Faith Ringgold

Ringgold’s work as an artist, an activist, and an educator has influenced both the art world and communities beyond the art world. Her founding or co-founding of many arts organizations focused on issues faced by women of color has created many opportunities for those artists.

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Sonia Delaunay

Delaunay’s textile designs extended the range of her influence into fashion, home decor and the theater. Her ability to introduce art into regular life by creating and wearing clothing, and living in spaces that were of her own design, can be seen as an early form of performance art, inspiring contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic.

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Amy Hadfield Hutchinson

From 1901 to 1904 Amy was matron of the boarding hostel at her old high school; a friend, Bessie Spencer, was headmistress. On 30 August 1907, at Napier, Amy married Francis (Frank) Hutchinson, a sheepfarmer from Rissington; the marriage was childless. The homestead on Frank’s farm, Omatua, had been unoccupied, except by bees, for years. Amy and Frank restored the house and garden, and Omatua became known as a place where visitors found an ‘opportunity for intellectual conversation’.

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Agnes Addison

Agnes Addison entered a small community where mothers would be the customers for her future business venture. Within a year the Addison family had purchased a second cottage in Hamilton Street, in Hokitika’s government office district. Nearby Revell Street was infamous for its many hotels, saloons and miners’ gatherings, and against this environment Agnes Addison won a reputation as a teetotaller and a woman of high moral standards.

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Betsy Ross

Considered essential to the American Revolution, Betsy Ross is credited with sewing the first United States flag. A symbol of patriotism, Ross is often celebrated as the woman who helped George Washington finish the design. Although there is no historical evidence that she created this flag, her story has made her a national icon.

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Thérèse de Dillmont

In 1884 needleworker Thérèse de Dillmont left the embroidery school that she had started with her sister Franziska and moved to France, where she wrote her Encyclopedia of Needlework (1886).

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