Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner.

Francesca Woodman (1958 -1981) is, was (and probably always will be) an enigma. Her work is full of tension and spectral explorations of the female form, but her early death at the age of 22 has left scholars questioning Woodman’s artistic intentions. Were these photographs an exploration of the artist’s internal angst? Or simply the early works of a college student who favoured a surrealist aesthetic?

Born in 1958, to ceramicists George and Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman was surrounded by artistic practice and creativity from a young age. Growing up, her family home in Colorado would become a temporary sanctuary to the likes of David Hockney, Richard Serra and other famous artists, as they made tours of America. As an adolescent, Woodman received her first camera – a Yashica 2 ¼ x 2 ¼, which was a gift from her father and would continue to be her camera of choice throughout her short career. Her first self portrait (aged 13) shows the same defiant and graceful Surrealist self-representation that would not only typify her later work, but define her artistic practice. 

The young photographer attended college at Rhode Island School of design in 1975, and between 1977 and 1978, she studied in Rome (a familiar city where she had spent many summers as a child). In 1979, Woodman moved to New York with the intention of beginning her career as an artist, and in 1980 was awarded Artist-In-Residence at the distinguished MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Unfortunately, upon returning to New York, her work was met with much indifference, and it is only in the last decade has there been a resurgence of interest in her photography and videography, the latter of which became a method with which to expand her creative projects.

Aside from her photographic work, Francesca Woodman produced several livre d’artiste including Portrait of a Reputation (date unknown), Quaderno dei Dettati e dei Temi (c.1978), Quaderno Raffaello (c.1977), Portraits Friends Equations (c.1979) and Angels, Calendars (c.1977). However, just one book (Some Distorted Interior Geometries, 1981) was published during her lifetime – only a few weeks before the artist’s suicide. The book itself is made from a repurposed, Italian exercise notepad with pale pink pages, pasted with photographs and annotated with scratchy, sprawling marginalia. In it, we see Woodman exploring her fascination with time and identity, as she writes: “These things arrived from my Grandmother’s. They make me think about where I fit in this odd geometry of time.”

This theme of pasting down, erasing and overlapping can also be seen in Quaderno Raffaello which includes a selection of taped-down transparencies instead of opaque photographs, allowing the printed page to be visible through the image. Woodman takes power from choosing what the viewer is allowed to see – the process of covering, uncovering and recovering sections of images or book pages is also used in regards to her own body.

If surrealism can be described as a visual, oral or physical montage of unsettling juxtapositions, then Woodman’s work certainly subscribes to this definition. We see the artist using a variety of motifs that have been associated with the Surrealist Movement, including birds, gloves (another method with which to conceal and reveal the body), mirrors and phantom-like figures, which the artist sometimes shrouds in white sheets or large sections of dusty, floral wallpaper. Her photographs are characterised by wraith-like female figures and ghostly presences which begin to dissipate like vapour. She referred to these long-exposure images as Ghost Photos, and her work has been likened to the spirit photography that gained popularity after WWI. Setting her phantoms against the backdrop of crumbling walls in derelict buildings and using delayed exposure times, Woodman created blurry shapes and distorted the features of her protagonists, allowing them to appear stationary when in motion and fragmented yet whole.

More often than not these ‘phantoms’ are nude with their faces obscured, and often the models bear a striking resemblance to Woodman herself. The women are objectified and creature-like, becoming part of the fabric of the abandoned buildings in which they roam. Woodman’s work is nightmarish, and toes-the-line between rationality and hysteria – do these images predict the artist’s own inevitable self-effacement? Woodman’s early death by her own hand at the age of 22 allows us to question her creative motives, and an 1980 entry from her diary displays her clear desire to “disappear”: “I finally managed to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible […] I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you and some other artefacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.”

In 1980, Woodman was diagnosed with profound depression, an illness that would plague her for the rest of her brief life. She survived her first suicide attempt in the Autumn of the same year, but in January of 1981, she was found dead after jumping from the window of a building on the East Side of New York.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Dunhill, A. 2012.‘Quaderno Raffaello: Anticipation and Delights’ // Ferris, A. 2003. ‘The Disembodied Spirit’. Bowdoin College Museum of Art // Gumport, E. 2011. ‘The Long exposure of Francesca Woodman’. NYR Daily // Raymond, C. 2016. ‘Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime’. Routledge // Riches, H. 2004. ‘A Disappearing Act: Francesca Woodman’s Portrait of a Reputation’. Oxford Art Journal, Volume 27, Issue 1, Pages 95–113.

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Born in Buenos Aires, Fini only lived in Argentina for a short time before fleeing to Italy with her mother to escape her abusive father. Living in Trieste allowed Fini to spend much of her youth surrounded by Mannerist and Renaissance art, both of which shared mutual themes of wealth, decadence and power, and would prove to be a source of great inspiration for the artist in later years.

From the age of 13, Fini would visit the local morgue and study the corpses, an experience that would help her to capture the human form, and develop the distinctive and ethereal humanoid figures that became her trademark. These early artistic encounters, combined with studies into psychoanalytic theory, informed much of Fini’s work throughout her artistic career.

Though Fini resisted joining the more unified ranks of the Surrealists, her work was certainly of the Surrealist canon. She depicts otherworldly creatures, strange landscapes, scenes of alchemy, occultism and desire. Often, Fini would use her work to respond to the male-gaze, objectifying the male form and allowing the female viewer to take a more dominant role. Fini’s description of her own work and demeanor sums this up perfectly:

Myself, I know that I belong with the idea of Lilith, the anti-Eve, and that my universe is that of the spirit.

