Filmmaker Chiara Clemente spent two years following five high-profile female artists in New York, and her resulting feature documentary is "Our City Dreams," screening at 6:30 tonight at the Henry Art Gallery. It only costs $5 to get in. (Details.)

The five artists are the late Nancy Spero (to see whom I'd go to any film, anywhere); street artist Swoon; Egyptian-born porn-appropriatin' faux-expressionist Ghada Amer; death-and humility-defying performer Marina Abramovic; and the willful, kooky Kiki Smith, whose slightly endless, totally awesome exhibition of photographs is at the Henry through August 15 (a half-hour tour of the show will happen at 8:30, after the movie).

I'd put Spero and Abramovic right at the top of my list of artists I'll never stop thinking about from the second half of the 20th century, whose works pose persistent problems about art, the world, and themselves. I'll definitely be there tonight.

There's also another, more obscure but equally deserving-of-your-attention and entirely free event celebrating women artists—this time, of the glass variety, and women are perhaps even more rare in the glass world than in the art world at large, so celebrate harder!

It's four days, starting tonight, of free talks and demonstrations honoring three generations of female artists in glass, named after the visiting guest of honor: Czech artist Jaroslava Brychtova. (Brychtova Forum schedule.) She may not be a household name but her work in collaboration with her husband, the late Stanislav Libensky, is some of the glass art that has affected me more than any other.

On the occasion of the Museum of Glass opening in Tacoma, there was an entire exhibition of Libensky/Brychtova's smart, stripped-back, modernist, haunting sculptures, made of thick cast glass, sometimes pure shapes playing interiors against exteriors, other times suggestive of bodies (almost machine-like, post-futurist bodies).

Since that 2002 exhibition I haven't seen their work as much as I'd like to. According to Seattle Art Museum's web site, the museum owns only one small piece by them, which is unfortunate. Mainstream contemporary artists interested in perception, like Olafur Eliasson or even Anthony McCall, would love Libensky/Brychtova, if they don't already know them. A couple of their works: