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Johanna Gadski (1872–1932) was a German soprano singer. Though she made her operatic debut in Berlin, Gadski’s artistic reputation flourished in England and the United States. Her operatic performances were as compelling dramatically as they were musically. In the early 1900s Gadsky performed sang in a number of Wagnerian operas and repertory productions; she also performed in Dame Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald, the first opera written by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera. In the midst of World War I, Gadsky temporarily retired from her work. She resumed her musical career in 1921 and continued to perform until her health compromised her voice.
Frances Dana Barker Gage (1808–1884) was a leading American reformer, feminist, and abolitionist. She worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with other leaders of the early women’s rights movement in the United States. She was among the first to champion voting rights for all citizens without regard to race or gender and was an outspoken supporter of giving newly freed African-American women and men the franchise during Reconstruction.
Zona Gale (1874–1938) was an American writer. She wrote plays, fiction, essays, and poetry. Born in Wisconsin, Gale studied at the University of Wisconsin and received a B.A. and M.A. in writing. She began her writing career as a journalist at a local newspaper, and her sixth novel, Miss Lulu Bett, brought critical attention to her fiction in 1920. A year later, Gale adapted her novel to the stage and became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Throughout her writing career, Gale was active in women’s movements for equal rights. She was a member of National Woman’s Party and attended the founding meeting of the Lucy Stone League. Gale felt the urgency of social action, and her literature reflects the immanence of gender inequality as much as her political activity. Amy Jacques Garvey (1895–1973) was an activist and writer born in Kingston, Jamaica. Garvey was among only 2 per cent of youth in her region to attend high school. She later became a nurse. Garvey’s real passion, however, was for politics, and she worked for a law firm in Kingston for four years before moving to New York City in 1918. In New York she was involved with the newspaper Negro World, as well as the United Negro Improvement Association. In 1923, Garvey became the leader of the U NIA utilizing her renowned skills as a passionate public speak er and activist.
Anna Billings Gallup (1872–1956) was a botanist and zoologist who was appointed museum curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in 1902, serving until 1937. Formed only a few years before she was hired, the museum aimed to be an educational center for the Brooklyn Museum that would entertain, instruct, and stimulate a child’s power of observation. Gallup helped to translate these goals into a reality, creating a museum space for children that enabled them to touch and manipulate the exhibits, a highly unorthodox practice at the time. Her work and writing exemplifies progressive museum education during the early twentieth century.
Greta Garbo (1905–1990) is considered one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars. Born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden, Garbo grew up in impoverished conditions, the youngest daughter of a laborer and a jam-factory worker. As a teenager, Garbo took a job as a soap-lather girl in a barbershop, and then worked at the PUB department store, which led to modeling jobs for the store’s catalogues. She attended the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s Acting School in 1922, and soon began a long and fruitful career as a film star in both silent films and talkies. Garbo was the first to employ what is now called “method acting,” and her reclusive personality only fueled her image as a woman of mystery. During the 1920s and ’30s, Garbo made twenty-eight feature films in only sixteen years, earning three Academy Award nominations, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. After retiring from film at the age of thirty-five, Garbo became an avid art collector, obtaining paintings by Bonnard, Renoir, Rouault, and Kandinsky, and amassing a collection that was worth millions by the time of her death.
Angelica Vanessa Garnett (1918–2012) was the daughter of painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. She grew up among the members of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, writers, philosophers, and intellectuals including her aunt, Virginia Woolf. Garnett’s unusual upbringing influenced much of her life and work, and she is most known for her 1984 memoir, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood. In the book, Garnett discusses her mother’s love affair with Duncan Grant, whose previous relationships had been mostly homosexual. Garnett grew up believing her father was Clive Bell and did not learn the truth until she was eighteen. Perhaps in an effort to replace her missing father figure, Angelica speculates, she eventually married David Garnett, who had at one time carried on an affair with her father. Garnett had, in fact, been present around the time of her birth, and had been recorded as saying about baby Angelica, “Its beauty is a remarkable thing. . . . I think of marrying it; when she is 20 I shall be 46—will it be scandalous?” Garnett continued the tradition of artistic creation within the Bloomsbury Group, and exhibited her still-life paintings and sculptures in Europe and America. She later took on the effort to restore Charleston Farmhouse, the home of her upbringing, and turned it into a public museum, donating more than eight thousand drawings by her parents to the Charleston Trust.
