If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Yolanda Lopez’s art practice grew alongside her activism for the Chicanx student movement, which emerged in the late 1960s, and frequently centers the labor of women. Women’s Work Is Never Done is currently on view in Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. In it, Lopez combines a 1965 image of labor leader Dolores Huerta proudly holding a strike poster with a group portrait of anonymous female farm workers dressed in protective gear for the heavy industrial work of a 1995 broccoli harvest. This International Women’s Day we celebrate the intellectual, organizing, and nourishing labor of the women depicted—and the work and lives of all trans and cis women around the world. 

“Mary is in a Hurry: Magnificent and in a Hurry” -- A Quick Christmas Poem by Nancy Cardoso

Mary is in a hurry: she accepted to be a mother in a time of empire and crosses. Young, pregnant and single, she wraps the cloth around her shoulders and thinks, "God is with me, I will not be afraid." Mary is in a hurry: Joseph’s insecurity - a possible safe father - asks for agility and she goes to meet her cousin Isabel. Hastily. She needs partnership, complicity and joy, which only another woman, in those cases, knows how to be. "Blessed. Both"

Mary is in a hurry: she weaves songs of lullaby to her son with words that rhyme with overturning, dispersing and dethroning; she hums the hasty dream of the humble, the poor and the hungry. God was never the same again.

Mary is in a hurry: she completes her days of gestation in a time when the powerful establish laws of death, control and exploitation. Pushed by the census, she travels with Joseph to Bethlehem to fulfill the theological and literary fantasies of expected messiahs, but she knows that her son is Galileo. It is poor, black and from the outskirts: Jesus child, the savior. Mary is in a hurry: to find a place to give birth to a boy: a grotto, a hole, a marquee, a bathroom, a corral, a cave ... any place where God makes a point of being born poor. She feels the contractions that are coming; she opens her legs to give birth to the new one ... and she sees that everything is good. There was crying and placenta on the first night.

Mary is in a hurry: she must flee, migrate, escape the fury of the occupying armies. She holds the boy as if she knows hope and throws herself on the impossible roads of deserts and checkpoints. She nurses the boy with hurried Christmas tits. She serves the Christmas supper in herself: the child is the hunger and the desire to eat, she is the breast, the plate and the prophecy to survive.

The verb became breast and migrated to us.

Mary is in a hurry: to create a boy in the time of empire and cross is to feel the pain of every mother of a poor child; she knows that the cross will always be there, waiting for her son at any corner of any Unity of Pacification Process; she is not afraid! She will hasten the child, believe in the miracle - "begins the feast!" - until all pain is turned into resurrection: "our dead have a voice," she says with blood in her eyes. A thousand other sons and daughters will be born there.

Mothers of May Mary, pray for us in this advent now and at the hour of the long hurried night. Amen.

image description: Mary, depicted with black hair and light brown or olive skin, running in white tennis shoes and a pink dress kicked up so that it shows her legs, with the blue mantle with stars worn by Our Lady of Guadalupe, clutches a snake by its throat as she runs and she is beaming, her smile big and light radiating from her. This art piece is called Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe or Virgin Running and was made by Yolanda Lopez.

Yolanda López Self-Portrait, from Tres Mujeres/Three Generations series US (1975-76) Charcoal on paper [Source]

Born in 1942, she is a painter, printmaker, educator, video artist and activist. Her art focuses on the experience of Mexican Americans and often challenges ethnic stereotypes associated with them.

As López wrote in 2008 (Women’s Work is Never Done, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco): “Growing up in San Diego, ten minutes from the Mexican/U.S. international border amid a family with a cast of characters suitable for any Gregory Nava script, my family spoke English and Mexico City Spanish in equal measure. Victoria Fuentes Castillo, my grandma, tried to teach me civility. However it was her critical and wry conversation that interested me the most. My beautiful and meticulously groomed mother, Margaret, worked in the basement of the Grant Hotel and several French laundries as a presser. In 1978 she designed and created for me a contemporary Guadalupe gown, based on a Calvin Klein disco dress pattern. Indelibly I learned from her the sacredness of a union picket line.”