Ten pioneering women of the arts and what we can learn from them in 2021.

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart. — Djuna Barnes

Throughout history, female artists have shaped and shifted culture, despite the limitations of their time. Today, we call them trailblazers — back then, they were creating the work they felt was missing from the world, expressing their creative truth’s unapologetically. Above all else, these women prove that, even in times of unrest and uncertainty, courage has the power to propel us all ever forward.

 Zaha Hadid

Lauded the ‘Queen of the curve’ Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was as ambitious in her career, as in her transformative architectural designs. Hadid once told the Financial Times, “As a woman in architecture you're always an outsider. It's OK, I like being on the edge”. While she may have seen herself as on the outside, Hadid persevered and made an indelible mark on the world of design. Among a slew of awards and accolades, in 2004 Hadid was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, first awarded in 1979. In a documentary produced in that same year, Hadid muses, at “every stage of your career you are always on the margin — but you need to push the work dimension, because it’s the only way you can achieve a shift in the status quo.” A true visionary, Hadid broke free from her predecessors with curvaceous, undulating and gravity-defying spaces that have transformed cityscapes and skylines around the world.  These wildly organic shapes and lines emerge from the unbounded imagination of Zaha Hadid. Hemmed in no longer, the architectural world was transformed by Hadid’s vision of designs dreamed from far outside the box.  

Diana Vreeland

Above her status as a style icon, or lengthy tenures at fashion bibles, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, it was for her wild imagination that Vreeland was most regarded. Her ‘Why don’t you?’ column for Harper’s presented women with the opportunity to — no matter how extravagant the suggestions — aspire to Vreeland’s charm. At odds with the particularly bleak times (her column began in the 1930’s and continued throughout World War II), she offered hope; “There’s only one very good life and that’s the life you know you want and you make it yourself”. Vreeland was famously self-made, and perhaps this gave her an ‘unerring feel for the Next Big Thing’. Vreeland discovered model Dame Lesley Lawson “Twiggy”, propelled the bikini into the mainstream, and gave fashion advice to First Lady Jackie Kennedy.  Her legacy wove together politics, art, music, fashion and society. Among her many talents was focussing on the individual and inevitably, they would blossom; “all these people invented themselves, naturally as the Editor I was there to help them along!”

Loie Fuller

Far from the delicate ballerinas of her time, Loie Fuller had no formal dance training when she took to the stage with Serpentine Dance in 1891 — America’s first modern dance work. Just as Vreeland used clothing as a form of reinvention, Fuller used costumes; billowing trails of fabric that transformed under the lighting effects she too created. These later became patented, including her use of chemical salts for luminescent lighting — discoveries that led Fuller to be celebrated in both the arts and sciences. Her ethereal performances took Fuller to Paris, where she performed regularly as the physical embodiment of the Art Nouveau movement. Regardless of her experience, critics described her work as ‘infinitely more artistic than the toe dancing of the greatest prima ballerina.”

Yayoi Kusama

In 1977, artist Yayoi Kusama admitted herself to a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she still lives, citing “I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art”. Kusama’s studio is positioned directly across the street. A world away from the internal battles she may face, Kusama’s works depict a world of light, colour, and bold experimentation. Her recent Flower Obsession (2016-2017) displayed at Melbourne’s NGV allowed gallery-goers to inject a small part of themselves into the artwork; attaching a plastic flower to what began as a plainly furnished room. Kusama references her inspiration as the hallucinations she experienced as a young child, where a floral tablecloth sprang to life in front of her. It is Kusama’s ability to know her limits, to make unimaginable sacrifice, that has allowed her to continue creating, and share her gifts with the world.

