I love spending time in art museums but, admittedly, I tend to rush through or entirely skip over galleries filled with colonial portraits. It’s difficult to connect with the stoic likenesses of privileged white men, many of whom enslaved or oppressed those within their domain. It wasn’t until the urging of a client in Switzerland that I watched Suffragette and realized how much women sacrificed to afford some of the rights we have today. I knew there were protests and the Second Wave of the 1960’s, but naively underestimated the extent of their ferocity.
And, yet, after so many years and so many battles, there is still an imbalance with gender wage gaps, representation in government, and corporate leadership. My heart weighs even heavier for women across the globe in nations where patriarchy rears its ugly face without shame. During my time in India, men would touch and grab at my body in open spaces. I was surrounded by what I would have assumed was the safety of a few hundred people as one man grabbed me by the vagina. I felt his filthy grasp on my body for the next two hours and cried in the taxi as two other men laughed and made insinuations pointed towards my sexuality and the interracial relationship between myself and my partner. I became a form of perverse entertainment, stripped of dignity.
Today I was imagining what it would have been like to grow up with foremothers along with forefathers. Not the wives of influential leaders, but leaders in and of themselves. Certainly, we have examples to look up to (research in my childhood on Harriet Tubman still moves me after all these years), but those long halls of gilded frames are overwhelmingly dominated by a very small spectrum. So here I am, painting my daydreams with a mashup of what our history books may have looked like in a more balanced world. I collected images online and merged them together to visualize an alternative history.
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