Here are the stories of women who use art to let light in – to expose what is happening and to force it to be visible, whether that’s for their own time or the future.

Firstly, Dorothea Lange, who took photos of FDR’s Japanese internment camps. They were suppressed for a long time but you can see them here:

The military commanders that reviewed her work realized that Lange’s contrary point of view was evident through her photographs, and seized them for the duration of World War II, even writing “Impounded” across some of the prints. The photos were quietly deposited into the National Archives, where they remained largely unseen until 2006.

https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

Barbara Nelson puts bright lights in abandoned houses to call attention to declining investment in cities:

“I want locomotive trains; I want murals; I want 3-D lights and Christmas postcard backdrops,” Ms. Gilmore, 64, said as she toured Stanley Street with Ms. Porterfield. “It’s when the lights are out that the depression sets in.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/nyregion/shining-a-light-on-cities-abandoned-buildings-from-the-inside-out.html?_r=0

Helen Frankenthaler was one of several women abstract expressionists. I love this quotation and how it speaks to the joy and the love involved in bringing light:

“The landscapes were in my arms as I did it,” Ms. Frankenthaler told an interviewer. “I didn’t realize all that I was doing. I was trying to get at something — I didn’t know what until it was manifest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/helen-frankenthaler-abstract-painter-dies-at-83.html

Happy Friday!

Alex.