As many of us spend more of our days alone, apart, and isolated, we perhaps have found space to step away from the screen and sit with ourselves. Maybe we’ve found moments to reflect on our relationship to control or our lack thereof. Maybe we’ve found a reconnection with art as a way to express the roiling waves inside us. Or maybe that sort of confrontational stillness has eluded you. If so, perhaps learning about the mother of American modernism will inspire you.

As a student, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe almost gave up on painting until she studied the philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow which emphasized personal design and invited the painter to “fill a space beautifully” instead of trying to copy classical painters. She sent several paintings to a friend of hers in New York who then showed them to renowned art dealer and photographer Alfred Steiglitz. She moved to New York in 1918 and began her career as a professional artist at Steglitz’s request, eventually marrying him in 1924.

She garnered recognition and acclaim for her depictions of the New York skyline, and eventually her extreme close up flowers. Many have commented on the sexual nature of her flowers, particularly ones like Red Canna (1924), to which O’Keeffe maintained, “they were talking about themselves not about me.” She explored color, form and shape, going so far as to create a series of Jack-in-the-Pulpit paintings deconstructing different elements of the flower.

In 1929, O’Keeffe started living part-time in the southwest. She fell in love with the New Mexican landscape and began focusing her art on the rock formations, sky, and, of course, the bones. She felt herself over the years coming alive in the sunshine and open skies of the southwest, which brought some reprieve from her strained marriage.

She painted her first skulls from a “barrel of bones” she collected her first time in Santa Fe. One of her more famous pieces Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931) was accented with the rest stripes to comment on the North eastern obsession with the “Great American Novel.” Adding her take on the Great America that exists past the Hudson River.

Much like her flowers, her bones were often misunderstood. As her flowers were seen as highly sexual, her bones were interpreted as an obsession with death. In O’Keefe’s words, “it never occurs to me they have anything to do with death. They’re very lively.”

When Steiglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to Santa Fe permanently — making her home at her Abiquiú property and spending her summers at Ghost Ranch. She truly lived her best life continuing a prolific career and traveling the world. She drew inspiration from new locations and showcased her art in galleries and museums across the globe. She never found a place she loved more than New Mexico.

She later took on a young assistant who helped her continue traveling and making art even as she aged. Her relationship with Juan Hamilton caused quite the scandal (much like her affair with Steiglitz before he divorced his previous wife) to which she would tell him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Juan, what do you care what they think? Just focus on your work.” With his help, she continued to paint even after losing her sight, until her death at 98.

In 2014, O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed (1936) sold for $44,405,000 blowing the world record for female artists out of the water more than three times over.

Today, we can take some lessons from this exemplary artist:

“If I can’t work by myself for a year with no stimulus other than what I can get from books, distant friends, and from my own fun in living, I’m not worth much.”

O’Keefe understood the value of solitude. She wouldn’t allow her husband in the room when she painted. Her time to work was sacred. Some of us have plenty of alone time now. Some of us have less than ever with children at home. Whatever your situation, can you carve out true solitude? No phones. No excuses. Just you and whatever muse moves you?

“I put up a lot of pictures that I had done during the year and I could say, ‘well, I painted that to please so-and-so, and I painted that to please so-and-so.’ Go around the room and there wasn’t anything to please myself and I thought that was pretty dull. So I put it all away and started over again.”

Wow. Imagine honestly assessing your work in that way and solemnly swearing to please yourself with your art rather than everyone else. What can you create that is just for you? Many great artists assert that their work comes from the raw truth of their being. What does yours look like?

“I have been terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Courage comes from doing the thing we are afraid of inspire of our terror, not from fearlessness. Can we move forward with our fears? Even now?

“I can’t explain it any other way, that I get this shape in my head. And sometimes I know where it comes from and sometimes I don’t.”

This sounds like a deep trust in her intuition. But we need the aforementioned solitude to get there. In order to really listen.

