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Loren MacIver (1909–1998) was an American painter. “I never thought of painting as a career,” Loren MacIver once said. “I never intended to be a painter. I just like to paint.” Apart from taking classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan in 1919, MacIver was self-taught, and she developed an eclectic, personal style, using oil paints with the delicacy of watercolors to create a mood of reverie. In 1946 she wrote “My wish is to make something permanent out of the transitory,” in a three-paragraph artist’s statement, the only one she ever composed. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art bought one of her paintings for its collection and made her one of the first women artists in the collection. She spent the next three years working for the Depression-era Federal Art Project, and had a solo show at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery in 1938. She later had one-woman retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1953), New York; the Phillips Collection (1965), Washington, D.C.; the Montclair Museum of Art (1975), New Jersey (1975); and the Newport Harbor Museum (1983), now the Orange County Museum, California.
Carol Brooks MacNeil (1871–1944) was an American sculptor, born in Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute. She is best known for her portraits of small children, which capture their gestures, moods, and innocence. MacNeil was one of the sculptors known as the “White Rabbits” who helped Lorado Taft with his sculptures for the World’s Colombian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Following the exposition, she moved to Paris to continue her education. While living in Rome, MacNeil created unique designs for vases, teakettles, inkstands, and a chafing dish supported by three nudes as its stand. In 1900 Brooks won an honorable mention at the International Exposition and a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle. She was awarded a bronze medal for a fountain at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis in 1904. MacNeil was a member of the National Sculpture Society.
Edith Carpenter Macy (1871–1925) was a suffragist and philanthropist from New York City. Macy had a deep commitment to charitable work and was particularly interested in the health and welfare of children. She was active in the League of Women Voters, the Teachers College, and the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. She was a founder of the Westchester Children’s Committee and one of the founding members of the Cosmopolitan Club in New York City. From 1919 to her death in 1925, Macy served as the chair of the Girl Scout National Board of Directors. Macy was among the first of the organization ’s officials to foresee the tremendous influence trained leadership would have on the development of Girl Scouting. She dreamed of a permanent school, staffed and equipped to offer the highest possible quality of guidance to Girl Scout leaders. After Macy’s death her husband donated land and built the school his wife had envisioned; the Edith Macy Conference Center was completed in 1926 and still functions today as a training center for Girl Scout volunteers and staff members.
Geraldyn “Gerri” Hodges Major (1894–1984) was a visible journalist and writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Known early on as Geraldyn Dismond, she pursued a professional career as a writer, journalist, and editor for several African-American newspapers including the New York Amsterdam News. Black society was Major’s primary journalistic interest, and she wrote about fashion, food, and style, frequently traveling around the globe as she covered social events. Her columns about the bohemian lifestyle and comings and goings of Harlem’s artistic and intellectual set were read widely, and she was sometimes referred to as “Harlem’s Hostess.” She was the first African-American woman to host a regular radio show. Her program, The Negro Achievement Hour, aired first on WABC and later appeared on other area stations. Later, then known as Gerri Major, she began a twenty-five-year career at the Johnson Publishing Company where she served as society editor and associate editor for Ebony and later Jet magazine. She wrote and lectured on aspects of black society, and co-authored the 1976 book Black Society.
Ellen Kuhn Manhan (1877–1947) was a dramatic reader, author, and poet. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, she wrote on subjects such as education and emotion and lived in Brighton, New York.
Abby Adeline Manning (1836-1906) grew up in New York living with her father and step mother. She met Anne Whitney, the poet and sculptor who would become her partner for forty-four years, around 1862. Between 1867 and 1876 she and Anne visited Munich, Paris and Rome. In 1876 Whitney and Manning established a home and four-story studio at 92 Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill in Boston. Abby at the time was also an artist, yet her works to this day have been lost to the shadows of history and time. In 1888 Anne purchased 225 acres in Shelburne, New Hampshire and Adeline and Anne spent their summers on the farm. They were both involved with the women suffrage movement, printing of pamphlets to hand out for different causes, and of sharing their home with friends and fellow artists. Whitney's relationship with Manning is frequently termed a Boston Marriage, a term used in New England in the decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe two women living together and supporting themselves financially. Such relationships between upper class professional women were both common and accepted by society at large. Some have written of Adeline Manning that she was gentle as a moonbeam, yet firm as a rock. After a brief illness, Adeline died at the age sixty-nine. Anne was grief-stricken, and she never spent another summer at the farm in Shelburne. Anne died in 1915 and their ashes were buried next to each other under the same headstone.
Maria Marc (1876–1955), born Bertha Pauline Marie Franck, was a German painter and printmaker. Marc trained as a drawing teacher for elementary, secondary, and high school at the Berlin Royal Art School. She then studied at the Women’s Academy of Munich Artist’s Association.
Louise March (1900–1987) was a teacher and the founder of the Rochester Folk Art Guild. She spent most of her childhood in Germany and studied art history at Berlin University. After coming to the United States in 1926, she did further study in art history at Smith College. Soon afterward, she joined the faculty of the art department at Hunter College in Manhattan. During her first years in New York, she took a job as manager of the Opportunity Gallery in Manhattan, and became established within a circle of artists and writers. In 1929 she traveled to France to live and study under spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. March worked closely with Gurdjieff as his secretary and translator. In 1957 March began to visit Rochester, New York, where a handful of people interested in the ideas of Gurdjieff had been gathering. She began leading this group, subsequently called the Rochester Folk Art Guild. March directed the activities of the Rochester Folk Art Guild and lived there until her death. Under her guidance the guild grew to become a nationally recognized center for fine quality craftsmanship with work in museums, galleries, and private collections throughout the United States.
Mathilde Marchesi (1821–1913) was a German mezzo-soprano, proponent of the bel canto vocal method, and renowned vocal teacher. She taught at conservatories in Cologne and Vienna, opening her own school in 1881 in Paris, where she spent the majority of her life. She was best known for teaching prominent singers such as Nellie Melba, Emma Calve, Frances Alda, and Emma Eames. While focused on the bel canto style of singing, Marchesi was committed to properly training voices for any style of singing, and she advocated for slow and deliberate training rather than dubious techniques that claimed to train a voice in a year or two. She carried the bel canto technique into the twentieth century, and her ideas are still studied, primarily by female singers with voices in the soprano range.
