Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was one of the few painters to have earned, sustained, and enjoyed the attention and adulation of commoners and connoisseurs alike and remained celebrated both during and after their lifetime. Known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers and New Mexico landscapes, O’Keeffe is celebrated as the originator of ‘female iconography’, despite her own refusal to join the feminist art movement or cooperate with any all-women projects.

Early Beginnings

Born November 15, 1887, O’Keeffe trained in her formative years at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905) and later at the Art Students League of New York (1908). With fierce zeal, she learnt industriously, taking up odd jobs and teaching, driving her learnings by self-education and intuition. She worked for two years as a commercial illustrator and taught in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina till 1918.

It was somewhere in this period that she was introduced to the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation rather than copying any previous style and emphasised the importance of the arrangement of shapes and colours. Understanding Dow’s style was a light-bulb moment for O’Keeffe; she explained: “his idea was, to put it simply, fill a space in a beautiful way”. She began to experiment with shapes, colours and marks. Dow’s lasting impact on her interpretation and purpose of painting can be seen in the originality and freshness with which she treated her subjects.

Stieglitz and New York

Despite having found inspiration, O’Keeffe was still looking for a mentor and guide to provide circumstances that favoured and facilitated her work. She was to find one in in Alfred Stieglitz, twenty-four years her senior, an art dealer and photographer who provided her financial support and arranged for a residence and studio for her in New York in 1918, where he persuaded her to move.

She came to know many early modernists who were part of Stieglitz’s circle, including painters Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and photographers Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. She was to be influenced by them all, especially the photography of Strand as well as that of Stieglitz himself. Notably, Stieglitz successfully discouraged O’Keeffe from using watercolours, something she had started after her time in Virginia, convincing her of its association with amateur women artists.

Madly in love, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York for more than ten years till 1929, five of them as husband and wife.

Enlarged Flowers and Tall Buildings

O’Keeffe in the mid-1920s made about two-hundred flower paintings. Several of these were large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen through a magnifying lens. Notable among these were Oriental Poppies, several Red Canna paintings and Petunia, No. 2, her first large-scale flower painting which was made in 1924 and exhibited in 1925.

O’Keeffe’s magnified depictions of objects and attention to close-ups created a sense of awe and emotional intensity. Following an exhibition of her flower paintings and her sensuous photographs taken by Stieglitz, critics saw in her paintings a depiction of women’s sexuality; many claimed her Black Iris III and the Red Cannas were morphological metaphors for female genitalia. O’Keeffe, however, remained in denial of this interpretation throughout her life.

From 1925, her studio established on the 30^th floor of the Shelton Hotel, O’Keeffe began a series of paintings of the city skyscrapers and skyline. One notable work demonstrating her skill at the precisionist style is the Radiator Building – Night, New York; others painted in this period include New York Street with Moon, The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., and City Night.  She made a cityscape called East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel, painting her view of the East River and smoke-emitting factories in Queens.

End of the Affair

Like all intense passions, the warmth and mutual attraction between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz cooled over time. As her biographer, Benita Eisler recorded, “their relationship was, collusion…. a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union”.

Artists are often sentimental and somewhat akin to delicate creepers of infinite tenderness and beauty. They naturally seek the support of a firm and strong mentor. But O’Keeffe’s natural flair, talent, and passion for painting ensured her mentorship could never substitute her fiercely independent mind and rare resolve.

Free from her emotional baggage and having established herself as a painter and artist of exceptional merit, talent, and accomplishments, she moved out of Stieglitz’s shadow. O’Keeffe did not revisit New York’s horizon in her works once she moved to New Mexico in 1929.

New Mexico

The New Mexico landscapes were to be her next home and inspiration. She stayed in Taos and explored the rugged terrains, mountains and deserts, making it the subject and inspiration for some of her best-known paintings. Her famous oil, The Lawrence Tree, was completed after her visit to the nearby D.H. Lawrence Ranch. She also made several paintings of the local church, offering a unique perspective to this genre as it amalgamated structure and sky in silhouettes of superb intensity.

Images of animal skulls, strewn across the desert, were inspired paintings such as Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock, and Little Hills. She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and added them as subjects in her work. She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico. A loner by now, O’Keeffe often explored the land she loved in a Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929.

Her creations during her time in New Mexico and Abiquiú supplemented and strengthened her reputation as a painter who could see objects like few others could and translate them on canvas in a way that left the viewer both perplexed and exultant.

