When asked how she wanted history to remember her, Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) dismissed her milestone accomplishments achieved as the first woman and/or African American. Instead, she wanted to be known as “a catalyst for change” — words emblazoned on the pennant she holds aloft in Artmaker’s 2005 mural "When Women Pursue Justice" (located at 498 Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn). Sharing the wall with Chisholm are 89 women who, over the past 150 years, also led or participated in movements for social change in the United States. The mural was painted by 13 professional woman artists, 5 young women interns, and over 30 volunteer artists and neighborhood residents. U.S. and foreign-born, Native American, and women of color, these women — 13 “movement leaders” and 67 “activists” as well as the 9 nineteenth-century “ancestors” who inspired them — influenced all spheres of American life. Many were jailed, several severely injured, some killed for their efforts. Yet they were undaunted in their struggles to achieve voting rights, civil rights and racial justice, health and reproductive rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, environmental justice and protection, and workplace/arts access and equality. In her illustrated talk, Jane Weissman — the mural’s project director and a participating artist — discusses their achievements in the larger context of twentieth-century activism. While many of them are well known and easily recognizable, several are unfamiliar to most Americans, their struggles never properly recognized or faded from memory. Pointing out their locations in this mural that restores them to their proper place in history, she will guide the audience to those visual “conversations” that connect these remarkable women within and across generations. Their endeavors give truth to the words Susan B. Anthony penned at age eighty-six: “Failure is impossible.”
New York City, NY; NYC