Mary Gawthorpe (1881–1973) was an English socialist activist, advocating for women’s suffrage and trade unions. She was born in Leeds, where she later began teaching and joined the National Union of Teachers. As she involved herself in emergent suffragist action, Gawthorpe left teaching to become an organizer with the Women’s Social and Political Union. She organized, spoke, and agitated, along the way defying threats, assault, and imprisonment. Along with Dora Marsden, a peer in the Women’s Social and Political Union, Gawthorpe co-edited the Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review. In 1912 she left her editorial position and immigrated to the United States four years later. There she continued her action, supporting the American women’s suffrage moment as well as the trade union movement.
Adeline Genée (1878–1970) was a Danish ballet dancer. She began dancing as a child—debuting at ten years old—and was seventeen when she became a principal dancer of the Royal Danish Ballet, in Copenhagen. Revered for her classical performance, Genée was invited to be prima ballerina at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in London. She danced there for ten years, choreographing much of her own work. As ballet lost popularity in England in the early twentieth century, Genée’s work consistently raised the form’s cultural status. She toured the world, dancing in hundreds of performances. In 1920, Genée collaborated to form the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain, a group dedicated to improving the standard of dance practice and education. The Association would eventually become the Royal Academy of Dance, which still operates today. Genée retired in 1933, performing for over forty years.
Ida Gerhardi (1862–1927) was a painter and businesswoman, born in Hagen, Germany. She studied at the Women’s Academy of Munich Artists Association under the guidance of landscape painter Tina Blau. Gerhardi moved to Paris in 1891 and continued her education at the Académie Colarossi where she became close friends with painter Jelka Roses. After her time at school, Gerhardi became a part of the Café du Dome circle of artists and had close ties to Käthe Kollwitz, Ottilie Roederstein, and Maria Slavona. Gerhardi worked as a commissioned portrait painter and as an arts advisor and curator for French and German museums. Her own paintings were exhibited in Paris at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and in Germany at the Berlin Succession.
Miriam Gideon (1906 - 1996) was a composer and educator who held teaching positions at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and at the Manhattan School of Music. She was a political leftist and in 1954 and 1955 resigned from teaching positions at City College and Brooklyn college following an investigation by the FBI. Gideon was inducted into the American Academy and Instiute of Arts and Letters in 1975, the second woman to be included following Louise Talma who was inducted the year before. Her compositions include Lyric Piece for Strings (1942), Mixco (1957), Adon Olom, Fortunato, Sabbath Morning Service, Friday Evening Service, and Of Shadows Numberless (1966).
Grace Gifford (1888–1955) was an Irish political cartoonist and activist. One of twelve children, Gifford attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art at the age of sixteen. She further developed her talent for caricature at the Slade School of Art in London. While working as a cartoonist for The Irish Review in 1913, Grace met Joseph Plunkett, and converted to Catholicism in preparation for their marriage. He was sentenced to death by firing squad for his leadership in the 1916 Easter Rising, and the two were married just hours before he was executed. In the aftermath of the uprising, Grace devoted herself and her art to the promotion of Sinn Féin policies, and was elected executive in 1917. During this period, her cartoons were used in pamphlets distributed by the Irish Worker’s Union, and the first collection of her cartoons was published. During the Civil War, Grace joined the Anti-Treaty IRA, and was subsequently arrested and held at Kilmainham Gaol for three months. While interned, she painted pictures of the Virgin Mary on her cell wall. After the war, facing social and professional ostracism, Grace returned to commercial cartooning out of necessity. Two more collections of her work were later published, and a popular Republican song was written about her.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a feminist, sociologist, and writer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she was close with activist relatives such as suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Catharine Beecher. She spent most of her adolescence in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was more interested in self-education than organized schooling. At eighteen, Gilman enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of design, subsequently supporting herself as a commercial artist. After the birth of her first child, Gilman suffered severe postpartum depression and was put on prolonged bed rest. This experience served as the inspiration for her best-known short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” With her story of a woman isolated in a single room for the sake of her mental health, Gilman address women’s role in society and the detrimental nature of marriages that stifle their autonomy. Gilman later moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California, where she became involved with feminist organizing and social reform movements and supported herself by lecturing. Gilman’s belief in communal living for economic independence inspired the book Herland, which depicts a utopian society solely made up of women.
