Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London, England, into a wealthy family. She was homeschooled, spent lots of her time outdoors, looked after her pets, such as rabbits, cats, and mice, and collected butterflies, which she studied and drew. From a young age, she was drawn to fairy tales and fantasy, incorporating her two loves by illustrating stories featuring her own pets. As Potter got older, especially during her family’s annual vacation in Scotland and the Lake District, she became interested in natural science, collecting fossils, exploring insects, and painting them. Over time, Potter focused on mycology – the study of fungi; she drew and wrote a paper on spore germination, which she presented to the Linnean Society in 1897. Later in life, she donated her mycological drawings to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, which mycologists still use to identify fungi. In her 20s, Potter, who wanted to become financially independent, began to sell holiday cards she designed, often featuring small animals like rabbits and mice. In 1890, a printing company bought some of her drawings of Benjamin Bunny to illustrate the rhyme book A Happy Pair. Afterward, she sold more illustrations for children’s books. Inspired by the successes, Potter decided to publish her own illustrated stories. She took an illustrated letter she sent to the son of her former governess and formed it into a book titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit. After she couldn’t find any buyers, she self-published it in 1901, but the following year, it was published commercially by Frederick Warne & Company. The story, which was about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter,” depicted the rural countryside by combining high-quality illustrations with simple prose. The book was printed as a small size book so that even small children could hold it. It was an immediate success, and within a year, Potter converted illustrated letters into two tale books, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester. During her lifetime, Potter wrote over 60 books, including 23 children’s tales, which sold millions of copies. The last tale book published in her lifetime was Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes in 1922. From the get-go, Potter anticipated her characters’ commercial potential. In 1903, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll and developed various merchandise, including figurines, board games, china tea sets, and baby blankets. It made Potter and her publisher a fortune, and she had the income that allowed her the autonomy that initiated this enterprise. In 1905, at 39, Potter bought the Hill Top Farm Near Sawrey in the Lake District. She learned Fell farming techniques, raised livestock, including chickens, cows, and pigs, and bred Herdwick sheep. A few years later, Potter bought Castle Farm across the road and resided there. Most books she wrote in this period reflect her interest and engagement with rural life, including The Tale of Ginger and Pickles and The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. In 1913, Potter married her solicitor William Heelis and became more involved with village life, establishing Nursing Trust for local villages and serving in numerous committees regarding rural issues. Throughout her life, Potter was a devoted conservationist and supported the National Trust’s efforts to preserve land from being destroyed by the increasing development of the time. She conserved and restored farms, and as an authority on the traditional Lakeland crafts, she always ensured that the restored farmhouses had antique Lakeland furniture. She died at 77 of complications from pneumonia. Read more...

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, then in the Kingdom of Hungary. Her father was an Indian Punjabi Sikh aristocrat scholar, and her mother was a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer. In 1921, when she was eight, the family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India. From a young age, Sher-Gil showed talent in painting but started her formal training only when arriving in India. She also learned piano and violin, and within a year of their arrival, she played in concerts at Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre. In 1924, at 11, she moved with her mother to Italy for a year, where she attended an art school in Florence and found inspiration in the works of the great Italian masters. At 16, she returned to Europe to get training as a painter in Paris. First, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the École des Beaux-Arts. At the time, she drew inspiration from Western art, especially the post-impressionism style, and included self-portraits, portraits of friends and classmates, still life, nudes, and Parisian life. At 19, she had her breakthrough with her painting Young Girls, for which she was awarded a gold medal and gained membership at the Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris, the youngest ever and the only Asian to become a member. In 1934, longings drew her back to India, and three years later, she embarked on a tour to South India to discover and explore her Indian roots. Inspired by the people and the scenery, especially the wall paintings of the Ajanta Caves, Sher-Gil began to incorporate her Western techniques with the Indian aesthetic. This new innovative style separated her from her contemporaries, particularly her use of colors, contrasting the pale tones of Bengal art. By then, Sher-Gil claimed to have found her ‘artistic mission,’ which was expressing the life of the Indian people through the canvas, as can be seen in her South Indian trilogy – Brahmacharis, Bride’s Toilet, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market. At 25, she married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Viktor Egan, and they settled near her paternal family in Saraya, in what is today Uttar Pradesh. There, she focused on rural life and began experimenting with the 17th-century Mughal miniatures painting style, as seen in her works In the Ladies, Village Scene, and Siesta. In 1941, Sher-Gil and her husband moved to Lahore, where she worked on her first major solo exhibition. She became ill only a few days before the show’s opening and slipped into a comma. She died a few days later, at the age of 28. Sher-Gil’s artistic style has influenced generations of Indian artists, and she is considered one of the significant avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century. Read more...