Guadalupe Marín (1895–1983), born María Guadalupe Marín Preciado, was a model and novelist. She was born in Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco, Mexico, and moved to Guadalajara with her family when she was eight years old. In 1922 she became the second wife of muralist Diego Rivera. Marín was the mother of Rivera’s two youngest daughters, Ruth and Guadalupe Rivera. She later married poet Jorge Cuesta. Marín was the subject of portrait paintings by Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Juan Soriano; she also served as a model for photographer Edward Weston. Marín was featured in Rivera’s mural Creation as “strength,” “song,” and “woman,” and while several months pregnant she was the nude model for “earth” for his Chapingo chapel mural. In 1938 Marín’s semi-autobiographical novel La única was published. The book was hailed by author Salvador A. Oropesa in The Contemporáneos Group (2003)as a feminist component of a counterculture writers’ movement in post-revolutionary Mexico. Marín published Un día patrio in 1941.
Helen Marot (1865–1940) was an American writer, librarian, and labor organizer. She is best remembered for her efforts to address child labor and improve the working conditions of women. Marot grew up in an affluent and cultured family and was educated in Quaker schools. In 1896 she worked as a librarian in Wilmington, Delaware, and the next year she returned to her hometown of Philadelphia and opened a private library that specialized in works on social and economic topics. In 1899 she published A Handbook of Labor Literature and conducted an investigation of working conditions in the tailoring trades in Philadelphia for the U.S. Industrial Commission. In 1902 Marot investigated child labor in New York City for the Association of Neighborhood Workers and helped form the New York Child Labor Committee. The resulting report, written with Josephine Goldmark and Florence Kelley, was the principal impetus to the passage of the Compulsory Education Act by the state legislature in 1903. Marot became the executive secretary of the two-year-old New York branch of the National Women’s Trade Union League in 1906. Her organizing talent built the group into a formidable force in labor organization. Marot was also largely responsible for creating the Bookkeepers’, Stenographers’, and Accountants’ Union of New York, a pioneering effort in organizing white-collar women. During that time, she also assisted Goldmark and Kelley in assembling the data for Louis Brandeis’s famous brief concerning the regulation of women’s working hours in the case of Muller v. Oregon. Marot was later the principal leader and organizer of the first major strike of shirtwaist makers and dressmakers (1909–10) under the banner of the new International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Anne Martin (1875–1951) was an American suffragist, pacifist, and author as well as the first woman to run for the United States Senate. She attended the University of Nevada and later founded their department of history in 1897. Martin went on to study at Columbia University, Chase’s Art School, the University of London, and the University of Leipzig. She briefly returned to the United States before traveling throughout Europe and Asia. She experienced the women’s revolution in England between 1909 and 1911 and became a Fabian Socialist, writing many short stories and political articles. Martin returned to Nevada in 1911 and became the president of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society, organizing a campaign that convinced male voters to enfranchise women just three years later. This success led to her representation of the national movement as a speaker and executive committee member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Congressional Union. Martin helped organize voting women in the West in 1916 to challenge Democrats. She was one of the Silent Sentinels, National Woman’s Party members who picketed for suffrage in front of the White House in July 1917; as a result, she was sentenced to Occoquan Workhouse, but was pardoned less than a week later by President Woodrow Wilson. Martin ran for the Senate in 1918, focusing her campaign on the ways in which women could be a positive influence on the political process. Before her second campaign in 1920, she wrote a series of articles and essays urging women to form autonomous political organizations. She moved to California in 1921 and later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nevada in 1945.
Berta Margoulies (1907-1996) was a Jewish sculptor born in Poland who spent her early childhood years evading persecution with her family during the first World War. These early experiences informed much of her later sculptures of highly expressive figures, often depicting multiple bodies in embrace. She studied at the Art Students League in New York and in Paris at the Academie Collarossi and Academie Julian. Margoulies returned from her studies in Paris during the Great Depression and began working as a social worker in New York concurrent to continuing her studio practice. Margoulies' sculptures can be found in public buildings including The Federal Building in Washington D.C. and in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa and Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.
Dora Marsden (1882–1960) was an English anarcho-feminist, suffragette, editor of literary journals, and a philosopher of language. She began her career as an activist in the Women’s Social and Political Union, run by prominent feminists Christabel and Emmaline Pankhurst, but broke with the suffragist organization to found a journal for more radical voices. Over the next seven years, Marsden was the editor for three successive journals: the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, andthe Egoist. Her journals focused on avant-garde cultural politics, and she published many early works by prominent Anglo-American and French high modernists. Marsden championed expanding feminist activism beyond the middle class woman, advocated for free-love, and wrote a five-part series on morality that was published in the Freewoman. In 1920, Marsden withdrew from public life and spent fifteen years writing a “magnum opus” that was published in two volumes, The Definition of the Godhead and Mysteries of Christianity. The poor reception of the work led to a psychological breakdown in 1930, and Marsden spent the remaining twenty-five years of her life in an institution for the mentally ill in Dumfries, Scotland.
Alice Trumbull Mason (1904–1971) of Litchfield, Connecticut, was a k ey figure of American abstraction. Her mother was an accomplished artist, and Mason spent much of her childhood in Europe. F rom 1921 to 1922 her family lived in Florence and Rome where she studied at the British Academy. She moved to New York in 1923 and she studied at the National Academy of Design, and from 1927 to 1928 she attended courses at the Grand Central Art Galleries taught by Arshile Gorky. Gorky inspired her interest in abstract painting, and Mason painted her first nonobjective works in 1929. With a group of close friends, Mason established the first American Abstract Artists group exhibition in 1937. She served as the association’s treasurer (1939), secretary (1940–1945), and president (1959–1963). She was also an activist for abstract art, protesting the decisions of the Museum of Modern Art several times for excluding abstract artists from exhibitions. Throughout her career Mason felt there was a bias against women in the New Y ork art world so she regularly presented her work at AAA group shows and encouraged other women to join her.
