Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women
D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Alpert Gallery, Springfield, MA
April 27, 2024 - February 23, 2025
This ongoing portfolio of woodcut and collage portraits was originally inspired by the New York Times “Overlooked” series, which since March of 2018 has been sharing the stories of remarkable people who were overlooked by the NY Times obituaries in the past.
To further illuminate their lives and legacies, each of my portraits is accompanied by a portrait poem, written by a woman poet. The poets created their pieces in response to both the women’s stories and to the portraits.
Meteorology
for Nella
A pale sky swallows a dark cloud,
spits
and
I am
conceived never
white
bright
black
“down”
Dane
Indian
Caribbean
American
enough never
writer
woman
fighter
white enough
never.
Dixie’s contradiction:
sin without contrition,
yellow never gold,
silver never sterling,
the coveted lining?
never, only thinning shell
veined with fractures, cracks,
quake my bones,
fever the marrow,
never fitting, never splitting
always shorn, torn,
never passing
always contrasting
the criteria.
Behold me:
the eternally stifled, toiling
beneath a battered horizon,
the flanking gray,
neither cloud nor sky, though
brewing morass asunder,
thunder holding its breath,
lightning poised with
clenched teeth,
bruised the skin
of the wind,
the cacophonous quiet, kept
never calm,
storm perfect.
Tamara J. Madison
IDA
Too many nooses snug
against black necks⎯
men limp & motionless, dark
pillars against horizon. You
took up the pen, staunch,
relentless, sounded the alarm
of injustice. Small in stature,
your voice boomed⎯
phrases from the pages
you wrote ignited fear,
white men threatened
by a black woman’s rage.
How quick the wildfire.
Unflinching, you tucked
pistol in skirt pocket,
gritted teeth, somehow
fearless after mobs
strung up your brothers,
burned your press⎯
gold flames, melted metal.
You fought as only a woman
can fight, thread of tenderness
pulled taut through every violence.
You conjured wings, saying
I would gather my race in my arms
& fly away with them.
Rage Hezekiah
Capping Rhymes with Sir Ishii From Sun's Root Land
Don't tell me women are not the stuff of heroes,
I alone rode over the East Sea's winds for ten thousand
leagues.
My poetic thoughts ever expand, like a sail between ocean and
heaven.
I dreamed of your three islands, all gems, all dazzling with
moonlight.
I grieve to think of the bronze camels, guardians of China, lost
in thorns.
Ashamed, I have done nothing; not one victory to my name.
I simply make my war horse sweat. Grieving over my native land
hurts my heart. So tell me; how can I spend these days here?
A guest enjoying your spring winds?
Qui Jin
Madhubala
already half gone
making up the heart's insufficiency
in bright, soft black
smile like color
as if the moonlight were real
black hair blushing
you ran here
on bare feet, a Bombay child
shoulders dancing
now pretend to rest
poise your chin in readiness
as if illumination
were your name
as if you were a spectral song
on gold water
as if this frame
and every flickering frame
made you full
Libby Maxey
Etel Adnan
You said “identity is your prison” and roamed the world borderless, art your harbor. You said “poets transcend language,” and languages flowed in you like a river. A polyglot exile who understood that all is translation, you let the wind enter your porous skin, shift the shimmering light into new constellations. A distillation. In motion you sank roots and sang “we’re rhythms,” extending your hands for the world to fall into your open palms. Algeria, Vietnam, Beirut; the gasps of Arab nations trying to free themselves from the clutches of tyrants broke your heart. You were of the pen and brush; with them you fashioned order, merciful, out of the unbearable. “The dream has no walls.” You called it love.
I, daughter of the nation-state carved out by cold-blooded giants from the empire that saw your beginnings, bow to the tapestry you wove out of the many threads of your life. The languages that inhabit me refuse to talk to each other, the threads “disappear in the wanderings.”
Therese Chehade
Inviting the Broad Horizons
—for Jovita Idár, 1885-1946
The border descended like a scythe
just forty years before your birth;
mountains, homes, and trees still hold
their Spanish names—montañas, casas, árboles.
