Brown Girl Artistry

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After the last newsletter's focus on radicalism, I thought it would be a good change to focus on women who used art as a form of resistance and activism.

This is a long #SistoryLesson. Get comfy and prepare a cuppa tea while I share about identity and art.

Art can be many things: refuge, bridge, witness. For three Brown women we will celebrate in this edition of #SistoryLessons—Etel Adnan, Zarina Hashmi, and Pacita Abad—art was, and remains, a living archive of memory, migration, and self. Each woman lived through war, authoritarian rule, exile, and silence. And each, in her own lexicon—abstract color, minimalist line, layered textile, or words in many languages—turned those realities into forms of witnessing, remembering, and reclaiming.

They used paint, paper, fabric, form, words, and wisdom to remind us that telling collective stories is more than a celebratory stance or a beautiful object, it can be a form of protest, and survival. We were here. We are still here. We will not disappear.

But before we get to them, let me say a few clarify my usage of the terms “Brown” and “Girls.”

What is "Girl"-Ness?

Obviously, none of these artists were active as little girls; they grew into their practice and “renown” as women (and in Etel Adnan’s case, as an elder woman).

“Brown Girl” is, in my usage, a common affectionate term used to infer affinity, solidarity, and love. It is an in-group designation. When you are not within the group, it’s advised to use the term “girl” with caution. (Many Black women I know even disapprove of gay men using the playful “gurrrrrrl,” too. I think you oughta know.)

I use the term “Brown Girl” because I am a “Black Girl,” but I flinch (inwardly) if my white friends are too casual about throwing around the term “Girl” (same goes with “sister” or “sis,” actually.) We dive into the sources of this disapproval more deeply in my coaching practice, so I will leave it there for now.

And What is Brown-Ness?

In matters Brave Sis Project, I use “Brown” as an umbrella term to describe people whose ethnicity, culture, or “race” (that truly slippery concept) are not “white” but neither are they (directly or generationally) descended from the African diaspora. Nor are they primarily Indigenous, nor of parentage from the broadly defined “Asian” region. Or they are mixed-race, a liminal space I’ll come back to in shortly.

Hmmm… if it only serves to depict that one is “not” one thing nor its opposite, what is Brownness, actually? Even in the six years of operating Brave Sis Project and doing this research, I’ve witnessed societal, cultural, and linguistic shifts in how that question is answered.

When I was a child, I hardly remember anyone referring to themselves or any other person as "Brown," with the notable exception of Paule Marshall in her 1959 coming-of-age novel Brown Girl, Brownstones—or also South Africa, where "Brown" designated identity and agency according to the strictest of parameters.

Under the apartheid regime, "Brown" was used as a synonym for “Coloured”—that old awkward term used to “other,” regulate, and punish people of mixed race (white mixed with African, Malaysian, Indian, and other non-European lineage, primarily.) Tragically stratified apartheid South Africa had four racial designations: white, Black (African), Coloured, and Indian/Asian, and, as I am sure you know, rights, livelihood, and all manner of human existence were highly regulated along these divisions.

What I discovered, in trying to find “Brown” women to include in my very first Journey-Journal (2020), was that “back in the day” (say, prior to the 1950s and 60s liberation movements), mixed-race or, non-White/not-Black/nor-Asian/and not Indigenous, (i.e.: as it’s sometimes euphemistically described today “racially ambiguous”) people generally evaded speaking about matters of race, especially if they could “pass” as white—or close enough.

You will still meet Latino/Hispanic people who claim pure Iberian (Spanish) heritage (no Indigenous! no "negro"!), seeking Castilian ingress into whiteness. Never mind the fact that most folks from Latin America are very mixed. Never also mind that when it comes to Spain, people from that country, Italy, and other Mediterranean regions were seen (and treated) for decades as very definitively “not white.” (This is a topic I go into more deeply in my online courses, so we will also leave it there for now!)

Though it’s sad, I can’t blame the old folks who cling(ed) to whiteness (such as the grandmother of a Filipino surfer friend who admonished him to not spend so much time on the beach, lest he become too brown…) They were living in a colorist world.

There’s trauma, tribulation, trahison (the French word for betrayal, just feelin’ these alliterations!) and triumph alike in naming and evolving.

