Women’s History Month at The Archive
For our first March in existence we featured and honored all women designers in honor of Women's History Month. The common refrain around women in graphic design history is that their work is less praised, conserved or researched. The People’s Graphic Design Archive offers a chance to flip that narrative by sharing the work of many women designers
in the hopes of offering inspiration and also new research.
It may surprise some to know that we had a hard time narrowing down our featured designers (2 per day)! In the end we featured the work of 59 designers, and continued to share far into April. We still felt that we only included the tiniest drop in a vast and diverse pool.
Our aim was to share lesser-known women mixed with some more known, as well as others whose practice exists somewhere between design and art.
The features for our 2021 Women’s History Month included:
Tomoko Miho / Sheila Levrant de Bretteville / Vanessa Bell / Linda Lucero / Elaine Lustig Cohen / Monica Helms / Dorothy Hayes / Florence Nightingale / Barbara T. Smith / Betty Brader / Sulki Choi / Marie Neurath / Mónica Mayer / The Club of Printing Women of New York / Sister Magdalen Mary Martin / Juliette Bellocq / Lucille Tenazas / Caryn Aono / Elena Serrano / Frances Butler / Varvara Stepanova / Barbara Jones-Hogu / Luanne Seymour Cohen / Louise E. Jefferson / Elizabeth Callen / Janet Bennett /Jacqueline Casey / Karenlee Grant / Muriel Cooper / Ruth McCrea / Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka (Angel deCora) / Mary Condon / Rebeca Méndez / Margaret Calvert/ Olga Rozanova / Eiko Ishioka / Deborah Sussman / Dorothy Waugh / Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui / Ellen Raskin / Lola Álvarez Bravo / Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon / Brenda Laurel / Thérèse Moll / Loïs Mailou Jones / Nancy Skolos/ Loretta Staples / Nancy Donald / Ellen M. Shapiro / Rosmarie Tissi / Amy Suo Wu / Hilda Dallas / Marget Larsen / Gail Swanlund / Majda Dobravec-Lajovic / Samina Quraeshi / Lorraine Wild
Some articles and resources we recommend:
- Some History About Black Women in Graphic Design—Lecture by Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton
- This Just In: Angel DeCora’s The Indians’ Book and Wigwam Stories—Guest post by Neebinnaukzhik Southall for Letterform Archive
- The Cost of Free Love and the Designers Who Bore It—Meet the Women of Psychedelic Design—Madeleine Morley
- Messy History vs. Neat History Toward an Expanded View of Women in Graphic Design—by Martha Scotford
- Feminist Findings—A series in Futuress online publication "uncovering multifold histories of feminist publishing."
- We Surveyed Gender Equality at the World’s Biggest Design Conferences—and the Numbers Are In—Eye on Design + notamuse
- Women Make Up Over Half the Design Industry—So Why Are There So Few at the Top?—Laura Bolt
- Alphabettes— a showcase for work, commentary, and research on lettering, typography, and type design.
- Women of Graphic Design—focused on exhibiting the contributions of women in graphic design and exploring issues of gender-equality in education.
- Design Dedux Podcast—Brockett Horne & Louise Sandhaus on The People’s Graphic Design Archive and Redesigning HERstory (S4E2)
The PGDA is a collective effort and welcomes and encourages everyone's participation. Please submit work to the archive. All are encouraged! Submit anything from finished projects to process, photos, letters, oral histories, anecdotes, published and unpublished articles, essays, and other supporting material to the archive here.