But in dirt-floor schools, you witness
textbooks teaching children to feel like strangers
in their homeland. You feel it too
with the knowledge of intimidations,
lack of resources, lynching.
They mean to bury your voices in sand.
So you as Astraea, goddess of justice,
puncture the blindfolds with starlight
then illumine the broad horizons.
You as Ave Negra dip your wings
into wells of ink mixed with weeping and ash
then write your message in the sky
for los habitantes Mexicanos de Texas,
for la mujer moderna, for la raza.
You, Jovita Idár, write in La Crónica,
and later in El Progresso,
and then in your own press: Evolución.
From cacophony, you assemble
one sound at a time until
your steadfast voice is a ringing bell
whose strength emboldens strength, until
your endeavors live in the air, your words
traveling generations ahead to say,
When you educate a woman, you educate a family.
You welcome las mujeres and las niñas
into la Liga Femenil Mexicanista.
And when la Revolución draws near,
you pass through the border
to heal the wounded fighting for their democracy.
Your heart erupts for them. You promise
to always stand in the doorway.
We feel your presence even now, your voice.
When officers came with sledgehammers
to destroy the press, you refused to move.
You said, No. I’m standing here.
The Longleaf Pine Woman
—Caroline Dormon (1888-1971)
I have listened to the trees talk, later
than I longed. My ear was its own
stethoscope, I felt the pulse, I heard
the waters flow through xylem
in vertical rivers, emptying
into fireworks of deep-green
needles. Need grows deeper.
For so long, I’ve collected life
histories. I’ve walked the land
through Louisiana, parish to parish,
raised seedlings, felt the fire
of their roman candles. A longing
carried me as I toiled to save them.
It can take a long century to reach
the forest canopy where sprays
of needles watch the clouds
and stars. And no bed is finer
than a needled floor, no resting
place more welcoming, far
below the oval, open crowns.
Being resinous, pitch and gum
can save them from fire, and
skeletons of snag may recover.
But from the blade? For this I walked.
—Sharon Tracey
Rose Zar, Hiding in Plain Sight
Look again.
Can you see who I am?
Do I give you even a moment's pause,
one more survivor of the Holocaust?
Rose ~ the name I took when I came
to this immigrant gathering place,
my husband and I, lone survivors,
haunted by our terrifying past.
Ruszka ~ my childhood name
echoing through our Polish home:
love...learning...laughter...
that world is gone forever.
Rushkala ~ my father called me,
he who prepared me, branded me
with the duty and courage to survive,
exiled from our ghetto grave.
Wanda ~ Arayan Catholic forged papers,
I was hunted, always afraid,
held in the mouth of the wolf;
how hard it was never showing fear!
Shoshana ~ Hebrew Zionist rose
happily singing of a promised land;
only three of our Youth Group lived.
Forty-two died. Israel was never home.
Hiding in plain sight, remembering
always, inside: I am a Jew,
even as they shrieked: “Alle Juden Raus!”
Prey of hate, fear helped me focus.
Look again.
Do you see who I am?
Joy is a stranger to me.
My life is my grief.
Nancy Collins-Warner
Tiger Lady
for Mabel Stark, born Mary Ann Haynie, 1888-1968
Just past twenty when she first walked by that royal Bengal—King—
and before long she had the whole streak suspended, walking thin lines
at her command, jumping through blazing hoops, assembling a wild pyramid
of striped power, held in place by the promise of raw meat and her stick.
Maybe she thought of her dead father and mother, and the stepfather
she escaped. She wanted to quit hoochie-coochie dancing—her bared belly,
twisting her body round a pole—and nursing, that other women’s work,
without thrill, the sap of taking care, spotlight on the sick and not the vital
growl. It makes sense she’d want to cast off fear, wield the whip,
hold back what would maul her if given half a chance.
She said I love these cats as a mother loves her children. Her tigers
raised under a tent, behind iron, made to pounce on pedestals and pose.
That is one kind of caring, all whip-smart and firm, demanding
arrangement, with the coo and the strike. What other fierce things
was she snapping into shape, inside her mind, prowling the edges of her
caged heart? As a woman, she would have known that balancing act,
what it is to be disciplined for baring the teeth we are born with.
