GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A group of girls from Union High school gather around listening to an artist discuss his display. Jon McDonald has pained 20 portraits, each featuring a different Black icon, and all of them women.
"I think it’s very important, especially for young Black girls, to know who possible role models are," McDonald said.
The first group of people to see the exhibit were the students from Union High School. For Montasia, a junior at the school, she says the portraits inspire her, and one day, she hopes to have someone make a portrait of her for a similar exhibit.
The portraits are all intentionally placed at eye level rather than at a height. McDonald says as a kid raised in Mississippi, he was told never to look white people in the eye, which he never listened to. Now, in his art, he's using the power of eye contact to make a stronger connection.
"They know they can achieve because these people have achieved," He said of each woman portrayed. "And they look just like them."
The twenty women featured in the exhibit are:
- Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate who spoke at the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden
- Aretha Franklin, recording artist known internationally as the Queen of Soul
- Rep. Barbara Jordan, first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate after reconstruction
- Breonna Taylor, icon for social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement
- Dianne Durham, first Black senior national gymnastics champion
- Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, first Black woman to become a doctor of medicine in the U.S.
- Hattie Beverly, first Black school teacher in Grand Rapids (Congress Elementary School)
- Helen Claytor, first Black president of the YWCA
- Laura Moody, helped found the Grand Rapids chapter of the Black Nurses Association
- Mae Jamison, first Black woman to travel into space
- Marian Anderson, first Black to perform at the Metropolitan Opera
- Marley Dias, founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, a campaign to find 1,000 books with black girls as protagonists
- Misty Copeland, first Black principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater
- Rosalind Brewer, first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company (Walgreens Boots Alliance)
- Serena Williams, internationally known as one of the greatest female tennis players of all time
- Sha’carri Richardson, one of the fastest female track and field athletes in history (19 years old)
- Rep. Shirley Chisholm, first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
- Simone Biles, most decorated Olympic female gymnast in history and mental health advocate
- Tarana Burke, Founder of the #MeToo movement.
- Thasunda Brown Duckett, third woman to lead a Fortune 500 company (TIAA)
The exhibit, My Story 4,will be on display at the Embassy Suites Friday 10/29 until 7pm, and Saturday 10/30 from 10 am to 7 pm. Tickets cost $10 for members of the NIA Centre, an organization aiming to create an African American Cultural Center in Grand Rapids. Non-member tickets cost $15.
Art exhibit to honor accomplishments of African American women
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