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Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Respect for Aretha Franklin

RESPECT for Aretha Franklin, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. She is called “Queen of Soul”. In 2010, Rolling Stone magazine ranked her number one on its list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” and number nine on its list of “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. Franklin began her career as a child, singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit where her father was a minister.

At the age of 18, she embarked on a secular music career as a recording artist for Columbia Records. While her career did not immediately flourish, she found acclaim and commercial success once she signed with Atlantic Records in 1966. Her commercial hits such as “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”, “Respect”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “Chain of Fools”, “Think” and “I Say a Little Prayer” propelled her past her musical peers. Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries, and 20 number-one R&B singles. She won 18 Grammy Awards,[3] including the first eight awards given for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (1968–1975) and a Grammy Awards Living Legend honor and Lifetime Achievement Award. Franklin is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 75 million records worldwide. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1987, she became the first female performer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She also was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2019 awarded Franklin a posthumous special citation “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades”. In 2020, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
—Adapted from Wikipedia

When Aretha died, so many excellent writers paid tribute. I am going to lazily quote them here with some links where you can see her perform.

“Franklin’s 76 years on Earth bookended a grand arc of tumult, letdowns, progress, setbacks, terror, and hope in American history. That in itself might not be a remarkable feat so much as a reminder that all black people older than 53 have seen and lived through hell. But Aretha—and that first name is sufficient, as it was in black churches and parlors for half a century—was an architect of a movement as much as a witness to it. She toured with the actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to raise money for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, when the organization was in dire financial straits and was attempting to embark on a Poor People’s Campaign. She was an activist who strained to keep a movement going even after King’s assassination, and who worked to support the Black Panthers and attempted to post bail to free the activist Angela Davis from jail. She loved black people. In this country, that simple fact was radical enough.”

“At her zenith, her main power was in transformation, in taking less potent songs and breathing fire into them. Through sheer force of will, she transformed Otis Redding’s “Respect” from a pleading ballad to a civil-rights staple, a slogan for struggles at the intersection of blackness and womanhood”

“Soul was and is a revolutionary art, and Aretha [the “Queen of soul”] belongs in the broader conversation about this country’s revolutionary heroes with any provocateur or patriot who ever lived.”
—Vann R. Newkirk II
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/aretha-franklins-revolution/567715/

“More controversially, in 1971 she publicly offered to pay bail for the black power figurehead and Communist party member Angela Davis, who had been charged with conspiracy, kidnapping and murder for her alleged role in a courtroom escape that had turned into a shootout with the police. “Angela Davis must go free,” Aretha said. “I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.””
—Sean O’Hagan
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/19/aretha-franklin-life-of-heartbreak-heroism-hope

“This was the promise of soul: that pain granted depth, and that one was never alone but accompanied by a vibrant community that had crossed too many bridges in order to survive. Franklin was the queen not only of soul music but of soul as a concept, because her great subject was the exceeding of limits. Her willingness to extend her own vocal technique, to venture beyond herself, to strain to implausible heights, and revive songs that seemed to be over—all these strategies could look and sound like grace. She knew that we would need it.”
—Emily Lordi
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/aretha-franklins-astonishing-dr-feelgood

“Franklin sang with a power and conviction that healed. She transformed pain—both others’ and her own—into jubilation.”

““Respect,” originally an Otis Redding song, is best-known as an Aretha anthem. The song became an unofficial rallying cry for both the civil-rights movement and women’s liberation, a powerful addition to the artistic arsenals of both efforts. Franklin’s singing made shared demands impossible to ignore.”
—Hannah Giorgis
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/aretha-franklin-natural-woman/567697/

“Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. “

“What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.”

“When I e-mailed President Obama about Aretha Franklin and that night, he wasn’t reticent in his reply. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

‘ “Aretha gets offended when she thinks you think you’re getting over on her,” Tavis Smiley told me. “It’s hard to know why that line gets blurred from time to time, between making people respect you and self-sabotage. But don’t ever underestimate the power of the personal. ‘Respect’ is not just a song to Aretha. It’s the mantra for her life.” ‘
—David Remnick
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul

Video

Performing “Respect” in 1967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGjZHvD5q4

Aretha sings “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center honors and President Obama sheds a tear while Carole King flips out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT4aRd-hCqQ

Amazing Grace, a documentary released in 2019 presenting the live recording of Aretha Franklin’s album Amazing Grace at The New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles in January 1972. Available on Amazon, Hulu, etc. This is an article about the film in Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/aretha-franklin-documentary-amazing-grace-making-of-true-story

This print was published in August 2021.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Set Boundaries for Simone Biles

SET BOUNDARIES for Simone Biles, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

Simone Arianne Biles (born March 14, 1997) is considered to be one of the greatest gymnasts of all time. A Wikipedia search will show you how many medals she has earned, and how many records she has broken. She is extraordinarily talented and dedicated to her sport. Her 2018 routine on vault and her 2019 routine on floor exercise are the most difficult ever performed in women’s artistic gymnastics. The four moves named after Biles are the most difficult elements on vault, balance beam, and floor exercise. 

