Kara Walker is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and filmmaker exploring American history through a lens of intersectional identities including gender, race, and sexuality. She first gained recognition for her epic panoramic friezes of black and white silhouettes in an imagined antebellum South. Walker aims to “skirt the line between reality and fantasy,” in order to speak more directly to an uncomfortable, ongoing strain of racial violence in American society. The title of Invasive Species summons a recurrent theme of human migration and displacement and the resulting advent of hybrid cultures embraced by some while reviled by others.
In 2014, Walker partnered with Creative Time on her first public sculpture installation in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York. The work, entitled A Subtlety of the Marvelous Sugar Baby Homage to the Unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the Cane Fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the Demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, was a masterpiece.

Shinoda Tōkō is a native Japanese painter, calligrapher, and printmaker known for her Sumi ink paintings and prints. She is a living authority and national treasure of modern Japanese calligraphy, having studied the art-form from age six. Such mastery and her experience living in New York City from 1956 to 1958 led her to develop a personal style that blends the expressive and spontaneous brushwork of traditional calligraphy with Abstract Expressionism. Though Shinoda does not identify with any specific art movement, she credits her overall aesthetic to the work of Jackson Pollock, in particular, with deepening her interest in abstract art and expanding her approach to painting.
Shinoda considers the places left blank in her work as visually important as those painted in a calligraphic technique the Japanese call yohaku or “the spaces left empty.”
Fugue displays Shinoda’s mastery of both gesture and yohaku. Her brushstrokes are diverse, each with its own size and depth. The artist’s speed, pressure, and direction, all feel present as if she’s just applied the ink. It is a tribute to a strong, dynamic woman bringing an ancient art form forward in a contemporary, transnational context.

In the late ‘70s, reaching back to her great-great-great-grandmother, Susie Shannon, who had sewn quilts as a slave, Faith Ringgold returned to a family tradition of the sewn arts and collaborated with her mother on her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem (1980). Her colorful narrative paintings on canvas are surrounded by patchwork cloth borders and turned into quilts that contain stories related to the African-American experience. At first these quilts, which combine a craft associated with women and folk art, were not considered serious art. Now they hang in museums. In 2015, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art purchased at auction Maya’s Quilt of Life from the estate of poet Maya Angelou for nearly a half million dollars noting its importance: “there’s painting, quilt-making, text—there’s high art, craft, figuration, abstraction, the visual aspects, narrative storytelling.”
Ringgold’s quilt, Tar Beach II (1990), depicts a memory from her childhood when apartment dwellers would go up to the roof to escape the heat of a summer night. Alongside drying laundry, children rest on a blanket, adults play cards on one table and a second table is set with food. In the background is the New York skyline and the George Washington Bridge. The central image is surrounded by a colorful fabric border with a floral motif creating the sense of a garden.

Tourmaline (formerly known as Reina Gossett) activist, writer and filmmaker, whose work focuses on disability justice, prison reform, and queer and trans liberation especially among self-identified artists of color. As a Fellow at Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women, she also helps to document and elevate the histories and legacies of these trans women.
Sasha Wortzel is a New York artist and filmmaker, whose interdisciplinary work explores how predominant power structures shape collective responses to race, gender, sexuality, and senses of place and social norms. Her work has been presented and recognized across the nation and beyond including at the Brooklyn Museum, the ICA London, and the Sundance Institute.
In this 2017 collaboration, Tourmaline and Wortzel produced Lost in the Music, in order to interrogate the ways justice can be both obstructed and delivered following the example of the great, late trans activist and performer Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson. Narrative staging is blended with archival footage of Marsha and her fellow pioneers like Sylvia Rivera, who together spawned the transformative gay liberation riots at Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fifty years ago.

