Katherine Millett was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She grew up with an alcoholic and abusive father, who left the family to live in poverty when she was 14. She was educated at parochial schools and later studied English literature at the University of Minnesota, graduating magna cum laude in 1956. Supported by her wealthy aunt, she furthered her education by studying at St Hilda’s College, one of the colleges of the University of Oxford in England, becoming the first woman to receive a first-class honors degree from the institute. She taught English briefly at the University of North Carolina before moving to New York City to pursue a career as an artist, supporting herself by working as a kindergarten teacher in Harlem. In 1961, at 27, Millett moved to Tokyo to study sculpture and held her first solo exhibition there. After two years, Millett returned to the US and taught English and Philosophy at Barnard College while creating art. At the time, she became involved with various women’s organizations, serving as a National Organization for Women committee member and joining the New York Radical Women and Radical Lesbians. In 1970, She began her writing career by contributing pieces to the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. That same year, she published her Ph.D. dissertation as a book titled Sexual Politics. In this groundbreaking work, Millett used sociology and anthropology tools to define the goals and strategies of the women’s liberation movement. Although it cost her the teaching position in Bernard, the book became the movement’s manifesto, making her a prominent figure and the voice of the second wave of feminism in the US. The following year, Millett founded the self-supporting women’s artist colony, Women’s Art Colony and Tree Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, later renamed the Millett Center for the Arts. In her second book, The Prostitution Papers (1971), Millett discussed the inherent relationship between prostitution and patriarchy and compared it to marriage contracts. Her following two books, published in 1974 and 1977, were autobiographies in which she explored her sexuality and role as a public figure. In the following decades, Millett continued to write and explore various aspects of feminism through writing and art. Throughout her life, she published ten books and exhibited her artwork in dozens of venues worldwide. She died of cardiac arrest several days before her 83rd birthday. Read more...

Anna Maria Grosholtz was born in Strasbourg, France. Her father died two months before she was born, and not long after, she and her mother moved to Bern, Switzerland, where her mother found a position as the housekeeper of the physician Philippe Curtius. Curtius made anatomical wax models for teaching purposes and later used his talent as a wax master to create portraits of notable figures. In 1765, he moved to Paris, where he established a wax portraiture firm, and Tussaud and her mother joined him the following year. There, she learned the art of wax modeling and soon began to work as his assistant. At 16, she made her first wax figure; it was of the French philosopher Voltaire. Over the next decade, she created many of her most famous portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1780, at 19, according to her memoirs, she was appointed the art tutor of Princess Elizabeth, Louis XVI’s sister, and lived in Versailles. So, when the French Revolution began, Tussaud, who was considered a royalist, was imprisoned but was released thanks to Curtius’s connections. To prove her allegiance to the Revolution, she had to make death masks for executed nobles, including Marie Antoinette, Maximilien Robespierre, and Princesse de Lamballe. In 1749, Curtius died, and she inherited his wax figures collection and his two museums. In the following year, she married François Tussaud and continued to create wax portraits. In 1802, at 41, she traveled to London to exhibit her collection. During this time, the Napoleonic wars started. Unable to return to Paris, she embarked on a 33 years exhibition tour through England and the British Isles, gaining fame and reputation for her wax figures creations. In 1835, at 74, she settled in London and established a permanent home for her exhibition on Baker Street. Upon her retirement, her son took over the management. She died in her sleep several years later, at the age of 88. In 1883, her grandson, who inherited his father’s role as the art director of the collection, moved the exhibition to Marylebone Road, where it still stands. Throughout the years, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum has grown to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in London and abroad, with more than 20 branches worldwide, including 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...

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...

Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in Falenty, Poland to a noble landowner family. When she was 9 years old, Nazi Germany occupied Poland, and the family moved to Warsaw and became involved in the Polish resistance. At 19, Abakanowicz began her art education. At the time, Poland was under Soviet control, which outlawed and censored every form of art except Socialist realism, characterized by depicting the utopianism of communism using images of nature, industry, and the human body. She was required to learn textile design, fiber design, screen printing. Techniques she will use later in her career. In 1954, after receiving her degree at 24, Abakanowicz began to work on her art while supporting herself by designing material for ties at a silk factory. In the late 1950s, she created her first series of large watercolors and gouaches obliged to the Communist standard of art. During this period, Poland had a social and cultural change that liberated the soviet form of art and exposed Abakanowicz to western art. Influenced by Constructivism, her work became more structured and geometric. Exploring her own artistic language, Abakanowicz started weaving as an art form. In 1960, at the age of 30, she had her first solo exhibit presenting a series of weaving alongside a collection of watercolors and gouaches works. The Polish textile and fiber design movement have embraced Abakanowicz, and she was included in the first Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie in Switzerland. By the end of the 1960s, Abakanowicz has developed her own weaving technique, expressed in her work series, Abakans – a three-dimensional fiber work. In the following decade, she created huge figurative textile sculptures of headless human figures made with sackcloth sewed together with synthetic resins. Afterward, she received various public commissions and expanded her material use, working with metals, stone, wood, and clay. In 1989, at the age of 59, Abakanowicz presented her most political work – War Games, a series of tree trunks placed on metal frames, bandaged with rags, and trapped in steel hoops. At 76, she installed her final piece, Agora, located in Chicago’s Grant Park. The installation consists of more than 100 nine feet tall iron headless figures. Abakanowicz’s art has been autobiographical, influenced by her experiences growing up during WW2 and under the Soviet regime. Her ambiguous sculptures are reflecting various conditions of humanity from a specific historical perspective. Throughout her career, she had more than 40 solo exhibitions worldwide, including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and the Museum Sonje in Korea. Abakanowicz died at the age of 86. Read more...