Elisabeth “Bessy” Marbury (1856–1933) was a theatrical and literary agent and producer based in New York City. Marbury used her connections as a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, a religious liberal and one of the founders of Rhode Island, to established herself in New England society. She was in an open lesbian relationship for twenty years with interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, both of whom became prominent as professionals and as socialites. In 1903 Marbury—along with Anne Tracy Morgan and Anne Vanderbilt—helped organize the first women’s social club in New York, the Colony Club. That same year, de W olfe and Marbury convinced Anne Tracy Morgan to buy the Petit Trianon next to the Palace at Versailles. There the women held many social events with important European cultural producers, until they had to flee due to the onset of World War I. During the war, Marbury dedicated herself to relief work for French and American soldiers.
Jacqueline Marval (1866–1932) was born Marie Josephine Vallet in Quaix, France. In 1895 Marval moved to Paris, where she worked as a seamstress and began her painting career. She was widely well-liked and a source of inspiration to many members of the “Fauve generation.” Marval exhibited her work at the Salon des Indépendants in 1901, followed with several shows across Europe in the years following. Her 1903 painting The Odalisques was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. From 1923 onward, she campaigned for the creation of a museum of modern art in Paris and Grenoble.
Caroline Campbell Mase (1880–1949) was an American painter best known for her Impressionist landscapes. She exhibited a pastel entitled September Haze at the Armory Show of 1913.
Charlotte Osgood Mason (1854–1946) was a New York–based philanthropist and supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and spent much of her life interested in the folklore of a wide range of ethnic groups. In the early 1900s Mason spent time living among the Plains Indians. Upon learning of the Harlem Renaissance, she eagerly supported the movement based on what she saw as “America’s great link with the primitive.” While the colonial sensibility of her involvement may have been problematic, Mason contributed a great deal of funding to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, including a trip to New Orleans to study Hoodoo and significant support in her writing of Mules and Men.
Nan Mason (1896–1982) was a painter and photographer from New York City. Mason’s life partner, Wilna Hervey, was a painter and silent film actress, and the two lived together for nearly sixty years, splitting time between painting and farming in Woodstock, New York, and vacationing in California and Florida.
Mercedes Matter née Carles (1913–2001) was an American painter and teacher. Matter grew up in Philadelphia, New York, and Europe. In the late 1930s she was an original member of the organization American Abstract Artists. She also worked for the Works Progress Administration. Beginning in 1953 Matter taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) for a decade, and then at the Pratt Institute for another ten years. She later taught at New York University. In 1963 she wrote an article for ARTnews titled “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?” in which she criticized the practice of phasing out extended studio classes. The article prompted a group of Pratt students, as well as some from Philadelphia, to ask Matter to form a school based on her ideas. She founded the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in 1964. The school gained almost immediate support from the Kaplan Fund, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, and the Ford Foundation. It granted no degrees, had only studio classes, and emphasized drawing from life. Matter taught at the Studio School every other week and remained very much involved in its development until her death. The school continues to train emerging artists.
Helen McAuslan (1904-1971) was a painter
Elizabeth McCausland (1899–1965) was an art critic and writer. A few years after graduating from Smith College in 1920, she began working for the Republican, a newspaper based in Springfield, Massachusetts. She became deeply invested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and eventually complied a series of articles in a pamphlet called The Blue Menace. She worked in close cooperation with the Works Progress Adminstration/Federal Art Project, and much of her interest in art scholarship was rooted in aspirations towards democracy and social justice. Writing primarily on Social Realist painting and photography, McCausland’s reaction to the art world’s turn to abstraction in the 1950s was grim, stating that she felt it “to be the artist’s flight from reality and from responsibility.” Her feelings softened somewhat in later years, and she wrote that in her holistic commitment to the social aspects of art, she felt she had neglected her own emotional and poetic sides. Along with many works on individual artists, including a monograph of photographer, Bernice Abbott, McCausland authored Work for Artists (1947), which outlined the living conditions and economic status of the American artist.
Florence McClung (1894–1992) was an American painter, printmaker, and art teacher. She was related to the Dallas Nine, an influential group of Dallas-based artists. After having studied for a career as a concert pianist, McClung began studying painting in the early 1920s. In the 1940s and ’50s McClung became an active member of the Printmakers Guild (renamed Texas Printmakers in 1952), which had been founded as a consequence of the exclusion of women from the Lone Star Printmakers of Dallas. In 1945 she was elected the Director of Texas Fine Arts Association, now known as the Texas Visual Arts Association. The following year she was elected to the board of directors of the Southern States Art League. McClung’s later works were mostly serigraphs. As she approached her early sixties in the mid-1950s she began to lose her sight and her productivity decreased. Her art remained deeply linked to her Texas identity and before she died, McClung gave several of her paintings to the Dallas Museum of Art.
Katharine Dexter McCormick (1875–1967) was a researcher, philanthropist, suffragist, birth control activist, and co-producer of the contraceptive pill. Katharine Dexter married Stanely McCormick in 1904 after she received her B.S. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the 1920s medical practitioners diagnosed Stanley with schizophrenia and suggested it was caused by hormonal deficiencies, which stimulated Katharine’s interest in hormone research. She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School (1927–1947) and subsidized the journal Endocrinology. McCormick joined the suffrage movement in 1909 and risked police brutality by organizing and leading outdoor rallies. She provided subsidies for the Women’s Journal and served as treasurer, vice president, and chair of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. During World War I McCormick met birth control activist Margaret Sanger whose contraception research she intermittently supported. In 1953 McCormick asked scientific entrepreneur Gregory Pincus to develop a contractive pill; Pincus was already experimenting with progesterone as an ovulation suppressant but lacked funding to progress his research. McCormick provided Pincus with the resource he needed. By 1960, the pill had come to fruition. Between 1962 and 1968 McCormick built female dormitories at MIT and donated funds to various art museums.