Dorothy Eisner was a New York painter, whose career spanned seven decades. As a result, she participated in various art movements across the 20th century, from the Ashcan School and Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism. Eisner was also a political activist and maintained close friendships and creative partnerships with many progressive peers and social reformers.
In Washington Square Park, Eisner paints a sunny warm day in the newly renovated park near her Greenwich Village studio. Although the powerful bureaucrat Robert Moses had just restored the fountain and nearby arch, he was pushing for a controversial roadway that cut directly through the Square’s precious green space. This led to a seven-year (and ultimately successful) battle of community opposition with “Save the Square” as its rallying cry. The joyful scene captured by the artist describes perfectly how and why such neighborhood spirit carried the day!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles sits here with three uniformed Department of Sanitation workers, “New York’s Strongest,” during her milestone performance Touch Sanitation. This work was her first as the newly-engaged “artist in residence” with the City of New York and the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) in particular. It is a position she holds to this day. In an unexpected unification of art, essential public service, and large-scale municipal systems, Ukeles worked with DSNY to map the pick-up route of all 8,500 sanitation workers. From July 1979 to June 1980, she traveled to all fifty-nine DSNY community districts, shook each uniformed worker’s hand, and thanked them, one-by-one, “for keeping New York City alive.”
Ukeles arrived at the DSNY through a bold feminist declaration made in 1969, when as a new mother and housekeeper she realized that child-rearing had cast her aside from a patriarchal art world.
The Maintenance Manifesto declared how she would continue her everyday work in the home and declare it as art. She succinctly juxtaposed the invisibility and life-sustaining labor of family care with the “action” of new creation when she asked, “The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” From garbage barge ballets to sanitation parades to street-washing performances, Ukeles has worked with DSNY on large-scale performance pieces to lend dignity and respect to well-deserving maintenance workers across the five boroughs and beyond.
In 2015, the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs established the Public Artists in Residence program, so far embedding ten artists in nine City agencies as inspired by Ukeles’ pioneering career.

Betty Woodman was a pioneering feminist ceramist. Her early training in and practice of pottery as functional craft evolved into fine art with exuberantly painted and often idiosyncratic vessels like those on view for She Persists. Many were made for display in groups of two or more with creative interplay including the negative space between all adding up to the complete artwork. Woodman realized that beautiful objects for everyday domestic use could take on a conceptual meaning besides a practical one.
In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a retrospective of her work, which was its first for a living female ceramic artist.
After graduating from the distinguished School for American Craftsmen in upstate New York, she moved to the City and began her career in earnest. In later years, she opened studios in Italy and Colorado, where she also taught. About this unfolding career from artisan to artist, Woodman would say, “The world of American ceramics was totally dominated by men, but as their consciousness was raised, they realized there were no women. And the first to be invited was me.”

Cindy Sherman (1954-) is an American photographer first recognized for her black-and-white “Untitled Film Stills” series and ongoing series of selfportraits. Acting as her own model, she adopts the costumes and makeup of female stereotypes from television, movies, magazines, and art history to examine a broad range of cultural representations of women both past and present. Her carefully crafted scenes subvert simplistic portrayals of women by focusing on the figure’s psyche regardless of its outer trappings. All her works remain untitled, freeing the viewer to develop their own personal narrative perceptions. Sherman states, “I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.” Sherman graduated from State University College, Buffalo in 1976 before relocating to New York City where she currently lives and works.
Untitled (In Honor of Mark Morrisroe from 1989 Portfolio) is typical of Sherman’s signature “Film Stills.” This image was her contribution to the artist portfolio from 1989, honoring artists lost to AIDS and benefitting the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. Sherman’s photograph was dedicated to her late friend and fellow photographer, Mark Morrisroe, whose life was cut short the year the portfolio appeared.

Diane Nemerov Arbus, educated in New York City’s Ethical Culture and Fieldston schools, changed the vocabulary of portraiture in photography and is considered one of the best known and influential female photographers of her generation.
At age 18, Diane Nemerov married Allan Arbus, then assistant to the advertising director of Russeks, a Fifth Avenue department store owned by her father. With the end of World War II, the couple began a combined career in fashion photography. In 1959, Diane announced, “I cannot do this anymore,” and quit the commercial field.
Arbus studied with Lisette Model at The New School, which greatly influenced the development of her personal vision in the work for which she became known. She was committed to representing people as they are, once stating, “… everybody has this thing where they need to look one way, but they come out looking another way, and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.” Her artistic process was to roam the streets of New York, sometimes following strangers, to find subjects she felt compelled to photograph. Ultimately, she would develop a strong personal relationship with her subjects. The resulting portraits document the human existence as both ordinary and frail.