Identity as Political and Social Statement

"Brown-ness" has, in recent decades, become a choice of self-defining among those who politically, culturally, or socially do not or cannot consider themselves white.

(This is why young Tiger Woods elicited so much shade when he referred to himself as “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau he made up combining “Caucasian,* Black, Indian/Native American, and Asian. He might have thought it was clever, but if you take into account the one-drop rule that has defined Blackness from the enslavement times until today, it was derided as a refutation of his Black identity. Fairly unforgiveable.)

If this all seems terribly binary and restrictive, well, that describes the one-drop rule in a nutshell. One-drop was a construction of evil and enslaving exploitation. It subjected and continues to subject people to discrimination and abuse. To quote the great Bob Marley (in the song “One Drop”):

*P.S. I must ask this favor: do NOT use the term Caucasian, unless you are referring to someone from the Caucasus Mountain region of Central Asia. (That's Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan, and environs.) Just say “white.” It’s really ok.

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Ambiguity Persists

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All this said, many people exist in an ambiguous, shape-shifting space regarding “Brownness.” Some Latino/a/x/e people consider themselves Brown, some Arab and Middle Eastern people do too. Even as a non-anthropologist, though, I would posit that Middle Eastern and North African (MENA), folks” (Arab, Iranian, Kurdish, Armenian, Turkish, and others), while generally considered “white” in census qualifications, may experience “otherness” (e.g.: Islamophobia, or other forms of discrimination) that have led some of these folks to embrace “Brownness” as an identity apart, and an allegiance with diasporic and non-western identity. (One needn't be Muslim; such discrimination has been experienced by Christian, Coptic, Sikh, Hindu, and even Jewish people.)

By the way, an alternative to “MENA” you may see is “SWANA” (South West Asian and North African), which is a more decolonial term and widely used in activist and academic spaces.

Mixed-race (once known as mulatto, and a whole bunch of other names I won’t publish) people (those of Black and white parentage) have, in the lore of enslaving lands, been the subject and object of scorn, shame, derision, fascination, and every other sentiment you can imagine. Today, many mixed-race people identify with their Blackness (“one drop, you said?”) and others, like Tiger Woods, make up all sorts of subterfuge.

In our more open-minded and fluid current world, biracial people have more agency around self-identity than ever before. This is comforting considering that “multiracial” is the fastest-growing category of individual in the United States (with many legacy white nations of Europe not far behind.) The United States’ multiracial population grew by 276% between 2010 and 2020—an increase from 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. A fact that drives some fellow citizens to malicious emotion.

And what of the Indian subcontinent, where colorism continues to demand a light-skinned cultural arbiter of “worth”? Complicated, divergent. I’ve met many Indian, Pakistani, and other women of that diaspora and region who, somewhat defiantly, carry “Brownness” as an activist badge of honor, identifying culturally and socially with Black Americans (Kamala Harris’s mother was a noted example).

Others I have known vehemently resist this. (You may consider the current Second Lady of the United States as you reflect.)

One may meet Filipino, Samoan, and other Pacific Rim people who claim Brown-ness, and others who cleave first to Asian-ness. My Papua New Guinean niece has enjoyed discussing Black hair products and makeup with me as expertly as my Black American nieces from Virginia.

And yet others from these regions want to skip the whole matter and live as “white people.”

Further, in a free world, folks may well shape-shift their declamation depending on the context and situation.

How #fluid!

But for the purposes of my practice and #SistoryLessons, I use “Brown” as an umbrella, inclusive, and celebratory designation.

OK! Back to These Three Artists, Please! ... What Etel Adnan, Zarina Hashmi, and Pacita Abad Teach Us About How Art Can Serve as Memory, Migration, and Self

Neither Etel Adnan, Zarina Hashmi, nor Pacita Abad claimed “non-whiteness” in their day, much less “Brown-ness.” They referred to themselves as “citizens of the world,” “global,” or embracing “multiplicity.” That was the safe way, the acceptable way, and to have dived further into social-racial-political discourse would have been implausible, possibly reckless.