Elise Johnson McDougald (1885–1971), also known as Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, was the first African-American graduate of the Girls’ Technical School in 1903. She later earned a teaching certificate from the New York Training School for Teachers. Although McDougald never received her bachelor’s degree, she completed coursework at Hunter College, Columbia University, and New York City College. In 1905 she began her teaching career at P.S. 11 in lower Manhattan, later teaching as a vocational counselor at the Manhattan Trade School. She then worked as an industrial secretary at the local branch of the National Urban League. It was there that McDougald began documenting the working conditions of New York City’s African-American women. In 1919 she published “New Day for the Colored Woman in Industry in NY City” with co-author Jessie Clark. Her essay “The Double Task: The Struggle for Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” published in Survey Graphic magazine’s influential special issue Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro (1925), was one of the first to explore the double bind of race and gender that African-American women experienced. McDougald also served as the executive secretary for the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers. She was notably appointed principal of P.S. 24 in 1935, becoming the first African-American woman principal of a New York City public school. After ten years at the institution, McDougald transferred to P.S. 119. She retired in 1954, but remained active, writing a column in the Amsterdam News on Harlem schools and other topics.
Mary McDowell (1854–1936), born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was an outstanding Quaker educator, committed to the cause of peace and to teaching New York City’s children. McDowell’s father was active in the anti-slavery movement and the family moved to Chicago after the Civil War. As a young woman she joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and was active in the struggle for women’s suffrage. After graduating from Swarthmore College, McDowell became an instructor in Latin at the Manual Training High School in Brooklyn. When she refused to sign a loyalty oath in support of World War I because it conflicted with her Quaker principles, she was put on trial before a special Board of Education committee. She was charged with “conduct unbecoming to a teacher” and was dismissed from her position. Reinstated five years later, in 1923, she resumed working with children, her life’s passion. McDowell, who became known as the “Angel of the Stockyards,” was such a loved figure that when a local newspaper ran a contest entitled “Who Is the Best Woman in Chicago?” McDowell placed second to Jane Addams.
Kathleen McEnery (1885–1965) was an American painter who worked in the New York Ashcan style and participated in the 1913 Armory Show. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, McEnery returned to New York City in the early 1900s to attend the Pratt Institute. Later studying at the New York School of Art, she traveled to Spain in 1906. Two years later she rented a studio in Paris, where she worked for several years. After the Armory Show, McEnery abandoned her painting career. From 1927 until 1971 she served on the Memorial Art Gallery Board of Managers of the University of Rochester.
Margaret McKellar was the executive secretary at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1974 to 1978, where she supervised the reorganization of the museum’s artist files.
Audrey McMahon (1898–1981) was the director of the College Art Association before becoming the director of the New York region of the Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943, overseeing New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. At the Federal Art Project she attempted to give the artists employed a great deal of freedom, and as she recalled later, “It is gratifying to note . . . that almost all of the painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and muralists who recall those days remember little or no artistic stricture.” As the Federal Art Project wound down in 1939, McMahon worked to delay the liquidation process, and in 1942 parts of the program became the Graphic Section of the War Services Division, for which “mural painters designed and executed camouflage patterns for tanks, ships, and many military objects.” The program was liquidated in early 1943 and McMahon resigned. She went on to fundraise for social agencies such as the East Side House and the University Settlement, serving on its board until 1980, just a year before her death.
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) was a cultural anthropologist and women’s rights activist. Mead graduated from Barnard College with a degree in psychology and in 1929 received her PhD from Columbia. While pursuing her doctorate Mead worked as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and she published her best selling book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Two years later she published Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). Both books demonstrated that human beings were shaped through social interaction and cultural conditioning, and that certain human characteristics were therefore not inherent and stable. She furthered her arguments in Male and Female (1949) and Growth and Culture (1951), arguing against the supposedly inherent differences between the sexes. During World War II, when access to the South Pacific was barred, Mead established the Institute for Intercultural Studies to address research methodologies of contemporary cultures. Among the many organizations that Mead headed, she was president of the American Anthropological Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received twenty-eight honorary doctorates. Following her death in 1978, Mead received the Presidential Merit of Freedom.
Mary Mears was the older sister of the sculptor Helen Farnsworth Mears.
Yaltah Menuhin (1921–2001) was an American-born British pianist, artist, and poet. She studied music extensively in Europe and was encouraged by her parents to pursue a career in music. She toured worldwide as both a soloist and a chamber player. Just before the start of World War II, she enrolled at the Julliard School of Music in New York under an assumed name. No one recognized her, and the talented pianist quickly became a star pupil that was put in charge of teaching other students. Menuhin made her New York concert debut in 1951. Before enrolling in Julliard, Menuhin’s parents had employed the author Willa Cather to instruct their children in Shakespeare and American Literature when they moved to New York in the 1930s. Cather was a mentor to Menuhin and took her to see plays, attend operas, and visit museums. Menuhin may even be the inspiration for the heroine in Cather’s novella Lucy Gayheart. Their friendship endured well past Cather’s time as Menuhin’s teacher and the pair remained in touch for many years.
Charlotte Meltzer was a New York artist whose work was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. Her nude painting Lovernene (n.d.) was considered offensive by some art critics.
Joan R. Mertens is an art historian and curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mertens is the author of How to Read Greek Vases (2011), The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greece and Rome (1987), and Greek Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1985).
Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887–1970) was a journalist, philanthropist, and education activist from New York City. She studied at Barnard College despite familial objections, paying her way through school by working odd jobs. After her graduation in 1907, she became one of the first female reporters to work at the New York Sun. Meyer later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became friends with Gertrude Stein. In 1917, she moved to Washington, D.C., where for the following sixteen years, she held influential financial positions within the federal government. Meyer’s position was initially Republican, but after World War II, her politics were radicalized, and she lobbied for integration, expanded social security benefits, and an end to racial discrimination in employment. She was a major proponent of the creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as well as federal aid to education. Meyer was an extensive supporter of the New School for Social Research, the Urban School Corps, and the National Committee for Support of the Public Schools. Meyer’s daughter, Katherine Meyer Graham, was the editor and publisher of the Washington Post.