Her reluctance to join a particular group or adhere to any artistic label was characteristic of Fini’s desire for autonomy. Wishing to subvert typical gender roles, Fini abandoned the femme fatale and innocent virgin prototypes, instead creating goddesses reminiscent of greek mythology, and female figures that could not be categorised or defined morally or sexually. Themes of fertility, female empowerment and magic run through her work, and Fini often depicts the figure of the Sphinx, a half human, half lion hybrid.

In the early forties, Fini accepted Peggy Guggenheim’s proposal to appear in the show ‘Exhibition by 31 Women’ held at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York. The 1943 exhibition brought together work by women of different ethnicities, age ranges and artistic practices, and explicitly highlighted Guggenheim’s fascination with surrealist art. Fini exhibited alongside the likes of Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and the extravagant Leonora Carrington, with whom she would form an intense and lasting friendship.

Fini was photographed by a several famous artists (most notably, Henri Cartier-Bresson), often in erotic or provocative poses, adopting the role of the sexually empowered female – a character we see in much of her painted work. Sometimes Fini appears in elaborate costumes, adorned in jewels, feathers and furs, looking like a high priestess or otherworldly creature. Never one to separate life from art, Fini often draped herself in lavish costumes and was rumoured to have attended a party in celebration of the Witches’ Sabbath, wearing nothing but “knee-length white leatherette boots and a cape of white feathers”.

Her talents appear to be endless. In addition to being a artist and designer, Fini also created costumes for ballets, theatre productions and operas, as well as designing the bottle for Schiaparelli’s perfume ‘Shocking’. In 1949, she conceptualised the ballet Le Rêve de Leonor (Leonor’s Dream), which was later choreographed by Frederick Ashton. During the 1970s, Fini turned her attention to writing, and penned three novels: Rogomelec, Moumour & Contes Pour Enfantes Velu and L’Oneiropompe. As an illustrator, Fini’s work accompanied the writing of authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the Marquis de Sade’s salacious novel ‘Justine’ (1791).

Fini was married once, briefly to Federico Venezianio, but she never married again and was openly bisexual at a time when sexual fluidity was still a taboo. 

Marriage never appealed to me, I’ve never lived with one person. Since I was 18 I’ve always preferred to live in a sort of community – a big house with my atelier and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and one with a man who was rather a friend. And it has always worked.

For the remaining years of her life she lived with her lovers Konstanty Aleksander Jeleński  (a polish writer) and Stanislao Lèpri (a surrealist artist) and (most importantly) her persian cats. She died in Paris in 1996.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Choucha, N. 1991. Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement. Mandrake of Oxford, Oxford. // Grew, R. 2010. Sphinxes, Witches and Little Girls: Reconsidering the Female Monster in the Art of Leonor Fini. // Lauter, E. 1980. Leonor Fini: Preparing to Meet the Strangers of the New World. Women’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1980. // Mahon, A. 2013. La Feminité triomphante: Surrealism, Leonor Fini, and the Sphinx. Iowa Research Online. 

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She started developing an interest in woodcarving after coming across a figurine carved by her late father, and decided she wanted to study art. She successfully applied to the Carnegie Institute of Technology but the school refused to let Catlett matriculate upon finding out that she was black. Instead she went to the historically black Howard University, and from there on to Iowa University, where in 1940 she became the first African-American woman to graduate with a MFA.

At Iowa, Catlett was encouraged to make work about the subjects she knew best – the reality of being an African-American woman, raising children, being at once dispossessed yet also proud and dignified. Women became the subject of much of her work, women with broad hips and angular faces, standing proudly, sometimes raising their fists, sometimes nursing children, but almost invariably depicted from a slightly lower angle, so that the viewer is forced to look up at them.

I felt my work should do something for women because nobody was interested in them

 

In 1941, Catlett married fellow artist Charles White and followed him South, where he had won a scholarship to study and make murals. In the South, Catlett experienced even harsher racism, and became firmer in her resolution to dedicate her art to representing and elevating black people.
She did this not only by making the black experience the subject of her work, but by being a passionate teacher. She would teach for decades.

In the early 1940s, she taught sculpture and dressmaking to adults at the Carver School in Harlem. The experience of teaching working class people who had limited access to education moved Catlett deeply. She saw how hungry to learn her students were; she later found that same hunger for education during her time in Mexico.

In 1946, she won the same Rosenwald Foundation grant her husband had been awarded five years prior, and she used it to move it to Mexico City. There, she joined the Taller de Grafica Popular, a group of printmakers who shared her vision of art as a political tool and responsibility. Catlett divorced White, with whom she had three sons, and married artist Francisco Mora.

In Mexico, her work evolved to encompass lithographs, linoleum cuts, and sculpture in wood, stone, clay and bronze. In it, one can see the influence of modernism with its abstract form and smooth shapes, the angular woodcut of German expressionism, African masks, Mexican populist art and more. Catlett was active in Mexico at the same time as some American artists were becoming internationally known for pop art, and this can be glimpsed in some of her work. But ever the activist, where Warhol was concerned with celebrity culture, Catlett focused on African American activists, as in her print ‘Malcolm X Speaks for Us’.

She was not so concerned with the aesthetics of her work and with the critics’ judgment of it, as with her mission as an artist. Of her art, she said: “I have always wanted [it] to service my people – to reflect us, to relate us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”

As a political activist, Catlett was targeted by the Communist witch-hunts of the mid-century. Repeatedly questioned and threatened to have her passport removed, eventually Catlett gave up her American citizenship and was declared an undesirable alien.

