A solo art exhibition about powerful women throughout history
In 2017, I created a solo exhibition with 5 painted canvases of pioneering women in different fields. For most of history, the stories of victories were written by men, who intentionally left women out of the picture. My exhibition was created in hopes to give credit and praise to women who have not been given enough of it. The name of the exhibition is a homage to Boudica, one of the subjects in my Women in Power painting, who commanded an army so brilliantly they defeated 70,000 Romans at the height of their power. The 5 areas I painted were of women in power, science, primatology, human rights, and the arts.
Tools used
Canvas
Acrylic Paint
Sisters of the sun
This painting consists of many of history’s best astronomers. While the history books may focus on the works of Kepler, Copernicus, or Galilieo, women have always been among the people that studied the stars.
Women in painting
Caroline Herschel
Vera Rubin
Annie Jump Canon
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Mae Jemison
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Valentina Tereshkova
Cecilia Payne Gapochkin
Jane Luu
The Trimates
The Trimates is a name given to 3 women — Biruté Galdikas, Dian Fossey, and Jane Goodall — who are there the pioneers of studying hominids in their natural environments. Each woman is painted with the respective primate they studied: Fossey with a gorilla, Galdikas with an orangutan, and Goodall with a chimpanzee.
Women in painting (left to right)
Biruté Galdikas
Dian Fossey
Jane Goodall
Queen in her own right
Our textbooks are filled with the history of kings, but seldom are they focused on the women who were queens in their own right.
Women in painting (left to right)
Empress Wu Zetian of China
Kurmanjan Datka of Kyrgyzstan
Empress Theodora of the Byzantine Empire
Boudica of British Celtic Iceni
Empress Myeoungeseong of Korea
Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii
Te Puea Herangi of Māori leader from New Zealand's Waikato region
Women rights are human rights
Throughout history, women have had to fight for their rights. Whether it’s voting, reproductive, or ownership, women have had to fight and prove their worth for these rights.
Women in painting (left to right)
Harriet Tubman
Ang Suu Kyi
Nujood Ali
Indira Jaising
Coretta Scout King
Not just a muse
Art is full of women, but almost always as objects of representation. Museums are full of paintings of nude women, but rarely do they have a large corpus of art created by women. Whether it’s in visual, written, or physical art, women have long been subordinated by their male peers.
Women in painting (clockwise from top left)
Murasaki Shikibu
Maya Angelou
Frida Kahlo
Yayoi Kusama
Artemisia Gentileschi
Beatrix Potter
Mary Blair
Misuzu Kaneko
Lotte Reigniger
Maud Stevens Wagner
Maria Tallchief
Show format
Paintings were hung in front of the Humanities Center in Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester. Decks of cards with brief biographies were printed and placed on ledges underneath the paintings. Viewers were asked to find the match the biographies to the painted woman on the canvas. Books that I used as references were also place near the canvases for viewers to flip through.
