Paula J. Caplan was a clinical and research psychologist, author of books and plays, playwright, actor, director, and activist. She was born  July 7, 1947,  and raised in Springfield, Missouri; attended Greenwood Laboratory School; received her A.B. with honors from Radcliffe College of Harvard University; and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Duke University. She was an Associate at the Du Bois Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University at the time of her death.  She had been a Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; a Lecturer in Harvard's Program on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Psychology Department. She was a former Full Professor of Applied Psychology and Head of the Centre for Women's Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education; and former Lecturer in Women's Studies and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

In regard to her expertise in psychology and in women's studies, as well as her political/social action work, she appeared on many major network talk and news shows.

 She gave hundreds of invited addresses to a wide variety of community and academic groups. She was interviewed frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and Psychology Today.

Among her plays, "Shades" (secret wounds that only love can heal) won the Pen & Brush New Plays Contest; "Call Me Crazy" (about the questions "Is anybody normal? And who gets to decide?") won second place in the 1997 Arlene and William Lewis Playwriting Contest for Women and other awards; and "The Test" (based on the poignant, true story of two men on Death Row) was published by Samuel French in its collection of winners of its 2001 Off-Off-Broadway New, Short Plays Competition. Her screenplay for "The Test" was made into a video that won the Alliance for Community Media-New England Film Festival and has been screened in numerous other festivals and various other venues.  The number of books she authored or co-authored is in the double digits.

Before Paula passed away, July 21, 2021, she formed a nonprofit organization called Picture Social Justice (PSJ). The mission of PSJ is to promote social justice equity through film and television. Paula's vision was simple: raise awareness, educate, and advocate for those adversely affected by social injustice.

Not only was Paula the founder of Picture Social Justice, but she was the heart-and-soul of the latest film project, Execution by the Numbers. As you can imagine, Paula's untimely death interrupted efforts to complete the film project. But Paula's vision and body of work are too vital to the social justice community for it to be abandoned, so  plans for completion have moved forward.

For more details of Dr. Paula Caplan’s life and work go to :

Paula Joan Caplan (July 7, 1947 - July 21, 2021) - Home (paulajcaplan.net)

 

 

 

 

 

 In September, 2023, a memorial was held in New York City to honor the life and work of Joan Love. There were speakers, years-old video footage of Love’s speeches, media coverage, tributes, and more.  A feminist activist, Barbara fought for gay rights and for lesbians to have a voice in the early days of the women's movement.

Barbara Joan Love was born into an affluent and conservative family in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 1937.  She and her two brothers grew up with a maid and chauffeur and Sunday dinner at the country club.  In her 2021 memoir, "There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist", she described it as "upper-middle-class comfort".  In high school, she was a competitive swimmer and won several state championships. She graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism and had hoped to join her father's company, but he didn't think women were qualified to run a business.  Instead, she worked in publishing as an editor.

In her early 20s Barbara registered as a Democrat, the first person in her family for generations to do so..  She began her activism in the late '50s as a closeted young woman in Greenwich Village, haunting the city's Mafia-run lesbian bars.  In those days these bars were often raided by the police.  A blinking red light signaled the police's arrival.  Officers then warned the women not to dance or touch or they would be arrested.

Love was convinced by a girlfriend to cut her hair and dress more like a man.  One evening their car broke down and a group of male thugs stopped to help them.  Seeing her masculine appearance, the thugs beat her bloody.  In those pre-Stonewall days, if you were discovered to be gay, you could be openly harassed, attacked, and/or discriminated against in all sorts of ways.  Your own parents might turn on you.  Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness.

But times were changing, and Barbara felt empowered.  At age 33 she finally came out to her family.  

Love was on what is now known as the National LGBTQ Task Force for 10 years and co-founded the New York-based Identity House with activists and therapists to help LGBTQ people find acceptance. She was involved in the establishment of PFLAG, an organization dedicated to the support and education of LGBTQ individuals and their families, which helped Love’s mother accept her.  Her mother then participated with her in marches and other gay rights activities.

She forged lifelong friendships with those fighting for the same rights of recognition and equality for all, in her work with the National Gay Task Force; with the formation of Identity House; advocating for the recognition of lesbianism as a feminist issue by the National Organization for Women (NOW); as a board member of Veteran Feminists of America; and as an author of important works, from the first non-fiction book to put lesbianism in a positive light, Sappho was a Right On Woman: A Liberated View of Feminism (1972), to the record of many women and men who took news making actions in protest for change in the encyclopedic, Feminists Who Changed America: 1963-1975, and other books.