In 1958, she became the first female professor of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She carried on teaching even after becoming a successful artist until, in 1975 she retired to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She then spent her time between Mexico and New York. She regained her American citizenship in 2002.

Catlett experienced discrimination throughout her life: she was black, she was poor, she was a woman, and she was targeted by the American government. It was not easy for her to have her voice heard and her work seen, yet she never compromised the nature of her work nor what she stood for. Eventually, fame found her, her work was exhibited on a bigger scale and introduced to a new audience by jazz musician Rufus Reid, who composed an album inspired by her work.

Catlett died in 2012. The fact that her work isn’t better known speaks of the discrimination rife in the art world, but Catlett’s legacy is kept alive by both artists and art historians who were inspired by her life and work.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Beckwith, Noemi, Elizabeth Catlett, Rufus Reid et al. “An Alternative History of Art: Elizabeth Catlett” BBC Radio 4. Accessed on 15 February 2019.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tf0d8 // Boucher, Brian. “Elizabeth Catlett, 1915-2012.” Art in America. Accessed on 15 February 2019. https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/elizabeth-catlett-1915-2012/ // Carnegie Mellon University. “May 15: University Honors Artist Elizabeth Catlett With Special Exhibition, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.” Accessed on 18 February 2019. https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may15_catlettexhibition.shtml // National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Elizabeth Catlett”. Accessed on 13 February 2019. https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/elizabeth-catlett // Rosenberg, Karen, and Daniel Slotnik. “Elizabeth Catlett, Sculptor With Eye on Social Issues, Is Dead at 96” The New York Times. // Smitshonian American Art Museum, “Elizabeth Catlett.” Accessed on 13 February 2019. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/elizabeth-catlett-781.

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Born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Chicago, Phillips was one of ten children. Her father, William, died when she was eight years old. 

Phillips attended the University of Illinois where she studied Drama. After she graduated, she failed to find work as an actress and so spent the next seven years teaching English and Drama. During her time away from work in the summer, Phillips worked for WGN, a radio station in Chicago.

In 1930, while working at WGN, Phillips was asked to write and act in Painted Dreams, a radio soap opera about the generational divide between women. The fictional Irish-American family that Phillips created was headed up by a widowed matriarch, and the show, which initially only featured female characters, was immediately popular with it’s predominately female audience. Critic Les White argued that during her time writing Painted Dreams, Phillips developed three themes which she would return to throughout her career: a woman choosing her career over a male love interest, single motherhood and a protagonist searching for their true family.

As Painted Dreams was beginning to gain popularity, Phillips was fired from WGN. She quickly went on to create Today’s Children, a very similar daytime radio soap opera about a large Irish-American family, with WGN’s rivals, WMAQ. In 1949, Phillips created These Are My Children for television, which was an amalgamation of Painted Dreams and Today’s Children. These Are All My Children was the first soap opera broadcast on American television.

In 1956, Phillips created As the World Turns. The show premiered in 1956 as a 30-minute show. The running time was a risky innovation on Phillips’s part because at the time all other soap operas ran at 15 minutes. By developing As the World Turns as a 30-minute show, Phillips was able to craft in-depth stories and focus on characterisation. Her producers and advertisers were initially sceptical of the length of the episodes so Phillips negotiated a contract which meant that As the World Turns could not be cancelled until it had been on-air for a year.

Phillips’s gamble paid off and As the World Turns became one of the most culturally significant American soap opera in the TV landscape, holding the title of the highest rated daytime soap from 1958 to 1978. As the World Turns emphasised character complexity over plot and dwelled on the nuances and contradictions of human emotion, which forged an intimacy between the audience and the programme because the viewers were invested in the psychological make-up of the cast of flawed characters. Phillips also pioneered the use of the TV ‘close-up’, furthering this feeling of intimacy.

As her career continued, Phillips became known for cliff-hangers, the use of organ music to move between scenes and introducing professional characters, such as doctors and lawyers, to the soap opera lexicon. In terms of style, Phillips tended to concentrate on the day-to-day troubles which affected women and their families and she veered away from populist sensationalism.

Phillips also inspired a new generation of soap opera producers and mentored Agnes Nixon, who created All My Children, and William J. Bell, who created The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. Phillips never married and adopted two children, Thomas and Katherine.

Irma Phillips died in Chicago in 1973. At the time of her death, four of her soap opera creations were still airing including Guiding Light and As the World Turns. Guiding Light would go on to become one of the longest-running television shows in history, ending in 2009 after an uninterrupted 72 years on the air.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Les White, ‘Imperial Soap Opera’, The Common Review, Spring 2005, http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/queen-days [accessed 26.02.19] // Joanne Passet, ‘Irna Phillips, 1901 – 1973’, Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/phillips-irna [accessed 26.02.19] // Lynn Liccardo, ‘Irna Phillips’, Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb 2013, https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/vita-irna-phillips [accessed 26.02.19] // ‘Irna Phillips: Mother of the Soap Opera’, Old Radio Shows, 11.02.11, http://www.oldradioshows.org/2011/02/irna-phillips-mother-of-the-soap-opera/ [accessed 26.02.19] // ‘As The World Stop Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One), Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 03.04.13, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2013/04/as-the-world-stopped-turning-lynn-liccardo-talks-about-soap-operas-part-one.html [accessed 26.02.19] // Thomas Vinciguerra, ‘The Day the World Stopped Turning’, The New York Times, 22.11.13, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/arts/television/as-the-world-turns-interrupted-by-kennedys-shooting.html [accessed 26.02.19].