“If you work hard enough you can get almost anything.. [After 10 years] I got [The O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu] from the Catholic Church.”

O’Keeffe obtained her dream home 10 years after falling in love with it. Sometimes we need to play the long game to get where we’re going. Remember that when you feel like you’re not accomplishing enough in a day.

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About the author.  

Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

After 110 years, the U.S. Navy finally has its first Black female tactical jet pilot! Her path was paved by the iconic Bessie Coleman: the first BIPOC female pilot, who saw aviation as a way to empower women and people of color in the United States.

Born to poor sharecropper parents in 1892, Bessie Coleman, one of 13 children, had a hardscrabble childhood in rural east Texas raised by a single mom — but she soared past her humble beginnings to become the first African-American and Native American female pilot. Known for performing daredevil flying tricks, she was dubbed “Queen Bess,” “Brave Bessie,” and “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World.” Her goal? To encourage women — especially African-American and other women of color — to reach their dreams.

Humble Beginnings

Her mother was an African-American maid; her father, a Native American sharecropper. When Bessie was 9, her father moved back to Oklahoma to try and escape discrimination. Bessie’s mother did not go with him, staying in Waxahachie, Texas. Childhood was what you might imagine for poor African-American children in the racially-divided South at that time. She walked four miles to a one-room schoolhouse that lacked the basic materials that most students take for granted today, and helped her Mom pick cotton and wash laundry to help earn extra money. But despite these humble beginnings, Bessie excelled at mathematics, and she finished all eight grades.

College, Chicago, and Falling in Love with Flight

By the time she turned 18, Bessie had saved enough money to attend the Colored Agricultural and Normal University — today Langston University — in Langston, Oklahoma, but completed only one semester before running out of money, and returning to Waxahachie, Texas.

When she turned 23, Bessie decided to move to Chicago, where she moved in with one of her brothers. She went to beauty school in 1915 and became a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop. Chicago is where she fell in love with flying; she would listen for hours on end to pilots’ stories about their adventures during World War I.

Her two brothers served in the military during World War I and came home with tales from their time in France — where French women were allowed to learn how to fly airplanes. This fueled her dreams of becoming a pilot. Bessie applied to many flight schools across the United States but received countless rejections; no school would accept her because she was both a woman and a woman of color. Her brother teased her, saying that women in France were better than those in the United States because they were allowed to fly. Bessie — determined to fly — decided to take her dream across the pond to France, where she could become a pilot.

Vive le France

With support from a local banker and famed Chicago Defender newspaper publisher, Robert Abbott (one of the first self-made African American millionaires), she took a crash course in French from the Berlitz language school so that she could complete her application, which needed to be in French. At long last, she was accepted at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation — founded by sibling aviation pioneers René and Gaston Caudron, in Le Crotoy, in northern France. Triumphant, she set off for Paris on November 20, 1920, aboard the ocean liner S.S. Imperator.

She began a seven-month flight course, learning to fly in a Nieuport Type 82 — a fragile, 27-foot long biplane, with a 40-foot wingspan. Not the steadiest craft, Coleman had to inspect it tip to tail before every flight. She learned aerial maneuvers like tail spins, banking, and loop-the-loops, but also witnessed an accident that killed another student. On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first African-American and Native American woman to earn an international pilot’s license, granted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, an organization that oversees aeronautic sports, that gave her the right to fly anywhere in the world. After several months of additional training with a top French pilot, Coleman was ready to return home and fulfill her dream of owning a plane and opening her own flight school stateside.

Bessie Coleman: The Sky Kissing Sensation

When she returned to New York City in September of 1921, The Associated Press lauded her as “a full-fledged aviatrix, said to be the first of her race.” Coleman gave speeches and showed films of her airborne exploits in theaters, schools, and churches to earn money — but refused to speak anywhere that was segregated, or that discriminated against people of color. In 1922, Coleman performed the first public flight by an African American and Native American woman. She dazzled onlookers with her daring stunts — showing off her aerial skills by doing loop-the-loops, making the figure “8” with her plane, and became famous for walking on the wings of her plane while aloft or parachuting down while a co-pilot took the controls.

