ZITKALA SA (1876-1938)

Zitkála-Šá or “Red Bird”, was born a Yankton Dakota Sioux and grew to be a prominent 20th Century suffragist, author, educator and musician. Helping to secure voting rights with the passing of The Indian Citizen Act in 1924, she became a voice for women and Native Americans; seeing herself as a fearless “preserver of her Tribe”. Using her classical music training, Red Bird cut a trail of consciousness and hope between the worlds of “Red” and “White”. By composing The Sun Dance Opera, in defiance and resurrection, she played her peoples roots and evolution into one.

VISUAL

LARYSA HENIUSH (1910-1983)

Larysa “Hienijus” was a Belarusian Archivist, Poet, Writer, National Activist and Political Refugee. As an Archivist, Larysa was appointed Secretary General for the Belarusian National Republic while in exile, March 1943. She preserved, organized and hid valuable parts of the country’s archive. After WWII, her family was split apart by the Ministry of State Soviet Security Service (MGB). In 1949, she was tortured and sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, serving 8 years in the camps of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. As a writer, she published works from 1942-2005 including poetry, children’s books and more. English translations are extremely rare, with one poem in the 1971 Anthology Like Water, Like Fire.

Larysa Hienijuš Portrait – Oil on Canvas by Belarusian Native and New York Artist Yelena Tylkina

SCENT

ROSE VALLAND (1898 – 1980)

Heroine of Art in WWII, Rose Antonia Maria Valland was an art historian for the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. She was also a member of the Resistance, a spy, a military captain and one of the most decorated women in French history. Secretly, she protected, and eventually helped recover, thousands in stolen art. Relying on her sense of intuition in a mine field of risk, she unassumingly created and shared meticulous records with details on the Nazi’s systematic looting of Europe’s cultural heritage.

One of the many recovered German piles of loot.

TASTE

FRIDA KAHLO (1907 – 1954)

Frida Kahlo is well known as a Surrealist and Magic Realist Painter. However, she is also a deep lover of food and party, with an open appetite for the “Body & Soul Spectrum”. She held lovers of all ages and genders. Two of whom were life long friends and are directly associated with Long Island City. First, in the 1930’s, was the brilliant Sculptor and Designer Isamu Noguchi . Noguchi moved to LIC in 1961 and still has an open Museum here. The other is the white-hot Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted Long Island City from her 30th floor home at The Hotel Sheldon on 49th & Lexington.

East River from the Shelton Hotel 1928 12 × 32 in. Painting

By Georgia O’keeffe

A 1932 Detroit article about Frida’s work was shamefully titled “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”; and still, she rose in power to be a beloved woman, artist and icon for every generation.

LOST ART! The Wounded Table, 1940, is a Kahlo meditation on the despair of her broken home life. She sits center at an empty bleeding table, which is staged for a barren Last Supper and surrounded by symbols of her heartbreak. The Artist donated the painting to the former Soviet Union, but it was last seen at a Warsaw exhibition in 1955.

“Frida’s Fiestas is assembled by her stepdaughter, of recipes for more than 100 dishes that Frida served to family and friends with her characteristic enthusiasm for all the pleasures of life. In the tradition of the best-selling Monet’s Table, Frida’s Fiestas is a personal account in words and pictures of many important and happy events in the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and a scrapbook full-color photographs.”

TOUCH

MADAME LE BRUN (1755 – 1842)

Even though you have likely never heard of her, at one point in her long and free life, Elisabeth Louis Vigee Le Brun was the most famous portrait painter in 18th- century Europe, period. Her over 660 surviving portraits and 200 landscapes have been collected privately and by major museums for centuries. Her palette was desired by royalty, coveted by aristocrats and flaunted by celebrities throughout all of Europe and Russia. She was also a natural teacher, among the original Social and Fashion Influencers and the host of some of the most innovative costume feasts to be thrown in iconic Paris.

Her first exposure to art, and her artistic father, was after 6 years of age. Her next 4 years were spent in a convent being selectively educated for the role of wife and mother. Returning home at 11, her father encouraged her brilliance with training. By 12 her father passed and the almost purely self-taught artist began working to help the family.

Her prosperous talent was matched only by her charm and beauty. Throughout her life, this magnetic fairness would be as much a complication and shock, as an advantage. Because of her allure, she is said to have invented the romantic masculine theme of gazing off into the distance. “As for those gentlemen, as soon as I realized they wished to make eyes at me, I would paint them with their gaze averted, which prevents the sitter from looking at the painter. At the least movement of their pupils in my direction I would say ‘I’m doing the eyes now…’   

Queen Marie Antoninette, who was Elisabeth’s age, also found her delightful after meeting on one of Paris’ famous park strolls. In the city’s many fashionable gathering places, these strolls were designed for attention as much as leisure. The Queen would become both friend and protector, with Elisabeth painting some 30 portraits of her and her royal family.

In Elisabeth’s twilight years, after much prodding, she took to writing her memoirs saying: