May: The Woman Artist who Built Men New Faces
This month: I produced a new zine! In honor of the launch, I'm sharing one of the artist profiles, along with a list of my favorite artist zines by women.
This month in The Women Artists’ Birthday Project:
🎉 I’m launching a zine at a book fair. Taking outfit recommendations.
🖋 A peek inside the zine: the profile of an incredible artist who changed science.
📔 Some favorite artist zines.
The Proustian birthday questionnaire will be back next month!
This month (this weekend?) I’ll be launching a new zine at the 2025 LA Art Book Fair. The zine is called A Calendar of Women Artists’ Birthdays and is, somewhat obviously, a physical extension of this Substack. It contains over 1500 women artists from over 40 countries, but it is by no means complete. I plan to release updated versions as I continue the project and collect more birthdays. Between each month’s calendar page, there are a few non-calendar pages that contain some of the fun, bizarre, unsettling, and/or fascinating facts about women artists and their work that I discovered during my research. For example:
A list of craters on Mercury that are named after women artists (a lot to unpack here)
The world of butter sculpting (a lost paradise)
The women’s reserve camouflage corps (camouflaged straight out of history books)
And a little profile of the author of one of my favorite children’s books, who was, unbeknownst to me, an incredibly talented artist and badass immigrant
If you’re heading to the fair (May 15 - 18), you can find my zine at the Artbook/Hauser & Wirth booth. After the fair, I’ll be listing the zine for sale online 😎
My new zine features various profiles of women artists who accomplished incredible, strange, and/or notorious feats during their careers. In honor of the upcoming Memorial Day holiday here in the US, let’s take a peek inside the zine at a woman who figured out a way to use her artistic talents to help wounded soldiers during WWI.
Anaplastology is the art, craft, and science of restoring absent or malformed anatomy through artificial means. Enter Anna Coleman Ladd: a sculptor who helped designed prosthetic limbs and facial features for soldiers with injuries during WWI.
As an artist, she excelled not only in sculpture but also portraiture, and she wrote two books and two plays, one of which was about a female sculptor who joined the war effort. This is exactly the type of person I would want designing a new part of my face: an overachiever, first of all, but more importantly, a person with the talent to notice and borrow the essential parts of real life in order to make an entirely new creation. A person who pays attention.
After her husband, a doctor, was recruited to lead the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross, Anna looked for her own way to help. She learned about the work of Francis Derwent Wood, who developed realistic prosthetic masks for soldiers who had been wounded in war and suffered extreme facial deformities.
She offered her experience in portraiture and sculpture to his cause, and together they worked with the American Red Cross in France in the ‘Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department.’ (I realize that, during war, there were bigger things to worry about, but I ache to think of the puns the universe might have provided had anyone spent more time workshopping the name of this department to come up with something less aggressive and depressing. Just saying, something like “Sale on Personalized Mugs” could have brought a little levity to a bizarre, nightmarish time in many people’s lives. I digress!)
Soldiers came to Ladd's studio to have casts made of their faces. She sculpted their features onto clay or plasticine, and this form was then used to construct the prosthetic piece from extremely thin galvanized copper. The metal was painted with hard enamel to resemble the recipient's skin tone.
Ladd used real hair to create the eyelashes, eyebrows and mustaches. The prosthesis was attached to the face by strings or eyeglasses.
By the end of 1919, she had created 185 masks. In 1932, the French Government honored her as a Knight (Chevalier) of the Legion of Honour, in recognition of the work she'd done. Get it babe!
You can read more about her here, and you can read more profiles and bad puns in my zine!
😻 Some artist zines I love:
Beth Pickens, Making Art During Fascism, a survival guide
Molly Young, The Things They Fancied, essays & cultural criticism
Kaitlin Chan’s Hong Kong Food Personality Quizzes and Bedroom, visual art & memoir
Chloe Chappe, SCRAPBOOK: A Pandemic Archive from the Los Angeles Food Community, a time capsule
Coco Brigitte, The Trashwomen, profile of a band I am sad to say no longer exists
Be Oakley, Mother Nature is a Lesbian, a type book of poster and prints
Kimberly Gonzalez, Revolution Womxn Style Now, a very honest/vulnerable intro to intersectional feminism
🌟 Bonus:
Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (this is technically a book and not self-published, but it has zine energy and is possibly one of the most important texts of our time?)
Next month is the best month of the year: it’s June, it’s Gemini season, it’s my birthday. See you babes then 😎
Happy birthday to the best woman artist I know! Where can I get the zine?
I want the zine!