Biles has a very active and influential social media presence and she has used her voice to influence how her sport is run. Here is a link to a really good piece about her influence on gymnastics culture. I don’t think her importance can be exaggerated:

https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/29455749/how-simone-biles-found-voice-changed-gymnastics-culture

On January 18, 2018, Biles released a statement on Twitter confirming that she was one of the scores of women whom former USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar had sexually assaulted. She also called out USA Gymnastics for allowing the abuse to occur, and for subsequently covering it up. USA gymnastics had been for 15 years an authoritarian system run by an abusive trainer called Martha Karolyi. The young women were isolated and controlled, they were broken like horses, so that they would be obedient and completely dedicated to building their gymnastics skills. However, Simone’s coach, Aimee Boorman, took a different path and nurtured Simone as a human, not a gymnastics machine, and encouraged her autonomy. Biles has obviously thrived under this “new” approach. Simone still had to train at the Karolyi camp, but because she was so talented, she had some leverage, and Simone’s parents and coach sought to protect her. Simone’s story is all about pushing the boundaries of the U.S. gymnastics machine, leaping over obstacles, performing at the frontier of excellence, and setting boundaries to protect her mental health.

In the 2020 Olympic games (held in 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic) Biles withdrew from most of her events, citing mental health concerns. Adapted from Wikipedia: Biles explained that she withdrew primarily due to experiencing “the twisties”, a psychological phenomenon causing a gymnast to lose air awareness while performing twisting elements. Biles made the decision to withdraw after the first rotation of the team final because she felt that she had “simply got so lost [her] safety was at risk as well as a team medal.” Some commentators criticized Biles, accusing her of being a “quitter” or selfishly depriving another athlete of the chance to compete. She was also slandered in the Russian state-owned media. Multiple gymnasts defended Biles’s decision and relayed their own stories of struggling with the twisties. Biles’s decision to prioritize her mental health was generally widely praised and credited with starting a wider conversation about the role of mental health in sports. This discussion was launched earlier in the year by Naomi Osaka, the champion tennis player, when she refused to speak with the press to protect her mental health. Biles showcased that the new U.S. approach to the Olympics is focused on athletes’ well-being rather than only on winning.

Here is an interview with Biles speaking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4eJ2TZytY

A few weeks after the Olympics, Biles and other gymnasts testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Nassar’s abuse of American gymnasts, and how the USA Gymnastics organization—and the FBI—did not protect the athletes from abuse and deliberately failed to address reports of abuse. The gymnasts were clearly angry and in pain during this testimony, and the event shed new light on the stress Biles must have been suffering at the Olympics, so soon before thishearing.

Here is a quote from her testimony:
“Nelson Mandela once said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” It is the power of that statement that compels and empowers me to be here in front of you today. I do not want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse. To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetuated his abuse.”

Here is a link to the transcript of Biles’s testimony on 9/15/2021:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Biles%20Testimony1.pdf

Early life

Biles was born on March 14, 1997, in Columbus, Ohio, the third of four siblings. Her parents were unable to care for Simone or her three siblings. All four went in and out of foster care. In 2000, Biles’ maternal grandfather, Ron Biles, and his second wife, Nellie Cayetano Biles, began temporarily caring for the children in the north Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, after learning that his grandchildren had been in foster care. In 2003, the couple officially adopted Simone and her younger sister Adria. Ron’s sister adopted the two oldest children. Simone started doing gymnastics when she was six and started training with coach Boorman at age eight.

This print was published in August 2021.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Make A Way for Jane Goodall

MAKE A WAY for Jane Goodall, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

Jane Goodall was born in 1934. Since she had been a small child, Goodall knew that she wanted to go to Africa and work with wild animals, and to write. Her mother always made it clear that if she put her mind to it, she could find a way to do what she wanted. Goodall’s father (a race car driver) divorced her mother when Jane was twelve, and she grew up in a home full of women, in Bournemouth. They didn’t have much money, and couldn’t afford college for Jane, so she did a secretarial course in order to have some professional skills that could be useful anywhere. In 1957 she had been working in London when she had the great luck to be invited to visit a friend who had moved to Kenya. She moved back in to her family’s home to save on rent and worked long hours at a tiresome job to raise the money for a sea voyage to Africa.  

Once in Africa, Goodall confirmed her feeling that she wanted to stay there, so through family connections she got a job with a British company. At a dinner party she was told that if she wanted to work with animals she should go to see Louis Leakey, a famously infamous paleoanthropologist. So she called him up, impressed him with her enthusiasm, asked for his help with her plan to work with animals and write, and took a job replacing his outgoing secretary. It turns out the previous secretary was leaving because the married Leakey had a habit of sexually harassing the young women he worked with. At the time this was thought to be “striking up an office romance.” Leakey decided to stay with his brilliant archeologist wife, Mary, so the secretary had to go. Amazingly, Jane was able to decline such a relationship with her boss, but still pursue a mentorship arrangement with him. He eventually had other plans for her.