Elsa Schiaparelli

For a woman who created the shade, ‘Shocking Pink’, Elsa Schiaparelli dressed conservatively by comparison — a simple dress or suit and blouse was most often her daily uniform. Influenced by the controversial Surrealism art movement, Schiaparelli rubbed shoulders with the 1930s vanguard — Picasso, Cocteau, and Dalí, before moving on to Hollywood stars Mae West and Gretta Garbo, seemingly drawn to the allure of stardom. “A Schiaperelli creation was more than clothing, it garnered the wearer with a loaned confidence; it was like borrowing someone else’s chic and, along with it, their assurance” said former Vogue editor, Bettina Ballard. While Schiaparelli’s personal dress sense may have shirked from the spotlight, the 12 commandments in her autobiography, “Shocking Life” are nonetheless powerful and poignant: "Ninety percent [of women] are afraid of being conspicuous, and of what people will say. So they buy a grey suit. They should dare to be different”.

Djuna Barnes

“A woman’s only hope...” is how journalist and illustrator, Djuna Barnes described the act of writing. Her works explored both the pleasure and pain of belonging to any one group, whether defined by politics, gender, or the one you love. While she produced a relatively small body of work, Barnes remains a significant figure among the bohemians of 1920’s Paris. A long list of influential writers claim her as a major inspiration for their work.  Short but to the point, her message will reverberate for centuring to come; perhaps expression, the freedom to be oneself, is the only hope for all of us.

Agnes Martin

So unconcerned with accolade and attention, after achieving success in the 1960s, painter Agnes Martin packed up her New York studio, gave away her materials and went ‘off grid’. Some time later she emerged from her home in New Mexico, with a new luminous body of work, living out perhaps her most famous statement: “I paint with my back to the world”.

Having a space of her own was of the utmost importance to Martin, as was solidarity: "When you’re with other people, your mind isn’t your own”, an interesting comparison to artists who thrive off the stimulation of others and the outside world. Martin was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which presented in visions and voices— “she heard and saw things that others didn’t” observes Nancy Princenthal in her biography, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, though Martin denied her personal experience had anything to do with her work.  But she did express that she painted to quieten the voices, an act that required tremendous determination and will.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Countless literary magazines rejected her work and Brooks didn’t succeed in selling her first poem until the age of 28. "This should encourage youngsters,” said Brooks, “all you have to do it stick at it...for fourteen years". In 1945, Brooks published her first book of poetry, followed by a second in 1949 and the following year it was awarded the Pulitzer. Her way of working could be seen as the perfect metaphor for life: “...you revise, and you revise. And often the finished product is nothing like the first draft. Sometimes it is.”

Joan Didion

Didion’s 1961 seminal essay for Vogue titled ‘Self-respect: Its source, its power’ is as relevant now as it was 50 years ago. According to the writer, it may be defined as “doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts”. True to her words, in 1991 Didion wrote the first mainstream media article that challenged the conviction of the Central Park Five, a group of African American and Hispanic teenagers accused of committing a brutal sexual assault against female jogger, Trisha Meili. Four of the young men were sent to juvenile detention for sentences ranging 5 to 15 years. The eldest accused, at just 16, was tried and imprisoned as an adult receiving a sentence of 13 years. In 2002 the man who committed the crimes confessed, and confirmed he acted alone. The true assailant was never convicted of the assault — owing to the statute of limitations, however Didion was right in her skeptical consideration of the case given the racial politics of the time, “by putting fears and doubts to one side” she spoke up against prominent New Yorkers, the media, and future president, Donald Trump.

Joan Jonas

“I am always looking for stories,” said video and performance artist, Joan Jonas — though new ideas are not her primary concern, “I often use the same ideas over and over again, in different ways... it’s kind of a language I’ve developed”. That ‘language’ has carved out Jonas’ career as a pioneer who invented her own art medium, developing the My New Theater series (1977) to portray a sense of live performance to audiences, even when she wasn’t present. A prolific traveller, Jonas takes inspiration from both the grand (the Noh and Kabuki theater in Japan) and the more mundane (her evening dog walks, dinners with friends) — “it’s all in the same experience of being curious about the world. That’s what I find the most inspiring, the world — you know, the world around me.” 

These pioneering women, through all of their personal experiences and creative endeavours, have contributed their gifts to the world so that we can continue to enjoy, learn from, and build upon them at this pivotal moment for change. This point in time calls for the courage to do things differently, to stand for something and to express our creative Truth’s unapologetically above all else. 

‘You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices’ - Zaha Hadid 

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