I always get so fucking mad when I remember that it’s actually a 16-year-old Algerian girl who influenced BOTH Picasso and Matisse. and. No one gives a rat’s ass about her work which was very focused on women and nature. History -or people dare I say- didn’t bother to remember her name because she was a young Algerian woman and no one cares about Maghrebi/Arab women. unlike P*casso & M*tisse who both became legends, almost gods both during their lives and after their deaths, no one knows her.
Her name was Baya Mahieddine.
i hope that more people know about her now, especially seeing as OP literally linked to an article about a Baya Mahieddine exhibition in 2018.
It is remarkable that she had such a strong practise and had great influence at 16. Despite various disruptions that caused her to stop painting, she returned to her practise from the 60s until the end of her life.
It was within her work that Baya found freedom. The world she painted, after all, is one where women assert their individuality and are free from the men who attempt to brand them with labels, keep them inside the home, or hold them back in any way. “If I change my paintings, I will no longer be Baya,” the artist said in 1991, after her husband died and she’d returned to painting. “When I paint, I am happy and I am in another world.”
when i started writing this comic, there were courses on duolingo for klingon and dothraki, fictional languages that are only spoken by characters on television shows who don’t exist, but the course for yiddish, a language spoken by jews – real, living, breathing people – for generations, didn’t exist until april 2021.
in 2017 a jewish employee at the anne frank museum was asked to put a baseball cap over his yarmulke. yeah, you read that right – an employee who worked in the house anne frank and her family hid for two years was asked to hide his judaism when he came into work.
what i’m saying is goyim are trying very hard to pretend jewish people don’t exist anymore, and it’s safer for a man to tattoo a swastika on his face than it is for me to wear a necklace with a symbol of my culture on it.
Ilya Kaminsky, “While the Child Sleeps Sonya Undresses” / Joni Mitchell, All I Want / John Edmonds, “Men Like Us,” New York Times Style Magazine / u/expensivetill9 on Reddit / Mitski, I Will / Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe / David Hockney, Domestic Scene / Elizabeth Bishop,“The Shampoo” / Homer, The Odyssey