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Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire in 1895, Whitaker was the eight of eleven children. A voracious reader and prolific writer from a young age, Whitaker recalled that she would often deliberately get into trouble so she would be sent to her room where she could read in peace. At primary school, she was awarded scripture prizes, but her academic career was cut short at Belle Vue Girls’ Grammar School, which she hated. She left school at 13 and went to work for her father, who was a bookbinder.

Whitaker was a writer from a young age but, worried that everything she was writing had been written before, she would often burn all her work. When World War I broke out, Whitaker had her first flush of published success: she sold verses to a Christmas card firm. However, it would still be some years before her writing career would begin in earnest. She left the family bookbinding business in 1917 when she married a textile businessman, Leonard Whitaker. The couple later adopted two children, Valerie and Michael.

After moving to France in the early years of their marriage, the pair finally settled in Yorkshire, and it was around 1926 that Whitaker wrote her first short story ‘Sultan Jekker’. Unsure as to what to do with it, Whitaker found The Adelphi, a literary magazine run by John Middleton Murry, in her local library. At the time, The Adelphi was publishing writers such as D.H. Lawrence, who Whitaker greatly admired; she decided The Adelphi was where she wanted to be published.

It was a while before Whitaker had the courage to submit the story. In ‘Beginnings’, an essay recalling her early writing days, Whitaker describes walking up and down Cursitor Street, where The Adelphi offices were based, daring herself to post the story to them. She didn’t post it and instead took the story home with her.

Eventually, when Whitaker did submit the story, Murry wrote back – addressing Whitaker as ‘Sir’ – praising the story and offering to publish her work if the magazine was still in circulation in a couple of months’ time. Whitaker kept writing and her first short story was published in The Outlook in July 1927, but she recalls that she hardly noticed the significance of her debut publication because she was still waiting for The Adelphi to publish her work. A few months later, The Adelphi accepted her short story ‘Unleashed’ for publication. Over the next seven years, they would publish ten more.

As well as publishing her work, Murry helped Whitaker to find a publisher for a collection of her short stories. In October 1929, her first collection, Frost in April, was published by Jonathan Cape, followed by No Luggage in 1930, Five For Silver in 1932 and Honeymoon and Other Stories in 1934. Whitaker also in 1937 published, with friend Gay Taylor, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, a spoof autobiography.

Whitaker’s sales were always small and early critics were not impressed, with many addressing Whitaker as ‘he’ in their reviews. However, critical acclaim arrived when Arnold Bennett gave her a rave review in the Evening Standard. Further praise followed from Vita Sackville-West in 1929, who compared Whitaker’s work to that of Katharine Mansfield, and from V.S. Pritchett, who called Whitaker a ‘watchful, unwasteful and noteworthy talent’ in a review for The Spectator.

Whitaker’s stories move slowly, describing appearances, emotions and movements in precise detail, before dramatically snapping shut, and sometimes tipping over into surrealism, in the final paragraphs. Thematically, Whitaker’s stories are concerned with everyday life, are mostly set in Yorkshire and often concentrate on the gender dynamics between men and women. Whitaker is unromantic when writing about relationships and rather pinpoints the social expectations and boundaries of the time.

For example, in ‘Pin’s Fee Wife’, Effie, a poor orphan who has been mistreated throughout her life, finds work in a fishmonger’s with brothers Ronald and Bert. The brothers fall out and, as stubborn revenge, Ronald marries Effie. As the two brothers reconcile, Effie is pushed out of her marital bed and into the attic. The story ends with Effie, humiliated and lonely, being packed onto a train to London by the brothers. It’s a twisted portrait of gender dynamics, almost a fairy tale gone sour (the story has echoes of Cinderella). 

Another story, ‘Five For Silver’, centres on a young single mother taking her baby on a bus ride through London. Throughout the course of the journey, protagonist Freda recalls her fleeting relationship with the baby’s father, how she kept her pregnancy secret after he rejected her and how she escaped to London. ‘Five For Silver’ is interesting because of its portrayal of the limits of female agency within male-female relationships; Freda has the agency to seduce her partner but she is still rejected, and threatened with violence, because of her actions.

Whitaker’s final story, The Mandoline, was arguably her biggest commercial success. It was published in 1946 and broadcast on the radio. The author is quoted by her family as saying that she was ‘all written out’. In an essay in The Journey Home and Other Stories, Valerie Waterhouse argues that Whitaker’s lack of creative inspiration following the publication of The Mandoline could have been due to the changes in Whitaker’s domestic life. The downward turn in her writing coincided with the adoption of her two children and a change in her social status – the family moved to Bolton Old Hall, a Yorkshire Manor around this time – and Whitaker became more removed from the lives she was writing about.

Whitaker died in 1976. Following her death, her son, Michael Whitaker, permitted the release of The Crystal Fountain, a collection of Whitaker’s short stories. In 2017, Persephone Books published a collection of Whitaker’s short stories, The Journey Home and Other Stories.

