Yvonne Chouteau
Shawnee dancer Yvonne Chouteau was one of the “Five Moons”, Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma who gained international fame in the 20th century.
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Bernice Lumley
Identical twins Bernice and Doreen Lumley were well-known athletes from New Zealand.
Doreen Lumley
Identical twins Bernice and Doreen Lumley were well-known athletes from New Zealand.
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). As a poet, activist, and musician, Joy Harjo’s work has won countless awards. In 2019, Harjo became the first Native American United States Poet Laureate in history and is only the second poet to be appointed for three terms.
Betye Saar
Saar was a key player in the post-war American legacy of assemblage. Her attitude toward identity, assemblage art, and a visual language for Black art can be seen in the work of contemporary African-American artist Radcliffe Bailey, and Post-Black artist Rashid Johnson.
María Izquierdo
Izquierdo’s work opened up new possibilities for using symbols tied to Mexican traditions in a way other than to serve the nationalist discourse in art at the time. Izquierdo believed in art for art’s sake and wanted to go beyond the bounds of political art then. While the concept of art for art’s sake traced back to nineteenth-century European avant-gardes, in her context of post-revolutionary Mexico, this direction in art especially bucked the trend of using art as a propagandistic tool. Instead, art’s meaning, for Izquierdo, could be personal and variegated, not following the lines set by the politically powerful art establishment then.
Rebecca Belmore
Canadian Rebecca Belmore has contributed to the international contemporary art world by developing a performance vocabulary for the representation of a (distinctly female) First Nations identity in art.
Anacaona
Anacaona was a Taíno cacica, (female cacique or chief), religious expert, poet and composer of Xaraguá, in what is now Haiti.
Pocahontas
Among the most famous women in early American history, Pocahontas is credited with having helped the struggling English settlers in Virginia survive in the early 1600s. The explorer John Smith—who claimed Pocahontas saved his life—hailed her as “the instrument to pursurve this colonie from death, famine, and utter confusion.”
Sacagawea
Sacagawea was an interpreter and guide for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition westward from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Though spelled numerous ways in the journals of expedition members, Sacagawea is generally believed to be a Hidatsa name (Sacaga means “bird” and wea means “woman”). In that case, the third syllable starts with a hard g, as there is no soft g in the Hidatsa language. However, many Shoshone Indians maintain that it is a Shoshone name meaning “boat launcher” and spell and pronounce it “Sacajawea.”