The Broadway Producer Aiming to ‘Sharpie Women Into History’

The famed patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim once wrote that, in her prime acquiring years, “My motto was ‘buy a picture a day,’ and I lived up to it.”

Though the New York theatrical producer Jenna Segal has not quite reached that rate (yet), she is doing her best.

Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Ms. Segal has made it her mission to collect works by the artists who were featured in a historic show: “Exhibition of 31 Women,” put on by Ms. Guggenheim in 1943 at her New York gallery, Art of This Century, and believed by many to be the first show in the United States to feature exclusively work by women artists.

“I want to Sharpie women into history,” said Ms. Segal, seated in her midtown office, of her quest to remind today’s viewers of the achievements of the artists included.

So far, Ms. Segal has acquired 143 works by 30 of the women. Only Gypsy Rose Lee — the burlesque entertainer and inspiration for the musical “Gypsy,” who, while not known as a visual artist, also made paintings — has eluded her.

The 1943 roster featured some names that would later be etched into history, including the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, perhaps the group’s most famous name; the British-born Surrealist Leonora Carrington; the Swiss multimedia maker Sophie Taeuber-Arp; the artist Meret Oppenheim, known for her fur-lined teacup “Object” (1936) and the subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; and the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, as well as lesser-known figures. Included were a portrait by the noted writer Djuna Barnes as well as pieces by Ms. Guggenheim’s sister, Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, and her daughter, Pegeen Vail.

And soon, May 15-21, Ms. Segal will show some of what she calls “The 31 Women Collection” in the offices of her producing company, Segal NYC — which happens to be housed in the same West 57th Street building that once held Ms. Guggenheim’s gallery and was the site of the original “Exhibition of 31 Women.”

Ms. Segal discovered in her research that the building was still in use, and she inquired about renting there, though she is not sure if the exact office space she obtained was occupied by Ms. Guggenheim.

“The goal is to have these women together and reach the largest possible audience,” said Ms. Segal, who won a producing Tony Award for “Hadestown,” currently on Broadway. Timed, free tickets to see the collected works, in her office space, are available on the31women.com.

Her quest has never been to recreate the 1943 show exactly. That would be impossible; there is not a complete record of the titles of the works that were in the show. Some works were identified simply by a description of the piece and the year the work was made.

“The show really was exceptional in 1943,” said Karole Vail, the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (part of the Guggenheim Museum) and one of Ms. Guggenheim’s granddaughters. “Women were considered to be muses. The idea of them as artists in their own right was quite unusual.”

Ms. Vail added of her grandmother, “She was ahead of her time.”

Despite the female focus of the show, Ms. Vail noted that it was a man, the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was the most influential adviser to Ms Guggenheim on the show, giving her the idea for the exhibition and serving on the show’s selection jury. “She respected him immensely,” Ms. Vail said.

The works in the original show were made between 1926 and 1942, and Ms. Segal has tried to collect a work by each woman that was made in the same year as the one featured in the show, or close to it, with a cutoff date of 1950. Though not all the artists were Surrealists, many of them made work in that vein at some point in their career, and it was a prevalent style at the time.

At first glance, Ms. Segal seems like an unlikely candidate to be embarking on this quest. She owns some contemporary art but has never considered herself a big collector.

But the story of Ms. Guggenheim’s pioneering work was imprinted on her when she was in college. At age 20, Ms. Segal went to Venice with her best friend, and they visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, founded in 1951, on the advice of a guidebook.

“I immediately felt like I was home,” Ms. Segal said. “It was the weirdest thing. I had never experienced anything like it. I was enthralled by everything I was seeing there.” She subsequently got a copy of Ms. Guggenheim’s memoir, “Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict.”

“I just loved from the very beginning that she came from these two great Jewish families, and that her father died in the Titanic,” said Ms. Segal — who hails from New Jersey and now lives with her family in Manhattan — referring to the smelting mogul Benjamin Guggenheim and Ms. Guggenheim’s mother’s side of the family, the prominent Seligmans.

Anecdotes that Ms. Guggenheim told about her own life — like her lunch with the sculptor Constantin Brancusi as bombs fell over Paris and his weeping at the fate of his works — stuck with her. “It could be a film,” Ms. Segal said, a project she may return to in the future.

In any case, she said, “I took this story with me and just tucked it away somewhere in my heart.”

The pandemic provided time for the story to become something more than a passing fancy.

The sober reflection of that time led Ms. Segal to think about the things she really wanted to do in life. One of them was getting a business degree, and she got one online from the Harvard Business Analytics Program. She also started rereading “Out of This Century,” and it spurred her to take action.

“I said, ‘OK, I can’t make a movie of this right now, so what can I do?’” Ms. Segal recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m going to collect the 31 women.’”

She found the works at auction, in galleries and through private dealers, but there has been a steep learning curve — she was offered many fakes.

She has not done it alone, enlisting researchers and consultants to help her find works and educate her about all the artists, and along the way she has built an archive of ephemera and related material, too, including letters, postcards, photographs and magazine articles. Her company’s team of interns is helping her get the word out about the project on Instagram and TikTok.

Ms. Segal found her way to dealers with relevant expertise like Wendi Norris, whose San Francisco gallery specializes in some of the Surrealist women artists featured in the 1943 show.

“She’s ambitious and thorough,” Ms. Norris said of Ms. Segal. The dealer ended up selling her three works and, perhaps more important, opened up her network to Ms. Segal to help her find more.

“My fellow geeky dealers in this area know what she’s doing,” Ms. Norris said. “And they are saying, ‘Thank God.’”

Ms. Norris added that Ms. Segal’s new show can advance the wider field. “Her collecting has spawned this exhibition, but also all-new scholarship,” she said.

Ms. Segal’s colleagues in the theatrical world are not surprised to hear that she is getting things done.

“I would say that there’s a tenacity mixed with deep kindness and a real love of art,” said Bartlett Sher, the Tony-winning director of “South Pacific,” who worked with Ms. Segal on an early workshop iteration of the 2015 Broadway revival of “Gigi,” which she produced.

“She’s enormously warm and caring and she gets stuff accomplished,” Mr. Sher said.

Ms. Segal leaned into the idea that her talent at her day job is what propelled the process.

As she put it, “Knowing what to look for, what to trust, who to call, doing the research around it — that’s producing.”