In the preface to The Journey Home and Other Stories, Philip Hensher states ‘it is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power. She is one of the great English short story writers, and her work is slowly reaching some prominence.’ Although Whitaker’s work had been somewhat forgotten, the publication of a collection of her work is hopefully a sign that her work will gradually be recovered by a new generation of short story readers.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References incude: ‘Malachi Whitaker’, Persephone Books, https://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/malachi-whitaker/ [last accessed 15 January] // Clare L. Taylor, ‘Whitaker [nee Taylor], Marjorie Olive [pseud. Malachi Whitaker], Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23.09.04 // ‘A Self revelation by Malachi Whitaker (Book review)’, The Spectator, Vol 162, Iss 5771, 03.02.1939, 192 // V.S. Pritchett, ‘Success by Lion Feuchtwanger; The Best Short Stories of 1930. American. Edited by E. J. O’Brien; No Luggage by Malachi Whitaker. Let Me Alone by Helen Ferguson’, The Spectator, Vol. 145, Iss. 5342, 15.11.30, 737 // Jim Greenhalf, ‘Bradford’s great ‘unknown’ writer’, The Telegraph and Argus, 12.06.09, https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/tahistory/featuresnostalgiapasttimes/4434632.bradfords-great-unknown-author/ [last accessed 14.01.18] // ‘Malachi Whitaker’, Objects of Interest, 07.01.19, https://objects-ofinterest.blogspot.com/2019/01/35-malachi-whitaker_41.html [last accessed 15.01.19] // Malachi Whitaker, The Journey Home and Other Stories, (Persephone Books, 2017: London).

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What is immediately arresting about her photographs is the subject matter, which often depicts angels or biblical scenes. It is this word “arresting” that defined Cameron’s descriptions of her own artistic ambition:

I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.

Born in Calcutta, India (now Kolkata, Bengal), Cameron (nee Pattle) was educated in France, where her grandparents had lived as aristocrats during the 1700s. In 1838 she married Charles Hay Cameron, who was a Jurist twenty years her senior. Charles and Julia went on to have five children together, but raised another five young relations as well as an adopted girl called Mary Ryan, who was often the chosen model for many of Cameron’s pictorial allegories and portraits.

After Charles’ retirement in 1848, the family moved to London, where Cameron’s sister hosted a salon in Kensington that was frequented by famous artists. This allowed Cameron to meet countless contemporaries who would later become sitters in her photographic work, such as Robert Browning and Edward Burne-Jones.

In 1863, Cameron’s daughter gifted her with her first camera. This became a pivotal moment for Cameron’s artistic career, and by 1864 she had joined the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. Cameron would continue to create works for just over a decade, producing over 12,000 images, and credited her mentor and fellow photographer, David Wilkie Wynfield for her success. Wynfield, like Cameron, was interested in creating shallow-focus portraits, and photographs with a painterly composition.

For Cameron, the “divine art of photography” was not simply a method in which to record her surroundings, but became a way in which to illustrate heroic tales, and create mythical scenes. This was largely due to the techniques she used during the wet collodian process, which produced blurred images and sometimes scratch or smudge marks, allowing the work to take on a dream-like quality.

Though this became Cameron’s trademark style, it was heavily criticised by her contemporaries, who believed such additions to the photographic plate to be the result of poor photographic skills. However, the aesthetic created by Cameron was not only deliberate and testaments to her understanding of photography as a science, but also lent her work a romantic demeanour that would prove popular amongst the Pre-Raphaelites.

Cameron’s photographs emulate a painterly style. She called her pictorial allegories her ‘fancy subjects’ and the characters of which were described by Emily Tennyson as ‘endless Madonnas and May Queens and Foolish Virgins and Wise Virgins.’ Academics have argued that by representing Arthurian Legend, scenes from the Bible and interpreted imagery from famous poems, Cameron became part of a sustained effort to celebrate British heritage and cultural identity. This was a difficult position for a female artist to take in the 1800s, and her efforts to engage with politics would be brushed off as symptoms of her eccentric nature, rather than serious contributions to a broader political discourse.

In 1860, after a visit to the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, Cameron fell in love with the landscape and purchased a property in the nearby village of Freshwater. As neighbors and friends, Tennyson would often bring his guests to observe Cameron’s artistic practice, and his two young sons modelled for Cameron on various occasions. Virginia Woolf, famous writer and the daughter of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Niece, wrote her first and only play about the artistic gatherings fostered by the Cameron’s at their new home, a comedy titled ‘Freshwater’.

The Cameron’s stayed in Freshwater until 1875, before moving to Ceylon, where Julia passed away in 1879 from complications with hypothermia. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the photographer began to receive wider recognition for her contribution to art history, quickened by the 1948 publication of Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work, by Helmut Gernsheim. In 1974, an exhibition titled Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs from life was held at the Stanford University Museum of Art, and since then there have been several acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to Cameron at Internationally recognised institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Cox, J. and Ford, C. 2003. Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs. Getty Publications, Los Angeles. Ford, C. 2003. Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography. National Portrait Gallery Publications, London. Rosen, J. 2016. Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: Photographic allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire. Manchester University Press.

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Odetta was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on New Year’s Eve in 1930. Her father died when she was still in infancy and, when her mother re-married a few years later, the family moved to Los Angeles. She took her stepfather’s name and became Odetta Holmes Felious, however, her professional name was always simply Odetta. She learned to play her grandmother’s piano as a child and began opera classes at the age of thirteen. Working as a maid to pay her way through Los Angeles City College, she later earned a degree in Classical Music.

She began her stage career with roles in musical theatre but, while performing in San Francisco in 1950, found she was greatly drawn to the emergent folk music scene there. She learned to play the guitar and began singing traditional songs in her own individual style. She was offered a residency at The Tin Angel club where her sumptuous voice and emotive performances made her an instant hit.

In 1953 Odetta moved to New York to perform at the city’s Blue Angel Club. Her rich, expressive vocals and broad range of spirituals, blues, jazz and folk impressed the city’s music community and brought her to the attention of folk luminaries such as Peter Seeger and Harry Belafonte, the latter becoming a good friend who helped to cultivate her burgeoning reputation. In 1954 her first recording, Odetta and Larry, an album of duets with Larry Mohr, was released. A year later Odetta appeared in the film, Cinerama Holiday, the first of several movie performances, after which she was again based in Los Angeles for a season at the Turnabout Theatre.

