09 October 2008
New Exhibition Celebrates Women Who Challenged and Changed U.S.
National Portrait Gallery offers a study in history, photography
Washington — The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery is about to unveil its newest exhibition, Women of Our Time: Twentieth-Century Photographs, a collection of images celebrating women from all walks of life whose achievements have changed the course of U.S. history.
The exhibition opens October 10 and features 90 photographs of women activists, artists, and athletes, as well as many others.
“We have a panoply of women’s ideas, struggles and achievements in the 20th century,” said Martin Sullivan, director of the gallery.
Nineteen female photographers are showcased in the exhibition, which celebrates not only women but the art of photography as well. The exhibition began as a traveling show when the National Portrait Gallery was closed for renovation from 2000 to 2006. As it crisscrossed the United States, the show acquired more photographs along the way.
The photographs are arranged in chronological order through six rooms. Mentors and those who followed in their footsteps appear practically side by side. Carl Von Vechten’s likeness of Bessie Smith, a great blues singer, is followed a few rooms down the hall by Linda McCartney’s photograph of Janis Joplin, a rock singer who cited Smith as one of her influences. Alice Paul, a leader in the movement for women’s suffrage in the 1920s, served as a model for modern feminists Susan Faludi and Gloria Steinem, whose joint portrait is the exhibition’s final image.
CHOOSING THE SUBJECTS
“There were people on an informal list” of possible subjects for the show, said Ann M. Shumard, the curator of Women of Our Time. Madam C.J. Walker, founder of a beauty empire in the early 20th century and the first African-American woman to make $1 million, was on that list. But the gallery did not have an image of Walker to display in the original exhibition — which seems surprising, since the photograph sought by Shumard was used in hundreds of print advertisements and plastered onto Walker’s cosmetic products.
“Publicity images don’t always survive,” Shumard said. “They were used for publications and then they disappeared.” Shumard finally tracked down a print of Walker and was about to bid on it at an art auction in New York City when Walker’s great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, donated the likeness that now hangs in the exhibition’s main hall.
Acquisitions are dictated by what is available on the market, but sometimes the museum scores an unexpected find, like the photograph of actress Marilyn Monroe donated by Navy medic David Geary. Geary had a front-row seat at Monroe’s 1954 performance for U.S. troops stationed in Korea. The image, one of the few color photographs in the exhibition, captures Monroe in a moment of personal triumph, thriving on the crowd’s energy.
Susan Johann’s photograph of playwright Wendy Wasserstein also catches a candid, personal moment: Johann photographed Wasserstein right after it was announced that Wasserstein had won the Pulitzer Prize for her play The Heidi Chronicles. The picture shows Wasserstein in a state of disbelief. “I love the fact that it just captures her at this completely sort of informal moment,” Shumard said.
WOMEN IN ACTION
Many of the photographs capture their subjects at work and in motion. “It’s not always easy to find an image of a celebrated or important figure actually doing the thing they do,” Shumard said. An exquisitely composed photograph of dancer Judith Jamison showcases her fluid movements in Cry, a famous work that Jamison starred in during her tenure with the renowned Alvin Ailey Dance Company.
Virginia Apgar, the first full professor of medicine at Columbia University and creator of the Apgar test for infant viability, is shown examining a minutes-old child in the hospital. Helen Wills Moody, the tennis champion who did not lose a set in singles play for six years, is photographed just before she backhands the ball.
The studio images can be just as arresting. An elegant Carolina Herrera, fashion designer and style icon, stands tall in a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. The first woman to hold a U.S. Cabinet position, Frances Perkins, is photographed in her signature pearls, but without her three-cornered hat, a wardrobe staple during her tenure as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor.
“This exhibition can’t begin to be a comprehensive look at every woman who has played an important role in the 20th century,” Shumard said. “Our collection is a work in progress.”
Women of Our Time is open until February 1, 2009. More information about the show can be found on the Web site of the National Portrait Gallery.
See some photos from the exhibition in an America.gov photo gallery, Great Women of the Twentieth Century.
Photo Gallery: Great Women of the Twentieth Century