Te Ata (aka Mary Frances Thompson (1895 –1995), was an actress and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation known for telling Native American stories. She performed as a representative of Native Americans at state dinners before President Roosevelt as well as for King and Queen of England. She went on to perform throughout Europe. She was named Oklahoma's first State Treasure in 1987. Her career spanned over 60 years and she collected hundreds of stories from different tribes.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was an author, a poet, actor, and a Civil Right’s Activist. With a career that spans over 50 years, she published many acclaimed works and received over 50 honorary degrees and had over 30 medical facilities named after her. She also wrote the first script by a black woman to be made into a Hollywood film. Her autobiographical book, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the most influential American books of the last century and is widely studied in high schools and colleges to this day.

Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) became the first African-American congresswoman in 1968. Four years later, she became the first major-party black candidate to make a bid for the U.S. presidency. She was originally a schoolteacher.

Josephine Baker Singer, Dancer, Civil Rights Activist, French Resistance spy (1906-1975)

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 – February 3, 1961) was an American actress. She is considered to be the first Chinese American movie star and also the first Asian American actress to gain international recognition. Her long and varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage and radio.

Susan B. Anthony (1820 – 1906) was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who dedicated her life to woman suffrage.  It is largely because of her determination and zeal that women in America have the equal right to vote and own their own property.

Alma Thomas (1891-1978) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist, and art educator, who devoted her life to the youth of her local Washington DC community. She was the first graduate of Howard University’s School of Fine Arts, after which she spent her life teaching middle school. Though she had painted throughout her life, taking graduate classes at nights, and using art as a communication tool in the classroom, it wasn’t until she retired at age 68 that she began another chapter of her life as an acclaimed professional artist. After a severe attack of arthritis that nearly left her paralyzed, she  restored her health and creativity by painting in a new style: “I decided to try to paint something different from anything I’ d ever done—different from anything I’ d ever seen. I thought to myself, ‘That must be accomplished.”’ With the tree and garden outside her room window as inspiration, Alma created a mosaic-like style, which would become her signature: small, rectangular shapes of bright, intense colors merged together in curves, and circles.  For the rest of her life, till she died at 86, she continued to paint, showing her work in many acclaimed galleries and shows. In 1972, at the age of 80, was was the first black woman to ever be given a solo exhibition at  New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. 

“People come to me and say, ‘Tell me how to paint.’ I say, ‘I can’ t. It comes from inside you. You have to expose yourself. Nobody taught me how to paint. I had to do it myself.”’

\Tamara de Lempicka (1889-1980) Polish painter aka “Baroness with a Brush.”

Althea Gibson (1927 – 2003) was an American tennis player and professional golfer. She became the first black athlete to break through the color line of international tennis.  In 1956, she became the first person of color to win a Gram Slam title. The following year, she won both Wimbledon and the US Nationals, and won both again the following year.  In all, she won 11 Grand Slam tournaments, including six doubles titles, In the early 1960s she also became the first black player to compete on the women’s professional golf tour.

At a time when racism and prejudice were widespread in sports and in society, Gibson was often compared to Jackie Robinson. It was enormously difficult to play in professional sports if you were black, let alone a woman, but she she made history by competing not only in tennis but in the golf circuit as well.”I am honored to have followed in such great footsteps,” wrote Venus Williams. “Her accomplishments set the stage for my success, and through players like myself and Serena and many others to come, her legacy will live on.”

Mary Cassatt (1887–1948) was one of the leading artists in the Impressionist movement of the later part of the 1800s. She studied art in a art college in Pennsylvania, but dropped out because she found the studies too limiting for women. On a trip to Paris, she discovered the work of Edgar Degas, which inspired her to move to Paris and copy masterpieces at the Louvre. Eventually, one of her paintings was accepted at the Salon, which was THE place to exhibit art in Paris at the time. After a time, she joined the avant-garde Impressionist painters and began to enjoy a new success in their group. When she returned home, she was influential in bringing Impressionist art to the American scene.

Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), known as the Grimké sisters, were writers, orators, and educators—the first American female advocates of abolition and women's rights. Breaking from the southern slaveholding family they were born into, they chose to become Quakers, where, as women, they were allowed to speak out against slavery and for equal rights.

Malala Yousafzai (born 1997) is a Pakistani activist for female and child education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. As a young girl, Malala defied the Taliban in Pakistan and demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education. She was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012, but she survived and went on to become an important voice for international human rights. She also founded the Malala Fund, which works to secure the rights to education for girls all over the world. Malala has been accepted to study at Oxford University.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (born into slavery on July 16, 1862 – died March 25, 1931), more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, feminist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Kara Walker (born 1969) is an African-American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes, mostly focusing on the Antebellum-era slave experience. 