Nearly eighty, at the close of her career of cats, she felt blank
as the bullets in her warning gun without them, downed
sedatives once she was no longer allowed to wrestle with tigers.
She leapt with them, through a kind of fire, when she entered their cages,
when she stepped to the middle of the ring. What conflagration
was she stoking with her little cape, her metal gloves? The crowd roared
over a circus backdrop reeking of peanuts, sweat, and rancid hay,
while teeth tore away a breast, ligaments, bestowed her with 700 stitches,
blood pouring into the chalices of her 26-inch boots. The only way she felt
alive, each tooth undoing old wounds fast as a flick of flame. She admitted
there was no such thing as tame. She placed her face between the open jaws.
Rebecca Hart Olander
Annie on the Edge
In your dark dress, you stand
beside the dark capsule of your design,
weighted to give gravity a hand
when you fall over Niagara Falls.
Pledge of bravery in
your posture. You lie about your age.
When you climb inside the barrel,
your skirt forms a padded circle.
The harness. Then the lid. The wide
river takes over.
At the brink there is a pause
and you pause.
In twenty minutes, the journey
ends. You are the first ever, the first
woman to survive the fall. The key
to your livelihood. Your survival.
The adventure so unlikely,
its desperation.
For a brief time, acclaim. Money. Brief.
You circle back to the watery
riot of the falls. At the end of your life,
pamphlets and potions and magic tricks
for tourists like us.
Jean Blakeman
Wings
“We’ll take the girls afield, and let them get acquainted with the
birds.
Then of inborn necessity, they will wear feathers never more.”
Florence Merriam Bailey
Birds Through an Opera Glass is what she called the book
she wrote at 26, upending the practice of shooting
birds to study them. Then there were the ladies of marvelous
plumed adornment, buying birds to death: 5 million/year
multiplied by the songs no one ever heard.
Not all of us are equipped with a driving passion, not all
driving passions are powered by love. Florence
said to the women, bring your opera glasses for our walk,
knowing once you watch a chickadee watch you,
you’re different. Maybe tuberculosis taught her something
we can’t learn an easy way, about constriction, and how anyway
to let the heart fly into the world. Think of it: 5 million x the years
since she wrote her book equals how many seeds carried
to new fields? How much pollination of the flowers of those seeds,
and honey made in the trees her saved birds planted?
Adin Thayer
Hinged Dreams
“I now have one desire — to make films.”
Lotte Reiniger
A sorcerer thin as a rake with gnarled knuckles shakes them
at Prince Achmed as his horse gallops
across a shivering moon. A princess bird descends by an opal
lake and steps from her owl-soft plumage. Lotte’s life
is a story of stories told through thinly hammered lead.
Before leaving the land of the Fuhrer, her gifted fingers
woke, and a gift’s desire was the fuel for their burning speed.
These stories flew from the small scissors
in her hand and step by step she coaxed them
across an under-lit screen, still-shot by still-shot. By each
the world’s treasury of magic grew and the mind
of childhood was nourished. As is the life of any pioneer, hers
was a series of obstacles, money, loss, the post-war taste
for realism, and steadily she scissored through them,
and who would not, who found within herself so rare a gift,
to imagine metal into motion, to snip a crow into dipping across
the moon of her imagination or a princess into slumping
down for a century of sleep?
Adin Thayer
Silueta
—for Ana Mendieta
The corpus—female body as icon—
its own landscape
was always your life’s work.
Silueta you called them—
dressed in weeds and white flowers, blots of blood
mixed with dirt. Apparitions thatched
and as matted as shocks
of wild hair. One
you laid to rest in an open stone
tomb, legs slender as pipettes
and translucent as veins. One
you carved in a dry streambed. One
you torched with red fire.
Some you made with your own
skin as canvas: a coat of mud, the grit of sand,
the end product of many things.
Raw and exposed, you are brave.
There are multitudes.
An exile seeks roots.
With a camera you tried to save them—
echoes and traces, afterimages
and impermanent marks. Penumbrae
caught between light and dark
in silver gelatin
the body—a landscape of the visible—
but also a figuration
of what lies
in shrouds of earth.
