All the Women in Me Are Tired

Maryam Amirvaghefi // Margaret Meehan // Dana Robinson

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to present All the Women in Me Are Tired, a group exhibition featuring works by Maryam Amirvaghefi (Fayetteville, AR), Margaret Meehan (Richmond, VA), and Dana Robinson (Brooklyn, NY). The exhibition opens Saturday, August 16 from 5:00 - 7:30 PM and runs through September 20, 2025.

About the exhibition: The exhibition title, All the Women in Me Are Tired, lovingly references a poem by Nayyirah Waheed, and resonates deeply with each of the featured artists and their work. The exhibition examines the multifaceted experiences of women navigating patriarchal expectations and limitations, societal and cultural pressures, and the ongoing struggle for visibility and autonomy. The featured artists explore themes of identity, resistance, transformation, and resilience through diverse mediums including painting, ceramics, collage, printmaking, and mixed media.

The weight women carry is substantial—from expectations to be quiet, soft, and conforming, to the idealized beauty standards and restrictions that attempt to obscure and control women's bodies and choices. Through their work, the artists offer powerful commentary on how women, particularly women of color and those who dare to assert their own agency, navigate these challenges as they move through the world.

Maryam Amirvaghefi brings her perspective as a woman born and raised in Iran, exploring the visibility and erasure of women in the Middle East through painting, ceramics, handmade papers, and mixed materials. Her work emerges from the tension between what is offered to women and what they must fight to claim, with particular attention to women in sports as a space of both restriction and empowerment.

“I carry within me the weight of countless quiet battles— fought at home, in studios, on the streets, and within institutions that were never built for us. In Iran, a woman painting an apple is not a neutral act. It is a quiet, radical statement—a refusal to disappear," Amirvaghefi explains. Her work serves as a record of resistance and a tribute to those who continue to push forward against all odds.

Margaret Meehan focuses on the cycles of female experience, from navigating the full spectrum of motherhood (raising children, losing children, trying and failing to have children), aging, to maintaining a sense of self amidst constant changes. This recent body of work uses moths as symbols of transformation and the nocturnal journey toward light, and childhood cartoons characters to invoke humor as a means of coping and hoping for a fairy tale ending. There is an acute awareness and anxiety in her work of the contemporary political climate and the war being waged on women’s bodies and their right to choose.

“If puberty introduces young girls to the notion that growth can cause anxiety, then menopause is its mirror. One’s sex, one’s gender, one’s sense of self – in relation to the materiality of a body – offers life as a constant state of metamorphosis, an oscillation between innocence, awareness, and the promise of wisdom,” Meehan shares. 

Dana Robinson employs painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric in her practice to address youth, femme identity, and nostalgia through vintage Black media, primarily 1970s Ebony magazines. Her work examines upward mobility and the growing Black middle class while questioning the rigid expectations of a "perfect" cis hetero patriarchal lifestyle. A life that is meant to be aspirational and never quite within reach.

Robinson changes the definition of the stylized advertisements or editorial images she selects by separating their origins and paring them down to “almost unrecognizable images that dissolve into flashes of skin and color, making an atmosphere that gently circulates and never quite settles.”