Tag Archives: Feminist Art

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

take power, for Nancy Pelosi

take power #FemalePowerProject print for Nancy Pelosi
take power — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS print honoring Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Patricia Pelosi, born March 26, 1940, to a political family in Baltimore, is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Representing four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, CA, she is the highest-ranking elected woman in United States history. Pelosi is second in the presidential line of succession, immediately after the vice president. She returns to the post after having served in it previously from January 4, 2007–January 3, 2011, when she was the first woman to hold the post.

I decided to make a perSISTERS print for Nancy Pelosi because of the suggestion of a young man I met in one of my Female Power Project booths at a street market in DC. He had previously worked for Pelosi and admired her. He also told me about the “people don’t give you power, you take it” comment, which I found sited in numerous places. Pelosi is, and has been for a while, the most powerful and effective woman in  American politics. Her story, and peoples’ stories about her, are a telling distillation of America’s ideas about female power. It isn’t rocket science; it isn’t subtle at all. Americans hate and distrust powerful women. According to a 2010 paper by Yale researchers sited by Peter Beinart in the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, when presented with the same description, both men and women reacted negatively to an ambitious, power-seeking leader with a woman’s name, while the same description attached to a man’s name elicited support. 

Beinart goes on to write, “As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe ‘that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.’ But ‘these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.’ In fact, ‘the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.’”

Pelosi is so powerful and effective because she is able to get a group of people (Democrats in the House of Representatives) to work together to pass legislation. She does this by figuring out how to appeal to their interests, give them what they want and need professionally, and convince them to vote a certain way according to her strategy.  

She is often targeted by the right wing and others, but she knows this is because she is effective. Being vilified does not hurt her feelings. “Be thick-skinned if you are going to take power” is the message BEHIND the message “Take Power.” And the message IN FRONT is: to raise up powerful women we need to admire, respect, and support women who are thick-skinned. We must check ourselves when we find we are reacting negatively to powerful women. We don’t have to interpret their effectiveness as selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness. We all need to work on this.

DESIGN NOTE

In the original photographs by Gage Skidmore (I created a composite of two from the same shoot), the pantsuit Pelosi wears is orange. I changed the color to fuchsia in my interpretation because Pelosi got a good bit of attention for the fuchsia dress she wore in her speaker swearing-in ceremony on January 3, 2019. There is a lot to say about how the clothes of powerful women are treated in the press. I don’t think it is sexist to talk about clothes because I believe that a garment always means something. I think that Pelosi believes this too, and uses dress in her toolbox of power. For example, when I was zoomed in, working on the photo of Pelosi, I saw that she was wearing a woven fabric watch band with a rainbow gradient. She was representing her LGBTQ constituents, the people whose needs she has championed, and who have elected her again and again. 

Pelosi’s image based on photographs by Gage Skidmore which I found here.

Read more about Pelosi on Wikipedia, and at these links: 

New York Times Magazine article by Robert Draper

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

http://time.com/5388347/nancy-pelosi-democrats-feminism/

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, special promotions, Uncategorized, What I'm Making

Some perSISTERS 2019 Calendar

I made a calendar with fourteen of the perSISTERS prints (includes cover) each in 8×10 plus beautiful grids for the days, and interesting dates relevant to women’s history in the USA. Now, since it is already 2019—today!—happy New Year!—I am putting it on sale for the next two weeks at my Female Power Project Etsy shop. Here is the link. The regular price is $28, but now you can buy as many as you want for $20 each with FREE US SHIPPING (until I run out). After the sale is over I will be matting the prints for individual sale. The calendar is printed in high-quality full-color offset lithography by a union printer here in Mount Rainier, Maryland. I am very happy with the print quality. Here is a gallery of the prints that are included in the calendar. You can read  about each of these designs on this page.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, Uncategorized, What I'm Making

Malala Persisted

Malala Persisted—perSISTERS print, part of the #FemalePowerProject honoring Malala Yousafzai.

This print for Malala Yousafzai (born 12 July 1997) is the third design I’ve made for her. I started the Female Power Project in 2015 with shawl and scarf designs honoring Malala, and they are called “A girl With a Book.” (The blog post I made at this time shows pictures of some of the images I’ve referenced in this post.) This text refers to some of the design elements in the shawls and scarves, not all of which I have used in this print design. But I include reference to them here because I think people might find this design research interesting.

I’ve asked friends and strangers about their female heroes. In fact, now that I am often selling directly at street fairs and similar venues, I see this input from the public who enter my booth as part of the creative process, its performative aspect. The first shawl design I finished, called “A Girl with a Book,” is in honor of Malala Yousafzai, the young woman who campaigned for girls’ education in Pakistan, was shot by a Taliban man, fought hard to survive the shooting, kept working for her cause, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her accomplishments (at 16!), is now a student at Oxford University in the UK, and continues to work for every child’s right to an education. While still a teen, she founded the Malala Fund, an international, non-profit organization that fights for girls’ education. A portion of the proceeds from the Female Power Project goes to the Malala Fund.

To design the shawl I did research on the visual culture of the Swat Valley, the region of Pakistan where Malala was born. I discovered that one of the recurring motifs in the wood carving of the area is based on a woman’s neck ring. The neck ring shape, a nearly-round crescent with outer-facing ends, is pre-islamic, and is thought by anthropologists to be a symbol of female power because of its similarity to the shape of a crescent moon. It persisted even after the coming of Islam because a crescent is Islamic as well. There are several versions, one is a double twist. Although the text I read suggested that the ends look like bird heads, I think they might just as well be serpent heads. The snake is also often a symbol of female power. (The Arts and Crafts of the Swat Valley: Living Traditions in the Hindu Kush, by Johannes Kalter, 1989.)

I built a neck ring shape from various materials because I was interested in experiencing the motif as a physical thing, not just as a drawing. I made a couple versions and they both seem a little magical when I hold them. One version was wrapped and the other was twisted. The twisted version looks much more like two snakes. This is the one I scanned and used in the shawl design.

The shape also made me think of two hands held out, cupped, as if holding water—or holding a book. So I drew a motif of hands in the neck ring shape holding a book. The text on the shawl reads: “Extremists have shown what frightens them most: a girl with a book.” This is a Malala quote used by Amnesty International. I like this sentence because, on the one hand, it is calling the Taliban cowards because they are afraid of a little girl and everyone knows that girls are weak and harmless [sic!]. On the other hand, it suggests that it really is a very powerful thing for a girl to reach into the world and seize knowledge for herself. They should be afraid if their ideology dictates that women should remain ignorant. It is not a secret that the lifting of the status of women lifts up a whole society.

I also read Malala’s memoir, I Am Malala, which I recommend to everyone. She writes lovingly of her homeland. She holds fast to her Muslim faith and describes how the Koran encourages women on their path to knowledge. She tells a compelling story that describes how extremism takes hold of a society. She describes how the Taliban moved into her land and slowly won over people through rhetoric and intimidation. Then they started destroying schools and assassinating people. Their tactics were designed to breed fear and conformity. She held to her conviction that it is not a crime to seek an education. In this she was supported by her educator/activist father and her illiterate mother. Again and again we see the importance of committed fathers in the nurturing of strong women.  The day that Malala was shot, in a school bus delivering her home from school, her mother was attending her own first reading lesson.