Her performances riveted people in both the United States and Europe. Her aerial exploits were widely covered by the press — particularly in black newspapers — and she became a glamorous sensation. Coleman toured the United States, giving flight lessons, performing in aerial shows, and inspiring African Americans, Native Americans, and women to learn how to fly.

A Plane of Her Own

Eventually, Coleman saved up enough money to buy her own plane: a military surplus Curtiss JN-4, known colloquially as a Jenny. She went to Santa Monica, California to pick it up. While there, Coleman was to perform at an air show — but instead ended up surviving her first major plane crash. As she was taking off to fly to the Los Angeles Fairgrounds, the site of her show, her engine suddenly stopped working, and she plummeted from 300 feet up to the ground. She destroyed her plane and sustained severe injuries, including a broken leg, several cracked ribs, cuts on her face — but was able to fully heal and went back to performing daredevil aerial stunts in 1925.

It All Comes Tumbling Down

By April 1926, Coleman had saved enough money to purchase another surplus Jenny plane. She scheduled an aerial show for May 1. On April 30, Coleman and her co-pilot, William Wills, took a practice flight in the new plane. Coleman sat in the passenger seat, unharnessed so that she could peer over the side of the plane once in the sky and find a good place for her parachute landing during the show. But at 3,500 feet in the air, a loose wrench got stuck in the engine of the plane, and Wills was unable to control the steering wheel. The plane flipped over — and Coleman immediately fell from the open plane and died instantly on impact. She was 34. Wills crashed the plane just a few feet from Coleman’s body; he also died. Her death was heartbreaking. More than 10,000 people came to pay their respects, with the journalist Ida B. Wells — famed for her crusade against lynching — leading the ceremonies.

She was never able to open her flight school, but many flight clubs have since been named in her honor. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago began a tradition of flying over Coleman’s grave every year; in 1977, African American female pilots created the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club; and in 1995, the Bessie Coleman stamp was issued to honor her accomplishments. At a time when flights are largely grounded due to COVID-19, we remember Bessie Coleman, who saw aviation as a way to empower people of color in the United States.

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About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist — Karina writes, edits, and produces compelling content across multiple platforms — including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties.

This past year, we’ve seen individuals and organizations alike using their voices to speak their values. But such moves are not without controversy. Only a few years ago, the Kellogg Foundation drew ire for funding support of BLM and an ad for Cheerios featuring a mixed-race family faced a deluge of hate comments. Advertising that depicts LGBTQ folks has also garnered criticism. This comes from both detractors and the communities represented themselves.

Advertising can play a role in advancing social justice. Through greater public representation and funding support for strategic initiatives, businesses can help.

Gay Money Talks

LGBTQ purchasing power in the US hovers around $1 trillion. Globally, that number is around $3.7 trillion. Yes, the advantage of affluence in the community disproportionately benefits white cis gay men. But we are undeniably a huge market segment. Queer folks want to see messages of support and representation in advertising.

On the flip side, it was widely publicized in 2012 that Chick-fil-A Foundation donated to two anti-gay organizations. Their mostly conservative fanbase doubled down on their support. They were met with kiss-ins and ridicule. Perhaps it was their expansion into more liberal cities — rather than protests and education efforts — that led to an end of that funding support. Right wing pundits criticized the switch.

When social movements reach a tipping point of public support, advertising can make what was once radical into something mainstream and apolitical. Activists routinely criticize corporate sponsorships at pride events for creating a sanitized “corporate pride.” In the landmark book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, the authors caution that social movements for liberation can be co-opted by nonprofits, foundations, and corporations in support of the status quo.

