Anita Kunz: Original Sisters Portraits of Tenacity and Courage

Original Sisters is a series of portraits that reveals and honors the contributions of history-making women. To create the series, award-winning illustrator Anita Kunz carefully researched, wrote about, and portrayed each subject, sometimes compiling scant available information to establish a more complete picture. Her portraits present famed and lesser-known women in the fields of art, science, technology and invention, education, history, and politics, offering a needed expansion and revision of the historical record. In the words of author Roxane Gay, Original Sisters offers “possibility and promise … . You will be introduced to many of these women for the first time, because history is rarely kind to women until it is forced to be.”

Among Kunz’s many subjects are historical figures like Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Anne Frank, and Eleanor Roosevelt; adventurers like Bessie Coleman (1892-1926), the first African American and the first Native American woman pilot; creatives in the world of art and fashion like mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), costume designer Edith Head (1897-1981), singer/songwriter Nina Simone (1933-2003), and painter Lee Krasner (1908-1984); and social activists Angela Davis (b. 1944), Reshma Qureshi (b. 1996), Malala Yousafzai (b. 1997), and Greta Thunberg (b. 2003). Also featured are many scientists, inventors, warriors, pirates, military leaders, and others from all walks of life whose startling stories will inspire. These include anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl (1921-1943), who was executed at age twenty-one by the Third Reich; Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), who helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion during the Manhattan Project; and Alice Ball (1892-1916), a young African American chemist who discovered a treatment for leprosy but died tragically before she could be recognized.

Kunz’s project began in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the artist spent hours in her Toronto studio seeking inspiration by searching the internet for information about notable women in history. Though the subject had always interested her, Kunz realized that her knowledge base was limited, and she became determined to fill in the gaps. She began painting portraits of accomplished women across time, cultures, and geography, accompanied by texts she assembled to tell their stories. These portraits form the ever-growing nucleus of Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, an exhibition and book that together bring to light hundreds of women trailblazers who made and changed history.

About The Artist

ANITA KUNZ is an artist and illustrator living in Toronto. Her art has been published widely and shown in galleries and museums all over the world. She has also been featured regularly in Time, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, and she has done work for Sony Music. Kunz has also illustrated more than fifty book covers. From 1988 to 1990 she was one of two artists chosen by Rolling Stone to produce a monthly illustrated history of rock ’n’ roll endpaper. In 2017, she was inducted into the Society of Illustrators’ Museum of American Illustration Hall of Fame.

Full Biography

Visit OriginalSisters.com and AnitaKunz.com for additional information.