Whilst performing in Chicago, Odetta was spotted by music impresario, Al Grossman. He became her manager and signed her to the Tradition record label. Her first solo album, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues was released in 1956 and is credited by Bob Dylan as the inspiration which brought him to folk music. 

In 1959 Odetta appeared on Harry Belafonte’s television special, bringing her to the attention of a much wider audience. After signing with Vanguard Records in New York, she made three albums in 1960 and continued to record on a regular basis. However, she was at her best when performing live in concert. Her barn-storming appearance at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival was the stuff of legend. Her live albums, Odetta at Carnegie Hall and Odetta at Town Hall, released in 1960 and 1962 respectively, captured not only the range of her repertoire, but the gravitas of her performance. Her formidable stage presence, her unique musical interpretations and her soulful mezzo-soprano voice filled every song she sang with power and emotion.

Odetta’s music connected cultures and genres, melding black American blues and gospel with contemporary folk. Thanks to her, a much wider audience heard and understood black spirituals and work songs, the ballads sung by black prisoners and slaves to express their sorrow and anguish. Through her music she was able to portray the racism and suffering experienced by black people in America.

Odetta was a significant role model for many black Americans. She was glamorous, charismatic, confident, had a highly individual style and was tremendously proud of her African heritage (once claiming to have invented the Afro hairstyle! [*2]).  She used her music and her platform to advance the fight for social justice and she became an important figure of the American black civil rights movement. In August 1963 she performed at the 250,000 strong March on Washington, the rally at which Martin Luther King Jnr made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. She sang for John F Kennedy at a civil rights presentation and in 1965 marched with Reverend King from Selma to Alabama.

Although she was at the height of her fame during the 1960s, Odetta continued to perform and record well into the 21^st Century, sometimes appearing onstage alongside the very musicians on whom she had been a huge influence. In April 2007 she performed 57 Channels at a Carnegie Hall tribute concert for Bruce Springsteen, causing the star to come out from the wings and declare it the greatest version of the song he had ever heard. Later that year, Odetta’s album, Gonna Let It Shine, was nominated for a Grammy award.

Early in 2008 Odetta undertook a US tour, despite a serious heart condition and failing health which meant that she now performed from a wheelchair. Having been a vocal supporter during his candidacy, Odetta had been due to sing at Obama’s presidential inauguration. Sadly, she died in December 2008, only weeks before the event.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include The Independent [*1] and [*2], The Guardian, The New York Times, workers.org.

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Born into a Jewish family, Bernstein spent her early life in Newark, New Jersey. Although she did not come from an overtly artistic family – though her father used to paint in their basement with his friends – Bernstein had wanted to be an artist since childhood. After attending Pennsylvania State University, Bernstein entered a Master of Fine Arts programme at the Yale School of Art, where she was in a minority of women studying the arts.

While at Yale, Bernstein read in The New York Times that playwright Edward Albee had seen ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ graffitied in a bathroom and taken it for the title of his play. Intrigued by this idea, two of Bernstein’s male friends – one was playwright John Guare – introduced her to the graffiti in the men’s bathrooms at Yale. Bernstein was artistically and linguistically inspired by the graffiti, finding a raw humour and deep psychological motivation in what she found.

Building on this, Bernstein went on to create a body of aggressive anti-Vietnam War work that utilised graffiti and large scale penises to comment on male aggression and the horror of war. In 1967, Bernstein produced Fun Gun, a painting of a penis which doubled as a gun shooting bullets. Bernstein also painted the Union Jack-Off series, which featured two penises in the shape of an X. Bernstein’s style in these early pieces was fun and irreverent; she used distressed canvasses to mimic the walls of toilet cubicles.

Bernstein graduated from Yale in 1967 and found that although she was talented, and hardworking enough to excel at the university, she struggled to find work in the male-dominated New York gallery system. In response to this, in 1972 Bernstein, along with several others, founded the all-women A.I.R. (Artist in Residence) Gallery, an artistic cooperative in New York. The founding of A.I.R. Gallery is now seen as a key moment for the feminist art movement in the United States. Bernstein continued to be involved with many activist artistic organisations throughout her career, including Guerrilla Girls and Art Workers’ Coalition.

A.I.R. gave Bernstein her first solo exhibition in 1973. The exhibition featured what would become her most well-known series: the screw drawings. Developed out of her work with graffiti and playing on language and sex, the drawings depicted flathead screws transformed into images more overtly phallic.

A year after her first solo show, one of Bernstein’s large-scale screw drawings, Horizontal, was selected for ‘Focus: Women’s Work – American Art in 1974’ at the Philadelphia Civic Centre Museum. However, and despite protests from contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois, Horizontal was removed from the exhibition by the museum because it was likened to pornography. Supporters of Bernstein wore ‘Where’s Judith Bernstein?’ badges to the exhibition opening.

Following this, Bernstein joined together with Fight Censorship, a collective of women who were similarly facing discrimination in the art world. Founded by visual artist Anita Steckel, who was also criticised for using sexual imagery in her work, Bernstein later said that although the group did get some press coverage, they were not taken seriously.

In recent years, Bernstein has also reflected on the fractious nature of the feminist movement during these years. Her work was not wholly embraced by the feminist movement, as some believed that representations of penises could not be feminist. Bernstein argued that her version of feminism included observing male culture and commenting on it through her art.