Nathalie Micas (1824-1889) met Rosa Bonheur when she was 14. They were childhood friends. They became reacquainted in 1844 when both were in their 20s and from there on lived together until Nathalie’s death. Micas was a still life painter. She exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1852 and 1865 and is known to have painted part of one of Bonheur's best-known work, “The Horse Fair”. She later also became an inventor as well as a self-declared veterinarian. Micas dedicated herself fully to the support of Bonheur’s talent and work. They are buried together in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in France.
Louise Michel (1830–1905) was a French anarchist, often referred to as “Bonne Louise” or the “Vierge rouge” (Red Virgin) for her highly committed political activism. Michel was born the daughter of a serving maid, Marianne Michel, at the Chateau of Vroncourt. She was tried to become a teacher, but she refused to acknowledge Napoleon III, an act that prevented her from working for a state school. In 1866 she began teaching in Montmartre, where she also began working for charity and in revolutionary politics. Michel was aligned with the Communar ds and was sent to prison for twenty months, followed by a deportation to New Caledonia for her efforts to overthrow the French government. While in New Caledonia, Michel refused to receive special treatment because of her gender and befriended Nathalie Lemel, another active figure from the Paris commune. Upon her return to Paris in 1880, she began lecturing across Europe about anarchism and revolutionary practice. Her writings ranged from theory and poetry to legends produced for children. Michel is highly celebrated in France, and several public commons areas and schools bear her name.
Inez Milholland (1886–1916) was a suffragist, labor lawyer, and activist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her extensive education included studies at the Comstock School in New York, Kensington High School in London, the Willard School for Girls in Berlin, and finally, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Despite the banning of suffrage meetings on campus, Milholland held regular classes with her peers on the issues, often staging public protests and organizing petitions. During her time at Vassar, she enrolled two-thirds of the students in her suffrage club, and taught them the principles of Socialism. Milholland received her LL.B degree in 1912 from New York University Law School. In addition to her lifelong commitment to women’s rights, Milholland’s causes as a lawyer included prison reform, antiwar protest, and equality for African Americans. In 1913, at the age of twenty-seven, she organized the suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. Three years later, Milholland gave a speaking tour in the western United States despite deteriorating health; she collapsed mid-speech in Los Angeles. Her last public words were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet born in Rockland, Maine. At the age of fifteen, her poetry was published by the notable anthology Current Literature. While still in high school, she had a number of relationships with women, including Edith Wynne Matthison, who went on to become a silent film star. St. Vincent Millay was openly bisexual and refused to marry a number of writers who proposed to her. She attended Vassar College at age twenty-one in 1913, but her fame had already begun the year previous when she entered the poetry contest for the annual anthology The Lyric Year. Her poem “Renascence” was awarded fourth place, but even the first place winner acknowledged that hers was the best poem in the competition. It created quite a scandal and led arts patron Caroline B. Dow to offer to pay for her to attend Vassar. In 1923 St. Vincent Millay began a twenty-six-year open marriage and settled in Austerlitz, New York. That same year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In addition to her poetry, she is remembered for her verse drama, which often discussed female sexuality, feminism, as well as political pacifism.
Alice Duer Miller (1874–1942) was an American writer and poet. Born in New York City to a wealthy family, she entered Barnard College in 1895 to study mathematics and astronomy. At that point, her family had lost most of its fortune, and Miller helped to finance her education by selling novels and essays. By 1903 she began focusing entirely on her writing and activities and became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. In 1915 she published a collection of satirical poems entitled Are Women People?, which became a catchphrase of the suffrage movement. Miller released a second collection, Women Are People!, shortly thereafter. She wrote her first novel, Come Out of the Kitchen, in 1916 and continued publishing short novels through the 1920s and ’30s, many of which were staged as plays and adapted into films. Her verse novel The White Cliffs, published in 1940, was made into the 1944 film The White Cliffs of Dover, and was unusually popular for a book of verse, selling nearly one million copies in the United States and England.
Dorothy Miller (1904–2003) was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She graduated from Smith College in 1925 and began working at the Newark Museum one year later. From 1930 to 1932, she worked with Mrs. Henry Lang at the Montclair Art Museum, and in 1934 she became an assistant curator at MoMA. Miller’s most significant curatorial projects were the Americans exhibitions, which began in 1942. Miller was known for pulling the shows together at the last minute in order to stay as up-to-date as possible, and gave many renowned artists their first exhibition in a major museum. Though the exhibitions were not always well received at the time, many of the artists she included, like Lee Bountecou, Jay DeFeo, and Louise Nevelson, have retained contemporary significance.
Flora Whitney Miller (1897–1986) was the president and chair of the Whitney Museum from 1941 to 1974. Following her mother, museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Whitney Miller continued to develop an art museum that served artists, the public, and art institutions. Under Whitney Miller’s leadership, the museum was transformed into a national organization with external trustees and a board program with national activities. Although Whitney Miller remained an active chair of the museum, she entrusted the presidency to her daughter Flora Miller Biddle in 1967.
Lee Miller (1907–1977) was an artist and photojournalist born in Poughkeepsie, New York. When she was nineteen, she was discovered on the street by the founder of Vogue and worked as a model in New York for the next two years. Miller became immersed Parisian Surrealist art scene in 1929. After contributing to a few artists’ works and beginning to develop her own craft, Miller moved back to New York and established a portrait and commercial photo studio. She was given a solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1933. Between 1934 and 1937 Miller moved to Cairo where she took some of her most strikingly Surrealist images. After her stay in Cairo Miller moved back to Paris and later London, where she was located when World War II broke out. At this time, Miller became the official war photographer for Vogue, where she bore witness to atrocities of the war, including the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Following her fieldwork for Vogue, Miller moved to a farmhouse in Sussex, which later became an artistic mecca for artists such as Eileen Agar and Dorthea Tanning.
