporating Voodoo references, amulets and computer chips in her collaged works.
Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann is a multi-disciplinary artist whose performance pieces exploded taboos surrounding sexuality, gender and the body. One of her most famous pieces is an erotic rite entitled "Meat Joy," celebrating flesh of all kinds -- including raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic and paper. Fluctuating between the erotic, playful and grotesque, the performance merged the sacred and the profane in a revolutionary fashion.
Shirin Neshat
Neshat moved to California during the Iranian revolution and enrolled at UC Berkeley, where she began working with film, photography and video to address themes of literature, politics, feminism and identity. Her 2012 exhibition, "Book of Kings," placed 11th-century Persian poetry on black-and-white images of young Arab protesters, creating a long-spanning narrative of identity, creativity and dissent.
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Eva Hesse
Hesse, a Jewish artist who escaped from Nazi Germany as a child, is known for her post-minimalist tactile forms made from aging, organic fiberglass. Her repetitive sculptures were deceptively simple and yet comedic, erotic and just on the verge of decay.
Jay DeFeo
The Bay Area Beat generation artist is most well-known for "The Rose," an epic multimedia painting that took eight years to create and weighs a whopping 2,300 pounds. DeFeo was evicted from her apartment when she was working on the piece, and according to The New York Times, "the only way to move it was to cut out part of the building’s front wall and extract the painting with a forklift." (Way to go out with a bang!)
Martha Rosler
Rosler has explored the everyday and public spheres since the 1960s, whether examining the semiotics of the kitchen, creating postmodern photography mashups addressing women and domesticity, or throwing the most massive, artsy garage sale ever.
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