Nampeyo was born in Hano, a Hopi Reservation on the First Mesa in Arizona. Her mother was Tewa and her father Quootsva, and she grew up with her mother’s corn clan. As a child, she learned the art of pottery from her Hopi grandmother, becoming one of the finest potters at First Mesa. After mastering contemporary pottery making in styles such as Polacca and Crackleware, Nampeyo began to experiment with the ancient designs and forms of Hopi pottery. She visited the ruins of ancient Hopi villages, coping designs of prehistoric and protohistoric pottery pieces, and applying them to her work. She also used ancient techniques to brighten and smoothen the clay and combined five different clays instead of the common use of two types of clays. Nampeyo’s innovation and integration of the old with the new created a unique and original style of pottery. In 1875, a trader named Thomas Keam opened a post at First Mesa, where 16 years old Nampeyo sold her pottery, soon earning a steady income from her work. Within a few years, she became known for her “old Hopi pottery.” In 1898 Nampeyo’s husband traveled to Chicago to exhibit her pottery, which afterward her fame spread, and her art became a collector’s item both in the US and in Europe. At the begging of the 20th century, Nampeyo settled for a few years at the Grand Canyon Lodge. She created and sold her work in a Hopi House, a tourist attraction that included a museum, theater, a curio shop, and living space for Native American artists. In this period, she was diagnosed with trachoma, which damaged her sight. By 1925, she was almost blind, though she continued to create pottery by touch and instructing her husband and daughters how to paint the finished vassals. She died at the age of 83, but her works are presented in museums worldwide. Read more...

Maya Ying Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Both of her parents were scholar artists who fled China in the late 1940s. Her father was a ceramist and dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, and her mother was a poet and a professor of literature at Ohio University. Her creative tendencies were encouraged from a young age, creating art in her father’s ceramics studio and taking bronze casting classes at Ohio University. Lin studied architecture and sculpture at Yale University, earning her Bachelor of Arts in 1981. In her senior year, 21 years old Lin won a public competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the National Mall in Washington, DC. Picked out anonymously of 1,422 submissions, her design was a V-shaped black granite wall inscribed with the names of approximately 58,000 fallen soldiers. One side of the wall is pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument. The minimal design creates a woundlike opening in the earth which symbolizes the pain caused by the war. Contrasting the traditional commemorative designs, the memorial aroused controversy for reflecting a negative attitude towards the war. After defending her design before the US Congress, Lin compromised and added a traditional bronze statue of three soldiers with a flag standing near the memorial. After the dedication on the Veterans Day of 1982, Lin returned to academia, beginning her graduate studies in architecture at Harvard University. In 1986, at the age of 27, she received her master’s degree from Yale and opened a studio in NYC. Two years later, she designed the Civil Rights Movement Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Women’s Table in Yale. In the 1990s, Lin began to work on more artistic installations, focusing on environmental issues and the relationship between people and nature, highlighting the people’s impact on its surroundings. This can be seen in her work Groundswell – a mound of recycled glass and in her series of Wave fields in which she reshaped grass into ocean waves. Water is another recurring motive in Lin’s art, such as Wave Field in which she captured the motion of water, the 2×4 Landscape sculpture that resonant water movement, and her 2006 series Bodies of Water – a representation of The Caspian Sea, The Black Sea, and The Red Sea. In 2000, Lin created a series of seven installations along the Columbia River and Snake River for the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In this work, Lin explored the impact of the expedition on the land and the Native population throughout history. Lin’s environmentalism interest reached its peak in her work What Is Missing. Began in 2009, this multimedia project is an examination and commemoration of the growing threats of biodiversity and natural habitats. Lin is known mainly as a sculptor, though she also worked on various architectural projects that have become recognized for their emphasis on sustainability. Among them are the Langston Hughes Library in Clinton, Tennessee, and the Museum of Chinese in America in NYC. Her creative process has a verbal and literal component. First, she expresses the work verbally to understand its meaning. Then she verbalizes the definition of the site where the work will be presented, trying to understand the piece conceptually and its relationship with nature. Finally, she creates a design model and examines the juxtaposition of the materials and their relationship with the viewers and the surroundings. Read more...