Even Etel, active in 2010s New York City circles, where identities were worn as badges of honor, didn’t use terms like “Brown”, “POC,” or even “Middle Eastern” in the way we do today. She certainly positioned herself as existing in contrast to colonial whiteness, nationalism, and racial supremacy. She was also highly conscious of the scourges of
"Orientalism," erasure, and how empire shaped perception. But also, as an openly queer person in a period where that could mean marginalization and erasure, she just did not jump into the Brown-ness conversation. I could find no record of an interview where anyone asked her why not, and we don’t disparage her for how she went through her life. But today, we invite her (and the other two featured artists) into the circle, posthumously, as inspiration and bridge.

The work and lives of all these women, especially as they become more known today, certainly serve as precedent and inspiration for many of today’s practicing artist-activists, and that is, in my view, the lesson to prioritize right now. In this moment of ascendant authoritarianism, xenophobia, and erasure, their work offers not only beauty, but blueprints for resistance.

Etel Adnan’s vibrant landscapes reclaim exile as a site of spiritual sovereignty. Zarina Hashmi’s minimalist maps depict the pain of displacement and the tenacity of remembrance. And Pacita’s Abad’s vivid tapestries unapologetically celebrate culture and community.

And to me, that’s the power and purpose of art: it opens you up to seeing, feeling, investigating, interpreting—and coming to your own conclusions. Don’t lose sight of that possibility! That, friends, is a form of liberation.

More About Their Lives

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Etel Adnan: Painter, Poet, Witness to the Self and the World

Born in 1925 in Beirut to a Syrian Muslim father and Greek Christian mother, Etel Adnan was raised in a polyglot world—Arabic, French, Greek—living between cultures shaped by empire and exile. This early complexity (and yet, simultaneously, opportunity) of ambiguity and mixed-ness, became the foundation of her life’s work.

After completing her education in philosophy in Paris and the U.S., She began painting while teaching in California, seeking a new form of expression that defied colonial language. Her vibrant abstractions, especially of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais, became meditations on place, presence, and spiritual clarity.

She was a multi-disciplinary artist, creating poetry and novels that dealt with war, displacement, love, and resistance, most notably in 1977’s Sitt Marie Rose, a fictionalized retelling of the life of Lebanese Christian activist and Palestinian refugee advocate Marie Rose Boulos who was abducted and executed during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) for her political and humanitarian actions. This novel, originally written in French, is considered a groundbreaking anti-sectarian work of feminist literature.

Adnan lived between Beirut, Paris, and California, carrying with her a profound attention to light, land, and longing. Inflected with her identities: queer, diasporic, humanistic, her work is a luminous testimonial to identity, memory, and belonging.

(See some of her work at https://www.artnet.com/artists/etel-adnan)

Reflection: What multiple languages — literal or emotional — do you live in?

Zarina Hashmi: Mapping Loss and Home

Born in 1937 in Aligarh, India, Zarina came of age in the shadow of Partition—the cataclysmic division of the former British India Empire into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, one of the largest and most traumatic mass migrations in human history. Her family’s displacement to Pakistan marked her early with themes of rupture and exile that would shape her artistic path.

Educated in mathematics and printmaking, she developed a style that was spare, elegant, and deeply emotional. Zarina combined paper, gold leaf, woodblock, and ink, creating maps not of geography, but of memory. Her works were borderlines, floorplans, and abstracted scripts that whispered of homelands left behind.

Living across Bangkok, Paris, Tokyo, and finally New York, Zarina navigated multiple dislocations with quiet, powerful poise. Her minimalist aesthetic was rooted in Islamic geometry, modernist abstraction, and personal narrative. Her work has been described as murmuring, inviting the viewer to notice what’s missing, what was taken, where the ache remains. Grief, grace, and belonging all interplay.

(See her work at: https://www.zarina.work.)

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Reflection: What borders live inside you?

Pacita Abad: Stitching the World with Color and Courage

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Born in 1946 in the northernmost archipelago of Batanes, Philippines, Pacita Abad grew up in an isolated island region. Of indigenous Ivatan heritage, she was immersed in traditional values of sustainability, honesty, and resilience. A deep sense of social justice and cultural pride would define her life.

