Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi was born in Rome, Italy, the eldest of five children and the single daughter of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi and his wife, Prudenzia. At 12, after her mother died, she began to work as her father’s apprentice, learning the skills of a professional painter. Showing exemplary talents and with the support of her father, she began to create her artworks, and at 17, she completed her earliest surviving piece Susanna and the Elders. In 1611, at the age of 18, she was rapeed by her father’s colleague, painter Agostino Tassi. After he refused to marry her, a costume meant to restore her dignity, her father pressed charges against him. The main discussion of the trial was not the rape itself but her virginity; if she was not a virgin, there was no legal case. The court exiled Tassi from Rome, though it was never enforced. In the following month, Gentileschi married the Florentine artist Pierantonio Stiattesi, and the couple moved to Florence. There, she became a successful court painter at the House of Medici. She learned to read and write, attended musical and theatrical performances, and befriended many artists, writers, and thinkers, including Galileo Galilei. During this period, she began to develop her painting style. In 1615, at 23, Gentileschi contributed the painting Allegory of Inclination to the ceiling of the Casa Buonarotti, honoring the life of Michelangelo. The following year, she joined the Accademia Delle Arti del Disegno, becoming the first woman accepted to the prestigious art academy. In 1620, at 27, she separated from her husband and returned to Rome. There, she painted in her studio, had freedom and independence that was rare for women at the time and had numerous relationships with men. Due to her growing reputation as an artist, she became associated with various patrons, who commissioned her to paint in various genres, such as the Baroque style, known for its straightforward imagery, as seen in her work, Susanna and the Elders from 1622. In 1626, she moved to Venice before relocating to Naples to seek more job opportunities. Once again, she was able to adapt her style to the demand of her patrons, which at the time requested more religious themes, for example, her painting The Birth of Saint John the Baptist from 1635. During this period, she painted one of her most known self-portraits, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. In 1638, at 45, she traveled to London to collaborate with her father on a series of ceiling paintings in the Great Hall in the Queen House, commissioned by King Charles I of England. In 1642, she returned to Naples, managed a successful studio, and painted until she died in her 60s. In her lifetime, she broke barriers for a woman in the male-dominated art world and managed to thrive and become a successful and respectful artist. Despite changing painting genres, she remained true to her unique voice and style, which was reflected in the subjects she chose to depict – heroic female protagonists from history, mythology, and the bible, such as Cleopatra, Bathsheba, the Penitent Magdalenes, and especially Judith. Today, she is recognized as one of the most accomplished artists of the 17th-century. Read more...

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, to an upper-middle-class family. Her family was active in the Black community in town and often hosted art and literary salons. She showed artistic abilities from a young age, creating sculptures and puppets out of clay from the river behind her house. In 1907, racial violence increased in the South, and at 16, Thomas and her family moved to Washington, DC. She attended the segregated Armstrong Technical High School, where she had her first art class. She aspired to become an architect, and since it was an unusual profession for women at the time, she decided to study kindergarten education instead. In 1914, at 23, she began her 36 years career as a teacher. In 1921, at the age of 30, Thomas returned to school as a home economics student at Howard University. Soon after, she switched to fine art in the new art department, becoming the first student to graduate the program and probably the first Black woman in the US to earn a bachelor’s degree in art. At 33, with her new specialization, Thomas began teaching art at Shaw Junior High School, leaving for her retirement 36 years later. She also founded a community arts program for children while attending similar programs for adults. In 1930, she began taking summer courses at Columbia University, earning a Master’s in art education at 43 years old. In this period, her art was influenced by the French School of Painting, focusing on landscapes and still-life painted in an impressionist style. During the 1940s, she was part of The Little Paris Group – a community of Black Washington artists that helped beginner artists improve their techniques. It had inspired her to further her academic education, and for the next ten years, she took night and weekend classes in Art History and Painting at the American University. At the time, her art evolved from figurative painting to abstracts, experimenting with shapes and colors, and she became associated with the Washington Color School – an abstract expressionist art movement. Over the years, Thomas continued painting, but only after she retired from teaching did she become a full-time professional artist. At 69, she began to translate all the theoretical and practical education she acquired over the decades into her own art with a unique point of view. She became known for her colorful paintings of abstracted shapes and patterns, as can be seen in her series of Earth Paintings, in which she painted abstract circles that reference the rows of azaleas and cherry blossoms that grow in Washington DC. In 1966, at the age of 75, Thomas had her first retrospective exhibition at Howard University. She continued to create new work, such as the Space series, inspired by the moon landing in 1969 and displaying it in various venues, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1972 she became the first black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thomas died at the age of 87 following aortic surgery. Read more...