Last Days

In 1973, O’Keeffe hired John Bruce ‘Juan’ Hamilton as a live-in assistant and caretaker. Juan was a potter, divorced, broke and fifty-eight years her junior. Now in her final days, Juan’s presence served as a catalyst to O’Keeffe. She learnt from him working with clay. She was encouraged to resume painting despite her deteriorating eyesight, and finished her autobiography, all with his assistance. He was to stay with her for thirteen years till her death

In the latter half of her 90s and increasingly getting frail and weak, O’Keeffe moved to Santa Fe in 1984 where she died two years later on March 6, 1986. Her ashes were scattered on the land around Ghost Ranch, a place about which she wrote “… such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before … even now I must do it again.”

Legacy

O’Keeffe was a true legend, known as much for her independent spirit and fierce femininity as for her dramatic and innovative works of art. In each phase of her painting journey, she was audacious and different. Her uncommon genius for giving a surreal hue and sublimity to simple natural objects like flowers, leaves and rocks defined her craft.

Her paintings today enjoy iconic status and even now command unusually high biddings. Almost three decades after her death, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000 in 2014, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. Her unprecedented acceptance as an artist was due to her own talent, powerful graphic expression, and extraordinary depiction; not due to her gender, as she herself took pains to ensure, disliking being called a ‘woman artist’ and insisting on just ‘artist’.

But O’Keeffe’s true celebration lies in her making her life a cascade of bold statements. Credited for practising pure abstraction, O’Keeffe’s legacy is far richer, both splendid and dazzling in its range and opulence. At a time when few artists were exploring abstractions, her experimentations were strikingly original and far ahead of their time. Displaying elements of surrealism and Precisionism, she perfected a synthesis uniquely her own, wherein her idiosyncratic contributions to the modern world of art lie.

Another gem from the pen of Uday Varma, Former I&B secretary, writing exclusively for us, on women in history overlooked by omission or distortion!

This article is part of a series on women through history by author Uday Kumar Varma, former secretary of the Ministry of Information & broadcasting and MSME, Government of India. An ardent proponent of gender equity, Varma writes on women through history who have excelled in their area of passion and defied conventions. You may also like to read about the woman who triggered the abolishment of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe, activist Emmeline Pankhurst from England, the lady sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko from Russia,  the American pilot Amelia Earhart or Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg or just maybe a piece on the Spanish artist  Frida Kahloor Artemisia from Italy? And you must read the story of Mata Hari from the Netherlands– “Harlot? Oui! Mais traitoress, jamais!” ‘Courtesan! Yes; Spy, never!’

The post Painter O’Keeffe: American Modernism appeared first on Woman Endangered.

एक वैश्विक ब्रांड सुपर्णा चड्डा को स्वीकार करता है और उसकी सराहनीय कहानी दर्ज करता है ।वोल्वो ने सुपर्णा की कहानी को महाबलेश्वर के पहाड़ी शहर में दर्ज किया, वहाँ उन्होंने अपने लक्जरी ब्रांड वोल्वो XC90 को दुनिया की सबसे सुरक्षित कार के रूप में जाना!ऑटोकार इंडिया ने यूट्यूब पर अपने 10 लाख ग्राहकों के लिए महिला दिवस पर कहानी प्रकाशित की। सुपर्णा प्लेटफॉर्म वुमनएन्डरंग की संस्थापक भी हैं। वह इसे एक सुरक्षित दुनिया बनाने के महत्व के बारे में बोलती है और हमारे बच्चों के आनंद के लिए सुंदरता से भरी दुनिया को पीछे छोड़ने में सक्षम होने के लिए।

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“A girl shouldn’t sit like that” my 3^rd grade teacher once told me, before proceeding on to demonstrate how a straight back with crossed legs was the ‘lady-like’ way to sit.

I never noticed any teacher telling a boy how to sit or to not be loud, whereas girls were policed about how they should talk, be non-disruptive and behave like ‘ladies’ in general.

As I grew up and feminism rescued me from a very dangerous thought process, I realised the fact that everything a girl does is seen as explicit by the society (a society that we contribute to, by the way).

We have been systematically taught that it is shameful to be a girl. Everything should happen behind closed doors and yet is secretly lusted after anyway in public. Naturally it escalates into full-blown misogyny towards even the most natural of things, like menstruation.

God forbid a tampon falls out of our bag in a metro or we carry Pads without the black polythene the shopkeeper so kindly offers. All this is necessary, believe me, or otherwise the world might just find out that half of its population bleeds every 28 days.

The shame and stigma that we associate with Periods (yes I said the word) is blatantly obvious in the euphemisms we use, ‘chumming’, ‘on the rag’, ‘I’m down’.. a few of at least 5,000 such slang words that we chose to use instead of just calling them periods.

