What is Her Flag?
Her Flag was a nationwide art and travel project created by artist Marilyn Artus to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the 72 years long nonviolent fight that kicked open voting for women in the United States.
Marilyn collaborated with a woman artist from each of the 36 states that ratified the 19th Amendment into law to create a HUGE 18 x 26 foot flag. Each artist created artwork inspired by this anniversary that Marilyn turned into a stripe. Marilyn’s original plan was to travel to all 36 states in order of ratification over 14 months, taking 17 separate trips. She sewed the stripe onto the flag in each Capital city in a public performance with the artist that made the representing stripe attending.
She began traveling June of 2019 and completed over 22,000 miles in her car before the end of the year. She got to the 25th state to ratify, Oregon, before Covid-19 stopped the traveling to make Her Flag. She began live-streaming the sewing of each stripe from her home in Oklahoma. Her Flag was completed on August 18th, 2020 when Marilyn sewed the final stripe on via live-streaming from Nashville, Tennessee.
The culmination is a new flag sewn as a thank you and a love letter to the states that ratified the 19th Amendment into law.
This project is about moving forward. This project is not about Democrats or Republicans. It is about Americans. It is about celebrating an important anniversary in our history. And it is about evaluating how we can encourage more women to participate in their democracy.
Marilyn Artus
My family has been in the United States since its inception. I can track family back to the revolutionary war.
I have three ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary war and my great great great grandmother Jesse Hayes was an early member of The Daughters of the American Revolution. Two family members fought for the Union during the Civil War and were captured and held in Confederate prisons.
I also have family that came West and settled in the 19th century. I have a family legacy that has actively participated in the American dream since its founding. I want to continue my family legacy of service through my art making, by honoring this upcoming important anniversary in American History, voting for women.
As I little girl growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the school text books were mighty thin with women to look to for role models.
A few year ago, I created works about the suffragist era in the U.S. Through my research I collided with some fascinating women: Harriet Forten Purvis, Victoria Woodhull, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Elizabeth Piper Ensley, Frances Wright, Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Lucy Stone, Miriam Leslie and Sojourner Truth.
They were complex and real.
They were complicated.
They were activists.
They were passionate.
They were Republicans and Democrats.
They were groundbreakers.
WHERE THIS FLAG THING CAME FROM
When I was 14 years old, I took a school trip to Washington, D.C. and visited the Smithsonian Museum. Even though much of it was missing, my strongest memory is of the colossal flag that hung over Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the war of 1812. It was the star-spangled banner, and the inspiration for the poem by Francis Scott Key that later became our national anthem.
Here was a moment in history that I could relate to. A woman had created this important thing — it was sewn by her hands, just as a young girl I had watched my mother sew clothes for me.
To this day my experience at that museum manifests itself in my art making.
ABOUT Marilyn
Marilyn Artus is a visual artist based in Oklahoma, and her work explores the female experience and women’s issues. She has created shows that explore the suffragist era in the U.S., pays tribute to an assortment of women in U.S. history and continues to collide the many different stereotypes that women navigate through on a daily basis.
After graduating with a bachelor of Fine Arts degree she worked for 16 years as a commercial artist. In 2003, she co-founded The Girlie Show, an all female art festival in Oklahoma City that drew artisans from all over the United States to exhibit, celebrate, encourage and showcase female talent, that ran for 10 years. Each year, the organization awarded a $1,000 grant to a selected female art or design student. She also founded a branch of Dr. Sketchy's Anti Art School, a cabaret life drawing class that she owned for 3 years in OKC.
Other career highlights include solo and group gallery and museum exhibitions in Oklahoma, New York, Tennessee and Washington. She was awarded the Brady Craft Alliance Award for Innovation in fiber arts in 2011 and led an art making workshop at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of female pop art.
RAISING AWARENESS OF MINORITIES AND WOMEN OF COLOR WITHIN THE SUFFRAGE FIGHT
This is one of six stickers in our Unknown Suffrage Fighters Sticker pack that we sell at each sewing performance.
The 19th amendment states: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This amendment did legally give all women the right to vote, but, laws within each state varied and created complications for many women in exercising this right. Jim Crow Laws in the South impeded many African Americans from voting until the 1960s and Native Americans did not have full voting rights in all 50 states until 1970. Asian-American women could not vote until 1952. Women's history is often times over looked, we think this anniversary is an opportunity to celebrate and discuss the many challenges related to voting in the past and present for women and people of color.
We featured a woman of color from the suffrage era everyday on Instagram for Black History Month in 2019. We are not interested in talking about Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other well known suffrage fighters, there will be plenty of projects doing that. We will be focusing on women like Ida B Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Forten Purvis and so many more.
To celebrate National Suffrage Month this August, we will again be featuring a woman of color each day on our social media platforms. See the links below to follow and learn.