Sharon Tracey
Woodcut of Sylvia
There are others in the series of photographs
the artist could have chosen. The one where her smile
is a cracked-open geode. Radiant. Or the one beside him
on the couch, her crown of thorns necklace partially
visible there too, Hughes looking like a tired old man.
Here, her armored jewelry is prominent, showing
she won’t shy from hard edges. She’s interior, but she’s not
looking at nothing. She’s just not looking at you, or me.
She’s training her mind’s eye to make miracles.
She is witch-magician, yet only thirty when she dies.
Still 1959 here, neither child born yet. Curl of girlish
bangs, crosshatch cheeks, cardigan, and briar patch dress
on which the nettle-like necklace makes it seem
she’s fastened a tidy explosion just below her clavicle.
Dangerous adornment, she’s a woman avoiding a gaze.
What can’t be seen is sea, rain, the slick rocks
of the North Shore, the insistence of blue skies and bulbs,
the exhaustion of spring, the incessancy of clouds.
Her brilliance is rooted there, in the formative spaces,
before nappies and milk mind. But not before poetry.
That was manifest in the salt-cured hometown,
the fierce mind admiring other gods, the heights to which
they understood expanse and wrote that way to match,
though she outmatched them all. Hairshirt necklace,
hairball amulet. Destined for domestic and divine.
Rebecca Hart Olander
Queen Bess
Built for flight, for soaring, she who
always checked her wings, the weather—
aviatrix, wing-walker, barnstormer,
first black woman pilot in the U.S.—
heard the stories of WWI flyers at the White Sox
Barber Shop in Chicago as she worked doing nails.
The military selling surplus “Jennys” in the twenties
(she would own two). And yet, to earn her pilot’s license,
the sharecropper’s daughter raised in Waxahachie, Texas
had to leave the country, train in France. The biplane
mostly wings, no steering wheel, no brakes.
If you fly above the earth does the world look truer?
She flew figure eights, dipping and looping, stuntwoman
and guide of her sky-self, parting the blue—
the see-through clouds, fully licensed to operate.
Demanded blacks and whites enter the same front gates.
She was thirty-four the last morning.
You don’t need to look up the weather report,
it was said to be a wrench—jammed—that sent her Jenny
spiraling, nose-diving, past the future roundabouts
to be named after her, the flying clubs she dreamed of
the pilots flying low, dropping blossoms on her grave.
—Sharon Tracey
The Longleaf Pine Woman
— Caroline Dormon (1888-1971)
I have listened to the trees talk, later
than I longed. My ear was its own
stethoscope, I felt the pulse, I heard
the waters flow through xylem
in vertical rivers, emptying
into fireworks of deep-green
needles. Need grows deeper.
For so long, I’ve collected life
histories. I’ve walked the land
through Louisiana, parish to parish,
raised seedlings, felt the fire
of their roman candles. A longing
carried me as I toiled to save them.
It can take a long century to reach
the forest canopy where sprays
of needles watch the clouds
and stars. And no bed is finer
than a needled floor, no resting
place more welcoming, far
below the oval, open crowns.
Being resinous, pitch and gum
can save them from fire, and
skeletons of snag may recover.
But from the blade? For this I walked.
—Sharon Tracey
Thank You for Your Labors, Pioneer, Undertaken Often at Night
It is soothing, scientist, to think of the sand fleas,
and the ghost crabs that devour them, and the sea bass
that eat them, then the shark school circling,
and the remains of the fish tossed back in the jetsam
to the beach where the fleas flock to their food.
We can be comforted, deft lyricist, by your description
of moon-bewildered squid, how the swath of light
from the fullness finds them dashed upon the shore
in their panicked retreat, where the following morning
they serve as feast for scavenging gulls.
When we remember, beloved daughter, our own gone,
or you, by cancer, at 56, your mother might come to mind—
she typed your first manuscript to arrive famously without error
to its publisher—and we will know some things
can be managed by love and attention, and some can’t.
