Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. After both of her parents died, she moved to live with her uncle in Baltimore, where she attended Saturday evening salons, a kind of social gathering that years later she will emulate in Paris. At age 24, Stein earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Radcliffe College, afterward studied medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. When she reached age 29, Stein moved to Paris, joining her brother Leo. Together they began to collect post-impressionist paintings and helped artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The two siblings established a literary and artistic salon in their apartment, where they’ve hosted leading artists and writers, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. After Leo moved to Italy, Gertrude remained in Paris with her assistant and lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. In her writing, Stein experimented with different kinds of techniques, like Cubism, abstraction, and stream-of-consciousness. Although her work was appreciated, it wasn’t comprehensible to everyone; thus, her only commercial success was “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” that was written from Toklas’s point-of-view. Stein remained in France through the two World Wars, at WW1 she even served as an ambulance driver for the French. During WW2 she hid from the Gestapo in a small village near the Swiss border. Stein died no long after the end of the war when she was 72 years old. Though she wasn’t always understood, Stein had a significant influence on contemporary literature and had been the subject of many artistic works, including musicals, movies, and plays. Read more...

Born in Aleppo, Syria, and migrated with her family to Ohio, USA when she was 5 years old. From a young age, Al-Hadid knew she wanted to be an artist, and by the age of 22, she earned her BA in Art History and a BFA in Sculpture from Kent State University. Following that, she earned an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. In her work, Al-Hadid references her Middle-Eastern heritage as well as ancient architecture, art history, cosmology, and physics. Her works are displayed in a variety of museums and art galleries all around the world. Read more...

Grace Louise McCann Morley was born in Berkeley and grew up in St. Helena. She received her MA in French from the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks to a scholarship, she lived three years in Paris – working on her PhD from the Sorbonne. It is in France where she earned a deeper understanding of the arts. When she returned, she found a job teaching French at Goucher College in Baltimore. Her career took a shift thanks to a summer course at Harvard, which was intended to introduce museum studies to teachers. Her first curatorial position was at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. From there she moved back to California and took on the role of director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (which is currently called San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In her role she was considered very progressive in engaging her community: she offered educational activities, kept the museum open until ten in the evening, presented up to 100 exhibitions a year, supporting local artists and artists of color. Morley gave unprecedented attention to women in the program, with dozens of solo shows to female artists such as Ruth Armer, Julia Codesido, Aline Liebman, Henrietta Shore, and Susi Singer. She then continued to serve as the first head of the Museum Division of UNESCO, helped to organize the International Council of Museums and founded the publication “Museum.” When she was sixty years old, she was offered to become the director of the National Museum of New Delhi. After six years in her role, she stayed in India until her death in 1985. Read more...

Judith Sylvia Cohen was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother inspired her passion for art, and by the age of three, she began to draw and attend classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In college, she studied Fine Arts at UCLA and was active at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, designing posters for the organization and serving as its corresponding secretary. At 20, she met Jerry Gerowitz, they got married in 1961, but two years later, he died in a car accident. Widowed at 23, she had an identity crisis, which eventually led her to change her last name from Cohen to Chicago, freeing herself from being connected to a man, by heritage, or by marriage. In her art, Chicago experimented with different media types, from drawing and sculptures to acrylic plastic and even fireworks and pyrotechnics. At the age of 26, she had her first solo show at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in LA, been one of only four women to display their work in that event. In that same year, Chicago married the sculptor Lloyd Hamrol and stayed married for 14 years. At 31, she took a teaching position at Fresno State College. She opened a women-only class, which soon became a full Feminist Art Program – the first feminist art program in the US. She rented a studio off-campus with her students, and in addition to art collaborations, they held reading and discussion groups, exploring their experiences and translating them into art. In 1972, together with Miriam Schapiro, Chicago founded the Womanhouse – a Hollywood mansion which was turned into a workshop and exhibition space, where women can create and display their art. In 1978, she founded the “Through the Flower” – a non-profit feminist art organization for educating about the importance of art and promoting it as a tool for emphasizing women’s achievements. In 1979, Chicago exhibited her most known work for the first time – “The Dinner Party.” The piece is a large triangle table, set for 39 places, each one commemorates a mythical or historical female figure, such as Virginia Woolf, Sojourner Truth, and Empress Theodora of Byzantium. The artwork symbolizes the struggle for equality women face in male-dominant societies. In 1980, she began to work on the installation – Birth Project, in which she reinterpreted the Genesis creation narrative by using images of childbirth, emphasizing women’s role in giving life. In 1985, she returned to work independently in her studio. In her next piece, “PowerPlay,” she explored the construct of masculinity by replacing the male gaze with a female’s one. In the same year, she married photographer Donald Woodman, with whom she collaborated on “The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light,” in which she examined her Jewish identity by exploring masculine power in the context of the Holocaust. Chicago continues to create and experiment with materials. In her art, she is challenging not only the male-dominated art world but also the conventional conceptions about society and women’s role in it. Her art has been exhibited all around the world and is on display in permanent collections in museums around the globe. Read more...