Harriet Hosmer was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. By the age of 4, her mother and her three siblings died of tuberculosis. Her father, who was a physician, was determined that his only surviving child would be healthy and strong, and from a young age, Hosmer knew to ride, row, and skate. Her father also supported her artistic passion and built her a studio where she sculptured animals from clay. After high school, Hosmer decided to become a professional sculptor, which required both anatomy and art training. Not able to attend medical school and live modeling classes because of her gender, Hosmer took private lessons at the Medical Department of the state university (today the Missouri Medical College) and then studied sculpting with an artist in Boston. At 23, Hosmer realized that she would not be taken seriously as a sculptor in the US, and together with her girlfriend at the time, Charlotte Cushman, moved to Rome, Italy. There, she was accepted to the studio of the sculptor John Gibson and practiced live modeling. She joined a group of expatriate artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and numerous American women such as Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. Together they were known as the Sisterhood of American Lady Sculptors and as the White Marmorean Flock. Six months after she arrived in Rome, Hosmer received her first commission. Not long after, she began working on her first life-size sculpture of Oenone. In 1855, she created a sculpture of Puck, based on the character from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It became one of her most popular pieces, selling 50 copies, one of them to the prince of Wales (later Edward VII). Afterward, Hosmer became a well-known artist both in Europe and in the US, and by 1859, she had earned enough money and secured enough commissions to open a studio of her own and run her business independently. Influenced by the artistic trend of that time, Hosmer sculptured in the Neoclassical style, mostly depicting mythological figures, strong and courageous female characters, such as Daphne, Medusa, and Zenobia – the Queen of Palmyra. At the time, Hosmer met Louisa, Lady Ashburton, a Scottish philanthrope and art collector, who became her life partner for the next 25 years. The couple lived mainly in England, and Hosmer traveled between her studio in Kent and her studio in Rome. In the late 19th century, the neoclassical style fell out of fashion, and Hosmer became focused on designing and constructing new devices to convert limestone into marble, as well as inventing a modeling process in which the shape of the statue is made first in plaster, and the wax coating came second. In 1900, Hosmer returned to the US and settled in Chicago, where she befriended Susan B. Anthony and became involved with the women’s rights movement. Her last work, a sculpture of Queen Isabella of Castile, commissioned by her fellow members at the women’s suffrage group the Queen Isabella Association, was displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In her last years, Hosmer lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, where she died, 78 years old, from respiratory disease. As a successful professional sculptor with international recognition, Hosmer created almost a hundred pieces and became one of the most independent women of her time. She made her mark in art history and paved the way for generations of women who became artists, especially sculptresses. 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...

Emma Stebbins was born to a wealthy family in NYC. From a young age, Stebbins was encouraged to pursue her artistic talent, studying art in various studios and exhibiting her work in several galleries, including the National Academy of Design. In her early years, Stebbins focused on oil paintings and later began to explore sculpting. At the age of 41, her brother pushed her to nurture her newly found gift and sponsored her a trip to Rome to study neoclassicist sculpting. There, Stebbins joined the community of expatriate American artists; among them were the sculptors Harriet Hosmer, John Gibson, and Paul Akers, who taught her anatomy and modeling. One of the community’s leading members was Charlotte Cushman, who was the most famous English-language actress at the time. Stebbins and Cushman had an immediate connection, and soon they became partners. They exchanged vows and considered themselves a married couple. In Rome, Stebbins mastered her skills, and at 42, she embarked on a professional career. With advocation and influence from her life partner, she gained popularity and obtained commissions for her work, including three public sculptures – the highest amount that an American woman had received to that date. Over the next decade, she created a dozen marble sculptures, including “Industry” and “Commerce,” and two bronze statues, one of them is of the politicians and educational reformer Horace Mann, located at the Massachusetts State House. In 1870, after Cushman was diagnosed with breast cancer, the couple returned to the US. Stebbins stopped working and declined commissions so she could take care of her partner. The last creation she completed before suspending her work is her most famous one – the “Angel of the Waters” fountain on the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park in NYC, unveiled in 1873. It was the first public art commission awarded to a woman in NYC. After Cushman died in 1876, Stebbins dedicated herself to write her partner’s biography, titled “Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life.” Cushman’s death and the years of inhaling marble dust affected Stebbins’ health, and in her last years, she rested at her sisters’ home in New York and Lenox, Massachusetts. She passed away at the age of 67. Read more...