March = National Women's History Month

[D. Allan]

Now is a fine time to find out! News@accessmylibrary.com just sent me an e-mail today...on the very last day! The theme for 2008 is women artists.

They suggest five ways to encourage equal rights for women.

• Wage war on the wage gap
• Support women in power
• Do your home work... learn some history
• Read relevant Message boards, Forums, and Blogs

• National Women's History Project

  Women's History Month at wikipedia

  Library of Congress - Women's History Month

  International Women's Day (March 08) at wikipedia.com

  Women's History Month at the Smithsonian

  Nation Women's Hall of Fame

[D. Allan]

2008 honoree

Judy Chicago

b. 1939

Painter/Printmaker/Tapestry/Needlework

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans four decades. Her work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and a woman’s right to freedom of expression.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Harmony Hammond

b.1944

Painter/Writer/Curator

Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer, and independent curator who lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she lectures, writes and publishes on feminist art, lesbian art, and the cultural representation of “difference”.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Edna Hibel

b.1917

Colorist, painter, stone lithographer, serigrapher, etcher, sculptress, and filmmaker

Born in MA, in 1917, the internationally renowned artist Edna Hibel, has been painting for over seventy years. Hibel’s talent was developed under the direction of noted portraitist Gregory Michaels. Edna then studied with the renowned Russian and German masters, Alexander Yakovlev and Karl Zerbe, at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Completing her training at the Museum School in 1939, Hibel was awarded the Ruth B. Sturtevant Traveling Fellowship for study in Mexico.

In 1940, the Boston Museum of fine Arts purchase one of her painting for its permanent collection, making Edna the youngest artist at the time so honored by a major American museum. Hibel later returned to the Boston Museum School for graduate study in the art and techniques of the Renaissance, and to absorb the discipline of the masters.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Lihua Lei

b. 1966

Multimedia Installation

Lihua Lei was born in 1966 in Taiwan. Her parents were rice farmers. She contracted polio when she was only 5 months old. As a small child, she was unable to stand and her job was to sit on the edge of her family’s rice field and scare the scavenging birds away.

She describes this childhood as a time when she would make up stories about the mama birds helping their babies who might have their torn wings or were having other physical problems.

As an adult, she realized that creating these stories was the way she experienced and recognized her own disability. As an artist, she designs installation art that explores, defines, and honors the personal experiences of her own life.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Violet Oakley

1874-1961

Muralist/ Stained Glass Artist

Violet Oakley was born in Bergen Heights, New Jersey. Her family was very interested in the arts, but Violet’s formal art training was rather sporadic. She studied at the Arts Student League in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at various institutions abroad during summer trips. Most of her training came from copying works of old masters.

When she was 22 years old, her family moved to Philadelphia where Oakley soon entered Howard Pyle's illustration class at Drexel Institute. Influenced greatly by the Pre-Raphaelites, she used color and luminosity to portray philosophical beliefs. Under Pyle’s tutelage, she flourished. Designing covers for Century Magazine, St. Nicholas, Woman's Home Companion, and other popular magazines, she became one of America's most popular illustrators. She also gained a reputation as a talented designer of stained glass.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Rose O'Neill

1874-1944

llustrator, Author, and Business Woman

Rose O'Neill, illustrator, author and business woman, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. At age 13, O'Neill entered and won an art contest held by the Omaha World Herald paper with a drawing, "Temptation Leading Down into an Abyss" which astounded the judges. The Herald hired her for weekly cartoons and poetry.

In 1893, she went to New York City to sell her works in a larger market. With the income from selling illustrations to many periodicals and books, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Truth, Ladies' Home Journal, and Puck, she helped to support her large family. The women in O'Neill's illustrations have been described as "refreshingly independent, able-minded, confident, modern and strong-willed.” In 1904 she wrote and illustrated a novel, The Loves of Edwy.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Faith Ringgold

b.1930

Painter/Quilter/Writer

Faith Ringgold, artist and author, was born in 1930 in Harlem, New York. Her artistic career began more than 35 years ago as a painter. Today, she is best known for her painted story quilts -- art that combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling

Her mother and grandmother promoted African-American culture and she had many wonderful role models as neighbors. Among them were Thurgood Marshall, Dinah Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aaron Douglass and Duke Ellington.

