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.

 

 

By Alex Thompson  

Ballet and Engineering

Born in 1933, Judith Love Cohen set out from an early age to do things girls were simply not expected to do at that time. She had a deep passion for maths and was very good at it, to the point where her fellow classmates would pay her to do their homework for them. As she grew up Cohen realised she was more interested in engineering and studied at college whilst also performing in New York’s Metropolitan Opera Ballet company.

Though this may seem an odd mix but Cohen was used to being unique – as she went through school, she had noticed that she was the only girl in the majority of her maths classes. This continued when she went to study at the University of South California, completing both her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science courses without ever seeing another female engineer. She studied at night whilst working in the day as a junior engineer for North American Aviation. Upon joining NASA, she was one of only a handful of female engineers employed by the space agency at the time. Not that this discouraged her. She later remarked “I had already figured out that I was going to do things that no [other girls] ever did.”

Project Apollo

Cohen worked on many of the first spacecraft in America’s space programme, including Pioneer, where she worked with her first husband, Bud. However, she considered her greatest achievement to be her work on the Apollo missions. Her most important engineering feat was her contribution to the Lunar Module’s Abort Guidance System, which played a critical role in the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded on their way to the Moon. The return of the astronauts alive and well is considered one of the most incredible moments in the history of human spaceflight and Cohen was present when the astronauts paid their thanks to the TRW facility for their crucial role in their return.

A Star is Born

It was whilst working on the Abort Guidance System that the story that went viral took place. At the time of the first Moon landings in July 1969, Cohen was already eight months pregnant with her fourth child. On one particular day the following month Cohen came into work as usual when her waters broke. On her way out of the door she grabbed a printout of a problem she’d been working on and continued to work on it whilst in labour. According to another of her children, Neil Siegel, she phoned her boss later that day and “told him she had solved the problem. And… oh yes, the baby was born, too.” The child she gave both to that day was future School of Rock and Jumanji star Jack Black.

Yes really.

Engineer to Author

Cohen continued to work at NASA throughout the 1970s and 80s, working with then-husband (and Black’s dad) Tom as satellite engineers on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Cohen retired as an engineer in 1990 and set up a publishing company Cascade Pass with new husband David Katz. She wrote and published a series of books called “You Can be a Woman….”, which was aimed at young girls and encouraged them to follow various careers in science, with David illustrating. They also published another series that encouraged younger children to practice environmentally friendly exercises called “Green”, and a book named “The Women of Apollo” which featured four biographies of women who had helped put humans on the Moon, including Cohen herself.

Legacy

Judith Love Cohen is much more than an interesting anecdote. She was a mathematician, a dancer, a publisher, a highly talented engineer and an advocate for women in the workplace. Some of the practices we take for granted today, such as internal listings of jobs in companies and formal descriptions for every vacant position, were Cohen’s ideas, with the main purpose being to encourage more women to apply. Upon her passing in 2016, Siegel wrote “she must have influenced tens of thousands of young girls to become interested in professional careers of one sort or another.”

And that is the true legacy of Judith Love Cohen.

About the author: Alex Thompson is a Space Communications Presenter at the National Space Centre.

 

 

Focusing on the struggles, achievements, and courage of those with disabilities during Disability Pride Month.

By Brianna Letendre

 

What a remarkable, young woman.  Hers will be a name we will hear more about as the years go by.  We must do all that we can to protect our democracy so that young people like Dasia can get the knowledge to make the world a better place.

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