Rarely do I get to work on two portraits of the same person at the same time, but, last spring, I gave myself just that assignment for Apple Pie. I painted two portraits of Allie, one as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and one as Susan B. Anthony, representing both of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement with one person in order to emphasize the peculiarities of their individual histories and of the history of the movement.
When looking to combine Allie’s likeness with Anthony’s, I quickly ran up against a problem--the same as I did when working on the Allie/Elizabeth combination. The heros of the women’s suffrage movement don’t have a whole lot of established attributes to choose from. Usually icons have costumes, items, or gestures associated with them, making it easy to play dress up with a subject by blending her-his face with references to a particular historical figure.
I didn’t have any trouble creating an Iranian-German-American Rosie the Riveter for example because there were quite a few Riveter conventions--background elements and even the polka dot headscarf--that I could include even as I changed the image fundamentally by changing Rosie’s face and putting a her in a hijab. Nor was it difficult to make a Native American subject look like George Washington since our first President’s hairdo and cherry tree associations are so ingrained in our culture.
Anthony and Stanton, on the other hand, are not depicted very often and, as such, have fewer attributes by which they are known.
The most iconic image of Anthony is her profile on a dollar coin. Minted first between 1979 and 1981 and then again in 1999, the “Susie B.” (as it’s known by collectors) is not heavily circulated since Americans prefer their dollars as bills. Still, Anthony was the first woman to appear on a form of US currency that was not simply commemorative (she’s also one of only two to have appeared on a coin and one of just four to ever have appeared on US currency of any kind).
It’s ironic that the one image of Anthony that begins to be iconic is the one that appears on a coin. After all, money = power, and those are both things that women certainly didn’t have in this country before Anthony and Stanton came along.
I painted Allie-as-Susan and Allie-as-Elizabeth both on purses to further drive home this point. The handbag may be a symbol of women’s enduring servitude to some, but, when you get right down to it, a purse is about money.
Solid on the concepts for the portrait purses, I started in on the bags themselves. The making of The Susan B. was more complicated than I had anticipated.
It started out simply enough: pink is Allie’s favorite color (and Anthony was famous for her red shawl).
But green, white, and violet have special importance in the women’s suffrage movement. These colors stand for “Give Women the Vote,” a fact which Allie had shared with me and which I felt compelled to include in the piece…
...while at the same time trying to keep the day bag matching the clutch and using metallic paint to make the coin image particularly coin-like.
All too soon, it became apparent that my inexperience with the silver paint was a liability when working in grisaille. Metallic pigments come with a whole set of rules and potentials that I knew nothing about.
I struggled with the silver, layering and re-layering…
...until I arrived at this point. Allie’s features were completely lost in my media issues.
I tried retrieving them along with some dignity by falling back on the pigments I was more comfortable with…
...and then re-introduced the silver.
But it wasn’t long before I’d lost my way again.
Still more lost.
Finally fed up with silver, I started painting in grey tones. It’s at this point that I also realized I had a hard time keeping the coin circular as I worked.
That’s when I decided to scrap the work I’d done on Allie-as-Susan and start with a fresh piece of canvas that I would sew onto the bag.
This time around, I was more methodical as I recreated Allie’s profile.
Eventually, I sewed the canvas circle onto the bag, and continued working on the piece as a whole.
The Declarer and The Susan B. (Anglo-American, Alexandra Cowen)
2008
acrylic on canvas bags
37 x 15 x 2 inches
These matched bags try to give an iconography to two women who remain largely uncelebrated. That I’ve given them faces other their own is only fitting.
detail image of The Susan B.
Neither Anthony nor Stanton lived to see women’s suffrage. Other women took up the cause and fought for it in a country that was adamantly opposed to it. The right to vote with all accompanying privileges and duties wasn’t recognized until 1920, not even one hundred years ago. And today we have just sixteen women in the US Senate--an all-time high, but still not exactly a representative body.