Women who reshaped life and art

 

The artist and illustrator Anita Kunz has created nearly 300 portraits of women, some famed and others little known, who shaped the course of history or made important contributions to the arts, science and other fields. “Original Sisters” opened in November at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Photo courtesy of Norman Rockwell Museum

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.

In November 1936, Amrita Sher-Gil was winning recognition throughout India as an artist.
She was drawing crowds in Mumbai for her paintings: a woman sleeping on her back, three girls sitting together with sun washing over a cheek, a shoulder — bringing out the nap of cloth with a vivid sense of heat and light.

As her name spread across the country, Sher-Gil was standing awed in the Ajanta caves in Maharashtra, absorbing colors imagined 2,500 years before.

She described them as “painting with a kernel,” an essential core. Women kneel together, gesturing as they talk. Padmapani, the Bodhisattva of compassion, holds a lotus with petals brushing skin and a background of firelight and the green of water running through limestone.
“I think all art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical,” Sher-Gil wrote to a friend. “How can one find the beauty of a form, the intensity or subtlety of a color, the quality of a line, unless one is a sensualist of the eyes?”

Three thousand miles away, in Odesa, in the Ukraine, Anna Akhmatova was returning to writing poems after 10 years away, and she was embarking on a requiem she would write for 25 years. She would become an international voice, and in the last years of her life she would be nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature for two years running.

But in 1936, Stalin was purging the country around Akhmatova, having hundreds of thousands of people arrested, killed or sent to labor camps like the one where her son was confined for years and where her husband died. She had already lived through revolution and a world war, censorship and terror.

“Now all’s eternal confusion,” she said, but she kept on writing.
Imagine these two women together now in one room, 90 years later. Around them gather 280 more -- women coming together across time and space. Internationally recognized illustrator and artist Anita Kunz has brought a labor of love to the Berkshires in “Original Sisters,” a new exhibit of portraits at the Norman Rockwell Museum, guided in this incarnation by the museum’s curator of exhibitions, Jane Dini.

 

Portraits of strength, courage
As a Canadian artist living and working in London, New York and Toronto, Kunz has created socially and politically themed work, in her own words, for publications from Time to The New Yorker and Rolling Stone as well as magazines from Switzerland to Korea and Japan.
In “Original Sisters,” she has reached out to a community of women through centuries and around the world — at a time when she has felt a need for courage.

Kunz said she began this work in the pandemic. As the lockdown took hold, she thought of women living in dark and difficult times, and she wanted to honor their strength. So she began to paint a new woman each day.

In these rooms, women stand together who have commanded fleets of ships and mapped the human genome and the night sky. They have uncovered fossils and learned the structures of metamorphosis.

“’Original Sisters’ is a love note to women on whose shoulders I stand,” Kunz said.
Fatima al-Fihri is known as having founded al-Qarawiyyin, the oldest continually living university in the world, in Fez, Morocco, in the year 880. Her university holds the world’s oldest library.
And standing here within a few feet of her, Shamsia Hassani, a contemporary Iranian born artist, has become the first graffiti artist in Afghanistan. In her own words, Hassani’s art “gives Afghan women a different face, a face with power, ambitions and willingness to achieve goals.” She often paints women as well, each one bright with energy and color, “a human being who is proud, loud and can bring positive changes to people’s lives.”

As Kunz’s work has grown, she has met more and more women new to her. Over and over, she said, she would find herself thinking, “She is awesome -- how didn’t I know about her?”

She found suggestions from friends in many fields, she said. She scoured the Internet, blogs and searches, and she delved into a series of obituaries The New York Times has published in the last few years to commemorate women from the 19th and 20th centuries whose lives and achievements were ignored on the newspaper’s obituary pages at the time of their deaths.
“Women have been responsible for remarkable achievements in all areas of life,” Kunz writes in the opening of the exhibit’s catalog, “and have made major contributions throughout the ages. Yet … they are not known or remembered in the way they should be.”

 

Pushing boundaries, making waves
Wall texts in the show reveal patterns in the lives of many of the women gathered here. They are deeply intelligent, forceful, active in ways that can define and reshape worlds far beyond their home communities — and they can protect and transform those communities and the world beyond.

Rachel Carson, walking in tide pools, set currents in motion that would lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Autumn Peltier has addressed the Global Landscapes Commission at the United Nations as chief water commissioner of the Anishinabek Nation.

These women are scientists and activists and leaders of political movements, and they are musicians and writers, athletes and astronauts. And they are artists — the kinds of artists, Kunz said, that she had never learned about before she started down this path.