Margaret Glace was the first woman to be appointed dean at an art school when she was named academic dead of the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1948. She was director of the MICA from 1959–1961 and later served as director of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.
Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) was an American novelist. She was born in Richmond, Virginia, and lived there for the majority of her life. Glasgow’s first novel was written secretly and published anonymously. It was acclaimed under the assumption that it was written by a man, and then thoroughly criticized following the disclosure of her authorship. Not dissuaded, Glasgow continued to write: she published nineteen novels throughout her life and received numerous awards. As her novels developed, Glasgow actively inverted the literary conventions of gender and plot. Outside of her work, Glasgow was active in the suffrage movement as well as serving as the president of the Richmond chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was a writer, actress, and poet born in Davenport, Iowa. After receiving her B.A. from Drake University, Glaspell worked as a reporter before pursing a graduate degree at the University of Chicago. Around this time she began to publish short works of fiction and became associated with the Chicago Renaissance. In 1915 Glaspell moved to the East Coast, splitting time between Greenwich Village, New York, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she became a member of the early feminist debate group Heterodoxy and a founder of the theater group Provincetown Players. In 1931, Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her three-act play, Alison’s House, based on the life and work of Emily Dickinson.
Henrietta Glick (1901–1994) was an American composer. She was friends with Lola Ridge, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein, among other notable writers. Glick graduated from Chicago Musical College, and her symphonies were performed in Italy and New York.
Gluck (1895–1978) was a painter born in England and trained at the St. John’s Wood School of Art. After graduating in 1916, she became a part of an artists’ colony at Lamorna, Cornwall. In 1918, refusing the gendered markers of her given name, Hannah Gluckstein, she took on the name Gluck, and refused to be addressed as “Miss” or to have her chosen name be written in quotation marks. While she was best known for portraits and floral paintings, she also invented a special frame that she patented for the display of her works. Called the “Gluck Frame,” it rose from the wall in three tiers and made the painting an integral part of the room’s architecture. Gluck was in several open relationships with other women; one of her partners, Nesta Obermer, is depicted alongside a self-portrait of the artist in a 1937 painting titled Medallion. This painting, which Gluck referred to as the “You We” picture, became one of the artist’s best known and was later used as the cover for Radclyffe Hall’s seminal lesbian drama, The Well of Loneliness. Later in her life, Gluck started a campaign to increase the quality of paints in England, eventually persuading the British Standards Institution to initiate new standards for oil paints.
Emma Goldman (1868–1940) was a feminist and anarchist activist born in Kovno, Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania). Goldman worked in factories throughout the majority of her teens, first in Russia and then in Rochester, New York, where she emigrated to be with her sister. She became interested in radical thinking at a young age, finding inspiration in the Nihilists in Russia and later the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. Goldman was a well-known anarchist writer and lecturer who spoke about women’s rights, social issues, and anarchist philosophy, eventually founding the journal Mother Earth. She was imprisoned on several occasions for “inciting to riot,” as well as distributing information about birth control and ways to avoid the war draft. With the support of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and Peggy Guggenheim, Goldman wrote an autobiography entitled Living My Life that gained her a wider audience but also stifled her ability to speak openly about politics. Following the release of her book, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and she traveled to Barcelona to support the anarchist revolution there. Despite never supporting the suffrage movement—she refused to support any form of voting—Goldman is touted as a feminist icon, and her work to incorporate gender politics into the overall mission of anarchism is unparalleled.
Berthe Kroll Goldsmith was a sculptor and cofounder with Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village. Halpert made her money as a highly paid executive of an investment firm, but had a background in fine art. In 1926 she entered into a business partnership with Goldsmith, and together they opened the Downtown Gallery, dedicated to contemporary American art. The gallery also served as a social gathering spot for artists and collectors, and they held lectures and meetings to help facilitate conversation around American art. In 1929, they partnered with Holger Cahill and opened the American Folk Art Gallery, the first of its kind, on the second floor of the Downtown Gallery. There they continued to expand the boundaries of the gallery space by opening the Daylight Gallery in 1930, which was designed to unify architecture and art by focusing on the diffusion of light.
