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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Natalia Goncharova

Goncharova’s Rayonist and Futurist work influenced many of her Russian contemporaries, including Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. In turn, two major new art movements were coined in Russia, Suprematism and Constructivism. Figurative scenes that had been fragmented into shards by Goncharova and Larinov became more and more abstract with only geometrical spaces recognizable as particular forms in the work of Malevich. This lead to a wave of abstract work being produced in Russia and Europe more widely.
In the artist’s later years, while her work as a painter received little attention, she was well known for her stage and costume designs, which were influenced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the most innovative of ballet companies which had a long-lasting impact on dance, theatre, and opera productions. In the 21st century her work has again risen to the forefront, and she is today considered a leading Russian painter.

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Aghabaji Rzayeva

Azerbaijani composer Aghabaji Ismayil gizi Rzayeva received many honors, including the Honored Art Worker of the Azerbaijan SSR (1960), Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of the Badge of Honour (1972).

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Bano Qudsia

Pakistani novelist, playwright and spiritualist Bano Qudsia wrote novels, dramas plays and short stories in Urdu and wrote for television and stage inUrdu and Punjabi languages. She is best recognized for her novel Raja Gidh and her critically acclaimed play Aadhi Baat.

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Claribel Alegría

Claribel Alegría was a poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who was a major literary voice in 20th century Central America. She won the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards.

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Erinna

Erinna was an ancient Greek poet, who was in her time considered one of the great women poets, second only to Sappho.

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Hồ Xuân Hương

Hồ Xuân Hương was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty (1428 to 1789). She wrote poetry using chữ nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters to write demotic Vietnamese. She is considered one of Vietnam’s greatest classical poets.

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Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Though she is little known, Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven helped to shape the direction of New York Dada with her eccentric public displays and performances as well as with her desire to fuse her sexuality with her art. In the face of accusations that she was “crazy,” Freytag-Loringhoven would simply state, “Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.” Her gender bending and blatant displays of her sexuality anticipated Feminist art and performance of the mid-20th century. She was an innovative artist whose works paved the way for later experimental Performance art of the late 1950s and 1960s. A renowned poet and a proto-feminist, Elsa and her work have only recently been rediscovered by art historians who have recognized the importance of her contribution to New York Dada. Her provocative poetry was published posthumously in 2011 in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. At the very forefront of developing the readymade and performance art, the Baroness holds a legacy as the “Mama of Dada,” as the New York Times critic Holland Cotter dubbed her.

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Anne Wilson

She chose ‘Austral’ as her first literary pseudonym, but later wrote under the name of Mrs Glenny Wilson.
Between 1875 and 1880 she had five children and began publishing sketches, verses and short stories. These appeared in the Australasian and in English and American journals, including Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Temple Bar and the Spectator. Her work attracted sufficient interest to warrant the publication in London in 1889 of a collection of poetry, Themes and variations. This was favourably reviewed in Britain and was reprinted in 1895 in an enlarged edition. A second collection, A book of verses, was published in 1901 and reprinted in 1917. She was particularly pleased when two of her poems, ‘Fairyland’ and ‘A spring afternoon in New Zealand’, appeared in a children’s reading series produced by the New Zealand government. Although a number of critics noted an uneven quality in her later poetry, a survey of early New Zealand women writers, published in 1909, praised her subject matter and style: ‘She sings of love and home and motherhood, and paints the Maori landscape with grace and power’.

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