She first studied political science and became involved in anti-Marcos regime activism. Fearing for her safety, her family encouraged her to flee the country. Stopping to visit family in San Francisco, she discovered that art was a way to document, connect, and resist. After studying art in Washington, D.C. and New York City, she launched her career as a painter and subsequently integrating her extensive worldwide travel into her work.

Pacita was fortunate to travel to over 60 countries throughout her life—extended periods in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe. This wide exposure to other cultures afforded her the opportunity to absorb the textures, rituals, and resilience of everyday people across the globe.

Pacita’s signature trapunto paintings—a unique mixed-media art she pioneered—is derived from the Italian word "trapunto" ("to quilt") and involves stitching, stuffing, and embellishing the surface of the canvas to create a richly textured, dimensional effect.

If you are familiar with the work of Bisa Butler, take note that while also quilted, Abad’s trapunto paintings involve extra stuffing and sculptural padding beneath the surface to physically raise portions of the artwork, whereas Bisa’s glorious portraits gain their dimensionality through piecing, layering, and stitching fabric to create texture and depth.

Bisa Butler’s career took off just a few years before Pacita Abad died, but both quilt artists are linked in my imagination for the way they use fabric arts and boldly colored portraiture to celebrate storytelling and heritage, turning fabric and form into tributes to memory and marginalized lives.

Do yourself the great pleasure of visiting both Pacita's and Bisa Butler's sites (new one coming soon). Your heart will be so happy.

Reflection: When has a change of scenery opened your path to truth?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

Thinking about Etel Adnan, consider: How does place influence your creativity? Describe a place that inspires you.

Thinking about Zarina, ask yourself: What does home mean to you? Describe a place that feels like home.

Thinking about Pacita Abad, write about: In what ways do color and craft hold your stories, your cultural pulse, your community?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

Celebrating our legacy as women of color and thinking about Etel Adnan: What homeland(s) do you carry inside you? Create something (art, writing, music) inspired by your homeland or heritage

Celebrating our legacy as women of color and thinking about Zarina: How do displacement and longing show up in your creativity? Create art or writing inspired by your heritage.

Celebrating our legacy as women of color and thinking about Pacita Abad: When has your joy felt or actually been radical?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

Taking action in honor of Etel Adnan: Share writings by Arab, SWANA, and diasporic women. Let art speak geopolitics. Read literature or view art from BIPOC creators outside your own culture.

Taking action in honor of Zarina: Share art by diasporic women. Let their abstraction speak beyond politics. Visit a cultural art exhibit featuring BIPOC artists.

Taking action in honor of Pacita Abad: Uplift contemporary and historical AAPI women artists. Share their work beyond heritage months.

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More on Their Lives

Etel Adnan: February 24, 1925 – November 14, 2021: Global, Multi-arts Colorist

Poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan produced work that, like her life, flowed across continents, languages, and artistic disciplines. She was born in Beirut in 1925, a volatile period when Lebanon was rebelling against the French mandate and emerging as a modern state. The daughter of a Greek Orthodox mother from Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) and a Muslim Turkish-Syrian former Ottoman officer father, she grew up in a polyglot, multi-cultural world. In a reflection of the colonial and historical constraints of the time, Etel spoke Greek, Turkish, and French at home—but not Arabic; this was considered the language of the streets, not suitable for educated people.

This early dissonance around identity and belonging would inform her creative voice for decades to come.

Etel left Beirut in her twenties to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, (shout-out to the Sorbonne, where I earned my Master’s Degree in French Caribbean Literature!) later continuing at UC Berkeley (heyyyy, I lived in Berkeley for a decade) and Harvard (right on, neighbor, I’m a Tufts Jumbo, from just down the road)!

(OK, enough of that!) In the 1950s, she began teaching philosophy in California, radicalized by the Vietnam War protests. She turned to painting as a form of protest—as she famously said, “I started to paint in order to refuse to speak French.”

Her visual art—notably her abstract landscapes and leporellos (accordion-folded books)—were vibrant explosions of color and form, inspired by the beloved vista of Mount Tam (Tamalpais) in California’s North Bay.

