As an artist and an educator this is very important to me. I taught history and economics and later in my career, AP Art.
Presenting women, their struggles, their accomplishments, and their contributions to societies and the arts was and still is a cornerstone in my teachings.
The idea of doing a 19th amendment piece excited me knowing that it would fit into my Historic American Pop Collection. With high interest, I began to research for inspiration. I was a bit taken back when I learned that only 36 states ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920 and it took another 64 years until that last state finally ratified it in 1984. I must admit, my discoveries put me into a different direction.
I concentrated on doing a painting that begins in 1920 with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and ends in 1965 with the Civil Rights Amendment.
As with all the pieces of my HAPcollection, I used one of my abstract paintings as the background. I over laid bricks and came up with a depiction of city wall from the 1920’s.
My concept was to engrave on random bricks, dates and the names of many African American Women that worked to be included in the 19th amendment along with the states that did not ratify and their dates, when finally ratified. Engraved in the bricks will also be references to Jim Crow Laws and the 24th Amendment.
Highlighting the piece is a statement by Sojourner Truth delivered in 1851 to the Woman’s Rights Convention at the Old Stone Church in Akron, Ohio “Ain’t I A Woman?” I have taken the liberty to add the number two, with a hidden reference to today’s women advocacy of the “Me 2” movement. Also, as with all my HAP pieces there is an accompanying quote by either FDR or ER, selected by my sister Elizabeth Roosevelt Kelly, who serves on the board of the FDR library. Liz has also spear headed a program for girls about the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt for the ER Institute and is a scholar on Eleanor Roosevelt’s column My Day. In doing research about ER and the Woman’s Right’s movement the attached paper from GWU became informative in selecting this quote: https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/lesson-plans/notes-er-and-womens-movement.cfm
Brick Engravings
12 States that did not ratify the 19th Amendment until after August 26, 1920
• Vermont February 8, 1921
• Connecticut passed September 14, 1920 not ratified until July 16, 1970
• Delaware March 6, 1923
• Maryland passed March 29, 1941 not ratified until February 25, 1958
• Virginia February 21, 1952
• North Carolina May 6, 1961
• Georgia February 20, 1970
• Florida May 13, 1969
• Alabama September 8, 1953
• Mississippi March 22, 1984
• Louisiana June 11, 1970
Jim Crow and other Influences
• White Primary
• Poll Tax
• Literacy Tests
• KKK
• The 24th Amendment in 1964
• The 26th Amendment in 1965
African American Suffragettes/Activists
• Mary McLeod Bethune
• Frances E. W. Harper
• Sojourner Truth
• Harriet Tubman
• Hallie Quin Brown
• Ida Wells
• Tandy Nixon
• Juanita Craft
• Lulu White
• Christia Adair
“Where after do human rights begin? In small places, close to home– so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt – “Remarks at the United Nations,” March 27, 1958
Artists, Jo Temming and Cindy Brewer collaborated on the Woman’s Suffrage project to create three pieces that can be displayed together horizontally or vertically. The intersecting of their two distinct styles creates a unique and beautiful portrayal of the celebration of the women’s suffrage movement.
Artist | Jo Temming
Jo Temming is an Asian-American artist that creates contemporary minimalist art ranging from small single-panel pieces to large scale multi-panel works. Her artistic objective is to eliminate the extraneous and reduce her art to the simplest form, whether with composition, color or form. Jo believes that the connection between artist and viewer should be collaborative, so she frequently designs her creations so they can be displayed and viewed in multiple ways, allowing her art the flexibility to work in a variety of private and public spaces.
Artist | Cindy Brewer
Cindy began painting again after retiring from a career in Interior Design. She enjoys expression through vivid colors and textures. Her paintings evolve and emerge through several layers of paint. She achieves a 3-dimensional effect experimenting with additives, papers and various mediums. Color, texture, the interplay with light and the spatial relationship on the canvas creates interesting pieces often unexpected and surprisingly revealing.
I am a long-time volunteer at Old City Park and have always loved the unique stories behind the buildings there, especially the hotel. I wanted to tell the story of the Moles sisters, who ran the hotel together, through cut-paper illustration. It’s a really remarkable story of two unmarried women taking on the job of running a business after the men in their lives, their father and brother, have died. At a time when most women married young and had children, Mary and Eula Moles paved their own way. I hope guests come away from this exhibit with new insight into the untold stories of everyday women who fought hard to have better lives.
