Indeed, the renewed appreciation for Abercrombie at this moment may be due to what Crosby calls “the many different Gertrudes implied by her work,” as she sought to identify the various aspects of her lived experience and incorporate them into her paintings. “That’s a very contemporary perspective, to try to understand the many different facets of oneself and how they can show up in creative practice,” he observes. “There’s a queerness in that, an inclusivity, and potential for anybody to find a way into the work.”

Crosby hopes the show, which will travel to Colby College in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum, prompts a reconsideration not only of Abercrombie but of American modern art narratives broadly. “We should be asking not just who we can add to the canon but why the canon has been so limited,” he says. “There are so many other artists whose stories have yet to be told who were really quite defining in what we understand to be American art today.”

Although Abercrombie latterly admitted to being influenced by René Magritte, cheekily calling him her “spiritual daddy,” her work doesn’t fit squarely under Western European Surrealism, explains Crosby (who prefers to call it magical realism); while American artists may have come across Surrealist works in reproduction or exhibitions, they weren’t immersed in its cultural context. Instead, he observes, Abercrombie’s work is “grounded in a uniquely American experience, one that was deeply inclusive and steeped in jazz and poetry and life in Chicago.” After all, as Abercrombie herself put it, “There is magic everywhere if you stop and look and listen.”