For Those Who Speak and Those Who Have Yet To Speak

  • The completed mural catches the eyes of many community members. The team worked hard to visually challenge its onlookers to think about and celebrate female strength and solidarity.
  • During the research stage of the mural making process, the youth go on field trips, research themes of their mural, and begin to practice sketching. During a figure drawing session pictured here, the girls draw various human forms while their team member model different poses.
  • The Lead and Assistant Artist planned several drawing activities to get the team to begin refining their drawing skills. During this activity, the girls team up and draw portraits of each other.
  • During the community partner presentation, the team presents its mural design and how they developed their ideas.
  • The team members pose in front of their blank wall. In the next stage of the mural making process (before the painting begins), the wall will be primed and gridded so that the girls can proportionally recreate their design to a large scale.
  • A braid runs through the image, unraveling under adversity and re-weaving at the end, leading to a “teaser” section on Flatbush Ave, where it grows like a vine out of soil held by two hands.
Congresswoman Yvette Clark speaks at a Groundswell mural dedication

Project Description

“For Those Who Speak and Those Who Have Yet To Speak” celebrates women as international community through representations of global struggles of and progress by women. During an intensive afterschool research phase, the Voices Her’d Visionaries team investigated the rise of women’s rights movements across the globe. They also interviewed New York City activists to better understand women’s organizing efforts on a local level. The finished design celebrates female strength and solidarity through visual representations of these struggles. Included in the mural is a tribute to the CoMadres of El Salvador, a human rights group founded to raise awareness of the disappearances and murders committed during the country’s civil war. Also included are Burmese opposition leader and Noble Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and Peggielene Bartels, known informally as King Peggy, renowned as the first female chief chosen of the Ghanaian village of Otuam.

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Project Info

Fun Facts

Impact
The young women observed dance classes hosted by Spoke the Hub Dancing and visited the Brooklyn Museum. Inspired by the diversity of female figures observed, the team’s resulting sketches celebrate healthy representations of the female body.
Fun Fact
Burmese opposition leader and Noble Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners, under house arrest in Burma for almost 15 years before her most recent release in November 2010.
Research
From the central role of women in the Egyptian revolution, to grassroots activism across Latin America, this decade has witnessed a groundswell of female leadership which transcends national boundaries.