And let’s not even touch upon the subject of period taboos, a whole thesis on how a woman is impure and what she should or should not do during her cycle. And all of this dictated by a handful of people, who sit hiding behind the veil of privilege and ‘good sense’.

Just when we think there is no end to this regressive mindset, we have non-profits and activists actively propagating women’s safety, rights and sanitation (while also restoring our faith into humanity).

There have been age-old movements and rebellions that have successfully enabled the world to move on from the times when women weren’t even allowed to vote or have a voice.

One such modern-day initiative, “#Letstalkperiod – Gift a Menstrual Cup”, is challenging the very ground of ignorance for menstrual health.

Created by Woman Endangered and Stone Soup, it challenges period taboos and superstitions while addressing the issue of human health crisis that stems from repeated use of commercial pads or tampons over decades. It does this by distributing menstrual cups free-of-cost.

Why Menstrual Cups?

Studies have found that a woman uses a pad or a tampon for more than 100,000 hours in a lifetime. And that’s just the minimum estimate!

Yet we don’t talk about the chemical residue these products leave on the vaginal walls which can cause serious diseases such as cancer.

India accounts for 27 percent of deaths caused by cervical cancer, which is twice the global average. And the study links the cause partly to poor menstrual hygiene.

Amidst all of this, menstrual cups provide a safer, eco-friendly and economical option for women all over. It simply holds the period fluid, which can be emptied, and cup can be reused again.

The medical grade silicone used to make these cups, is infection-free and does not irritate the vaginal walls or pose any health risk by leaving residue.

After a one-time cost, it can be washed and reused for up to 10 years. Since, a single cup lasts that long, it greatly reduces the amount of menstrual waste generated to be disposed-off.

Benefits Of Using A Menstrual Cup

• Made from medical grade silicone which reduces risk of infection since it is also anti-bacterial – a quality otherwise not seen in other materials.
• It is bell-shaped and does not irritate the vaginal walls, as it is adjustable and easy to insert/remove.
• Simply holds period fluid and can be washed to be reused 2 to 3 times a day and is easy to store.
• Lasts from 8 to 10 years and reduces the hassle of disposing of used menstrual materials
• Reduces the burden on environment by reducing waste generation.

Menstruation health issues are probably the most stigmatized and ignored topic, even in the 21^st Century. And this is exactly what the #LetsTalkPeriod campaign aims to destroy.

The agenda is simple:

• Provide a sustainable menstrual alternative to pads and tampons which is a silicone menstrual cup
• Distribute these medical grade silicone cups free-of-cost to the most marginalized sections of women
• Address the ignorance and stigma around periods which has forced women to suffer in silence for years.

Joining hands with the crowdfunding platform DesiredWings.com, WE and Stone Soup have launched a crowdfunding campaign that aims to raise enough funds to organize a free-of-cost distribution of menstrual cups in Azadpur in New Delhi.

Aiming to distribute 1000 cups to 1000 women or even more, they want to target this health, environment and mental crisis at the grass root level.

In a time where period blood is still depicted as a ‘blue liquid’ gently splashed upon fluffy pads and any close-to-reality depiction is deemed inappropriate (not a family dinner conversation apparently), we need to stand up for menstrual health.

It’s time each of us contribute to the Gift A Menstrual Cup – Let’s Talk Period campaign, and destroy a few stereotypes ourselves!

About the Author:

A feminist at heart, Tarushi Varma believes change starts with just one person. So, raise your voice, stand up for yourself because you have it in you to make the world a better place.

The post Challenging Mindsets appeared first on Woman Endangered.

WE or womanendangered as an initiative aims to target debilitating mindsets that affect all of us in different degrees, specifically in promoting a gender equitable society. While all kinds of approach created to help gender equity are indeed welcome, WE have chosen a proactive approach to target Gender inequity at its root cause, that of mindset. And WE are under no illusion that a dent in the mindset will happen overnight. We’ve taken many generations to get here; we will take at least a few generations to start affecting change, but only if WE start talking now. Hence #LetsTalkPeriod

The tangible outcomes of such an approach are often met with raised brows, given measuring a mindset and its evolution is a long drawn process.

But where there is a will there is a way. And when the intention is beyond motives of profit or popularity, the universe offers tangible solutions. In my own personal capacity as the curator of events for the media, marketing and advertising domain, my focus is always to have a fair representation of women on all panels, speaking & juror slots. The situation is far from being equal participation of all genders and the task is tough, only cos of the already skewed statistics towards Men in senior management positions. Further, the focus is to maintain communication, creative’s and gifts to be beyond gender stereotypes (You’d be surprised).

