XENIA CAGE

Juneau, Alaska, 1913 — New York, 1995

Xenia Cage occupies a distinctive yet historically underrecognized position within twentieth-century modernism. Once framed primarily through her relationships with prominent avant-garde figures, she is now increasingly understood as an artist whose work illuminates the collaborative, material, and often invisible labor that underpins artistic production. To reconsider Cage is to move beyond singular authorship and toward the networks and practices that sustain creative innovation.

Born Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff in Juneau, Alaska, to a Native Alaskan mother and an Alutiiq Russian Orthodox priest, Cage's early life was shaped by cultural hybridity and physical adversity. A prolonged illness in adolescence sharpened her awareness of fragility and endurance, sensibilities that later informed her exploration of balance, suspension, and movement. After attending Reed College in Oregon, she moved to Los Angeles to study art and bookbinding. Her formative years in Carmel, California, immersed her in a dynamic artistic community where figures such as John Steinbeck and Edward Weston shaped a culture of exchange and experimentation that would define her approach.

After marrying composer John Cage in 1935, she entered and actively shaped a growing avant-garde network that spanned music, dance, and visual art. Her role in John Cage’s work exceeded that of a companion; she performed as a percussionist (notably featured in Life magazine in 1943), designed costumes, and executed highly skilled fabrication work, including contributions to Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise. Once viewed as ancillary, these forms of labor are now understood as fundamental to the production and realization of avant-garde practice. Her own artistic practice found a distinctive voice in her mobiles of the early 1940s, which she composed using diaphanous rice paper suspended within spare wooden frameworks, and which Julien Levy described as "abstractions of the marriage of a kite and a canoe." 

Cage’s Mobile (1942) was exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) and returned for the second all-women show, The Women (1945), at Art of This Century. In 1944 she also held a solo exhibition of her mobiles at the Julien Levy Gallery. Her work, Postcard to Dorothy Globus [Jackson Pollock Art w/ Santa Decorating Christmas Tree] (December 1985), was presented in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025) 

Today, Cage's legacy lies in how her life reframes artistic authorship itself. As maker, collaborator, and facilitator, she exemplifies a mode of practice rooted in connection and exchange — one that invites a broader reassessment of modernism acknowledging not only its celebrated figures, but also those who sustained its creative ecosystems.

Work by Xenia Cage is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Cage's contributions in the record of art history.