Ringgold uses her art to tell her own story, and in collaboration with her mother, began to sew fabric borders around her paintings, instead of stretching the canvas over wooden stretchers in the traditional manner.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Miriam Schapiro

b. 1923

Print/ Painter

Miriam Schapiro is s pioneer in feminist art who reevaluates roles assigned to women and art and society.

Becoming a professional artist in 1955, she originally painted in the Abstract Expressionist style. As she developed her art and expanded her vision, she developed her own personal style which she called femmage. Using commonplace elements as lace, fabric scraps, buttons, rickrack, sequins, and tea towels she transformed them into sophisticated compositions.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Lorna Simpson

b. 1960

Artist

Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. When Lorna Simpson emerged from the graduate program at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography.

Feeling a strong need to re-examine and re-define photographic practice for contemporary relevance, Simpson was producing work that engaged the conceptual vocabulary of the time by creating exquisitely crafted documents that are as clean and spare as the closed, cyclic systems of meaning they produce. Her initial body of work alone helped to incite a significant shift in the view of the photographic art’s transience and malleability.

Lorna Simpson first became well-known in the mid-1980s for her large-scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

b. 1940

Painter/Printmaker

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born at the Indian Mission on the Flathead Reservation in 1940. She is an enrolled Flathead Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, Montana.

She received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960. She attended the University of Washington in Seattle, received her BA in Art Education at Framingham State College in 1976, and a masters degree in art at the University of New Mexico in 1980.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is one of today’s most acclaimed American Indian artists. She has been reviewed in all major art periodicals. Smith has had over 100 solo exhibits in the past 35 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide. Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions, lectured at more than 185 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at 5 universities in China.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

Nancy Spero

b.1926

Painter

Social, political, and feminist activism has clearly been the impetus for Nancy Spero’s lifetime of work. Her art has been sustained by her involvement in protest of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and, particularly, for the last four decades, the women’s movement.

Spero was born in Ohio in 1926 and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and went on to study painting in Paris. During the years between 1959 and 1964, Spero had her first major solo exhibitions in Paris. These shows included a series now known as the “Black Paintings” theme continued in her work as she further explored social and political protest and her growing awareness of the subjugation of and violence towards women. Coupled with her growing feminist perspective in art form, she also became more aware of the absence of women’s art in a culturally male defined art world.

[D. Allan]

2008 Honoree

June Claire Wayne

b. 1918

Painter/Lithographer/Filmmaker

Visual artist June Claire Wayne was born on March 7, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois. she was raised as June Claire Kline by her divorced mother, Dorothy Alice Kline, a traveling corset saleswoman. At age fifteen, June dropped out of high school, wanting to become an artist.

Avoiding the last names of both her parents, she used her first and middle names, June Claire, for her first solo exhibition in 1935 in Chicago, followed in 1936, by a second one at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. By 1938, June Claire was on the WPA Easel Project in Chicago and had become a ‘regular’ in a cutting-edge culture of writers, actors, artists, and scientists.

Circa 1939, she moved to New York, working as a designer of costume jewelry in the garment industry while continuing to paint at night and on weekends. In mid-1941, she married an Air Force Flight Surgeon and substituted his name, Wayne, for Claire. From then on her identity remained June Wayne even though that marriage did not endure.

all bios-briefs are taken from more extensive bios at http://www.nwhp.org/whm/honorees.php

[Amelia]

It must have been hard to find outstanding women in fields other than art.

[D. Allan]

I don't know. But art is a wide open field, you're right. It is just that this year 2008 Art is the field they chose to select from. I don't know about previous years. Anybody?

Other fields for Great Women could be: Music, Writing, Politics (just beginning to expand), Philanthropy, Practical Religion, Business (many here!), Theatre Arts, Science.