The shift in public perception can lull people into complacency. Those at the margins of the LGBTQ community — people of color, trans folks, the poor — are too often left out of the conversation. While advertising featuring the gay community continues to grow, devastating policy can seem to undo the incremental changes made.

That said, representation does matter. Seeing our relationships and families represented in commercials, rainbow flags splashed in storefronts everywhere, gender fluidity in fashion ads, and countless other examples, does play a part in shifting the public narrative. And it can sometimes lead to positive political change.

The Early Adopter: Absolut

Absolut, the Swedish vodka sold by Pernod Ricard, is not afraid to take risks in their advertising strategy. Absolut began promoting the brand in gay publications back in 1981! The vodka, sold at Studio 54 in the 80s, led to an encounter with Andy Warhol. That initiated their legendary print advertising collaborations with artists. Here’s a sample of 10 of those ads speaking to the LGBTQ community, created by the ad agency TBWA Worldwide.

The Quiet Supporter: Subaru

Lesbians love to joke about our affinity for Subarus. But before the targeted ads of the 1990s, the company’s marketers identified lesbians (as well as hikers, teachers, and others) as fans of their all-wheel-drive vehicles. Those marketers took a risk at a time when other companies were pulling their ads from the Ellen sitcom (after she came out). Subaru promoted the brand to gays and lesbians in ads created by Mulryan/Nash. Sometimes the messages were “coded” to the community. That gamble paid off. The unassuming car manufacturer won lifelong dedication from the tribe.

The Turnaround: Target

Long before boycotts for “promoting gay lifestyles,” a former Target CEO made a sizeable donation to an anti-gay politician. But we’re a forgiving bunch. Target made strides as allies by standing up for marriage equality (see this ad featuring gay dads). They publicly came out to welcome trans employees and shoppers. These days, we love their campy aesthetic, their Pride clothing section, their inexpensive housewares, and their open support for the community.

In Our Own Words: It Gets Better Project

The LGBTQ community has long wielded the power of advertising approaches to lobby for change to policy and to shift public consciousness. The “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” campaign for ACT UP during the height of the AIDS epidemic was unprecedented. It was politically charged, clever, and wildly influential.

The “It Gets Better” Project was launched in 2010 by columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller. It features videos made in response to high rates of death by suicide of gay teens and youth perceived to be gay. It is strategic storytelling at its finest. Google Creative Lab created a spot highlighting the campaign the following year and leveraged it to show the power of the web for good.

Trans/Genderqueer Visibility: Secret

It’s not the first ad or product geared towards the trans community. But this spot for Secret deodorant features androgynous queer model Karis Wilde. Ending with the tagline, “there’s no wrong way to be a woman,” it’s understated and sweet. Parent company Proctor and Gamble (P&G) has garnered criticism, however. The spot affirms the right to use a bathroom aligned with one’s gender identity. But the company doesn’t defend those rights for their own employees or more broadly.

LGBTQ POC Visibility: Spotify

The 2014 “Can’t Find the Words?” commercial from Spotify is a sweet, subtle take on that feeling of butterflies in your stomach when you’re interested in someone. This time, the characters are two Black men and we watch as those three dots indicate waiting for a response. LGBTQ people have always been well represented in the arts, so it’s only fitting that a music streaming app would take this approach.

It’s hard to deny the role that advertising can play in social change, whether it leads the way for other brands or simply follows the trend. It can show support for our communities, advance our causes, and help shift culture. Companies that take those risks show support for their own diverse workplace, earn social capital, and cultivate brand loyalty. Happy Pride!

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About the author.
Jess Powers writes about marketing, food, and wellness. She has experience in nonprofit communications and emergency management. Follow her @foodandfury.

 

As we furiously wash our hands to maintain health and hygiene amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, we can thank Florence Nightingale for her work as one of the first advocates of hygiene in medicine. Through her work nursing and collecting data during the Crimean War, she laid the groundwork for standards of practice that put compassion, humanity, and cleanliness into the healing process.