In studying art history, she said, her professors and the artists she studied were overwhelmingly white and male.

“I never had any women teachers,” Kunz said, “and the art history I received was mostly Western and European artists.”

In her own work, she has pushed some of those boundaries. Twenty years ago, she became the first woman artist celebrated in a solo show in the Library of Congress.

Art and humor illustrators in the press have a long history of keeping a check on people in power, Kunz said, though she feels this influence has weakened in the United States over the past 20 years since Sept. 11 — in part because editors have acted with less courage and have imposed more restrictions, with the result that artists have lost the freedom to create with strong voices on many platforms.

This pattern is another reason Kunz has felt the need to work in her own space, on her own terms. She has made an international career in print illustration and in satire and humor, and though she said some of the editors she works with can give their artists flexibility in their work, she has wanted more time to evolve her own ideas as she has become more established.
In 2017, she painted the Women’s March from her own direct experience. She remembers the charged excitement of a downtown filled with so many women that they overflowed public spaces with a positive and active energy.

And then Covid came. And she began a new search for creative life force.
At the Faison artist residency on Peaks Island, Maine, she heard for the first time of Jane Bakes, a trans woman who had lived here. Kunz looked for more of her story and could find very little.
“How many stories have been lost?” she asked.

So Kunz began to paint women she felt should be known. She learns and celebrates their stories, their brilliant vigor and pleasure, curiosity and beauty, for their grit and love of life. Walking through the rooms at the Rockwell, she traced lineages and found kinship among them.
Here is Sojourner Truth — born into slavery in New York state 10 years after Elizabeth Freeman led Massachusetts to declare it illegal under the new state constitution — speaking across the country for abolition and women’s rights.

And here, close enough to call to her, Dorothy Height is leading the National Council of Negro Women in national efforts to end lynching.

And Billie Holliday is singing “Strange Fruit” in a Greenwich Village nightclub, singing in the dark with the light shining on her.

As she explored, Kunz would learn about women who have saved lives and reshaped countries and ways of being.

Looking back across four years, recalling moments that stand out for her, Kunz described her first encounter with Frederika Dicker-Brandeis, an artist and teacher imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto during the Holocaust.

Dicker-Brandeis brought art supplies and taught children to draw, as a way to help them cope with trauma and dislocation, the loss of their families, illness, hunger and fear. She would guide them to draw a world beyond the one they were living in. Many of them did not survive, but their drawings have.

Kunz felt humbled by her story and her persistent spirit. And she has found such courage around the world.

Theresa Kachindamoto, senior chief of the Dedza District of central Malawi in East Africa, has dissolved more than 2,000 child marriages. When she was appointed chief, Kunz said, Kachindamoto was seeing 12-year-old girls who had already been forced to have children. She has faced down threats of violence, and she has convinced chiefs to end these practices and fought for the education of young women.

 

Three women of the Berkshires
And here in the Housatonic River valley, Kunz celebrates women growing culture and freedom in the Berkshires. At the Norman Rockwell Museum, she presents three new portraits.

Shannon Holsey, president of the Stockbridge Munsee community of the Mohican Nation, has come to the opening to recognize her own. She has served as president since 2015, and she also serves now as president of the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council, which represents 11 member communities with a land base of about 1 million acres spanning 45 counties.

Beside the painting of Holsey, Elizabeth Freeman stands at her shoulder. In 1781, Freeman led the successful fight to make slavery illegal in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, bringing the case to the state’s highest court at a time when no woman could, let alone a woman of color.
And halfway between them, at the turn of the 20th century, Edith Wharton is writing her novels in bed, bicycling over the ridges and reading Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” on the terrace at dusk.

Someone who knows the local byways may find more connections among the portraits here. Maria Tallchief performed as the firebird at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the vivid crimson she wears, and within a few years, Lorraine Hansberry would be writing “A Raisin in the Sun” at Festival House in Lenox.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, as this country shook with the Freedom movements and passed the Voting Rights act, across the ocean Akhmatova finally became free enough of censorship and threat to her family and loved ones to publish a form of her “Requiem.”

She writes with sadness and love, as in an earlier verse she imagines Lot’s wife as a woman loving the land where she has lived and worked with her hands and come out to sing with her neighbors in the streets, where she has held her daughters when each one was newborn.
Akhmatova would have known how it feels to hold an infant to nurse on a winter morning, and to stand in protest, to face fear for her own life and for her son, and for her freedom — and to glory in her strength of mind, and to create for the burning love of making.