Herrera’s legacy also lies in the example of her late-blooming career. Like other women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, her life has been dedicated to art, but she did not find an audience for her work until she was very old. Her legacy, then, is not just about her painting but about her tenacious creative perseverance in the face of an indifferent, oar biased, world.
Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.
Unlike many conservative supporters of sex-differentiated education, Boys-Smith saw the study of home science at university level as ‘a great force in the education of women’ – specifically, the higher education of women. She believed that because of changing social patterns domestic skills had increasingly come to be seen as menial. The educational programme set up by her for the School of Home Science sought to lift the status of the domestic arts by providing a strong scientific education, augmented with technical instruction. An emphasis on science, particularly chemistry, also served to silence those critics who believed that the School of Home Science belonged in a technical institute, not a university.
Margaret Preston was a leading painter, printmaker and designer.
Edmonia Lewis is considered the first professional BIPOC sculptor in the United States and the first to achieve international acclaim. Even though much of her work has not survived into the 21st century, Lewis used her art to depict the stories of women and Indigenous people with reverence and beauty. Shattering gender and racial expectations in the 19th-century U.S., her life story is a testament to the ability to succeed despite adversity.
We’wha, a Lhamana (Zuni Two Spirit) individual, took on both male and female tasks as a Zuni cultural ambassador and pottery and textile artist. Also a spiritual leader, We’wha endeavored to preserve the history, traditions, and knowledge of the Zuni people.
Selma Burke discovered her love for sculpture as a young child and followed her passion to Harlem Renaissance New York, Parisian art studios, and even the White House. The artist behind President Franklin Roosevelt’s image on the dime, she was a dedicated art teacher and one of the most notable sculptors of the twentieth century.
War internee and artist, Miné Okubo is well known for her representations of daily life and humanity. She is most famous for her drawings depicting Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II.
Alviine-Johanna “Elvy” Kalep was an Estonian aviator and the country’s first female pilot, as well as an artist, toy designer and children’s author.
Kalep grew up in Estonia and Russia, and later moved to China due to the Russian Civil War, before settling in Paris to study art. In 1931, she qualified as a pilot in Germany, becoming the first Estonian female pilot. Befriending American aviator Amelia Earhart, she joined the Ninety-Nines, an international organisation for women pilots, and took up the cause of encouraging other women to take up aviation. She wrote and illustrated a children’s book about flying, Air Babies, first published in 1936. The book’s 1938 reprint included a foreword from Earhart, who embarked on her last flight three days after writing the piece in 1937.
After moving to the United States, Kalep founded a toy manufacturing business in New York in 1939, where she produced a doll she had designed – when thrown into the air, Patsie Parachute would fall down slowly as a parachutist would. Although she had to close the business in 1946 due to her poor health, she made a living through the 1950s by selling patents to toy designs to larger companies. This included the successful Scribbles Dolls, which had blank faces that could be individually decorated by children, inspired by the 50,000 doll heads she had left over from the closure of the Patsie Parachute factory. In the 1960s and 1970s, she created three-dimensional paintings made out of small pieces of coloured leather, which she sold to support herself and exhibited across the United States.
Sophia Al Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale, the New Museum in New York, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She coined the term Gulf Futurism to explain a phenomenon she has observed in architecture, urban planning, art, aesthetics and popular culture in the post-oil Persian Gulf. “The Arabian Gulf is a region that has been hyper-driven into a present made up of interior wastelands, municipal master plans and environmental collapse, thus making it a projection of a global future.” Her interest in these areas arises from her youth growing up in the Persian Gulf area during the 1980s and 1990s, which she describes in her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth. The themes and ideas of Gulf Futurism include the isolation of individuals via technology, wealth and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth, the replacement of history with glorified heritage fantasy in the collective memory and in many cases, the erasure of existing physical surroundings. Gulf Futurism utilises imagery from Islamic eschatology, corporate ideology, posthumanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.
After her studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Al Maria returned to the Gulf, where she worked towards opening the contemporary and modern art museum, Mathaf, alongside curators Wassan Al-Khudhairi and Deena Chalabi. The museum opened in Doha in 2010. Al Maria calls the experience a formative one, where she was ‘tasked with meeting and interviewing artists like Hassan Sharif or Zineb Sedira—that was my real art education. Having that proximity was, in a weird way, how I got into artmaking.’