As a young lady, Nightingale had a spiritual awakening that she was destined to serve the world instead of simply being a member of the elite. After studying in Germany and working in London, she heard about the deplorable conditions wounded soldiers were being subjected to during the Crimean War. Instead of furthering her career in London, Nightingale led a team of 38 nurses in the Barrack Hospital outside of Constantinople to improve nursing conditions for the sick and wounded soldiers.

After arriving in 1854, she noticed that more soldiers died of disease rather than battle wounds and suspected the unhygienic quarters, poor nutrition, stale air, and darkness as contributing factors to the soldiers’ dismal health. She called for the Sanitary Commission to flush sewage and improve the hygienic standards of the hospital. She also had the audacity to advocate for hand washing practices (which, unfortunately, did not become standard until the late 1800s and early 1900s). During her nightly rounds, she often visited soldiers and became known as “The Lady with the Lamp,” as she is most famously depicted.

These changes severely reduced the death rate among wounded soldiers and eventually proved to reduce death rates during peacetime as well. She brought back tons of data on how sanitation improved the odds of survival using pie charts and other graphics — which was actually rare at the time — and even developed her own kind of diagram. For her efforts as a pioneer in statistics, she was the first woman inducted into the Royal Statistical Society in 1859.

After her return, she grew ill with a bacterial infection she most likely contracted in Crimea and was bedridden for the rest of her life at age 38. From her sickbed, Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing published in 1860, which detailed her proven methods for improving the conditions of the sick — directed specifically at mothers and other caretakers. The book is still a standard text for nursing schools.

Because of her contributions to the war effort and beyond, Queen Victoria granted her £45,000 for the Nightingale Fund, with which she set up the Nightingale Training School in July 1860. It is now part of King’s College in London and known as the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery.

With her school, written works, and mounds of data, she solidified nursing as a career path for women during a time when medicine was become predominantly male (and during a time when there were few opportunities for women to make a living to begin with). Most importantly, her intuitive contributions on the importance of cleanliness saved many lives before germ theory became widely accepted in the 20th century.

Today, a temporary hospital has been set up in London called NHS Nightingale Hospital in the ExCel Centre in East London as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Need tips on caretaking? Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Notes on Nursing:

VENTILATION + WARMING

The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM.

Air from the outside. Open your windows, shut your doors.

Always air your room, then, from the outside air, if possible. Windows are made to open; doors are made to shut—a truth which seems extremely difficult of apprehension. (The sass of this sentence is EVERYTHING.)

HEALTH OF HOUSES

There are five essential points in securing the health of houses:
1. Pure air. 2. Pure water. 3. Efficient drainage. 4. Cleanliness. 5. Light.

Without these, no house can be healthy. And it will be unhealthy just in proportion as they are deficient.

On Cleanliness:
Without cleanliness, within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively useless.

On Darkness:
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth, and promotes scrofula, rickets, &c., among the children…. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill they cannot get well again in it.

[Sidenote: Without sunlight, we degenerate body and mind.]
(It seems obvious that sunlight is essential for health and yet it was often neglected. We know know that UV light even has antimicrobial effects in concentration. I love how she emphasizes this because apparently sick people would just be left in closed dark places which seems insane now.)

My personal favorite and one of the more important things to keep in mind when talking to anyone who isn’t well:

CHATTERING HOPES AND ADVICES.

The fact is, that the patient[1] is not “cheered” at all by these well-meaning, most tiresome friends. On the contrary, he is depressed and wearied. If, on the one hand, he exerts himself to tell each successive member of this too numerous conspiracy, whose name is legion, why he does not think as they do,—in what respect he is worse,—what symptoms exist that they know nothing of,—he is fatigued instead of “cheered,” and his attention is fixed upon himself. In general, patients who are really ill, do not want to talk about themselves. Hypochondriacs do, but again I say we are not on the subject of hypochondriacs.

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About the author.
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.