Born Artis Shreve in North Buxton, Canada, and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From an early age, she showed interest in art, and during high school, she painted her classmates’ portraits. After graduation, she got a scholarship to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Ontario. After receiving her degree, she married Bill Lane, and the couple moved to Detroit, Michigan. She continued her education at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the first woman to be admitted to the institute, and supported her family by painting portraits. Soon, her reputation as a portrait artist grew, receiving commissions from prominent figures, such as Michigan Governor George Romney, Detroit’s mayor Coleman Young, and members of the Ford family. Upon her divorce, she moved to NYC, NY, and met her second husband, Vince Cannon. After spending some time in Texas and New Mexico, she settled in Los Angeles, CA, working with Universal Studios and becoming the portrait painter of celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Nancy Kissinger, and President John F. Kennedy. During the 1970s, the civil rights movement influenced Lane’s work, and she began to depict social issues in her art, as can be seen in the painting Tear on the Face of America. With time, Lane’s art expanded to various mediums, such as oil painting, sketching, and collage. It became more figurative and universal, reflecting her vision of metaphysical truth rather than the specific feature of the persons she depicts. Among the portraits and sculptures of notable people she created are Dorothy Height, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aretha Franklin, Oprah Winfrey, and former President Barack Obama. Two of her most known works are a bronze bust of Sojourner Truth in the US Capitol, which upon its unveiling in 2009 by First Lady Michelle Obama, it became the first statue in the Capitol honoring a Black woman. The second is the bust she created of her great, great aunt, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, which stands in Canada since 2009. Read more...

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...

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...

Jane Golden was born in Minnesota and grew up in Margate, New Jersey. From a young age, she loved painting and studied at The Philadelphia Museum of Art. After graduating high school, she attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, and after receiving her Masters in Fine Arts degree, she continued her education at Stanford University, studying Fine Arts and Political Science. At 24, Golden moved to LA, where she taught art to children in the Santa Monica area. In 1981, after receiving a grant to create a mural as a community artist, she co-founded the Los Angeles Public Art Foundation, where she trained children to create public art and worked with parolees as their community service. During that period, Golden painted one of her first massive artworks – a 20ft x 100ft mural titled Ocean Pier, which later was named a historic landmark. In 1984, after diagnosed with Lupus and annoyed by the continuous destruction of her murals by graffiti, Golden moved to Philadelphia to be closer to her family. There, she was hired by the Anti-Graffiti Network as a field representative. The organization’s mission was to fight graffiti by providing graffiti artists a productive and artistic outlet. In this position, she worked with at-risk teens, providing them a place to contribute to the city as artists. In 1989, the Anti-Graffiti Network painted the mural Stop the Violence in Point Breeze in honor of the neighborhood children killed by gun violence. In 1996, Golden expanded the small initiative into the Mural Arts Philadelphia program as part of the city Department of Recreation. As founder and executive director, Golden collaborated with community-based and nonprofit organizations, philanthropies, and private sector organizations to sponsor and support public artworks and transforming public spaces through art. Under her leadership, Mural Arts have branched out to other programs that promote practice and policies regarding environmental issues, youth education, behavioral health, and restorative justice. By 2010, Mural Arts Philadelphia became the largest public art program in the US, creating more than 4,000 murals in Philadelphia, turning it into “the city of murals.” In 2017, Golden founded Mural Arts Institute – a knowledge-sharing center to guide similar programs in the world. Since 2001, Golden is teaching art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She serves on the Penn Museum Advisory Committee, on the Mayor’s Cultural Advisory Council, and the Heliotrope Foundation board of directors. Read more...

Born as Maud Stevens in Lyon County, Kansas. She became an acrobat and worked in various traveling circuses as an aerialist and contortionist in her youth. At the age of 27 (1904), while performing at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, she met Gus Wagner, a tattoo artist known as the Tattooed Globetrotter. He liked her, and she was fascinated by the art of tattoos, so they agreed on a barter: a date in exchange for a tattooing lesson. She became his canvas and later a tattoo artist herself. Even though the modern machine was available, they used the hand-poked method, working with a manual stick, the last tattoo artists to continue tattooing with the traditional technique.   After a few years, they got married, and soon after, they left the circus to travel in the US, working as tattoo artists and tattooed attractions, performing in vaudeville houses and county fairs. Their traveling brought tattoo artistry from the coastal cities to the inland, growing this art in the US and making it approachable to all, not only sailors and circus performers. Her tattoos were typical for the early 20th century, including patriotic symbols, women, lions, snakes, butterflies, horses, monkeys, and trees. She even tattooed her name on her arm. At a time when women had limited rights and many social restrictions, she was one of those who broke down the barriers, not only getting tattoos but becoming the first woman in the US to be known as a tattoo artist. 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...