women outliers – Bonita LeFlore

In an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2015 (reviewed here), the images of women marching for the right to vote remind me of all the women who came before us, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Those women had a voice to raise, just as our voices were heard last month and all the days to follow. The difference is our ability to vote.

I hope that this month, where we celebrate Women’s History (in the U.S.), we will encounter voices both present and past, those we know and especially those that are waiting to be discovered.

Deeds Not Words was the rallying cry of the suffragettes. Women’s Rights is a recurring back-story in my novel, The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light.

In Chapter Three, Sydney, Australia, Maude Anderson reads to her mother, Caroline, from the London Times.

It is the story of Emily Davidson throwing herself under the King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

In Chapter Four, Caroline Light speaks to her suitor, Bernard, about her teacher Ada Wells. Later she invites her mother, Martha, to attend a meeting of the Temperance League with Kate Shepard.

In Chapter Five, Christchurch, New Zealand, Mary Müller speaks to Martha Light about whether she ever thought for herself without first consulting her husband.

The ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication the Rights of Women, written in 1792, are pressed forward through multiple generations.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. –George Santayana

More on Emily Davidson

The Hunger Artist – Marion Dunlop-Wallace

Primary image credit: ALEX BROOK LYNN/THE DAILY BEAST

Last February, just about now, I found this image.

Creative disruptors change the way we look at the world. Here, an icon is turned around, and our perception of what we thought we saw is something entirely different.

One of my favorite artist disruptors is Louise Bourgeoise.

“One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.” – Louise Bourgeoise

Born in Paris in 1911, Louise Bourgeoise was an inspiration, an outlier, and a disruptor throughout her life. Bourgeois died in New York in 2010 at the age of 98. Her images and sculptures may not be everyone’s cup of tea-but that’s what art is about.

I discovered her at the Tate Modern in London, 2002, where art is always disruptive and resistant to the status quo. A massive thirty foot spider standing in the atrium of an old power station startled me and made me want to know more about this woman artist who was then only 92.

As she put it, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.” And so it is for me, too.

“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. .”- Louise Bourgeoise

Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain.(1)
Through the use of abstract form and a wide variety of media, Bourgeois dealt with notions of universal balance, playfully juxtaposing materials conventionally considered male or female. She would, for example, use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of femininity. – (1) The Art Story

louise-bourgeois-portrait-photo-jeremy-pollard-copyright — Photo Jeremy Pollard

I never tire of finding life in her face and in her work.

“#ItWasNeverADress is an invitation to shift perceptions and assumptions about women and the audacious, sensitive, and powerful gestures they make every single day. In science, technology, arts, mathematics, politics, houses of worship, on the streets, and in our homes, insightful women are often uninvited, overlooked, or just plain dismissed… When we see women differently… we see the world differently!” – Axosoft

Read more about Louise here: MOMA’s archive has a wealth of information.