Like her poetry, Etel’s brushwork was considered intuitive, meditative, and deeply connected to nature and emotion. Rebelling against the linguistic bias of her childhood, she often blended Arabic calligraphy with swaths of bold color, creating works that embodied her multiple selves—Arab, woman, queer, diasporic—without being confined by any of them. At her 2021 Guggenheim retrospective, Light’s New Measure, critics described her paintings as “emotive topographies” that speak to both personal longing and collective memory.

In the 2022 Van Gogh Museum posthumous retrospective Colour as Language, her radiant palettes were likened to dreamscapes, where color becomes a form of communication—bold, free, alive. And at an Istanbul exhibit called Impossible Homecoming, mounted just months before her passing in 2021 and her first major retrospective in a Turkish context, Etel’s paintings and poems were received as quiet yet powerful meditations on diaspora, grief, and resilience.

Although she had been writing and publishing since the 1960s and was long respected in literary and intellectual circles, her paintings and visual art were largely under the radar for decades. Etel began receiving major international recognition for her visual art when she was in her mid-80s, particularly after her inclusion in Documenta 13 in 2012, one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions held in Kassel, Germany, when she was 87.

Adnan was also an acclaimed writer. Her novel Sitt Marie Rose (1977), set during the Lebanese Civil War, remains a feminist, humanistic, and anti-sectarian classic. She wrote in French, English, and occasionally Arabic, producing poetry, essays, and plays that explored war, exile, love, and landscape.

Sitt Marie Rose is a slim book—just under 100 pages—but it lands with astonishing weight. Published in French in 1977, and in English in 1982, the novella fictionalizes the life of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian Lebanese teacher and activist who stood with Palestinian refugees during the Lebanese Civil War—and was executed by Christian militiamen for doing so.

Told in shifting voices—those of Marie Rose herself, her interrogators, and a chorus of schoolchildren—the story lays bare the many violences at work: sectarianism, militarized masculinity, the erasure of women, and the deep cost of standing across lines—religious, political, emotional. It is a novel of refusal: feminist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist. Adnan wasn’t creating characters to be admired or pitied—she wrote to ask us to look more clearly at what cruelty ideology makes possible. Marie Rose’s fate is tragic, yes—but it’s also a warning that we must carry close in our consciousness today. Banned in Lebanon when first published, Sitt Marie Rose now stands as a classic of Arab feminist literature.

Etel Adnan was unequivocally a citizen of the world, but one who always carried the ache of exile, never fully rooted in one place but always creating—with integrity, wonder, and refusal. We celebrate her words and her colors, which gave us not just beauty, but maps for how to live outside all sorts of boundaries—and still belong.

Zarina Hashmi - July 16, 1937 – April 25, 2020: Prints, Partitions, Passages, and the Gravity of Home

Zarina—like Cher, Madonna, Oprah, Prince, or Beyoncé, she used only her first name—was an artist rooted in absence, and yet tirelessly devoted to the idea of home. She was born in Aligarh, British India, in 1937, and was uprooted to Karachi, Pakistan, after the violent upheaval of the 1947 Partition. That fracturing, formative upheaval would echo in every contour of her later work.

Her marriage to a diplomat afforded her an exciting, itinerant life, each interlude inspiring her artistry. First was Bangkok, where she fell in love with printmaking; then New Delhi, where she confronted estrangement; followed by Paris, where tutelage at Stanley William Hayter’s influential printmaking studio Atelier 17 taught her how to shape abstraction.

After this sojourn, she lived in Tokyo, where she became immersed in woodblock carving under master carver, Tōshi Yoshida; and later on, spent time in Bonn, Germany, and Los Angeles, all of which further burnished her inspiration.

Zarina eventually made New York her base in 1977, navigating the downtown feminist art scene while exploring new creative freedom. Her husband sadly passed away the year she arrived in my hometown, and Zarina’s world travels would come to an end, but her recognition as a minimalist artist would soar.

She often layered Urdu letters, geometric abstraction, and handmade paper to suggest not maps, but emotional geographies: borders not just of countries, but of feeling. Her works were spare, yet tremulously alive—described as a meditative investigation of memory and geography. One such work was her 1999 piece Home Is a Foreign Place, where she distilled words like "axis," "distance," and "wall" into 36 woodblock prints, creating invitations and evocations of absence.