Anne Goldthwaite (1869–1944) was an artist born in Montgomery, Alabama, and educated in New York City. She traveled to Paris in 1907 and quickly fell into an artistic circle after meeting Gertrude Stein. Goldthwaite returned to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Her work was included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Goldthwaite was primarily a printmaker and was known for the inclusion of African-American subjects in her work.
Edith Goode (1881-1970) was a suffragette and feminist activist who was a founding member of the National Women’s Party. Along with friend Alice Morgan Wright, she attended Smith College and dedicated herself to movements that promoted women’s and civil rights, world peace and animal protection. She supported the NAACP and founded organizations such as the Humane Education Center in Loudon County, Virginia as well as the Humane Society of the United States. Both Goode and Wright established trusts to emphasize international aspects of animal welfare.
Elizabeth Gordon (unknown–1945) was the secretary to George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s all-female study group, the Rope. The Rope was part of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France during the mid to late 1930s, which sought to marry the “wisdom” of the East to the “energy” of the West in order to spark spiritual awakening and avoid what Gurdjieff believed was the world’s impending destruction. Gordon was the only heterosexual member of the mostly lesbian group, which was comprised of Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Margaret Anderson, Georgette Leblanc, Louise Davidson, and Alice Rohrer. Jane Heap and Gertrude Stein were also associated with the group and Gurdjieff’s teachings. Gordon, described as the “Mother Superior” of the group by Gurdjieff, was the first to join the Institute in 1922, and remained loyal to Gurdjieff during the German occupation of Paris, and even spent time in an internment camp during the war. She was eventually released, but died soon after.
Katherine Meyer Graham (1917–2001) was an author and a publisher whose leadership of the Washington Post (1963–1979) made it one of the top newspapers in the United States. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree in 1938, Graham entered journalism as a reporter for the San Francisco Post, and a year later began work in the circulation department of her father’s newspaper, the Washington Post (which he later signed to Graham’s husband Philip Graham). When Philip Graham committed suicide after battling with illness, Graham took charge of the paper. At the helm Graham was committed to publishing stories of unequivocal accuracy, as evidenced by her numerous field trips to army bases during the Vietnam War (1955– 1975). Her devotion to truthful news media extended to the investigations that her team conducted into the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Watergate. The published results linked the break-in to illegal governmental activities and prompted the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Graham’s memoir, Personal Histories (1997), earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1998. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, after her death in 2001.
Martha Graham (1894–1991) was one of the most influential dancers and choreographers of the twentieth century. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts until 1923. Three years later she established the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance in New York. In 1936 Graham performed Chronicle, one of her most important works, which dealt explicitly with the Wall Street market crash, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. Martha Graham was highly dedicated to her practice, and despite her disadvantage in a field that privileges youth, she choreographed new works until her death at the age of 96.
Katia Granoff (1895–1989) was a Russian gallerist and writer. Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Granoff studied in Switzerland, earning a degree in literature before moving to France. In Paris, she opened her first gallery in 1926, after working as a secretary at the Tuileries. She became a French citizen in 1937, but the German occupation forced her to leave Paris. For the duration of the war she lived in a medieval castle along with the painter Georges Bouche, whose work she had shown in her Boulevard Haussman gallery. Following the war, she opened three new galleries in Honfleur, Cannes, and Paris. The Paris gallery, Place Beauveau, was one of the first to exhibit Monet’s The Nympheas. Granoff was a supporter of female artists, and she often exhibited the works of Anne French and Chana Orloff. Granoff received an esteemed award from the French Academy for her Anthology of Russian Poetry (1961), and her later autobiographical works spoke to the relationships between Jews and Christians. Her legacy survives in her many poems and recorded works, sung by the likes of Monique Morelli and Edith Desternes.
Margaret Grant was the penname John R. Coryell (1848–1924) used for his publications in Mother Earth, an anarchist journal edited by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Known for his dime novels, Coryell wrote stories in many genres under a variety of pseudonyms. Along with his wife, he was one of the first teachers at the anarchist Modern School in New York, which had been founded in 1911 by the Ferrer Association. Coryell wrote several satirical essays on conventional morality for Mother Earth, which was published monthly from 1906 to 1917, as well as pieces titled “Sex Union and Parenthood” and “What is Seduction?”He also wrote about he labor movement, education, literature and the arts, women’s emancipation, sexual freedom, and birth control. In 1917 the magazine called for opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I and to government laws regarding the military draft. Due to the Espionage Act passed the same year, the offices at Mother Earth were searched, and Goldman and Berkman were both deported.