Zaha Mohammad Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class family. Growing up, her family used to visit ancient Sumerian cities, which inspired her interest in architecture, and by the age of 11, she made up her mind to become one. Her parents encouraged her ambition and allowed her to design the interior of their home. In her youth, she attended boarding schools in Switzerland and England, and later she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. At 22, she moved to London to attend the Architectural Association School of Architecture. After graduation, her professor recruited her to his firm in the Netherlands. At 30, Hadid returned to the UK and opened Zaha Hadid Architects firm in London, and later another branch in NYC. At the time, the typical architectural style was postmodernism, and Hadid, with her innovative perspective, was set apart with more colorful and radical designs. In 1983, at the age of 33, Hadid caught international attention when her proposal won in a competition to design The Peak center in Hong Kong, offering a horizontal skyscraper that diagonally moved down the hillside. Even though it was never built, this project established her aggressive geometric and dynamic aesthetic, as was reflected in her following designs proposals for the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, the Düsseldorf Art and Media Centre, and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales. Some of her designs were too avant-garde to be actualized and were displayed as artworks in various museums. In 1993, 43 years old Hadid received her first major-built project for the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The structure, made of glass and concrete, was composed of sharp-angled forms that resemble a bird in flight. This design has launched her career, allowing her to explore her interests in designing dynamic sculptural structures with interconnecting spaces. Many appear in her works from this period, such as the IBA Housing in Berlin, the Mind Zone exhibition space at the Millennium Dome in London, the Land Formation One exhibition space in Weil am Rhein, and the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck. One of Hadid’s biggest successes came when she won the commission to design the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first woman to design an art museum in the US. Opened in 2003, the building, constructed of a series of vertical cubes and voids, was described as “the most important American building to be completed since the cold war.” Hadid continued winning more international competitions, designing buildings in her unique deconstructivist style. Including the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, for which she won her first Royal Institute of British Architects Award (RIBA) and the Guangzhou Opera House, Guangzhou, China, with a US$300 million budget. In 2004, at 54, Hadid won the most prestigious award in architecture -­ the Pritzker Architecture Prize, making history as its first female recipient. Her next ambitious projects included the waveform Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi, The National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century in Rome, and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. From the beginning of her career, Hadid taught architecture at various institutes, including- the Architectural Association, Cambridge University, and more. She also held the Sullivan Chair professorship at Chicago’s School of Architecture and served on the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation and the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board. Among the many awards and accolades she received throughout the years, she was named Commander of the Civil Division of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Hadid died of a heart attack at the age of 65. Read more...

Born Marvyne Elisabeth Betsch in Jacksonville, Florida, to a wealthy Southern black family. Her great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, was the first Black millionaire in Florida who founded American beach in Amelia Island, Florida, the largest vacation resort for black families during the Jim Crow era. From a young age, Betsch showed musical talent, and by the age of 5, she played the piano. She went on to study piano at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, but after seeing the opera Aida, she changed her course to vocal studies. In 1955, at the age of 20, she traveled to Europe to sharpen her skills. She studied voice in London and Paris, and within four years, she had her opera debut in Braunschweig, Germany. The crowd loved her, and she received accolades for her interpretations of Carmen and Salome. After ten years abroad, Betsch returned to the US and found out that the legacy of her great-grandfather was in danger. American Beach’s maintenance was neglected throughout the years, and with the desegregation of the beaches in 1964, the black community could choose better locations for its vacation. Betsch decided to fight for the preservation of the beach. In 1975, 40 years old Betsch gave up her singing career, moved to her great-grandfather’s beach house, and began to dedicate her time and efforts to protect American Beach and its inhabitants from development and destruction. She became active in various environmental organizations, gave tours about the American Beach and its black history, made media appearances to raise awareness of its historical and ecological importance, and spoke with passers-by about it. Her work gained her the nickname The Beach Lady. Betsch donated all her life earnings, of about $750,000, to environmental charities, studies, and projects. When she ran out of money, she sold her family home and slept at friends’ houses and even on a chair on the beach. Her sister rented for her a small trailer, and Betsch turned it into a museum about American Beach. In 2002, at 67, Betsch was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to remove her stomach. Instead of slowing her down, her declining health motivated her to do more. In the same year, she saw her efforts paying off when the American Beach became a National Register of Historic Places. In her last years, she worked on establishing the American Beach Museum, which opened in 2014, 9 years after her death. Read more...

