Ilana Lilienthal, of Lilienthal Gallery, is easy to spot in a crowd. Across the foyer of the Knoxville Museum of Art, I see her, looking tonight like art itself: asymmetrical, architectural, cinematic.
It’s the annual Keep Knoxville Beautiful Orchid Awards. KnoxWalls at Emory Place—the ambitious mural project Ilana and Dogwood Arts willed into being behind a block of buildings she owns and leases to women creatives—is up for an award.
Ilana’s eyes smolder as she surveys the crowd. A cascade of inky curls splashes down onto one black-caped shoulder. A statement teardrop earring defines a negative space against the curve of her neck. She wears a single leopard-print glove with a gold ornament sewn on like a ring. It looks like a flower, or a gold record melted by the sun. Is that a pearl glinting at its center? I try not to stare.
With the audacity of a journalist two chardonnays deep, I beg her to let me take her photo. She consents. The perfect backdrop appears as though it’s just been waiting for Ilana to arrive. She lifts her chin and stares into the lens like it owes her gas money. Has Ilana modeled? How is she in Knoxville, not NYC? I have so many questions, all of which I’m too shy to ask.
I am not an easily intimidated person. As a former international equestrian sports journalist, I was frequently shoulder-to-shoulder with Olympians, Forbes List net-worthers, celebrities and the occasional royal. Believe me when I say I can hold my own in any room.
But for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, Ilana Lilienthal scares the shit out of me.
Earlier that afternoon, I’d come by Lilienthal Gallery to preview the new exhibition opening Friday, Nov. 9: Her.
Ilana was head-down in a meeting, voice low but commanding, the kind of tone that makes people reach for their notebooks. Rainbow prisms flitted through two massive chandeliers behind her. The opening reception was in two days, and there was work to be done.
Gallery Director Kelly Ferguson, a force of nature in her own right, gave me the grand tour. This show, she said, was about “women thinking about women.” She acknowledged the vastness of that subject.
“Women aren’t just one thing,” Kelly said. “They’re strong, they’re powerful, they’re soft, they’re loving, they’re mothers—they can be whatever they want. Women don’t have to be put in a box anymore.”
She gestured to the first piece: four early limited lithographs by Judy Chicago, the godmother of feminist art. Her shapes pulse with color: pink, coral, fuchsia, geometry made sensual. What do you see? Well, that’s between you and the artwork.
As Kelly talked, I dissociated to a flashback of seeing Judy’s legendary installation The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum about 10 years ago. Three enormous tables set for 39 mythical and historical women, each with a ceramic plate and her own personal pan vulva. I remember staring, blushing and then realizing: oh, this isn’t shame, this is power. Standing in front of her work now, in Knoxville of all places, I felt that same charge—a low electric hum in my ribs.
From there, Kelly moved me through the pantheon: a rare lithograph by Jenny Saville, known for her enormous canvases that focus on women’s bodies and challenge dominant beauty standards. There’s work by Swoon, one of the first women street artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field.
LaKesha Lee’s textile pieces are stitched from her family’s clothes, dyed with elderberry and goldenrod from the land she grew up on in the Black Belt of Alabama. You can literally smell the earth in them. “It’s about her matrilineal line,” Kelly said. “She thinks of memory as material, and the act of cutting and sewing as a way of remembering and piecing back together all these parts.”
I nodded, thinking about my own grandmother’s sewing kit, and every woman I know who’s ever glued her life back together with coffee and sheer willpower.
Local artist Denise Stewart-Sanabria’s hyper-real figures observe Her so convincingly that Kelly worries they’ll get bumped by the crowd at the opening. Angela Fraleigh’s paintings yank historical women out of the background and drop them front and center, swathed in colors that would make a Renaissance painter clutch his pearls.
Everywhere I look: softness with teeth. Power wrapped in silk. Artists who are done asking for permission to take up space. Women like Ilana Lilienthal.
Two-chardonnay Leslie is brave.
She is bold. She has cornered the Goddess herself in the children’s room of the KMA to test-kitchen a hypothesis.
“It feels like Her is almost an exoskeleton of yourself,” I tell Ilana, “because you wear all of these different hats. You’re a mother, you’re a businesswoman, you’re an artist, you’re—”
Ilana cuts me off.
“All women are,” she says. “I am not exceptional. It comes with the gender territory.”
We pull up seats at a tiny table. Even perched in a chair made for toddlers—dangerously close to baskets of pipe cleaners and half-used glue sticks—Ilana looks perfectly put together. Regal, even. I watch her lips move and experience an uninvited, feral desire to feed her berries out of my hand. Dark red ones. Still warm from the sun.
“All women are multitasking,” she says, waving one leopard-print gloved hand like she’s reciting a law of physics. “We hold the family together. If something happens, we tape it. We make it right.”
In the art world, women have long been underestimated, underrepresented or simply left out of the frame. Between 2008 and 2020, only 11% of works acquired by major American museums were by women—and just 0.5% by Black women. Think about that.
It’s nothing new. Artists like Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo were essentially invisible until late in their lives, or after their deaths. The canon is crowded with Madonnas and muses; women as subject, not creator. That’s what Her pushes back against: women reclaiming the image, the gaze, the narrative.
Ilana tells me she doesn’t like being defined by her gender. She wants her work judged by its merit. “But women bring something else. Motherhood, femininity—some spices,” she says, rolling the word on her tongue like a fine wine.
Her father always told her she could do anything a man could do, as well as if not better. Born in Tel Aviv, Ilana had a diverse upbringing with a mix of Middle Eastern and European cultures. She always felt equal until she came to America and “discovered that there is some kind of inferiority. It’s so weird, because America was the place with the suffragists, the voting rights, the women’s liberation. And here I come from a tiny country but everything was equal.”
You’d think we had evolved, surely, but then along comes the man Alan quoted in his story yesterday about the Women’s Suffrage Museum who called women’s suffrage “an unmitigated disaster” that was partially to blame for the decline of this country. All of which is to say, the work continues.
Ilana wouldn’t want it headlined, but she has a couple pieces in Her as well. She paints women as forces of change, their inner light breaking through art-historical echoes of the goddess. They emerge through a veil, luminous yet just out of reach.
Ilana isn’t performing confidence. She is confidence. She’s the whole Venn diagram—beautiful, brilliant, intimidating, nurturing, terrifyingly competent. She contains multitudes and owns them all.
The women of Her stare down centuries of gatekeeping. Ilana stares down my imposter syndrome with a half-smile.
Maybe what scares me isn’t her power at all. Maybe it’s that I recognize it, and I’m still learning what to do with my own.
Lilienthal Gallery: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Address: 23 Emory Place | Knoxville, TN 37917
Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, noon-5 p.m. Opening reception Nov. 7 5-9 p.m. with an Artist Talk by Angela Fraleigh at 6:30 p.m.