Following her expulsion from ‘Focus’, Bernstein struggled to find galleries that would exhibit her work, and her career took nearly 25 years to recover. During this period, she taught in high schools across New York and continued her daily practice of painting and drawing. During this period, Bernstein feared that “I would die and everything would be thrown out.”

In 2007, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first major retrospective of early feminist art, omitted Bernstein’s work. The oversight was noted by critic Richard Meyer. The following year, Bernstein found champions in fellow artist Paul McCarthy, similarly famed for his use of sexual imagery in his art, and gallerist Mitchell Algus, who gave her a solo show. Following this, the New Museum gave Bernstein a mini-retrospective in 2012 titled ‘Judith Bernstein: Hard’. For this, Bernstein scrawled her name from ceiling to floor on a glass wall as a discussion on ego and male posturing. The new Whitney Museum of American Art also put her piece Vietnam Garden in its inaugural exhibition in 2015. The same year, Bernstein was also named Art Basel’s Feature curated selector.

Today, Bernstein continues to make work which is political and urgent, using sexuality and images of genitalia to explore human psychology and power structures. In 2014 she created her Birth of the Universe series, which addressed themes of aggression, sexuality and humour and placed the vagina at the centre of the canvas. With these paintings, Bernstein aimed to demystify the romantic vision of the vagina in art history while also representing the anger which she feels is an integral part of her background and artistic output.

In 2016, Bernstein opened two solo shows, one at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York and the other at Kunsthall Stavanger in Stavanger, Norway, both of which were critically acclaimed. In February 2018, Bernstein exhibited Money Shot at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. These were a series of large-scale paintings about the Trump presidency.

The length of Bernstein’s career is testament to her work’s importance and endurance. Still committed to the feminist cause, when recently asked her thoughts on 21st century feminism Bernstein stated that although the world has come a long way, there is still work to be done so women and artists of colour have equal access to the system.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Sofia Leiby, Judith Bernstein by Sofia Leiby’, Bomb, 28.07.18: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/judith-bernstein/ [accessed 26.10.18], Jillian McManemin, ‘Judith Bernstein Shines A Backlight on Trump’s Crimes’, Hyperallergic, 17.02.18: https://hyperallergic.com/427355/judith-bernstein-money-shot-paul-kasmin-gallery/ [accessed 17.02.18], ‘Judith Bernstein: A Feminist Art Activist’, Out of Sync, 13.01.16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uKLpe7hujk [accessed 26.10.18], ‘Review: Judith Bernstein’, Frieze, 12.09.14: https://frieze.com/article/judith-bernstein [accessed 26.10.18], Phoebe Hoban, ‘Works in Progress’, The New York Times, 15.05.15: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/15/t-magazine/17older-female-artists-agnes-dene-herrera-rockbourne-farmanfarmaian.html#bernstein [accessed 01.11.18], Julie L. Belcove, ‘Judith Bernstein, an Art Star at Last at 72, Has Never Been Afraid of Dirty Words’, Vulture, 05.05.15: http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/judith-bernstein-isnt-afraid-of-dirty-words.html [accessed 01.11.18], Christie’s, ‘Interview with Judith Bernstein’: https://www.christies.com/sales/post-war-contemporary-art-london-sept-2013/judith-bernstein.aspx [accessed 01.11.18], Brian Droitcour, ‘The Men’s Room: Judith Bernstein Talks to Alison Gingeras’, Art in America Magazine, 27.10.18: https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/the-menrsquos-room-judith-bernstein-talks-to-alison-gingeras/ [accessed 01.11.18], Emi Fontana, ‘Judith Bernstein on Art, Politics, and the Birth of the Universe’, Flash Art, 09.05.14: http://www.flashartonline.com/2014/05/traveling-into-the-void-judith-bernstein-on-art-politics-and-the-birth-of-the-universe/ [accessed 01.11.18], M.H. Miller, ‘How to Screw Your Way to the Top: Judith Bernstein Brings Her Signature Style to the New Museum’, The Observer, 09.10.12: https://observer.com/2012/10/how-to-screw-your-way-to-the-top-judith-bernstein-brings-her-signature-style-to-the-new-museum/ [accessed 01.11.18].

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Despite her family’s prominence, Charlotte grew up largely in poverty, something which was no doubt an outcome of her father’s decision to abandon the family when she was very young.  Her formal education was limited, but she did complete two years at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

In 1884, Charlotte married Charles Walter Stetson. She had misgivings about the marriage even before the wedding, and she almost immediately began experiencing depression. A year later, she gave birth to their daughter, Katherine Beecher Stetson, and began suffering from what we now know to be  postpartum depression.

As a result of her depression, Charlotte was prescribed the rest cure, a type of treatment popular in the 1800s which required women to lay in bed for extended periods of time and refrain from all mental and physical activity. The results were disastrous for Charlotte, nearly driving her completely mad. However, she eventually recovered and used this experience as the basis for her most famous piece of fiction writing, The Yellow Wallpaper.  

This exceptional short story presents a remarkably accurate, first person account of a woman’s descent into madness. A searing indictment of “the rest cure”, Charlotte sent the story to Dr. Silas Weir, the man who prescribed it for her. Though he never responded to her directly, upon reading it, he is said to have vowed never to prescribe the treatment again.

In 1888, Charlotte and Charles separated, a move that was virtually unheard of during that time period. They divorced in 1894, at which point Charlotte, finding that life as a single parent left her too little time to do the writing and advocacy work she craved, sent their daughter, Katherine, to live with Charles and his new wife. This move was even more unheard of during the time period, and it became quite the scandal. Charlotte, however, had very progressive views on childrearing and firmly believed that her husband had every bit as much of a right to be in his daughter’s life as she did.

