Women abstractionists were rare in 1940s New York, but Esphyr Slobodkina was one of the few to break through. The Russian-born artist developed a pioneering language of dynamic abstraction — yet today she is remembered chiefly for the children's book she wrote and illustrated in 1940, Caps for Sale, which has sold millions of copies. A new exhibition at Rosenberg & Co, An Unbound Creativity, on view through November 14, is the largest New York gallery show of her work since her death in 2002, and the centerpiece of a long-overdue comeback. The show builds on the gallery's presentation of Slobodkina at Independent 20th Century in September, and coincides with her inclusion alongside Louise Nevelson in the traveling museum exhibition Architects of Being, currently on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Taken together, the two presentations argue that her wider practice deserves the attention her picture book has long overshadowed. The historical record supports the case. Peggy Guggenheim included Slobodkina in the pivotal 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women at Art of This Century, alongside Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, after Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art's first director, recommended her work. A year earlier, the collector and artist A.E. Gallatin had given her a solo exhibition at the Museum of Living Art, the first modern art museum in America. Few artists of her generation were so thoroughly vetted by the era's gatekeepers — and so thoroughly forgotten afterward. Revivals like this one rarely arrive by accident; they require dealers, scholars and curators working in concert over years. With a foundation established in 2000 to preserve her legacy, and a new generation of curators taking up her cause, Slobodkina's abstraction finally has the institutional scaffolding to match its ambition.