Florence Mills (1895–1927) was an African-American cabaret singer, dancer, and comedian known for her carefree stage presence. She was often called the “Queen of Happiness.” Born to former slaves in Washington, D.C., Mills began performing at the age of six and toured in a vaudeville act called “The Mills Sisters” with her two older sisters. She was the only one of the three to continue pursuing vaudeville. Her breakout role was in the successful Broadway musical Shuffle Along (1921), a show of international acclaim credited as one of the catalysts for the Harlem Renaissance. In 1924 Mills headlined the Palace Theater, the most prestigious booking at that time, and became an international star with the hit show Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds in 1926. She was noted among the black press as a role model and an ambassador of good will from blacks to whites. Because of primitive recording technology at the turn of the century, Mills’s performances were never filmed and the audio recordings that exist cannot do her voice justice. After over two hundred fifty performances of Blackbirds in London, Mills contracted tuberculosis and died tragically young at the age of 32.
Harriet May Mills (1857–1936) was a political organizer and suffragist. Her parents were both abolitionists and granted her the middle name “May” after radical reformer Rev. Samuel Joseph May. Mills was based in Syracuse, New York, and hosted the headquarters for the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association in her home. In 1919 she founded Onondaga County Women’s Democratic Club and served as its president for sixteen years. She also worked as a paid statewide organizer and chair of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party, where she appointed Nancy Cook as executive secretary. Mills was close with many prominent suffragists, including Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Despite primarily working in New York State, she also assisted in leading suffrage campaigns in California, Michigan, and Ohio. After the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which allowed women to vote, Mills ran, albeit unsuccessfully, for secretary of state. In 1928 she worked together with Eleanor Roosevelt in state party politics and accompanied Franklin Roosevelt as he campaigned for governor, advising him on women’s rights. At age seventy-five, she became a member of the Electoral College that elected him as president.
Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was a pseudonym for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and feminist. She was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. Mistral’s works, both in verse and prose, deal with the passion of love as seen in the various relationships of mother and offspring, man and woman, individual and humankind, soul and God. She was a dedicated educator and committed intellectual, arguing for the rights of children, women and the poor through her poetry, newspaper articles, letters, and actions as Chilean representative in international organizations. In 1922 she accepted an invitation from the president of Mexico to work on the creation of the first public school system. Mistral toured extensively and gave lectures in Europe and the United States. Like other leading educators at the time, she was also appointed consul in many different cities, including Madrid, Lisbon, Nice, Petrópolis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Veracruz, Mexico, Naples, and New York, where she taught at Barnard College of Columbia University. She resided in Roslyn Heights, New York, until her death.
Margarete Mitscherlich (1917–2012) was a German psychoanalyst known as the “Grande Dame of German Psychoanalysis.” Her work centered on feminism, female sexuality, and the national psychology of postwar Germany. She originally studied medicine and received a doctorate in 1950. Mitscherlich’s psychoanalytic work began at an anthroposocial clinic in Switzerland where she was introduced to the work of Sigmund Freud. She completed psychoanalytic training at the London Institute, led by such psychoanalysts as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. In 1960 she cofounded the Sigmund-Freud-Institut dedicated to psychoanalytic research. Along with members of the Frankfurt School, Mitscherlich contributed to postwar intellectual debates, working to explain the causes behind Nazi Germany and its aftermath in German Society. Her works like The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, written with her husband in 1967, called for more collective attempts for Germans to address the crimes of the Nazi era. As her interest in feminism grew, Mitscherlich became friends with feminist journalist Alice Schwarzer and contributed to her magazine EMMA. She took an active part against sexist depictions of women in popular German media and her overtly political work was atypical as most of her peers remained neutral as an essential element of psychoanalysis. She continued to work as a psychoanalyst into her 90s.
Elizabeth Bauer Mock (1911–1998) was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She began working at the museum part-time in 1937 and organized What is Modern Architecture? the following year. In 1942, Mock took over the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design where she organized Built in U.S.A., 1932–44, Tomorrow’s Small House: Models and Plans, and If You Want to Build a House. Through her efforts, as well as those of her sister, Catherine Bauer, MoMA’s architecture department became an advocate in the fields of urban planning and housing in the 1930s and 1940s. Her 1964 book Modern Gardens and the Landscape (published under the name Elizabeth B. Kassler) is a definitive survey in the field.
Lisette Model (1901–1983), born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, was a photographer. Model was educated by private tutors and began studying classical music at age nineteen. In 1933 she gave up music and committed herself to studying visual art. Eventually taking up photography, she received instructions on darkroom technique from her younger sister Olga, a professional photographer. Model moved to New York City in 1938, where she worked as a photographer for PM magazine and Harper’s Bazaar. She also became a member of the New York Photo League.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) was a German-born modernist artist who specialized in nudes, landscapes, and still lifes. She was one of the first female artists to paint themselves and other women in the nude. Modersohn-Becker also resituated the context and content of still lifes by arranging artistic production in the kitchen as a feminine domestic practice alongside meal preparation. Modersohn-Becker’s career as an artist began when her paternal aunt taught her drawing during a seventeen-month stay with her in London. She was educated formally and informally through various art schools and artists in London, Paris, Berlin, and Worpswede, which contributed to her eclectic skill and technique.
Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, model, actress, and revolutionary political activist. She immigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in San Francisco. Inspired by the Italian émigré community in the Bay Area, Modotti began acting. She appeared in several plays, operas, and silent movies in the late 1910s and early ’20s, and worked as an art model. In 1923 Modotti went to Mexico City with Edward Weston. There they met several political radicals and Communists. Her work became increasingly politically informed and her photographs appeared in publications such as Mexican Folkways, Forma, and El Machete. Modotti became the primary photographer for the Mexican mural movement, documenting the works of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, and her own visual vocabulary matured as she experimented with photographing architectural interiors, flowers, urban landscapes, and imagery of peasants and workers. Her solo retrospective exhibition at the National Library in December 1929 was advertised as the “First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition in Mexico.” In 1930 Modotti was expelled from Mexico as a result of the anti-Communist campaign. Traveling on a restricted visa that mandated her final destination as Italy, Modotti initially stopped in Berlin and from there visited Switzerland. She apparently intended to join Italy’s anti-fascist resistance, but because she had exhausted her resources, she moved to Moscow in 1931 alongside Vittorio Vidali. There she participated in various missions on behalf of the International Workers’ Relief Organization and the Comintern in Europe. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Vidali and Modotti left Moscow for Spain, where they stayed and worked until 1939. In April 1939 following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti left Spain with Vidali and returned to Mexico under a pseudonym. She died from heart failure in Mexico City in 1942 under what is viewed by some as suspicious circumstances.
