Palestinian Women On A Rooftop Of A House In Jerusalem. 1932 Palestine.

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Yolanda Lopez’s art practice grew alongside her activism for the Chicanx student movement, which emerged in the late 1960s, and frequently centers the labor of women. Women’s Work Is Never Done is currently on view in Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. In it, Lopez combines a 1965 image of labor leader Dolores Huerta proudly holding a strike poster with a group portrait of anonymous female farm workers dressed in protective gear for the heavy industrial work of a 1995 broccoli harvest. This International Women’s Day we celebrate the intellectual, organizing, and nourishing labor of the women depicted—and the work and lives of all trans and cis women around the world. 

Yolanda M. López (American, born 1942). Woman’s Work is Never Done, from 10 x 10 Portfolio, 1995. Screenprint, sheet. Brooklyn Museum, Alfred T. White Fund, 1996.46.6. © artist or artist’s estate

Gustav Klimt - Hygieia (1907)

東條 明子 / Tojo Akiko (@akiko_tojo_sculpture)

Podium, 1999, Wolfgang Tillmans

Layla Al Attar (1942-1993) was one of Iraq’s most respected and influential painters in the 1970s and 80s. Layla was murdered alongside her husband by a U.S Missile attack that targeted the house she resided in, which was her sister Suad’s house, and several other civilian homes in her neighbourhood in Baghdad in 1993. Although the attack was considered to be accidental, many people believe the real reason behind the air-strike was due to one of her provocative pieces; which was a mosaic portrait of George H. W. Bush on the floor of the main entrance of Al Rasheed Hotel with the phrase “Bush is Criminal“ written beneath it.

The attack was ordered by Bill Clinton in retaliation for an attempted assassination on Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Most recently however, such claims of a targeted attack on Layla’s residence have been refuted by several members close to Layla’s family due to the simplicity of the thought and the improbability of a powerful government targeting a simple artist. This has also been refuted because according to several resources Layla didn’t create that mosaic of Bush, but she was rather a manager at the Arts Institute that commissioned an artist from Diyala/Baqubah to create it.

The details of Layla’s and her husband’s death might never be known, but one thing that should be realized from this event is the amount of disrespect and abasement the American administration had and continues to have until this day to the lives of Iraqis.

“Let us firmly unite with the youth of the third world under the banner of anti-imperialist liberation!”

Poster from DPRK, unknown year (probably 70s)

love is stored in the djungelskog

moonlight, 2020.

the dprk has the coolest fucking stamps and postcards

in your next life, you’re gonna be an ugly girl