Art series by Anna Brone
Art series by Anna Brone
Wanting to showcase the insight of inspiring women, both historical and modern, in an artistic way, in early 2018 I started the Women’s Wisdom Project. When I complete the project by the end of 2019, I will have profiled 100 women. Each portrait is paired with a quote, and hand cut from a single piece of paper. For many of the modern women that I feature, I often do an interview with them as well. I don’t have a particular strategy in choosing women, but over the course of this project I have basically noted down interesting women as I have come across them. It has been humbling to realize how lacking my own knowledge of women’s history is. Like Maria Mitchell, America’s first female astronomer. I bet we all can name 5 famous male scientists, but what about women? Or Gloria Anzaldúa, an important feminist writer, activist and scholar who I had never read before. So working on this project has been a real wake up call as to how little women have been included in our history books, particularly women of color. Because I profile a woman with a quote of hers, that requires her quote to have been noted down some where; either in an essay, a speech, a book, etc. For so long women weren’t even offered those platforms, so working on this project has made me think a lot about all the women’s voices that we don’t hear from, and all the wisdom that we have missed out on because of it.