Lucia Moholy (1894–1989) was a photographer, art critic, editor, writer, and educator. After qualifying as a German and English teacher in 1912, Moholy studied art history and philosophy in Prague and later became the editor and copyeditor of publishing houses such as Hyperion and Rowohlt in Berlin. During this same time (1919–1920) Moholy-Nagy published Expressionist literature under the pseudonym Steffen. In 1923 she entered the Bauhaus Weimar and started an apprenticeship in the photography studios. Moholy documented Bauhaus buildings and productions with photographs of objects made in workshops, of exteriors and Master houses, and of portraits of Bauhaus teachers; these images were used for the institution’s press and book publications. After she left the Bauhaus, Moholy presented her photographs in numerous exhibitions for example the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgard (1929). Soon after she became a specialist teacher of photography at Johannes Itten’s school in Berlin, then moved to London where she directed documentary films for UNESCO and published A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839–1939 (1939). She moved to Switzerland in 1959.
Adrienne Monnier (1892–1955) was a French poet, bookstore owner, publisher, and literary translator. In 1915 Monnier was the first women to open a bookshop in Paris; most male-owned bookstores had closed down because their owners had gone to war. Monnier’s bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, served to introduce French readers to American literature. She launched a French-language review called Le Navire d’Argent in 1925, and published French translations of poetry by T.S. Eliot. She also released an all-American issue in which she published translations of texts by E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Walt Whitman, among others. When Sylvia Beach contemplated opening an English bookstore in Paris, Monnier advised and encouraged her; subsequently Beach’s Shakespeare and Company opened across the street from Monnier’s. The two bookstores became meeting places for French, American, and British writers. Together, Monnier and Beach were responsible for the proliferation of American literature in Paris and they often collaborated on French translations. Monnier also worked as an essayist until her death in 1955.
Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was an Italian physician, educator, and educational innovator. Her method of pedagogy, the Montessori Method, is a mode of teaching that builds on the way that children engage physically with the world around them. She opened the first Montessori school in Rome in 1907 and traveled the world for decades teaching her method and overseeing the development of new schools. As a student, Montessori was unwilling to be subservient and entered an all-boys technical institute at the age of thirteen. In 1896 she became one of Italy’s first medical doctors, focusing primarily on psychiatry and educational theory. In 1907 she accepted an offer to open a childcare facility in a low-income area of Rome where she observed how the children absorbed knowledge from their surroundings, and in many ways, taught themselves. This became a cornerstone of the Montessori method: providing a classroom environment that fosters a child’s natural desire to learn. For most of her life Montessori was dedicated to this child-centered approach to teaching. She was also a vocal advocate of women’s rights, writing and speaking frequently on the need for greater opportunities for women.
Colleen Moore (1899–1988) was an actress born in Port Huron, Michigan. She starred mainly in silent films and, with her Dutch bob haircut and short skirts, was well known for her flapper style. At the height of her popularity, Moore was one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. But her flapper roles often differed from those of her peers Clara Bow and Louise Brooks, in that she ultimately returned home in her films, having only flirted with a glamorous lifestyle. In 1928 Moore followed her passion for dollhouses and built an eight-foot-tall castle, ornately decorated with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. The dollhouse went on tour to major department stores across the country, with admission to the attraction accumulating around $600,000 for children’s charities. Many of Moore’s films have been lost due to a storage mishap at the Museum of Modern Art: having been misplaced for years, the original films were were discovered in the museum’s collections deteriorated beyond repair.
Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was a writer, editor, and poet born in Kirkwood, Missouri. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and began teaching at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School shortly after graduation. Moore published her first poem in 1915 and quickly came to the attention of many poets, including Mina Loy. In 1925 she became the editor of the literary journal the Dial in New York City, where she had been living since 1918. In addition to Moore’s important contributions at the Dial as an editor and reviewer, her Collected Poems, released in 1951, earned the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. Moore’s formidable work as an editor helped bolster the careers of many writers now part of the literary canon. Much of her own poetry illuminated the conflicts she faced working as a woman within the literary field and posed a challenge to the consuming pressures impelled upon her by male peers.
Anne Tracy Morgan (1873–1952) was a philanthropist born in New York. An heiress of considerable wealth, Morgan received a private education and spent much of her time traveling. In 1903 she became owner of the Petit Trianon near Versailles, along with interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her partner Elisabeth Marbury, a theatrical and literary agent. The three women, known as “The Versailles Triumvirate,” hosted a salon here, drawing in significant cultural figures from across Europe and the United States. That same year, with the help of Anne Vanderbilt, Morgan and her friends organized the Colony Club, the first women’s club in New York. From 1917 to 1921 Morgan founded the American Friends of France to aid local victims of war. The AFF’s projects included a health service center, a workshop to rebuild furniture for survivors of violent attacks, a holiday camp for children, and a moving library. Morgan’s social savvy made possible her release of cookbook to help benefit the organization that included contributions from writer Pearl S. Buck and actress Katharine Hepburn, among others.
Barbara Morgan (1900–1992) was a dance photographer, painter, and curator. Her artistic explorations began with the mediums of drawing and painting, which were exhibited in California and New York. She encountered photography when she assisted her husband, Willard D. Morgan, with his photographic projects, but through the experience viewed photography as little more than a useful form of documentation until she curated an exhibition for Edward Weston in 1927. Weston’s work changed her perception of the ways in which photography allowed an artist to manipulate color and light. In 1935 Morgan attended a performance of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and was deeply moved by the social implications of the strength, endurance, and beauty of dance in a post- Depression context. From then on, Morgan aimed to capture the feeling of the dance using the techniques of photography. Between 1935 and 1945 she photographed more than forty dancers and built an especially close relationship with Martha Graham. In 1941 Morgan published Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, and in 1945 she presented the exhibition La Danza Moderna Norte-Americana: Fotografias por Barbara Morgan, first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, then on a South American tour. Morgan was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of American Society of Magazine Photographers and is the co-founder of Aperture.