 

Carmen Lomas Garza was born in Kingsville, Texas, in 1948. Inspired by her parent’s activism with the American G.I. Forum, Garza joined the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although she had decided at the age of thirteen to become a visual artist, she states, "It was the Chicano Movement that inspired the dedication of my creativity to the depiction of special and everyday events in the lives of Mexican Americans based on my memories and experiences in South Texas."   Adding, "I saw the need to create images that would elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture."   

According to the Texan Cultures website, Carmen Lomas Garza taught herself how to draw and learned about the basics of art by checking out books from her local library. She also practiced drawing every day and drew pictures of people she saw at school, at home, and in her neighborhood. During her undergraduate studies at Texas Arts and Industry University (now Texas A&M University, Kingsville), Garza decided that it was important for her to create art that would be understood by people of all ages.  She learned to be proud of her culture and wanted to educate others using her art.  She says that her artistic creations helped her “heal the wounds inflicted by discrimination and racism.”  Garza also feels that by creating positive images of Mexican-American families, her work can help combat racism

 Garza is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited her work in galleries and museums across the United States.  She has had several major one-person exhibitions in the United States including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in New York City in 1995, the Smith College Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1992, and The Mexican Museum in San Francisco in 1987.

Garza’s artwork was the subject of an interactive exhibition for children organized by the Austin Children’s Museum in 2003 in Austin, Texas. The exhibition traveled for 5 years to children’s museums in the United States. In 2019 the John E. Conner Museum at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas, acquired the exhibition “In My Family” and installed it permanently in the museum.

Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. Kruger briefly attended Syracuse University, then Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she studied with artists and photographers Marvin Israel and Diane Arbus. Kruger worked in graphic design for Condé Nast Publications at Mademoiselle magazine, and was promoted to head designer within a year, at the age of twenty-two. Kruger has described her time in graphic design as “the biggest influence on my work…[it] became, with a few adjustments, my ‘work’ as an artist.” In the early 1970s, Kruger started showing artwork in galleries in New York. At the time, she was mainly working in weaving and painting. However, she felt that her artwork lacked meaning, and in 1976, she quit creating art entirely for a year.

She took a series of teaching positions, including at University of California, Berkeley. When she began making art again in 1977, she had moved away from her earlier style into photo and text collages. In 1979, Kruger developed her signature style using large-scale black-and-white images overlaid with text. She repurposed found images, juxtaposing them with short, pithy phrases printed in Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold typeface in black, white, or red text bars. In addition to creating text and photographic works, Kruger has produced video and audio works, written criticism, taught classes, curated exhibitions, designed products, such as T-shirts and mugs, and developed public projects, such as billboards, bus wraps, and architectural interventions.

Kruger addresses media and politics in their native tongue: sensational, authoritative, and direct. Personal pronouns like “you” and “I” are staples of Kruger’s practice, bringing the viewer into each piece. “Direct address has motored my work from the very beginning,” Kruger said. “I like it because it cuts through the grease.” Kruger’s work prompts us to interrogate our own positions; in the artist’s words, “to question and change the systems that contain us.” She demands that we consider how our identities are formed within culture, through representation in language and image.

 

For more stories of remarkable women, see HERSTORY on womensvoicesmedia.org

 

 

New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel.

Mickalene Thomas was born and raised in New Jersey and lives and works in New York. One of the most influential artists today, her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Awards nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists.

Thomas received a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2000 and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2002. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (2022); Levy Gorvy, New York, London, Pairs and Hong Kong (2021); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2021); the Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO (2019); The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL (2019); The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2019); Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA (2019); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France (2019); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON (2018); The Dayton Art Institute, OH (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2018); Pomona College Museum of Art (2018), Claremont, CA (2017); Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (2017); Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (2017); Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta, GA (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2016); Aperture Foundation, New York (2016); George Eastman House, Rochester, NY (2014); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012-13); Santa Monica Museum of Art (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011); and La Conservera Contemporary Art Centre, Ceuti, Spain (2009). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Orlando, Aperture, New York, NY (2019);You Are Here: Light, Color, and Sound Experience, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC (2018); Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2018); The Color Line: African American Artists and the Civil Rights in the United States, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (2016); SHE: International Women Artists, Long Museum, Shanghai (2016); No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2015); 30 Americans, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2011), which has traveled extensively around the United States (2011-2017, ongoing); and Americans Now, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2010). Thomas’s work is in numerous international public and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA PS1, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Yale University Art Collection, New Haven, CT; and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Thomas has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); Visionary Award, Pioneer Works (2019); USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2013); Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012); and the Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts (2010). She is the cofounder of the Pratt>FORWARD ‘Artist in the Market’ incubator for post-graduate students, and serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1.