Days after the 2016 presidential election, artist Roxanne Jackson impulsively posted a message on Facebook . Hello female artists/curators! Lets organize a NASTY WOMEN group show!!! she wrote, invoking Donald Trump s by then famous characterization of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Whos interested???

An hour later, more than 300 women had responded, equally frustrated and appalled by the election of an accused sexual predator to the highest office in the country. They responded with such passion and excitement that Jackson and her co-organizer, curator Jessamyn Fiore, agreed they couldnt turn anyone away from the show. Instead, the two resolved to exhibit all artworks submitted requiring only that the works measure under 12 inches in every direction.

The Nasty Women Art Show opened in January, with work by 694 artists on view. The artworks were all priced under $100, with proceeds benefiting Planned Parenthood . In three days, the show sold out. It raised $42,500.

The idea quickly spread beyond New York, with sanctioned Nasty Women art shows popping up around the world in Arizona and Tennessee and Belgium and London. The next show is scheduled for January 2018 in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of Trumps inauguration.

The wild success of the Nasty Women art shows speaks to the climate of 2017, described by HuffPosts Emma Gray as the year women found their rage . From the Womens March in January, which New York magazines Jerry Saltz dubbed the best art achievement of 2017 , to Time designating the Silence Breakers its person of the year in December, the past 360 or so days have been marked by a kind of collective outcry thats been impossible to ignore.

But its inaccurate to suggest that 2017 alone prompted women to raise hell, as though they hadnt before. Its true that many people, particularly white women, were shocked by Trumps election and what it suggested about our country , and leaped into action in response. Yet for others, particularly women of color, the discrimination and oppression on naked display in the Trumpian era have always been part of the American experience. And people have been protesting it for just as long.

This truth was fiercely demonstrated by two sprawling exhibitions that showcased the radical art of women of color. In April, New Yorks Brooklyn Museum opened We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85 , which featured work from 40 artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Los Mailou Jones, Lorraine OGrady, Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold. The exhibition traced the rise of a distinctive African-American, feminist art movement in the 1960s, when artists like Emma Amos, Jae Jarrell and Barbara Jones-Hogu were among the few women represented in black artist circles. It followed the birth of all-womens collectives like Where We At, which blended artistic practice with fundraising, community outreach, education and political action in 1971.