Maude Morgan (1900–1999) was an American painter and teacher born to an aristocratic family in New York City. After attending Bard College and studying at the Sorbonne, she traveled the world, returning to New York in the 1930s. Morgan first exhibited her paintings in 1938, where both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Gallery (later the Whitney Museum of American Art) purchased works. Her Abstract Expressionist style’s lack of outwardly “feminine” aesthetics was noted as a hindrance to her career, however, and her relocation to the suburbs of Boston undermined her chances of being further recognized among the New York scene. She continued to exhibit her art in the Boston Area including at the Massachusetts College of Art, Fuller Art Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which presents an annual award in her name to women artists.
Ruth Morgan (1871–1934) was a peace activist and women’s suffragist from New Jersey. She was one of five high commissioners of the American Red Cross during World War I and became third vice president of the National League of Women Voters in 1923. Morgan later became the chairman of the peace committee of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship.
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) was a painter among the circle of Parisian artists to become known as the Impressionists. She grew up in Paris in an affluent family, and she received art training from a young age. Morisot’s first exhibition was in 1864 when she was selected for the Salon, the official juried exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work continued to be accepted there until 1874, when she began exhibiting with the Impressionists. Her work was small in scale, and she worked primarily with oil paint, watercolors, or pastel. She often painted on unprimed canvas and despite a limited color palette, she was considered an expert colorist by her peers.
Grace Louise McCann Morley (1900–1985) was one of the most respected museum directors in the United States. A powerful spokesman for contemporary art on the West Coast, Morley was fiercely determined to establish art as “an inseparable and essential part of human life.” She earned a doctorate in art history at the University of Paris (1923) and in art and literature from the Sorbonne (1926). In order to prepare for a teaching opportunity, she attended a six-week program for art history instructors held at Harvard University, then an important training ground for the nascent field of “museology,” under the direction of Professor Paul Sachs, associate director of the Fogg Museum. Morley excelled and in 1930 became a curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Resettling to the Bay Area in 1934, she became the founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (formerly the San Francisco Museum of Art), where she remained for twenty-three years. With an impressive program of one hundred exhibitions annually, Morley established the museum as major cultural institution in San Francisco. She established the museum’s Women’s Board to create art and art history courses, a public art reference library, a rental gallery, and the first regular film program at an American museum (“Art in Cinema”). The board also sponsored a television series called “Art in Your Life,” that aired in San Francisco during the 1950s. Married for a short time, she later had several lasting relationships with women that she kept private. In 1946 Morley was asked by the State Department to serve as a consultant on museums and libraries for UNESCO, and she traveled to Germany to consult with French, British, and American authorities about the repatriation of stolen artworks. Morley returned to SFMOMA in 1949 as an international art star in high demand, but a leadership disagreement occurred with the board of the museum and she resigned in 1957. After briefly serving as assistant director of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Morley went to India in 1960 to open, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s charge, that country’s first major museum. She spent the rest of her life in New Delhi, running the National Museum and in 1968 founding the International Council of Museums’ regional office. Morley received the prestigious Padma Bhushan government award and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. She was also awarded honorary doctorates by the University of California, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and Mills College.
Marlow Moss (1889–1958) was a British Constructivist artist who worked in painting and sculpture. She studied at the Slade School of Art but left in 1919. She returned to London in 1923 to study in the British Museum Reading Room and at the Penzance School of Art. At that time Moss adopted a masculine appearance and changed her first name from Marjorie to Marlow. In 1927 Marlow visited Paris where she met her lifelong partner, A. H. Nijhoff, wife of poet Martinus Nijhoff. She remained in Paris to study and work, eventually founding the Abstraction-Création association and exhibiting with the Salon des Surindépendants. At the start of World War II, Moss relocated to Cornwall in England and spent the rest of her life there, visiting Paris frequently. Her works are held at the Tate and the Henry Moore Institute in London.
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was a German Expressionist painter involved in the Munich avant-garde in the early twentieth century. The Expressionists rebelled against materialism and the mores of German imperial and bourgeois society, seeking to end the alienation of painting from society. She studied at the Phalanx School in Munich, where she would meet painter Wassily Kandinsky. The pair would go on to travel extensively together and to found Der Blaue Reiter, a group that sought to express spiritual truths through art. While living in Paris, Münter perfected her woodcut technique and learned how to paint on glass. By 1908 her work had shifted from more figurative work to richly colored landscapes inspired by Matisse and Fauvism.
Myra Musselman-Carr (1871–1929) was an American sculptor who participated in the 1913 Armory Show. She studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati as well as the Art Students League in New York. She was an early proponent of the direct carving method of sculpture and between 1915 and 1917 was a co-owner of and sculpture teacher at the Modern Art School in New York where she worked alongside painter Marguerite Zorach.
Ethel Myers (1881–1960) was a realist painter and sculptor born in Brooklyn, New York. Orphaned at age four, she was soon adopted by the Klinck family, who gave her the name Ethel. They provided her with a residence split between Brooklyn and Orange, New Jersey, where attended both public and private schools. Myers attempted to study at the National Academy in New York, but she failed her examination and decided to study at the Chase School instead. Ethel Myers’s education was largely in the Ashcan Style of American painting, focusing on social realist depictions of New York’s burgeoning and multicultural public life. Myers eventually moved away from painting to create figurative sculptures that were highly acclaimed at the 1913 Armory Show. This success was substantial, but not significant enough to compete with the attention that European artists were gaining form New York dealers. Over the following decades, Myers took on many entrepreneurial roles to support her family, including that of a clothing designer and later the Art Director of the Fine Arts and Ceramics Department at Christodora House. Myers was an early member of the Whitney Studio Club.