Myran Louise Grant was an active socialist and suffragist. Grant was a speaker on the New York Board of Education, as well as a professor of history at the Finch School in New York City.
Eileen Gray (1878–1976) was a key figure of the modernist architecture and an Irish furniture designer. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied painting and formed friendships with other female artists such as Jessie Gavin and Kathleen Bruce. While attending the Exposition Universelle at the World’s Fair in Paris, Gray was exposed to the style of Art Nouveau. Enthralled by the city, she moved to Paris with her peers from the Slade, continuing her studies at the Académie Julien and Colarossi. Her mother’s illness prevented her from settling permanently in Paris, and in 1905, she took residence in London and began teaching. While in London, she began working with lacquer under the mentorship of Sugawara. Her newfound skill was not without its setbacks, however, and in 1913, after only four years, she had developed lacquer disease on her hands. She continued to exhibit her work to much success until to World War I. After the war, Gray and Sugawara returned to Paris, where they were employed to decorate the apartment of Madame Mathieu Lévy. The four-year process resulted in innovative design and many lacquer works, including her creation of the Bibendum Chair, the Serpent Chair, and the Pirogue Boat Bed. The apartment was well received by the public and critics, and the Bibendum Chair, in particular, became an iconic piece of twentieth-century furniture and was put in to mass production. Gray was approached shortly after by Jean Badovici to work on new architectural design projects, including the modernist villa E-1027. Le Corbusier, encouraged by Badovici, painted many murals on Eileen’s estate in Saint Tropez, much to her disapproval. Her works are archived in Ireland at the National Museum of Ireland. In addition to her creative works, Gray was a known bisexual and involved in several lesbian groups of her time.
Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway King (1886–1953) is best known as the first U.S. congresswoman in Arizona history. During her life she was also noted as a one-time owner and operator of Los Angeles–based Gilpin Air Lines, a speaker at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, and a bridesmaid at the wedding of Eleanor Roosevelt. Greenway’s political interests and social activism paralleled the interests of her friend Roosevelt. During World War I, she developed and directed a network of women who farmed in the Southwest while the men were overseas, and during the late 1920s she opened Arizona Hut, a furniture factory that employed disabled veterans and their families. Though she broadly supported New Deal legislation during her terms in Congress, Greenway demonstrated political independence by breaking with President Roosevelt over issues of concern to veterans, an important part of her political base in Arizona, by opposing the reduction of the pensions of World War I servicemen. She also opposed some provisions of the Social Security Act, which she believed would be impossible to implement in the long term.
Frances Josepha Gregg (1885–1941) was born into a progressive feminist family. Raised by her grandmother, an avid women’s rights activist, Gregg was involved in marches from the age of six. These childhood moments shaped her into a strong, socially conscious woman, infamous for her numerous love triangles. Her relationship with poet H. D, inspired many of the author’s works, especially the piece HERmione. This novel creatively captured the tension between Gregg, H. D, and Ezra Pound. Likening Gregg to an alter ego of herself, H. D. found that her relationship with Gregg enabled her to disengage from Pound’s objectification. The relationship fizzled after H. D.’s success in Europe, but the two remained in sporadic correspondence until 1939. Gregg was a writer of merit, and she published in many of the same journals as H. D. Her memoir, The Mystic Leeway, was released in 1995. Gregg and her daughter were killed in the 1941 bombing of Plymouth.
Alyse Gregory (1884–1967) was a writer and suffragist born in Norwalk, Connecticut. She received a musical education in Paris at a young age and continued to study music upon her return to the United States. Gregory gave up her singing ambitions to become involved in the women’s suffrage movement, organizing a suffrage club in Connecticut and later working as an assistant state organizer for the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association. In 1918 Gregory moved to New York City where she worked as a freelance writer for the Freeman, the New Republic and the Dial, eventually becoming the managing editor for the Dial in 1924. She moved to England in 1925 and published three novels before moving to Switzerland, where she wrote a fourth book in 1938.
Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879) was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist from South Carolina. After being raised by a slaveholder in Charleston, South Carolina, Grimké Weld moved to Philadelphia in 1819, due to her strong opposition to slavery. In 1835 she wrote a letteragainst slavery published in the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper. Confronted by discrimination against women in the abolitionist movement, Grimké Weld turned her attention to women’s equality as well. In 1837, she published An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States and went on a tour of Northern churches to campaign against slavery and in favor of women’s rights. She came under attack by Catharine Beecher, a prominent commentator on the position of women in society, who argued that women should remain in the domestic sphere. In response, Grimké Weld wrote several letters to Beecher that were later published as Letters to Catherine Beecher, in which she vigorously defended her right to speak out in favor of causes like abolition. In 1838 she moved with her sister to Belleville, New Jersey, where they opened a school that educated the children of fellow abolitionists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Martha Gruening (1889–1937) was an American writer and civil rights activist. She graduated from Smith College in 1909. After college, Gruening went to Greenwich Village in New York, where she became a relentless political agitator. She wrote and edited the Dawn, a pacifist magazine, served as the assistant secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and wrote reports on national events for the association. She eventually moved to France and continued to advocate for the rights of black men and women until her death.
Gertrude Grunow (1870–1944) was a German composer. She was as an assistant at the Bauhaus School of Design until 1919, when she began teaching musical composition and theory. Her principals centered on concise notions of harmonization and the relationships between sound, color, and musical theory. Due to her avant-garde methodologies and a certain haughtiness (her personality was once even described as “sensitive to occultism”), Grunow was not favored among students, and she left the Bauhaus to follow painter Johannes Itten, a major supporter of her unorthodox practice. The remainder of her years was spent teaching across Europe and the United Kingdom.
Irene Guggenheim (1868–1954) was an American child-welfare advocate and art collector. Born in New York City, Guggenheim studied at Normal College, Miss Lindner’s School in Frankfurt, and a private school run by Madame da Silva. In the early 1890s, she began her charitable work with poor children in the city. With social worker Ida Clemons Guggenheim opened the Brightside Day Nursery for the children of working-class women. Brightside evolved, eventually offering trade classes, a community savings fund, and a circulating library, until it closed in 1948.
Olga Guggenheim (1877–1970) was a donor to the Guggenheim collection whose generous contributions helped shaped the institution’s collection. After gifting two initial paintings, Guggenheim created a purchase fund with two conditions attached to its use: that she must approve of the works purchased and that they must be deemed masterpieces. A total of sixty-nine acquisitions were made through her donations. In 1954 she was named an honorary trustee.
Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (1925-1967) was a Swiss-born American painter and daughter of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. She spent her childhood in England and France but moved to the states with her family in 1941, eventually studying at the prestigious Finch College. She went on to exhibit works internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work combines both surrealist and naïve styles, often autobiographical scenes depicting happy families. During the 1940’s Guggenheim’s paintings were featured in two exhibitions dedicated to women at Art of this Century, the gallery opened by her mother, alongside artists such as Leonora Carrington, Lee Krasner and Frida Kahlo. Her career was cut short in 1967 when she overdosed on medication managing her depression.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) was an art collector, dealer, and socialite born in New York City. She moved to Paris in 1920 where she became friends with avant-garde writers and artists including Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, and Romaine Brooks. Guggenheim opened a gallery for modern art in London in 1938 called Guggenheim Jeune. From 1942 to 1947 she ran the Art of This Century gallery in New York, exhibiting European Surrealists and lesser-known American artists. Part of the gallery presented her personal collection, but it was only after her death that the entire collection would find a permanent home. Following her time in New York, Guggenheim moved to Venice and stopped collecting to focus on displaying what was already in the collection, frequently loaning to museums in Europe and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her collection, and her home in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an eighteenth century palace, are now part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Edna Guy (1907–1982) was a dancer and choreographer born in Summit, New Jersey. At a young age, Guy saw Ruth St. Denis perform; highly influence by the experience, she was determined to join the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. She eventually found a place at Denishawn in 1924 but faced many hardships as one of the few African-American dancers at the school. Guy worked as St. Denis’s personal assistant from 1927 until 1928 and danced with the company but only in-house. She was asked to leave the company in the early 1930s and began a career on her own, later performing with the New Negro Art Theater. Her work in the 1930s focused on dance informed by different cultures of the African diaspora; she acted as a curator of events as well as a choreographer and performer. In 1938, Guy opened a dance school in New York and in the following year served on the American Dance Association committee.