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was born in Paris, France, where her parents owned an antique tapestries gallery. After WWI, the family moved to Antony, a suburb of Paris, and opened a tapestry restoration atelier below their apartment. During her childhood, she assisted her parents with washing, sewing, mending, and painting the tapestries. At 19, Bourgeois enrolled at the Sorbonne, studying mathematics and geometry. Two years into her studies, her mother died, and she decided to change her career path and study art. She joined classes as an English translator so she would not need to pay, and began her formal training in institutes such as the École des Beaux-Arts, École du Louvre, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. To gain practical experience, she visited studios and learned various techniques. Eventually, she opened a print shop in Paris, where she met Robert Goldwater, an American visiting art professor, and in 1938, the couple married and moved to NYC. There, Bourgeois enrolled in the Art Students League of New York and began to create her art. During this period, her art reflected her difficulties in the new country and her struggle to enter the art scene of NYC. She used driftwood and junkyard scraps for her sculptures, as seen in the “Sleeping Figure,” which depicts a soldier who cannot confront the real world. In 1945, at the age of 34, Bourgeois had her first solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in NYC, where she presented 12 of her paintings. In the 1950s, Bourgeois began experimenting with different materials, such as marble, bronze, and plaster, exploring feelings of vulnerability, fear, and loss of control. She joined the American Abstract Artists Group, and her work was displayed alongside leading artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. In the following decade, she explored relationships, and her creations became more sexual. In her 60s, Bourgeois became a known figure in the art world and started teaching in various institutes, including the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, the Brooklyn College, and the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She also taught in public schools in Long Island and established the “Sunday, bloody Sundays” club in her apartment, in which she hosted young artists and gave them critique – hence the name of the club. At the age of 59, a few years after her husband died, Bourgeois moved to a big studio in Brooklyn, which allowed her to create her famous large-scale installations, such as her famous monumental marble and steel spider. She had her first retrospective in 1982 at the MoMA, followed by two decades of large exhibitions at the finest art museums in the world, including the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern Museum in London. Throughout her life, Bourgeois’s art was biographical, echoing her experiences and feelings from childhood with her dominant and adulterer father and her sick mother to her difficulties as an immigrant and her emotions as a wife and mother. She also used her art to express her political views, creating numerous artworks promoting LGTBQ causes, such as the piece “I Do” for the Freedom to Marry organization in 2010. Bourgeois continued to create art until the week before she died, at the age of 98. Read more...

Annie Swan Coburn was born in Fremont, Illinois, and by the age of 15, she moved with her family to Chicago. At 24, she married Larned Coburn, a patent lawyer and the co-founder of the Union League Club of Chicago. When her husband died in 1910, Coburn moved to an apartment in the Blackstone Hotel, where she lived for more than 20 years. At that time, she began collecting art, especially by French Impressionist painters such as Renoir, Monet, and van Gogh. She exhibited her collection in her hotel suite, in every available space she had. She had drawers loaded with fine art, masterpieces stacked on the chairs, and famous artwork leaning against the walls. Curators and reporters from all over the world came to the hotel to see her art collection. Upon her death, she donated her fortune of $500,000 and hundreds of artworks to various art institutes, including the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Smith College, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where her contribution became the core of its Impressionist painting collection. Read more...

Marion Mahony was Born in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of five children. At the age of 3, two years after the Great Chicago Fire, the family moved to Winnetka, where she witnessed the quick development of the city when suburban homes replaced the natural landscape. When she was 11 years old, her father had died, and not long after, their house caught fire, and the family returned to Chicago. Back in the city, her mother joined the Chicago Women’s Club and became a school principal. Growing up, she inspired by her cousin, who studied architecture, and after graduating high school, she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At 23, she became the second woman to graduate from MIT and the first woman to have an architecture license in the US. For the next couple of years, she worked at her cousin firm, and at the age of 24, she was one of the first employees to be hired by Frank Lloyd Wright at Oak Park studio. Her architectural renderings of buildings, landscapes, furniture, and stained-glass windows became the signature of Wright’s designing style, though she never received any credit. During the 15 years she worked in the firm, she completed various independent projects, including All Souls Unitarian Church in Evanston. She had a significant contribution to the development of the American Prairie School of architecture. When Wright left the country, she declined his offer to take over the firm, but she stayed there under the leadership of Hermann con Holst, only after he assured her that she would fully control the design. At the age of 40, she married fellow architect Walter Burley Griffin. Together, they worked on the Rock Crest – Rock Glen district in Mason City, Iowa – the largest collection of Prairie Style houses, which today registered as a national historic site. The couple worked together on hundreds of projects before moving to Australia to manage the construction of their wining plan of Canberra – the new Australian capital city. They lived in Australia for 21 years, designing houses, theaters, restaurants, and colleges, creating new towns and communities. In 1935, her husband was invited to India to design a library for the University of Lucknow, and in the following year, she joined him to take charge of the office and work on other projects. After a few months, her husband died, and she returned to Australia for a short time and then back to the US. She was 67 years old when she retired from architecture and dedicated the next 20 years to work on a biography of her and her husband’s life and work, titled “The Magic of America.” Even though she never published the book, it was later digitized, and today is available online. Despite a 60 years career, and a significant impact on the development of cities in three continents, she died in poverty at the age of 90. Read more...

