The Great Women Gallery
(Giving girls, and boys, a new way to view the world)
One day, a woman in Vienna called an artist in Canada... and asked her to paint Harriet Brooks. The woman was Rumina Velshi. She was head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, she knew Harriet Brooks was Canada's 'unsung Marie Curie', and she'd heard of the Great Women Portrait Project - which uses Art to reveal the female pioneers who paved world-changing paths in traditionally male-dominated fields like science, tech, engineering and math (STEM).
Since Rumina made that call, Jo Napier's 'Great Women portrait' art of Canada's first female nuclear physicist has been hung in over 30 energy industry companies in Canada and the U.S. (see insert images).
As we know, the 'female face' of STEM innovation is too seldom seen. (Men, after all, were history's traditional record keepers; that's just the way things were, back in the day.)
But today we have the tools to fill in that gap in STEM education, and inspiration.
We have AI. We have Art. And we can, collectively, use both to reveal history's hidden scientists, inventors, engineers and innovators to students.
This is the goal of the Educational Phase of The Great Women Portrait Project....
PILOT PHASE - TESTING: We've been testing the 'speaking portraits' in local private and public schools.
Here is ANDREW MACDONALD, IB Middle Years Programme Coordinator | Middle School Faculty, Halifax Grammar School
NASA pioneer Portrait Project's 'North Star'
The first U.S. woman involved in the Great Women Portrait Project was Frances 'Poppy' Northcutt. She speaks here - (to Project participants who met in Year 1) - to the value and power of girls having a role model...
Great Women of STEM classroom portraits:
Hertha Ayrton
Each portrait is under one minute, and includes a prompt to spark student engagement and research into the subject, and her work in a STEM field.