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 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 Harriet Brooks - a radon pioneer and Canada's first female nuclear physicist - has been hung in over 30 energy industry companies in Canada and the U.S.
Harriet is just one of many 'hidden' STEM pioneers now honoured in boardrooms, offices, engineering libraries and hospitals - as part of this Project.
The Project actually began with a dozen women in Nova Scotia and spread, over the years to engage women STEM leaders like Rumina Velshi and the other female CEOs who collaborated on the Harriet Brooks portrait-sharing initative. Project participants are fueled by an awareness that we, too seldom, see the 'female face' of STEM innovation - and, therefore, don't know half that history.
The female half. 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 gender gap in STEM education (and girl's inspiration).
We have AI. We have Art.
And we can use both to reveal s history's hidden scientists, inventors, engineers and innovators. This is the goal of the Educational Phase of The Great Women Portrait Project....
More details below!
PILOT PHASE - TESTING: We've been testing the 'speaking portraits' in local private and public schools.
Here is ANDREW MACDONALD, International Baccalaureate 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. Here is the video Poppy shot for the Project Year 1 - which speaks to the value and power of girls having a role model...
A Great Women of STEM classroom portrait: GPS pioneer Gladys West
Each portrait in the "gallery" created for schools is under one minute length, and includes a prompt to spark student engagement and research into the subject, and her work in a STEM field.