Emily Ericson is a Texas-based artist currently studying Illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work is influenced by her passion for history and love of color and detail. Though she mainly works in ink and watercolor, she is always eager to explore new mediums.
My series, “We’re All Gorilla Girls Now” was prompted by reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel in the summer of 2019. That book combined with the #MeToo movement and the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment made me think of “Guerilla Girls”. Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. I use the word Gorilla in my series as a nod to the group and the masks we all wear.
Vintage photographs of women are the source material for this series. I use a combination of drawing, painting and photography in my work to create a deliberately unfinished and “partially stated” image. I am interested in the way women have been photographed, represented and viewed in family photos that have survived over time. Since I am working from black and white photos, my color palette is meant to introduce present day colors that would not have been the norm when the original image was created, as a bridge between the various time frames.
Marianne Howard is a Dallas based artist, and businesswomen. She studied drawing, painting, printmaking and photography at Wittenberg University and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by her extensive travels and cultural exchange through images, Howard has developed a multi-layered practice of drawing, painting and photography. Her solo photography exhibition featured at The Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas, Texas brought awareness to social issues in Myanmar. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and is held in private collections internationally.
“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” is a quote by Arthur Brisbane and is the motto behind Lindsay Star Morgan’s Art. The focus relies on stimulating and provoking the mind of the viewer, through aesthetics and conceptual elements.
Her work is inspired by real people and literature, and is presented through representational painting executed via oil, acrylic and mixed media with an approach to different painting styles, combining pop-art, surrealism, and Dada.
Lindsay’s biggest influence has been the diverse cultural background she has been exposed to throughout her life. She was born in Arizona, raised in Chile, South America, later on moved back to the States where she graduated from Oregon State University as Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art in Visual Arts; today, she lives with her family in Bend, Oregon. This exposure to cultural diversities gave the artist a feeling of being a “sponge” when it comes to all the information perceived and experienced through different cultures, systems, people, and places. This trend of thought and life has had a tremendous impact in her work and has become a tool in her philosophy and expression of art.
All these influences have constructed the development of her own style, as well as the processes of thinking in which portrays other people’s stories, experiences, and struggles, through visual aesthetics and provoking concept. All pieces are carefully constructed, created, and all contain different techniques, a diverse range of mediums, mixed style, concepts, and different paths of learning.
I have been experimenting with the process of porcelain slip dipping for the last year. It is pure joy to take an object that would likely be thrown away and turn it into something of permanence, beauty and interest. The process has been many trials and errors of learning this technique, but I have thoroughly enjoyed learning what works and what doesn’t.
This particular piece is a Swiffer duster. Women are still the bearers of most of the unpaid labor in the home. I loved the idea of elevating the duster from a sturdy, mundane household cleaning tool to a more intricate work of art symbolizing the impact of women’s activism and work in politics in 2020. No matter who wins the election, the impact of the work and voice of so many women is already evident.
Clean Sweep 2020 is a celebration of all those women who have worked in the last 100 years, 1st for the right to vote and today in the increasing leadership roles of women in governing our country. It has taken grassroots passion of ordinary people and the Swiffer duster represents the ordinary in this piece.
Dr. David Holcombe was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended the University of California at Davis, where he had the luck to attend art classes as electives. He subsequently graduated from the U. of Florida with a Masters in Agriculture, followed by an MD from the Catholic U. of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium (in French). Despite a hectic 30-year plus medical career, he has always painted, written plays and taught folk dancing. His art has been featured in many local and regional juried exhibits and is found in collections all over the U.S. and in Belgium. The overtly political overtones of his works often challenges viewers and never matches anyone’s couch.
I came about Back to the Future as a tribute to the suffragist movement and imagined a local parade 100 years before. In my vision the suffragists stood on the Dallas courthouse steps. I took historic photos and manipulated them to fit on those steps waving their flags. I was wanting to be able to put 100 or centennial somewhere on the painting, but it seemed forced to highlight that it had been 100 years…and then I looked up the actual address of the courthouse, and viola. It was 100 South Houston!!! So I put the 100 right above the door and called it finished.