Florence Schust Knoll grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and began her studies at Kingswood School for Girls. In 1934, she enrolled in the prestigious nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she launched her long, legendary career as one of the greatest designers and entrepreneurs of Modernism. This was more than a style but a social transformation, which from the mid-century until today has shaped the built environment and the ways its inhabitants work, play, and strive.
Warmed through color and texture, her enduring Lounge Chair testifies to a scaled-down translation of rhythm and proportions of mid-century Modern architecture. With a spare, geometric profile—an expression of the rational design approach that Florence Knoll learned from mentor, Mies van der Rohe—the lounge chair remains timeless.

Katharine Clarissa Eileen McCray designed and hand-crafted hundreds of dolls beginning in the late 1980s. A daughter of immigrants from Barbados and one of nine children, McCray had always noted the lack of beautiful black cuddly dolls. Not until she was in her late forties was she able to devote her time to this art form. The dolls shown represent each of her three daughters — Chirlane, Cynthia, and Cheryl. There are three sets of these dolls, one gifted to each daughter.
McCray was self taught in the art of embroidery and doll making. She called them Quashies in tribute to her mother, whose maiden name “Quashie” was West African. She created an array of Black and Brown dolls during a time when there were even fewer dolls of color available than now.
Can you guess which doll represents the First Lady?

Lorraine O’Grady is a New York-based conceptual artist, social critic, and activist, whose installations, performances and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity, with special reference to the role these have played in the history of Modernism.
Born in Boston in 1934 to West Indian parents, O’Grady’s artistic career came later in life after a career in writing and journalism. This broad background contributed to a distanced and critical view of the art world and to an unusually eclectic attitude toward art-making. In O’Grady’s work, the idea tends to come first, and then the medium. The work’s intellectual content is rigorous and political, but its form is often characterized by heightened beauty and elegance.

Emily Chow Bluck and Jennifer Harley are artists, educators, and organizers based in New York City. Working primarily with communities of color, they apply their art tactically to advance local campaigns for social justice. These creative campaigns harness experiences of struggle and oppression to create new pathways for overcoming social injustice with self-determined future alternatives. They have been actively engaged in organizing in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and New York City, working with organizations such as the Labor/Community Strategy Center, No Boundaries Coalition, and the Asian American Cultural Collective, Chinatown Art Brigade.
Horizon Line is an ongoing art project that investigates systemic boundaries to economic mobility, using the history of redlining in New York City as a point of departure. The first iteration of this project was installed along a historic redline on 14th street in Manhattan. Chow Bluck and Harley continue this project through interviews and art interventions in other neighborhoods such as Chinatown and Flatbush. This next phase of the project, titled Horizon Line (Falling into Place), employs materials from Asian Diasporic ancestral rituals to highlight current and ongoing struggles in finding, keeping, and sustaining affordable housing even within ethnic enclaves in New York. The casting of each miniature house, incorporating the cotton and flax fiber used in printing US currency, speaks even further of the perils of putting money ahead of humanity when it comes to urban domesticity. This work has a specific focus on immigrant and migrant communities and members of the African and Asian Diasporas, and their fights against displacement and homelessness.

Berenice Abbott was a photographer best known for her images of the architecture and urban spaces of 1930s New York City. Born in Springfield, Ohio, she arrived to study sculpture and befriended the elite of the New York avante-garde, including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Following a sojourn in Paris, where she became a protegé of the great  photographer Eugène Atget, Abbott returned to New York City in 1929 and chose the camera as her medium. Struck by the rapid Depression-era displacement of low-rise structures and communities to skyscrapers and housing projects, she began to record in detail the physical terrain. Abbott continued this series for six years until it was at last made an official subsidized program of the Federal Art Project. With funding secure, Abbott continued on with the assistance of a team, to produce a series of 305 photographs entitled Changing New York. Her unique bird’s-eye and “worm’s-eye” perspectives constitute a precious historical archive and body of outstanding artworks. Abbott openly identified as a lesbian and shared a Greenwich Village apartment for 30 years with her partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland

Ruth Orkin (1921-1985) was born in Boston and raised in Hollywood, where her mother was a silent screen actress. Life as a photographer began when she received her first camera at the age of ten. After a brief stint at L.A. City College in photojournalism, she worked as a messenger at MGM and extended this budding interest to cinematography. Years later, she went back to her studio and created a series of photographs documenting the lives of the messengers.
Orkin moved to the West Village of New York in 1944 and began her career as a freelance photographer, covering club life at night and making baby portraits by day. Some of her first successful images were candids of the children she encountered in her neighborhood. Her first major assignment came from the New York Times to take pictures for a story on Leonard Bernstein. Other assignments followed from magazines like Life and the Ladies Home Journal, for which she photographed well-known musicians, actors, and other celebrities.
The influence of storytelling appears in many of her pictures. Orkin had the ability to capture a gesture or expression that suggested the image was a brief episode in a longer narrative.
In this picture, the subjects are seated on a suitcase weary from a journey. The child, resting against her mother and facing the camera, seems unaware of being photographed. The mother appears to be anxiously waiting for someone. The photograph captures a sense of vulnerability and isolation one might feel upon arriving in a strange city.
While a good number of her photographs were taken on assignment, Orkin’s oeuvre also includes compelling candid shots of ordinary New York scenes. For the last two decades of her life, she spent a great deal of time in her apartment overlooking Central Park. From there she recorded the panorama of city life which included marathons, parades, demonstrations, as well as the colorful effect of the changing seasons on the skyline and landscape. These paeans to New York were the subject of two books by Orkin, A World Through My Window (1978) and More Pictures From My Window (1983).

Perla de Leon was born in Harlem. She received a B.A. degree in art history from Fordham/Lincoln Center, an M.F.A in photography from Brooklyn College, and then studied at Columbia University’s Graduate Film Directors Program.
When arriving at her first assigned school in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, she was shocked at the neighborhood’s physical decline yet was determined to record the resilient African-American and Puerto Rican residents. The vital spirit of the Bronx she knew from childhood survived despite the violent urbanist slash of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the arson-illuminated flight that followed in its destructive wake.
Going to Work shows a fashionable woman whose daily agency belies the depressed environment she strides through.
My Playground from her series “South Bronx Spirit 1979-1980” lays claim to such an assessment with the focus on the child rather than the sea of rubble which some mistook as a neighborhood of total abandonment.
The artist’s social awareness and activism have involved her in an important non-photography project providing solar lights to many communities in Puerto Rico that have been without electricity since Hurricane Maria struck in fall 2017.

Perla de Leon was born in Harlem. She received a B.A. degree in art history from Fordham/Lincoln Center, an M.F.A in photography from Brooklyn College, and then studied at Columbia University’s Graduate Film Directors Program.
When arriving at her first assigned school in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, she was shocked at the neighborhood’s physical decline yet was determined to record the resilient African-American and Puerto Rican residents. The vital spirit of the Bronx she knew from childhood survived despite the violent urbanist slash of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the arson-illuminated flight that followed in its destructive wake.
Going to Work shows a fashionable woman whose daily agency belies the depressed environment she strides through.
My Playground from her series “South Bronx Spirit 1979-1980” lays claim to such an assessment with the focus on the child rather than the sea of rubble which some mistook as a neighborhood of total abandonment.
The artist’s social awareness and activism have involved her in an important non-photography project providing solar lights to many communities in Puerto Rico that have been without electricity since Hurricane Maria struck in fall 2017.