Following the divorce, Charlotte began writing extensively. She published numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction, including Women in Economics, an immensely popular feminist treatise that was translated into 7 different languages.   

In 1900, just six years after divorcing her first husband, Charlotte remarried, and unlike her first marriage, Charlotte found this one to be satisfying and fulfilling. She continued to write extensively, authoring and publishing more than a dozen books in the quarter-century that followed.  She also began publishing her own magazine, The Forerunner. 

In 1934, her husband passed away, and Charlotte moved to California to be closer to her daughter.   A year later, after suffering for several years with breast cancer, Charlotte, an early advocate for euthanasia, took her own life.

Like many women whose ideas and ideals were so far ahead of their time, Charlotte’s work was not fully appreciated until after her death. When the women’s movement began picking up steam in the United States during the 1960s, her writings experienced a resurgence, and she has only grown in popularity since then. By the time we reached the 1990s, a full century after the publication of her seminal The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman was ranked as one of the 10 most influential women of the twentieth century. 

She was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Radcliffe Harvard website, Biography.com, Conneticuthistory.com, Ethics of Suicide website.

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I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?

Nikki Giovanni is one of the most eminent American poets alive today. After she initially gained fame in the 1960s as a prominent poet within the Black Arts movement, and a Civil Rights activist, Giovanni’s expansive and influential career has included over twenty poetry collections and numerous children’s books.

Highly decorated throughout her career, Giovanni has been awarded the Langston Hughes Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters and has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word record. Giovanni’s work is also popular outside of the literary world. In 2005, she was named one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 Living Legends and, in 2017, Giovanni was awarded Maya Angelou’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born in 1943 as Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr in Tennessee, Giovanni is the youngest of two daughters. Her sister, Gary, began calling her ‘Nikki’ when they were small children and Giovanni has retained the name throughout her life.

When Giovanni was a student at Fisk University, a literary and cultural renaissance was taking place as artists explored the possibilities of African-American identity. An active student, Giovanni served as editor of the university’s campus literary magazine, was a member of the Fisk Writers’ Workshop and became Head of the Fisk chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. At Fisk, Giovanni met future civil rights leaders Diane Nash and John Lewis.

Giovanni graduated with a BA in History in 1967 and went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, but left both graduate programmes before completing her study.

Giovanni’s first volume of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk, published in 1967, focused on her response to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Robert Kennedy. Her second Black Judgement was published in 1969 and was very successful, selling 6,000 copies in three months. Giovanni’s early collections were so popular with a wider public in part because she expressed anger at the position of African-Americans in society.

In 1970, Giovanni edited and published Night Comes Softly, one of the earliest anthologies of poetry solely by African-American women. The anthology contained emerging women writers alongside established poets such as Margaret Walker and Mari Evans. The same year, Giovanni published another poetry collection Re:Creation. The following year, Giovanni published her autobiography, Gemini, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, and a collection of poems for children, Spin A Soft Black Song. She also recorded Truth Is On Its Way with the New York Community Choir, which sold more than 100,000 copies in its first six months.

Her poetry, in these years and to this day, is characterised by giving voice to African-American experience, a commitment to the Civil Rights movement and use of its vernacular. One of her most famous poems from this time was Nikki-Rosa, published in Black Judgement, and focused on a happy childhood in a close-knit African-American family.

The early years of her career were intense for Giovanni. In addition to her published work she also appeared on Soul!, a talk show which promoted African-American art and culture. Giovanni was a regular guest on the show and appeared alongside figures such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, Stevie Wonder and James Baldwin.

In 1972, Giovanni published one of her most enduringly popular works: Ego-Tripping (there must be a reason why). The poem is not a call-to-arms, but rather a celebration of black heritage and an attempt to redefine what it means to be a African-American woman. Giovanni continued to publish work throughout the next two decades, and further collections of her poetry have included: Woman (1978), Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), Knoxville, Tennessee (1994), Love Poems (1997) and Acolytes (2007).

Giovanni has also produced work for children throughout her career which focused on African-American history and explored issues which are relevant to African-American children. Recently, she has published Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship, Hip-Hop Speaks to Children, and Rosa, an introduction to the life and achievements of Rosa Parks. In 2018, a collection of Giovanni’s poems were published for I Am Loved, an illustrated anthology for children.

Giovanni is currently University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, a position which she has held since 1989. In 2007, following the tragic campus shooting, Giovanni delivered a moving poem We Are Virginia Tech which emphasised the endurance of solidarity and community.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Poetry Foundation, ‘Nikki Giovanni’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikki-giovanni [accessed 24.07.18] // Bryce Wilson Stucki, Prospect, ‘Nikki Giovani Remembers 1963 with a New Poem’, 28.08.13, http://prospect.org/article/nikki-giovanni-remembers-1963-new-poem [accessed 24.07.18] // Nikki Giovanni, ‘Timeline’, http://www.nikki-giovanni.com/bio [accessed 24.07.18] // Emily Lordi, The Atlantic, ‘Nikki Giovanni: ‘Martin Had Faith in the People’’, 05.04.18, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/04/martin-luther-king-jr-nikki-giovanni-interview/554807/ [accessed 24.07.18] // Poetry Foundation, Nikki Giovanni, ‘Nikki-Rosa’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48219/nikki-rosa [accessed 25.07.18] // TEDx Talks, Nikki Giovanni, ‘Why Not the Right Thing the First Time’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekpw2xzPK2Y [accessed 25.07.18] // Encyclopedia.com, ‘Ego-Tripping’, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/ego-tripping [accessed 25.07.18]

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