Monica Minshew Cowsert has always been surrounded by the arts in one form or another. Her earlier years were spent studying music where she played the harp from a young age and continues to this day. She had the opportunity to study art history in Europe and was heavily influenced by the art and colors of Mexico where she lived and took art classes for a summer in San Miguel de Allende.
These influences and her love of nature are clear in the art she produces. Her vibrant colors and layering of those colors creates a style that seems to be best described as Fauvist with a focus on the aesthetic nature of each piece. Her distinctive personal style emanates joy and peace and expresses a vibrant spirit.
Monica continues to explore art techniques with classes en plein air, encaustic, and mixed media while keeping oil painting as her focus. A sampling of her work can be seen at MCowsertArt.com. Picturesque landscapes and cityscapes, beautiful birds and flowers are all brought to life with contrasting yet harmonious colors and bold compositions. As the artist explains, “I am a storyteller and I welcome you to join me on this visual journey.”
Lesley Bodzy is painter and sculptor who works in Houston and New York City. She is currently a 2021 MFA candidate at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
She is interested in materiality, luminosity and the interplay of light and color. She uses unusual tools, mediums and surfaces in her paintings. She also creates sculptures using 3-D printers and plexiglass.
Lesley is represented by galleries in New York, Houston and New Jersey. Her work was recently shown at Site:Brooklyn in New York City, The Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut, Guild Hall in Easthampton, NY, and Palix Fine Arts in Houston. Lesley has a BA from Mount Holyoke College and studied art at Hunter College and the Art Students League of New York.
In the last two years I have started working on ceramics, a medium which, to me, embodies the same poetic nuance and the same vulnerability and lightness as drawing on paper. I felt the need to take my work to a three-dimensional space and create a conversation between art and craft. My unique ceramic pieces are a link between history and civilization and the intimacy of personal stories. The drawings on this bowl present a narrative that deal with the place women have gained in contemporary society. This bowl is featuring women protesting with banners, some are in movement while others are just watching, but they display different aspects of being a woman by belonging to a strong community. The blue inside is acting as the color of hope. I use a typical element of table service as a symbol of women’s domestic life, but paint it with figures that are not used in traditional dish-ware decoration. This way I am pushing the beholders to pay attention to the scene I am describing and to the meaning of what they see.
Emmanuelle Berthet, was born in Paris in 1967, and currently lives and works in Houston, after having lived in Italy and Belgium for several years. Berthet studied art at l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (ENSAD), specializing in the printed image. She subsequently turned to illustration, which appealed to her love of books and their images. Drawing has always been her preferred mode of expression.
In 2007 she had the opportunity to study lithography on stone with Georges Meurant in the lithography studio atl’Ecole des Arts d’Ixelles in Brussels. She rediscovered the world of printmaking but with a new focus on the painterly gestures of lithography. Working with gestural abstraction, she embarked on a personal journey free from the constraints of “communicating” in the traditional sense, instead observing the world around her through images.
“Drawing is the way I am in the world. I find inspiration in the forms of everyday things that surround me. For me, drawing is a journey: with a pictorial gesture, a brushstroke, shadow and light, and mark-making, the image comes to life on the surface of the paper. I work primarily in black and white. Black with its wide range of tones and the white of the paper allow me to be even closer to the essence of drawing.
Starting out with abstract imagery in my early career, my work has started to take a more figurative turn since arriving in Houston. Inspired by the city, which, as an outsider, I often perceived as a movie, I started to document its rich life in sketchbooks. Like a Baudelaire “flaneuse” in contemporary Texas, I walk around the city and observe its textures, scents, vibrations and images. Sometimes I work directly from the surface of the city, tracing its contours on paper. I am particularly interested in the vantage point where nature and the built environment collide and sometimes clash.
Reference to a subject exists; however my works are not about representation, but rather about revealing a feeling through a subtle play of tensions, vibrations, or surfaces. My drawings often evoke enigmatic landscapes, sometimes inhabited by silhouettes in motion, sometimes still. They are based on memories of places I visited or things I dreamt, such as Italian gardens populated with “Genius Loci”
In the last two years I have started working in ceramics, a medium which, to me, embodies the same poetic nuance and the same vulnerability and lightness as drawing on paper. I felt the need to take my work to a three dimensional space and create a conversation between art and craft. My ceramic pieces are a link between History and civilization and the intimacy of personal stories. By drawing on ceramic, observing social life I’m telling about social interactions, women’s position and political aspect of their fights.”