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was an important, trail-blazing AfricanAmerican woman sculptor. She was seventh out of fourteen children born in poverty in Jacksonville, Florida. Determined to follow her muse, she moved to New York at age 20 to study at Cooper Union. There her talent blossomed, landing her a bust commission of scholar W.E.B. Du Bois. She went on to sculpt the likenesses of many other prominent AfricanAmericans, leading to a fellowship to study in Paris. Upon her return, Savage began teaching aspiring artists and in 1932 established the “Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts,” an arts-education center for adults. It was later named “Harlem’s Community Arts Center.”
In 1939, Savage was commissioned to create a plaster sculpture for the New York World’s Fair entitled The Harp, inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s 1900 song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Exhibited to much acclaim in the court of the Contemporary Arts building, the work depicted a group of twelve stylized black singers in graduated heights that symbolized the strings of the harp. The sounding board was formed by the hand and arm of God. A kneeling man holding music represented the foot pedal.
As no funds were available to cast it in bronze, the sculpture was demolished at the Fair’s closing and lives on only in photographs of its creation.

Elizabeth Colomba reclaims historical narratives by presenting men and women of color as heroic figures in the traditional figurative canon of Western art history. Colomba subverts that status quo by painting them as the primary focus of viewer attention. Colomba describes her intent, “to redefine not only how black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how they have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves.”
Haven is a fictional portrait of a couple overlooking the Brooklyn-based neighborhood of Weeksville. The Hunterfly Road homes was founded in 1838 by John Weeks as a safe, self-governing enclave of African-American freemen, emanicipated, and fugitive slaves. While full abolition became law in New York State in 1827, Weeksville’s creation preceded full national emancipation by a quarter century.
The population of Weeksville increased significantly after the 1863 draft riots, often characterized as one of the most catastrophic race riots in United States history with over one hundred people killed. As a consequence, over half of the black residents of New York City fled to Brooklyn over the course of the rest of the Civil War. Colomba’s not just marking the existence of a nineteenth century black community but also recognizing Weeksville as a bastion for those who took agency for the sake of their safety and livelihood. There’s a sign behind the couple in the painting indicating the year of the riots and migration, 1863.

A life-long New Yorker, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) helped to define post-war American abstract painting for more than 60 years. Her originality and experimentation with materials grew out of Abstract Expressionism and influenced generations of artists to follow. Frankenthaler established herself as an innovator in 1952 with a work entitled Mountains and Sea. The massive color-saturated picture was created with her unique “soak stain” technique. Diluting tube oil paints, house paint, and enamel with varying amounts of turpentine and kerosene, the artist poured the mixture and painted unprimed canvas laid on the floor. The technique resulted in large fields of translucent color, which was immediately influential for artists who became known as ‘Color Field’ painters.
Painted in 1954, Sun Spot is reminiscent of the gestural marks in the prehistoric caves of Altamira she had visited that summer. Frankenthaler eliminates any hierarchies between the visible brushstroke and fluid stains of paint emanating from the black hole centralized on the canvas. The heterogeneity of the marks, spills, and stains creates an almost extraterrestrial effect for the viewer, as if taking the abstraction into the geography of outerspace. Frankenthaler’s canvases weren’t necessarily predetermined; the artist conceived the image-making as a collaboration with her materials.
Like Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan, Frankenthaler emerged at a time when few other women artists were pursuing abstract painting. Critics sometimes described Frankenthaler’s work as “feminine,” choosing to interpret her color and transparency as gender-driven in contrast to the bold, heroic styles of men like Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler rejected such interpretations of her paintings including the categorical, hierarchical label of “woman painter.” She identified instead as “a painter — period.”

Florine Stettheimer was an American painter, poet, and designer. Her upbringing and education in Germany and New York City imbued her with a modern style that defies categorization. With the outbreak of World War I, Stettheimer settled permanently in New York where she befriended the vanguard of modern art in her wealthy family’s evening salons. Often ignoring the official tastes of gallery and museum exhibitions, she preferred to host elaborate art unveilings for her inner circle, the likes of whom included Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O’Keeffe. She was both presenter and patron of the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Brooklyn native Shirley Anita Chisholm (1924-2005) became the first African-American woman to serve in the Congress of the United Sates in 1968, when she won her race for the House of Representatives seat in New York’s 12th Congressional district. She held that office for seven successive terms until her retirement from public service in 1983.
In the second year of her second term in 1972, Ms. Chisholm declared her candidacy for President of the United States (later won by the incumbent Richard Nixon defeating George McGovern). As a result, Ms. Chisholm took her prominent place in American history as the first African-American woman seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination and the first declared black presidential candidate in either of the two major parties.
She was the daughter of West Indian immigrants Charles Christopher St. Hill and Ruby Seale, who were part of the great Caribbean diaspora then beginning to transform New York City. Much of her early childhood unfolded in Barbados, where she went to live and attend school at the home of her Bajan grandmother.
Ms. Chisholm’s career in childhood education and daycare led to a growing interest in politics and her election in 1966 to the New York State Assembly. Her Albany successes in labor and immigrant rights among other service goals paved the way for her historic election to Congress.

The Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism is dedicated to bringing Chisholm’s life and legacy to the general public through collecting archival materials, holding educational public forums, and creating a website that makes all these materials publicly available. In the spirit of Chisholm’s legacy as a groundbreaking community and political activist, the archive follows the many paths she pioneered — collecting materials from people who knew or worked with her, as well as from the extraordinary diversity of women’s organizations in Brooklyn since 1945.

The Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism is dedicated to bringing Chisholm’s life and legacy to the general public through collecting archival materials, holding educational public forums, and creating a website that makes all these materials publicly available. In the spirit of Chisholm’s legacy as a groundbreaking community and political activist, the archive follows the many paths she pioneered — collecting materials from people who knew or worked with her, as well as from the extraordinary diversity of women’s organizations in Brooklyn since 1945.

The Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism is dedicated to bringing Chisholm’s life and legacy to the general public through collecting archival materials, holding educational public forums, and creating a website that makes all these materials publicly available. In the spirit of Chisholm’s legacy as a groundbreaking community and political activist, the archive follows the many paths she pioneered — collecting materials from people who knew or worked with her, as well as from the extraordinary diversity of women’s organizations in Brooklyn since 1945.

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary New York artist best known for her bejeweled, acrylic, and enamel paintings of African-American women in powerful and provocative poses. Thomas works across media including sculpture, photography, and video art. Her work brings together art history, pop culture, and contemporary representations of women by placing her models in the formal context of masterpieces from the Western canon of art history. They are often clad in the fashions of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, a period spanning the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and the “Black is Beautiful” movements. This re-interpretation of art history brings new ideas of femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender to the visual forefront.
Thomas came to New York to study at the Pratt Institute before receiving an MFA degree from Yale University. She first experienced images of contemporary African-American families and women in the work of her mentor Carrie Mae Weems. Ever since, Thomas has worked to create authentic work that celebrates the female subjects whom she calls her “muses,” and to help young audiences see themselves and their lives represented in art galleries, museums, and ultimately a more inclusive history of art.
In Say It Plain, Thomas presents a video of Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1974 speech at a conference on black women in America held at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Thomas casts herself not only as an audience member, but also the metaphorical subject of Chisholm’s speech.

Born in 1949 and presently living between New York City and Gary, Indiana, Kay Rosen’s language-based paintings, drawings, editions, collages, installations, and videos have been exhibited in museums and institutions for four decades including the Museum of Modern Art; The Drawing Center; the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials of 2000 and 1991; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years.
Trained in languages and linguistics, Ms. Rosen realized in the 1970s that what most interested her about language were the ways it could be expressed visually. As a result, she left academia and started over as a “self-taught” artist. Drawing on this linguistic background, she began an exploration of the intersection of meaning and structure in language through pictorial means: color, materials, scale, composition, typography, and graphic design. Her investigation into alternative functions of language continues today.
AIDS was created at a time when treatments for the once fatal disease began to offer growing measures of hope and succor for its survivors. The words Rosen deploys in English and Spanish convey such a budding sense of benevolent resilience.

From their initial 19th century arrival (especially before the racist immigration statute known as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) early Chinese immigrants brought Cantonese opera to American shores. In the year 1852, they began sponsoring traveling opera troupes from China, and opening independent bilingual theaters. Cantonese opera, with its familiar storylines and heroes, was a popular form of entertainment developed in their home region of southern China– Hong Kong above all. For laborers here without their families, these theaters also served as public gathering places for exchanging news and socializing.