Hilma af Klint (1862—1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were among the first Western abstract art. In fact, a considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky (long considered the first abstract painter) by a good five years. Drawing on spiritual themes and transcendental in her approach to painting, her work covers six decades, and was largely hidden for a long time after she died. She left behind more than 1,000 works that she had kept private. She believed that the world “was not ready for her art,” so she asked that the pieces remain unseen for another two decades. Her large bright paintings have found an enthusiastic new audience this year through the a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC (she had envisioned her artwork would one day be showcased in a large circular building with a spiral staircase long before the museum was even built)...it turns out that NOW the right time. Lucky us!

12x16” Oil on Canvas. $875

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.”

Dame Agatha Christie (September 15, 1890-1976) Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. As a writer, she is only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation. Classic who-dun-its with last minute revelations, often centering around poison in high society, brought her the reputation as the “Queen of Crime and Mystery.,” Her personal life was also mystery: especially when she disappeared for a time after finding her husband wanted to leave her for another. Her disappearance caused a sensation: over 1,000 police officers, 15,000 volunteers and several planes scoured the area where her car was found. The story was front-page news not only in Britain but in newspapers around the world. Ten days later she was found resting quietly at a hotel in the north of England where she had registered as Mrs Teresa Neele – the surname of her husband's lover. Two doctors diagnosed her as suffering from amnesia, but the mystery was never fully solved because she never spoke of it herself. After the divorce, she remarried a young archaeologist, 13 years her junior. She said at one point: "An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her!" Besides mysteries, she also wrote romance novels under the name Mar

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was a beautiful Austrian-American actress during Hollywood's "Golden Age" as well as an inventor.  She helped develop an early technique for spread spectrum communication, which we now use in cellular and WiFi technology.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

12x16” oil on canvas 2021. $875

Secretary Deb Haaland (born 1960) made history when she became the first Native American to serve as a US cabinet Secretary of the Interior (as of 2021). She is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and a 35th generation New Mexican.

Dr. Virginia Apgar (1909 – 1974) was an American obstetrical anesthesiologist, best known as the inventor of the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child immediately after birth. Her method of rating babies helped lower infant mortality rates and still saves lives today. 

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was one of the first generation Abstract Expressionist painters. Through six decades devoted to art, she continually explored innovative approaches to painting and collage. Lee  mostly became known because of her marriage to the gifted, troubled painter Jackson Pollock,  but she was an established abstract artist well before she met him. Her engagement in the New York art scene and her long education of art and its history were important to the nourishment of Pollock’s career. They painted side by side in their country home, but after her husband was killed in an automobile accident, Lee devoted the rest of her life to promoting his art and legacy as well as exploring her own abstract painting. Shortly after her own death, she was given a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art, an honor bestowed on a small handful of women artists, even to this day. Today her work is considered some of the most significant in the Abstract Expressionist movement.*

*Abstract Expressionism is important because it was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. (wikipeda)

You can check out some of Lee Krasner’s work here.

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth."

—Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

12x16” oil on canvas 2021 $875

Bette Midler (b. 1945) is a living legend of entertainment (singer, actor, comedian, spokesperson, songwriter) and wise/witty advocate for equality. Love Bette!

Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was a Spanish surrealist artist working in Spain, France, and Mexico (where many European artists were exiled during WWII) she was one of a handful of acknowledged female artists of the Surrealist movement.

11X14” OIL ON CANVAS, 2020 $795

"If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time."

Janis Joplin (1943 – 1970) was an American singer-songwriter who sang rock, soul and blues music. One of the most successful and widely known rock stars of her era, she was noted for her powerful voice, "electric" stage presence, and wild lifestyle at the height of the Haight-Ashbury Hippie movement. Tragically, she died of a drug overdose at age 27...but her voice has held its soul-power over listeners as if she never left us.

Dolores Huerta (1930-) is an activist and labor leader who co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers. A living Civil Rights hero. 

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was an American poet. One of the first successful Jewish American authors, Lazarus was part of the late nineteenth century New York literary elite, but also became a passionate advocate for Jewish immigrants and refugees. Among other things, she helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York, which provided vocational training so that the destitute could learn to support themselves. She is most remembered for her poem “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on the pedestal of the statue of liberty, welcoming incoming immigrants as they arrived in New York Harbor with these powerful words, which have become a lasting, iconic part of the American fabric: “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus was only 37 when she was commissioned by a group of NY writers to write the poem “The New Colossus,” which would, in turn, raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty (the statue was a gift from the French, though the US was required to buy the pedestal.) The inscription of the poem ultimately changed the meaning of the statue, making Lady Liberty a beacon of hope to the “huddled masses” looking for a better life within the freedoms America offered. But the statue was originally a token of the French people to celebrate republican (anti-monarchy) government as established in the American and French Revolutions.   Emma died without public notice one year after she wrote the poem. A century and a later, her words are considered one of the most beloved and important American poems. So, writer friends, be mindful of your opportunities to write while you are alive. You never know how it will affect the world and the generations to come. That part is out of your hands. 🙂