Painting History’s Forgotten Women: An Interview With Anita Kunz

Anita Kunz has made a career of drawing famous people: presidents and other world leaders for the covers of the New Yorker, Variety and Time…, and rap and rock stars for Rolling Stone. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. For the past four years, however, she’s focused less on portraying VIPs and more on depicting subjects and stories unfamiliar to many or even most of us.

“Original Sisters, Portraits of Tenacity and Courage,” which made its U.S. debut at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this month, collects 240 of Kunz’s portraits of extraordinary women from across disciplines of science, art, technology and politics. Some names are well-known (of Kamala Harris, Kunz admits “the publisher suggested that one”), but at the heart of the project are women like drag performer Stormé DeLarverie, physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, abstract painter Hilma af Klint and ballerina Maria Tallchief—innovators whose achievements have been less celebrated than their male counterparts.

Kunz has now completed more than 450 portraits of women deserving of wider recognition. The first 150 were collected in Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage (published by Pantheon Books in 2021), featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay, and while the book is impressive and worth a look—as is her satirical feminist alt-history of Western art, Another History of Art—it’s only when seeing her Sisters en masse in one room, rows upon rows of them, that one fully understands the power and importance of her project. Observer spoke with Kunz at her studio in Toronto about her quest to correct our historical canon and why the Original Sisters series may never be finished.

I wanted to start with the one Original Sister that I keep thinking about: the anonymous cave woman and the handprint. Why did you want to go back as far as 40,000 BCE?

I read about the National Geographic Society handprint analysis research that showed that probably a lot of famous Paleolithic paintings [in France and Spain] were done by women. I thought, ‘Well, of course, why wouldn’t they be?’ But it showed me the natural inclination of science to automatically assume that if it’s important, a man would have done it. You know, a lot of people say we’re post-sexist or post-feminist, and we’re really not.

This was initially a pandemic project. Can we revisit to the first Sister painting and what you were think?ng?

For a long time, I wanted to do something more substantial because, as an illustrator, I wasn’t able to do a really deep dive into anything. You know, you do something for a magazine—it’s there, and then it’s gone; it’s so fleeting. I think the first time I thought about doing something about women, I was at the [Marilyn Faison Artist Residency] on Peaks Island, Maine. We took a boat ride around the islands, and there was one windswept, craggy rock, and our captain said that in the 1800s, a woman lived there for many years—it turns out she was a transgender woman, and when she died, they found her floating in a bay wearing a Japanese kimono. That’s all I could find out about her. I thought, ‘This is a story nobody knows about.’ That was the gem of the idea. I wanted to tell the stories of people you wouldn’t otherwise know.

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During the pandemic, I finally had the time. And I came across the story of St. Æbbe—she’s the one without the nose. She was a mother superior in Scotland in the Middle Ages, and she heard that Viking marauders were coming to rape all the nuns. So she told them all to cut off their noses so they’d be too disgusting. They killed them all anyway. But it’s thought that the term “cut off your nose to spite your face” comes from that incident. And then I found Mary Anning, a fossil collector in Victorian England. Of course, she wasn’t allowed to be a part of the historical societies at that time. She was an outcast. They think ‘she sells seashells by the seashore’ is about her. I thought maybe I could do a book about sayings about women. Then I thought, ‘just paint the women, that’s good enough.’

There are a lot of what I would call rebels here. Was there a specific type of person you wanted to highlight?

I didn’t want to make any moral judgments. So I have pirates. And I have a bank robber. I just wanted really interesting stories. I also consciously chose to make these stories accessible to a broader audience. This isn’t just a book for women. It’s also a book for men and kids. What kid doesn’t like a story about a pirate?

It did start out with a lot of historical subjects, but I just kept finding more current stories. Like [Malawi Chief] Theresa Kachindamoto—she has stopped over 2,000 child marriages under death threats, daily death threats. I had to paint her, you know?

You’ve done so much editorial illustration work depicting political subjects, helping to contextualize the news. With this project, you’re telling stories that, for the most part, have not made headlines. What role do you think the artist has in education?

I never thought that art had to only be decorative. My earliest influence was my uncle. His name was Robert Kunz, and his motto was Art For Education. He illustrated all my school textbooks, and he lavishly illustrated these books because he knew kids have short attention spans. I went more into editorial but my favorite artists were the ones making comments about social and political issues, like [British illustrator] Ralph Steadman.

I’ve done all kinds of stuff in my career. I’ve done silly stuff, frivolous stuff, rock ‘n’ roll, and more serious stuff. But this one, I really feel, is something that could potentially make a difference.

When I saw the Canadian version of this show at the TAP Gallery in London, Ontario, I watched other people take it all in, and I could see them in the act of discovering these stories. There were also a lot of conversations going on amongst friends and strangers. What kind of reactions have struck you the most?

That’s the day that the Girl Scouts came in. They had a scavenger hunt, like ‘Find your favorite scientists… find your favorite artist.’ The girls were running around and I thought, ‘This is the best.’ It gave me hope for a better world for girls and women—one where they’re not forgotten.