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born in Mexico City, Mexico. Her father was a German immigrant, and her mother was Mexican of Spanish and Native American descent, a dual identity that she will later reflect on in her art. When she was 6 years old, she contracted polio, which left her with a limp and chronic pain for the rest of her life. To strengthen her leg, she was encouraged by her parents to play soccer, swim, and wrestle, which at that time were not usual activities for girls. As a child, Kahlo assisted her father in his photography studio, an experience that helped her develop artistic tendencies and an eye for details. She enrolled at the National Preparatory School at the age of 15, intending to study medicine and not art. She became politically active and joined the Young Communist League. There, she first met the famous painter and her future lover, Diego Rivera, who worked on one of his murals for the school. At the age of 18, Kahlo was severely injured in a bus accident and went through more than 30 medical operations throughout her life. During her prolonged recovery, she taught herself to paint, practicing self-portraits. One of them was the Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress. Three years later, at the age of 21, Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party. In one of the Party’s meetings, she once again encountered Rivera and asked him to advise her about pursuing art as a career. The 42 years old artist was supportive of the young painter and encouraged her to develop her work. They got married in the following year, and afterward, Kahlo has changed her painting style, focusing on Mexican folk art, as seen in her work Frieda and Diego Rivera. In the first years of their relationship, Kahlo traveled with Rivera to the US to exhibit his works. During this period, Kahlo had two miscarriages, and she used art to reflect her pain, a taboo topic at the time. In 1933, the couple returned to Mexico and settled in San Angel, where they lived in separate houses joined by a bridge. Their residence became a gathering place for artists and political activists, including Leon Trotsky and his wife, who were expelled to Mexico. In 1938, at the age of 31, Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in NYC. In the following year, she lived in Paris for a while, where she exhibited her art and became friends with artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. When she came back to Mexico, she divorced Rivera, following numerous affairs of both sides. In that year, Kahlo had painted several of her most famous pieces, including The Two Fridas, in which she depicted herself in twin figures, each one is representing the opposite side of her personality – the one Rivera loved and the one he betrayed. After one year, the couple reconciled and moved to Kahlo’s childhood home in Coyoacán, known as La Casa Azul – the Blue House. Over time, Kahlo gained popularity, and she displayed her painting in various venues in the US. In 1943, at 36, she was appointed a professor of painting at the Education Ministry’s School of Fine Arts. In her 40s, her health has declined, and she was diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot. She had to go through several operations, including an amputation. She often used drugs and alcohol for relief but never stopped working, painting herself in her physical and mental struggles, as appeared in her work Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill. In 1953, at the age of 46, she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico, arriving lying on a bed because of her condition. In the following year, she was hospitalized several more times because of various health issues, but those did not prevent her attend political activities. Less than two weeks before she died, Kahlo had her last public appearance at a demonstration against the overthrow of the president of Guatemala. Kahlo died at the age of 47 in her childhood home in Coyoacán. For more than three decades, Kahlo had painted 155 paintings, in which she explored subjects of identity, class, postcolonialism, gender, and race. Her work is characterized by autobiographical elements such as physical and mental pain, marriage, miscarriages, Mexican and indigenous culture, and women’s experiences in society and as individuals. Although she achieved success during her life, it was only in the 1970s that she gained fame after being adopted as a feminist icon of female strength and creativity. Read more...