With your ode to ecology, Under the Sea-Wind, you urge us
to abandon human yardsticks, while the book itself survived
time’s ravages. You salvaged the original moldering illustrations,
forgotten in a warehouse in the midst of world war, to reprint
your masterpiece of sea, wind, migration, and change.
Rachel, you might be glancing backward at us
in our beautiful hell, driven not by fear, like Orpheus,
but by knowing we have not followed you into the sky or sea.
You could be draped in plumage splashed with cinnamon
and rust, like older sanderlings on their return flight.
You dwell in the shifting places, the microscopic,
the abyss. You knew it was our own folly, not any god,
that would trap us in the dark. Your eye, sharp
as a sandpiper rooting out a fiddler, took note. So many
tiny black journals. So many hours in the field.
You are in the tide pools. You are urchin, anemone,
sea star, mollusk, limpet, barnacle. You are algae, mussel,
and sponge, soaking in the beauty and wonder
and sharing it with us. The waters rise, and you cling
to the granite, to our conscience, our regret.
And despite altered terrain, the silenced season, it lulls us
to read what you left in your wake, protector of prairie
and ocean edge. How small a part we are in what there is.
How we should discriminate when we blanket earth and sea
with ourselves. To think it could still be as you say, the chain.
—Rebecca Hart Olander
HeLa: Stolen Gifts*
Henrietta (Hennie) Lacks
b. 8/1/1920 – d. 10/4/1951
She did not want immortality,
just life. Johns Hopkins, decades ago
cells pilfered, slashed from her cervix,
dropped onto clots of chicken-blood.
As they doubled each day; named HeLa.
Hennie, heartbeat of her clan –
bein' with her was like bein' with fun.”
Last goodbyes – her five children on
a small patch of grass as she sobbed --
pressed face, hands, to hospital glass.
Motherless days, months, years.
Daughter – longing – nails painted
fire-engine red like her mother's;
lifetime quest for answers. Son,
in fury, “Them cells were stolen.”
No permission given – “50 million
metric tons” grown and used in labs
worldwide. Family uncompensated.
We all have benefited: Gene mapping,
new chemos, vaccines – polio and COVID.
How do we thank you dear Hennie?
By Delores Juanita Brown and Janine Roberts
*With much appreciation to Henrietta's family for telling her story and theirs to Rebecca Skloot. All quotes and details are from the superb book by Skloot, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”.
I get you, Betty.
Convinced of our magnificence even in the silence.
When they played, “not you,”
we
sang “watch me.”
Even with yolk in our lashes.
Pieces of work ever lacking.
We wear the woven as a door but ache to trade
for a suit of skin.
Born in prison, we wouldn’t be caged.
Won’t be caught.
We’re determined
dynamic stubborn queer
biting brilliant
precocious
strange
unstable
uncertain
Lost
we yearn for personal truth connection clarity love peace exhilaration power strength speed
We tasted the crumbs
wanted the bite.
The nostalgia of
white knuckles on a wheel,
leaning into a curve,
controlling the machine.
Dominion over a landscape.
But we’re so shy scared tired safer
Alone.
—joj
Belle Townsley Smith
(1845–1928)
Born and buried in Springfield
and co-founder of the city’s first art museum
named for her husband alone:
George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum
See for yourself. It gleams above
the main doors.
Married in 1882, they set off for Europe
where two years of collecting turned into five—
tapestries, paintings, bronzes, ceramics,
illuminated manuscripts. Returning, they
offered the collection as a gift to the city
if they would build it a home.
Her passion was the art of lacemaking
and she sought out the finest—Italian cutwork,
Rose-point, Spanish, and French laces—
designed and handmade with needle
and bobbin, threads of linen and silk.
The lacemaker threading the eyelets,
the openwork web delicate and growing,
covering yet revealing. Creating veils,
shawls, and lappets—the lace strips
worn by bishops and popes or attached
to a woman’s hair in pairs. She organized
the museum’s lace exhibit in 1912 to fanfare.
Today, walking across the Quadrangle
and approaching the Pompeian brick façade,
it’s hard not to wonder if anyone suggested
one of his names be given up so one of
hers could shine. A legacy handed down.
After all, the museum was her child.
—Sharon Tracey