Janet Faye Collins (1917-2003) was born in New Orleans and grew up in Los Angeles. She began to study dance at the age of ten. Her first teacher was a neighbor, who agreed to give her lessons in exchange for costumes made by her seamstress mother. She studied ballet at the Los Angeles Catholic Community Center, one of the few places which accepted black students. At 16, she auditioned for the prestigious Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They asked her to paint her face white to perform. She declined the offer, saying, “I thought talent mattered, not color.” In the 1940s, she became the principal dancer for two Los Angeles musical productions and worked with a black dance troupe directed by Katherine Dunham. She also appeared in films and TV productions. In 1949, Collins made her New York debut performing her choreography, based on her “3-Bs” – blackness, ballet, and the Bible. At the age of 34, she was hired by the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York City as its Prima Ballerina. She was the first black dancer to be working under a full-time contract at a major American ballet company. She performed there for 4 years before leaving to teach modern dance in several institutions and performing solo dance concerts in the United States and Canada. In 1974 she retired from performing and teaching and spent her days focusing on religion and painting religious subjects in her studio in Seattle. When she died, at 86, the mourners at the service released butterflies.   Read more...

Jeanne Gang was born and raised in Belvidere, Illinois. As a child, she traveled with her father, who designed roads and bridges, to see big bridges and observe how they merged with the landscape. At age 22, after earning a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, she continued her studying abroad, first at the ETH Swiss Federal University of Technical Studies in Zurich, Switzerland, and then at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles in Versailles, France. Returning to the US, she enrolled at Harvard Graduate School of Design, from which she graduated with Distinction. At age 29, she moved to Rotterdam, Netherlands, for a few years to work with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. There she met her future husband. At 33, she established Studio Gang for architecture and urban design in Chicago. Not long after, the practice branched out to NYC, San Francisco, and Paris, working on projects all over the world. In her work, she incorporates individuals, communities, and environments. She explores the impact of the design on its surroundings while using ecology materials, and new technologies, foresaw the effect it will have on society. Her projects located all over the world and range from residential towers to cultural centers. Among them are the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, the Aqua Tower in Chicago, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the Q Residences in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the One Delisle in Toronto, Canada. Read more...

Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father was a Republican senator, and she grew up traveling back and forth between Rhode Island and Washington, DC. She was educated by a Quaker governess till she was 17 years old, and then attended Miss Abbott’s School for Young Ladies in Providence. During her upbringing, she was introduced to socialite and political circles, and at 19 years old, she made her official social debut. The following year, she embarked on an extensive European tour, where she visited many museums and art galleries and began to sharpen her skills as an art collector. At 20 years old, she met John Davison Rockefeller Jr., the son of the businessman and philanthropist John Davison Rockefeller Sr. After five years of courtship, the couple married at a big society wedding. The young Rockefellers settled in NYC, first in 13 W. 54th Street in Manhattan and later in 10 W. 54th Street. Rockefeller was a philanthropist in the heart, and she devoted herself to various charities. She donated money to the girl scouts, chaired the Auxiliary 336 of the American Red Cross, was a member of the Young Women’s Christian Association National Board, and served as chairman of different committees of the organization. In 1918, Rockefeller was chosen to chair the Housing Committee of the War Work Council, in which she worked for the improvement of living conditions for working women. She later applied the concept to the employees of Standard Oil – her husband’s family firm, purchasing land and building homes for the workers as well as a Community Center that included a clinic, nursery school, gym, and even a bowling alley. In 1925, Rockefeller revived her love for art and began collecting paintings and drawings mainly of contemporary American artists as well as European modernists such as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Within a few years, she converted part of the room in her 7th floor Manhattan apartment into a gallery, where visitors could view the art on display. In 1929, alongside Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, she co-founded the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC – the first museum in the US devoted entirely to the modern movement. Rockefeller held several positions in the museum management team, from treasurer to Vice-President and Vice-Chairman, as well as served in its committees. She pushed for establishing the museum’s film library and for the War Veterans’ Art Center – a rehabilitation program for WW2 veterans through art. Rockefeller’s dedication to art expanded outside of MoMA; she donated art pieces to other institutes, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Met Cloisters, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Ludwell-Paradise House at Colonial Williamsburg. She passed away after suffering a heart attack at the age of 73. Read more...