Anne Briardy Mergen was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Discovering her love for art from a young age, she went on to study commercial art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. At the age of 20, she moved with her family to Miami, Florida, where she worked as a fashion advertising artist for a local department store. At the age of 26, she married Frank Mergen, and the couple had two children. In 1933, at the age of 27, Mergen tried her luck and submitted some fashion drawings to the Miami Daily News. Her unique perspective, style, and skill caught the editor’s attention, and the paper began publishing her cartoons. Her first published drawing was a one-page fashion story titled “Anne and Peg’s Scrapbook.” Soon, the strip was expanded into a two-page feature and published for three years. In that same year, the newspaper published Mergen’s first political cartoon. After three years, she was appointed the editorial cartoonist of the newspaper, the first and only female editorial cartoonist in the US. In her cartoons, Mergen covered local, national, and international political and social issues. From tourism in Florida to the Great Depression, World War II, the Polio epidemic, and the Iron Curtain. Her witty cartoons became the readers’ favorite, and Mergen gained national recognition. At the age of 50, Mergen left the Miami Daily News but continued to create cartoons as a freelance for several more years. Throughout her career, she published more than 7000 cartoons, often highlighting topics she cared about, such as world peace, domestic problems, community well-being, and the importance of education. Mergen died at the age of 88. Her work paved the way for other female cartoonists. Read more...

Carmen Amaya was born in Barcelona, Spain, to a gypsy Romani family. As an infant, she learned to dance from her mother and aunt. When she was only 4, she started to accompany her father in his performances at pubs and clubs. After the show, she picked the coins that the crowd threw on the floor. When she was 6, she caught the attention of a show businessman who booked her shows in better-respected venues, such as the Spanish Theater. The audience loved her, and she became known as La Capitana. In 1929, the 16 years old Amaya performed at the International Fair of Barcelona in front of Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain. A praising review about her in the newspaper Mirador made her famous across the country. For the next few years, she performed in the most prestigious halls in Spain, including the Zarzuela Theatre and the Fontalba Theatre, as well as in films, such as the musical La Hija de Juan Simón. In July of 1936, 23 years old Amaya and her cuadro (a troupe of musicians, dancers, and singers) performed in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War began. They managed to cross the border to Portugal and from there to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, she continued to perform, and after 9 months, she embarked on a four-year tour through Latin America. In 1941, the company arrived in the US, where Amaya’s fame and reputation continued growing. She performed at Carnegie Hall, was invited to participate in several Hollywood films and the White House. By then, Amaya established herself as a renowned artist with a fascinating personality and sharp wit. Her dancing became known as the most daring flamenco, with constant improvisations and quick and rattling footwork that became her trademark. She broke the rules of traditional female flamenco by adding “masculine” elements and not emphasizing the “feminine” ones, such as upper torso movements. In 1947, at the age of 34, she returned to Europe, performing in Paris and London, before returning to her homeland Spain as a legend, the most outstanding flamenco dancer of her time. She continued to perform across Europe and Latin America for the next two decades. In 1963, Amaya’s health began to decline. Terminally ill with kidney disease, she did not stop performing until she was over-exhausted. On August 8, 1963, she performed her last dance, collapsing in the middle of the show. She died three months later at the age of 50. Read more...