In 1958, when Jane Goodall had the opportunity to do research on chimpanzees in the wild, the authorities in Africa wouldn’t let her, a young woman, go into the jungle without an official assistant. Remarkably, her mother volunteered and moved to Africa. In 1960, after all the permissions and funding were in order, they went together. Louis Leakey made the expedition possible. He wanted someone to study the chimps to get an idea of what the behavior of our common ape ancestors might have been like. It was important to him that Goodall had not been to University, he thought her mind “uncluttered by reductive scientific thinking” and set ideas about the differences between animals and humans. Leakey felt that women are better at studying animals than men are. As Goodall says in the film, “Jane’s Journey,” Leakey thought “women would be better observers, you need patience to be a good mother as you need to be able to understand quite quickly the needs, the wants, of a non-verbal being, and that’s our children before they can speak.” 

In the Gombe preserve in Tanzania, it was five or six months before the chimps would let Goodall close enough to see much. She left camp alone every day and many nights, in all weather, to go out into the jungle to try to observe them through her binoculars. She was able finally to get close to the chimps because of the personality of one individual chimpanzee that Goodall named “David Greybeard.” This particular chimp lost his fear of Goodall and let her get close to him. This influenced the behavior of the other chimps and she was able to regularly get close to the group. She eventually devised feeding stations close to camp so that the animals could be lured close daily. 

It is difficult to exaggerate how revolutionary is this long term study of chimpanzees. Goodall pushed against the methodological orthodoxy of the time by treating each animal as an individual with a personality. For example, she gave them names and spoke of their emotions. Goodall learned about effective child raising by watching Flo, a high-ranking female. Over six generations the project was able to connect effective child-raising with “successful” adults. Goodall found that chimpanzees make and use tools, something that was thought to define humans and separate us from all the other animals. She discovered that chimps eat meat. Chimps sometimes eat chimps! Chimpanzees engage in armed warfare. Troops of chimps have their own cultures that are different from other troops’; not every behavior is instinctual. She has concluded that the difference between humans and animals is a matter of degree and not of kind. 

When Goodall looks back at her story she is amazed at all the luck involved in her path. But I also see that she was able to turn her luck into something, and her will was just as important in creating her path. She made a way. She was a beautiful woman, and so got a lot of attention, sometimes condescending attention, but she also used this as a way to drum up public interest in her project and to get funding.

In 1986 Jane Goodall attended a conference about chimpanzees and was made to see all the threats to their survival around the world, not just the small group she was occupied with in Gombe. Since then she has been an activist and an organizer and her scope has vastly expanded. She can see that wildlife conservation can not be separated from work against poverty, because when humans will destroy their environment in order to find something to eat. She saw that if children do not have hope about the future then they will just give up. So her institute that was created to work for wildlife conservation expanded to include youth education. She called this program “Roots and Shoots” (see design note below).  When she saw the people living near Gombe cutting down the trees to make their living, she knew she needed to create an economic development scheme that gives micro loans to enterprises that must be environmentally sustainable. It wasn’t long before the forest started growing back. She leverages her fame to make a way forward for the survival of life on our planet. She is tireless. She persists.

Goodall did earn academic degrees. She had several marriages but always managed to belong to herself. She used child rearing methods she learned from Flo to raise her son (something like what we call attachment parenting now, quite out of fashion when she was a young mother). She has a spiritual interpretation of her feelings of connection to nature and her purpose in life. There is so much more to Goodall’s story than I can include here. Also, as she is still living, her story has not ended.

DESIGN NOTE
The first version of this design had a chimpanzee in the background and I never felt satisfied, it seemed too literal a representation of Jane’s story.The image was not about her power, for she admitted that the choice to study chimps was arbitrary. It was someone who visited my Female Power hut who gave me the idea I settled on (so far). The visitor said that her mother was a fan of Goodall’s and that her favorite thing from one of Jane’s speeches was that she described how a sprout can push through paving to grow: that an individual who seems slight can have immense strength. When I mentioned this to another visitor, she described how her own husband had been encouraged by someone who said that if you build roots, that is, a connected network, then you can have an outsized effect because of those connections. This image, then, gets at the radical optimism that Jane tries to promote with all her activism. We cannot give up because so much is at stake.

This print was published in June 2021 and revised in August 2021.

Here are some of the resources I used in this project:

The films “Jane” and “Jane’s Journey”

Books: In the Shadow of Man, by Jane van Lawick-Goodall
Jane Goodall, A Biography by Meg Greene

Online resources:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/episodes/weekender-dr-jane-goodall-her-lifelong-work-and-new-film
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/jane-goodall-research-
conservation/
https://www.ecowatch.com/jane-goodall-2646381906.html

The visitors to my booth (the “Female Power hut”) at Eastern Market in Washington, D.C.