With #LetsTalkPeriod Womanendangered.org has partnered with an eclectic group of women at Stonesoup.in who strongly believe in a sustainable living. And one of their initiatives is to promote a sustainable menstrual solution through medical grade silicone cups.

The idea with the Period campaign is to generate enough funds through our pilot project to distribute 1000 such cups to a marginalized women living in the slums settled on both sides of the railway track in Azadpur. Why here? It’s a beginning and based on the campaign’s success WE hope to replicate it across the country. In doing so WE are providing a solution which

·      Takes care of a marginalized woman’s menstrual solution need for upto 8-10 years

·      Reduces health hazards in comparison to conventional pads or tampons that are loaded with plastics and chemicals which makes a woman susceptible through prolonged exposure

·      Reduces the burden of waste on the planet

·      Gives a platform to talk of a tabooed subject on the digital platform

WE hope to crowd source funds to distribute these cups and raise awareness in the process about periods and of feminine hygiene products, an issue that almost never gets discussed. WE continue the proactive approach addressing a debilitating mindset and providing a tangible outcome. So won’t you join us in spreading the word? Its time we talk. #LetsTalkPeriod

Note:

Womanendangered is neither an NGO nor a trust , its an initiative fuelled by the passion of like-minded people who want to contribute their bit in passing on a society which is inclusive and free of gender inequity.

For a contribution of Re. 200 or more log onto desiredwings.com/period

The post #LetsTalkPeriod appeared first on Woman Endangered.

Feminism is not a catch phrase for angry women to put men down. It is the root-cause that takes expression at their worst as heinous crimes against women. Some, which women themselves may be participant to, leveraging the position of power that is endorsed in supporting such patriarchal mindsets. Time to point the fingers backwards.

The post 3 women 3 stories 1 LCD appeared first on Woman Endangered.

Double standards belief in #feminism n not in #LGBT rights! #WECHATUPhttps://t.co/nFYNL0fQgb

— Woman Endangered (@WE_Endangered) May 27, 2016

A wide range of questions came from across the globe ranging from disparity of income in couples to gender & age. Interests were piqued on status of feminism & LGBT rights as well.  Shared here is a summary of questions and their responses.

Question: Is the age of each gender an important factor in a heterosexual relationship? Why is the emphasis on having a young bride.

Answer:  We are moving towards equality in couple relationships. Age in gender should matter less and less, not more.Wanting a younger bride is still living in the era where men were the providers. It should change , In fact it is changing.

Question : Is #feminism a fashion or reality today?  Why is taken lightly or made a joke?

Answer : By it being a fashion, it has become a reality. However, its is still misunderstood to be hatred against men. Feminism at its core believes everyone should be treated equally. And any one who believes in gender equality is a feminist.

Question: What happens when a wife earns more than her husband. Can a couple live happily with this disparity?

@prernakumar21 @WE_Endangered The Indian patriarchal male needs to really work hard as does his mother, if the marriage has to work.

— Raksha Bharadia (@raksha_b) May 27, 2016

Answer: The Indian patriarchal male needs to really work as hard as does his mother, if the marriage has to work. According to a marriage therapist family interference is the biggest issue of urban couples.

Question: Is online activism as effective as other forms of activism?

Answer: Online activism is not limited by geography and hence has unlimited potential! We can change the world!

Question: Comment on feminist who don’t believe in LGBT rights?

@WE_Endangered @thewisebonobo Feminism at its core believes everyone should be treated equally.

— Raksha Bharadia (@raksha_b) May 27, 2016

Answer: People who don’t believe in LGBT rights are not feminists! This would amount to having double standards.

The post #WECHATUP with Raksha Bharadia appeared first on Woman Endangered.

‘Five Ordinary, Anti-National, Pseudo-sickular, openly smoking, Nanga dancing women will destroy Hindutva. For your voyeuristic pleasure’ Not every day one come’s across a dance theater description as such. While the static plate appears at the end of the video, I couldn’t help but smile.

Missed seeing the performance live in Delhi but am sure on the lookout for the next one by ‘Praatohkrityo’ or morning rituals as it translates from Bangla. A Dance theater to break away from the daily rituals. An expression through art of the unwritten expectations from a woman. A depiction of her daily rituals and the way she conducts her self. While the society may reign her speech, posture, attire and all that goes into making her ‘cultured’ the performance is an expression to break free.

The contemporary dance group of 5 urban millenials had its second performance in Delhi last month closely following a a successful launch in Kolkatta. A non ticketed show that nudges the viewer to put a price on the art they experienced.

Praatohkriya has the potential of being a movement  building a strong case for breaking barriers of religion,race, culture and sex.

The video is uploaded by Anindyo SenGupta and is titled as a ‘Fan Video’

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