Laura Mary Bragg was born in Northbridge, Massachusetts. At the age of 6, she contracted scarlet fever that caused her an incurable hearing loss, for which she compensated by reading lips and having an exceptional memory. She was home-schooled by private tutors until high school and afterward attended Simmons College, earning a degree in library science. At 25, she started to work as a librarian, first in Maine and then at one of the libraries in New York City. In 1909, at the age of 28, Bragg began her career at the Charleston Museum in South Carolina. She started as a librarian and soon got promoted to curate books and public instruction. In this position, she developed the first educational program of the museum, which was the first in a southern museum to welcome all visitors, regardless of their race. Bragg saw herself as a social missionary, believing that a museum is not only a visitors’ attraction but a teaching tool that should be available to everyone, including those who are unable to visit it. To execute her ideas, she developed traveling school exhibits that became known as “Bragg Boxes” – wooden boxes opened into a display set of local natural history or cultural history. The boxes were distributed to all the schools in the region, white and black, urban and rural. The Bragg Boxes had an immediate success and were incorporated in other museums as well. In 1921, 40 years old Bragg was named the director of the Charleston Museum – the first woman in the US to run a publicly funded art museum. Under her leadership, the museum had weekly opening hours for black visitors. She expanded the museum’s field by creating connections with the American Alliance of Museums, where she was later appointed as a board member. In 1931, Bragg added public reading rooms to the museum and established the first free library in Charleston, in which she served as a trustee and librarian. Bragg received national acclaim for her work at the Charleston Museum, and in 1930 she was asked to become the director of the Berkshire Museum. At the time, the museum had exhibited a small family collection, and Bragg developed it into an educational institute. She expanded the exhibitions, turned its yard into a sculpture gallery, and hosted performing artists. Within a year, the museum had doubled the number of visitors. After nine years, she retired from directing the museum and returned to Charleston to work as an educator at the museum’s library. Bragg’s interest in art and education expanded outside her work in the museums. In 1920, she was a part of the Charleston Renaissance, alongside artists such as Alice Ravenel Huger, DuBose Heyward, and Josephine Pinckney, and co-founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Southern Museum Conference, and the Southern States Art League. Bragg died at the age of 97 in Charleston. Learn more about Bragg and other pioneer women of Charleston in one of these guided tours: Charleston’s Strong Women of the South History Tour Historic Women of Charleston Guided Walking Tour Amazing Ladies of Charleston Walking Tour Read more...

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, to a family of merchants and started to paint at a young age. At the age of 10, she began hallucinating fields of dots that she later brought to life in her creations. At 13, during WW2, Kusama worked in a factory that supplied parachutes for the Japanese army. After the war, she studied Nihonga – a traditional Japanese painting style, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. At the time, she developed an interest in the avant-garde. She began to experiment with abstract natural forms, and in 1952, at the age of 23, she had her first solo exhibition. Her abusive relationship with her mother and the conservative Japanese culture drove Kusama to leave Japan, and at the age of 28, she moved to the US. She settled in NYC, where her avant-garde works received praise and exhibited among the most known pop-artists of the era, such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Kusama became familiar with her obsessive repetition, as can be seen in particular in her Infinity Nets – paintings of thousands of tiny dots that covered a 30 ft-long canvas, with no regard to its edges, as if they are endless. Her work, an implementation of her hallucinations, explored the boundaries of painting and created a hypnotic sensation for the viewer. This idea was reflected in her 1965 installation of Infinity rooms, in which she lined a room with mirrored glass and covered the floor with stuffed phalli painted with red polka dots. During this period, she expressed her sexual anxiety by covering objects, such as chairs and shoes, with phallic protrusions. In 1966, Kusama participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale, in which she sold individuals mirrored spheres that she installed on the lawn until the organizers made her stop. In the following years, her artworks were public performances and protests against the Vietnam War. They often involved nudity, such as the unauthorized performance at the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she painted polka dots on the naked participants. In 1968, she founded the Kusama Fashion Company Ltd, designing and selling avant-garde clothing. In that same year, she opened nude painting studios as well as a gay social club. Although Kusama gained fame for her art, she did not get paid for most of it, unlike the many male artists who copied her work. Her mental health declined, and she tried to commit suicide several times, been in and out of hospitals. In 1973, at the age of 44, she returned to Japan and began writing and publishing surrealistic poems, novels, and short stories. In 1977, by her own choice, she moved into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She opened a studio near the hospital and continued to make art. In 1989, Kusama returned to the public eye when the Center for International Contemporary Arts in NYC presented a retrospective of her work. In the following decades, similar shows took place in various cities around the world, including Oxford, Venice, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. Throughout her life, she created hundreds of artwork from different mediums. She inspired people and challenged them not only because of her original and innovative body of work but also because of her honesty and openness about her mental health and how art can save lives as it saved hers. In her 90s, Kusama is still working, creating new pieces and revisiting her previous works. She exhibits in the biggest art institutions, and usually, the tickets are sold out in advance. Read more...

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. Read more...