Rebecca Stanborough - 25 Women Who Dared to Create

G reat art changes the world, even when the world does not want to change. Great art tells the truth. It kindles joy. It bears witness to history. And it expresses passion in all its forms.

This book celebrates the work of women artists around the globe. This is how they changed the world: with brush and canvas, bronze and clay, needle and thread, music and movement, lens and light, brick and blueprints. Our world is better because these wonderous workers dared to pursue their dreams and create beautiful and powerful works of art.

Do your work and dont let anyone or anything stop you. Dont do your work to please other people; do it to please yourself.

Faith Ringgold, painter

Women artists challenge themselves creatively, through song, dance, sculpture, photography, painting, architecture, and other forms of art.

Women have been painting fine art for centuries. A mere 50 years after Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel in 1508, Plautilla Nelli created a nearly life-size painting of The Last Supper. In the mid-1600s, when Rembrandt was creating masterworks like The Night Watch in Holland, Rachel Ruysch was painting exquisite still lifes for clients throughout Europe. Yet art history books failed to include most of the women who painted in the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age.

The painters discussed here were fortunate. Though many of them had to defy societys expectations to create art, they were working in the 20th and 21st centuries. The century that brought women the right to vote also brought new opportunities to create art with brush and canvas.

Georgia OKeeffe is recognized by many as the Mother of American Modernism. She is best known for her paintings of natural objects such as enlarged flowers, leaves, and natural landscapes.

A young Wisconsin girl named Georgia OKeeffe picked up a brush. She began painting the natural world around her. She painted her way into art schools in Chicago and New York, spending years imitating the style of master painters.

But it was all academic, she remembered. We were taught to paint like somebody else. It made me not want to paint at all. For a while, she laid down her paintbrush.

Then she discovered the work of style that enhanced what she saw in the natural world. She painted everything from flowers to skyscrapers in a daring, modernist style.

In 1929, OKeeffe spent a summer in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. She went looking for flowers to paint, but what she found instead were bleached animal bones. She loved their shapes. She painted them larger than life and often centered them over the desert horizon.

OKeeffe made New Mexico her home in 1949. She would get up at 7 a.m. and drive her Model A Ford out across the countryside. She had removed the back seat so she could paint in the car, which gave her some relief from the fierce desert heat. People who knew her well said she loved working in New Mexico because she could be alone there.

President Gerald Ford awarded Georgia OKeeffe the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Today, she is considered one of the most important American painters of the 20th century.

OKeeffe once compared the life of an artist to walking on a knifes edge. So what? So what if you fall off? Id rather be doing something I really wanted to do, she said.

In 2014, OKeeffes Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million. It was the most expensive painting ever sold by a woman artist. The highest sale price of a painting by a male artist is Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi. It sold in 2017 for $450.3 million.

La Casa Azul, or The Blue House, is a museum in Mexico City dedicated to Frida Kahlo. People come from all over the world to see and learn what life was like for the famous artist. As a child, Frida was surrounded by pets, including cats, dogs, monkeys, and even a deer. Her father was a photographer and painter. He brought Kahlo along to see the Mexican countryside documenting their culture.

When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, a disease that twisted her pelvis and thinned her right leg. At age 18, her school bus was struck by an electric streetcar. Her spine was broken in three places. Her leg and foot were shattered, and a handrail pierced her abdomen. Kahlo was in the hospital for more than a year. There, she began painting in earnest. Her mother brought in a mirror and hung it above her so Kahlo could paint self-portraits.

Frida Kahlo worked on hundreds of paintings, including this portrait of a wealthy San Francisco society woman in 1931.

She kept painting self-portraitsand having painful surgeriesfor the rest of her life. Her art frequently explored her physical suffering.

Early in her career, her work was often overshadowed by the paintings and sculptures of her husband, Diego Rivera. The two were famous for their parties and for the ups and downs of their relationship. But in time, she made a name for herself.

In her self-portraits, Kahlo is often adorned in flowers and dressed in traditional Tehuana clothing. She is sometimes surrounded by birds and animals like the ones at La Casa Azul. Sometimes she appears to be floating. Other times she is confined to hospital beds.

Though she only lived to be 47 years old, Frida Kahlo became a leading figure in the Mexican tradition. Her facethat frank stare beneath the dark eyebrowsis instantly recognizable. Despite the many hardships she endured, she insisted on free self-expression.

When Alma Thomas was a girl, she dreamed of being an architecta nearly impossible dream at the time. Few women would have considered taking a career in a male-dominated field, especially when women were not allowed to handle a voting ballot, let alone a blueprint.

Alma Thomas posed in front of one of her paintings in 1976.

Instead of studying architecture, she studied art. Alma Thomas became the first student to graduate from the newly formed art department at Howard University, a historically black university. After obtaining a masters degree, she taught art to junior high school children for 38 years. She was such a devoted teacher that she wasnt able to give her own art the time it deserved.

Finally, when she retired from the classroom in 1960, she turned to her own canvases. She began developing the abstract, colorful style for which she is known today.

Thomas was part of a group of painters known as the Washington Color School. Her work is known for its tightly packed, abstract pats of color that seem to move on their own across the canvas. Some paintings look like mosaics. Some look rain-streaked.