In her 2012 retrospective Paper Like Skin, critic Christopher Knight wrote that, when treated by Zarina, “A sheet of paper is a place as much as it is a thing.” Another exhibition, 2014’s Descending Darkness at Luhring Augustine Gallery in Manhattan, was even more haunting. Through black marble "bulbs" that neither emit nor reflect light, the installation was described as wrestling with the unsettling space between the seen and unseen—like a temple built of absence and material mystery.

By the end of her life, Zarina had achieved significant institutional recognition: she represented India at its first-ever Venice Biennale pavilion (2011), and Paper Like Skin travelled from Hammer to the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works are now held by MoMA, the Whitney, the Met, SFMOMA—and many other institutions. Throughout all her world travels, her work remains a testament to those who live in the in-between spaces: exiles and dreamers alike.

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Pacita Abad (October 5, 1946 - December 7, 2004): Painting with Everything

Born in 1946 in Batanes, the Philippines, Pacita came from a large, politically active family. Her childhood on the windswept Ivatan islands shaped her with the rhythms of nature and a strong sense of civic duty. Though she studied political science, planning to follow in her parents’ activist footsteps, her life changed during protests against the Marcos dictatorship. After fleeing to the U.S. in the 1970s, Pacita turned her passion toward art.

She embarked on a lifetime of movement and making, with studies at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran School of Art and the Manhattan’s Art Students League enhancing her real education—that of extensive world traveler.

She married Jack Garrity, a development economist and arts administrator whose international development work with organizations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank took the couple to over 60 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. She was able to experience the many cultures, gathering textiles, stories, and artistic techniques. All this came together in her trapunto artwork—colorful textile portraits of batik, buttons, and beads that were layered, stitched, and padded, providing vivid portraits of the women and communities she met along her travels.

Although Pacita was prolific and beloved in global circles during her life, major art institutions overlooked her for decades. That changed in the 2020s when her landmark (posthumous) retrospective at New York’s MoMA PS1 (which subsequently traveled to Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and San Francisco’s SFMOMA) was praised for its riotous color, culture, and texture. One reviewer called it “a sequined velvet hammer, tender and unstoppable.” Another wrote that her work “animates the walls and sets the place aglow.” Abad’s work has also been featured in the Venice Biennale, London’s Tate Modern, and elsewhere.

Her use of textile traditions and non-Western visual language was finally recognized not as folk or fringe, but as formally innovative and politically resonant. These retrospectives reclaimed her place in the art world as a global feminist visionary—unafraid to be bold, maximalist, and deeply human.

Fusing her indigenous Ivatan heritage, her travels to over 60 countries, and her activist spirit, Pacita left us a legacy of portrait-celebrations of multiculturalism, migration, identity, and resilience.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

I really enjoyed researching, revisiting, and regaling my eyes with the art of the women featured in this #SistoryLesson. As a grad school student at the Sorbonne, I had an internship at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and later worked at the Bronx Museum of Arts, and SITE Santa Fe, so I’ve always held the visual arts in high esteem.

Art is really needed now. In the hellscape of today’s cruel socio-political landscape, where bans, walls, speech oppression, and white nationalism threaten to silence, deport, or devalue so many, the lives and work of Etel Adnan, Zarina Hashmi, and Pacita Abad refuse erasure. They can offer us a way to understand displacement, identity, and survival—not only as personal stories, but as shared human experiences.

ArtPower: Go Deeper

Here are a few more ways to immerse more deeply in the power of art:

• See: Where is art and creativity hiding in plain sight?
• Reflect: Do you notice the art, craft, or stories in your life that hold memory, loss, courage, or home?
• Act: Share those stories—your favorite poem, a meaningful sketch, a reclaimed object—with your circle. Invite a friend into a memory, an archive, a conversation.
• Activate: Consider supporting local artists and spaces that keep memory alive—through exhibitions, community stitching circles, poetry readings, or storytelling elders.
• Create: Create a small memoir thread—written, drawn, stitched—of your own roots and routes. Even a simple single-page collage of words, drawings, photos, or found objects can speak to where we've come from, and where we anchor. If you make one, share it with someone who might need the warmth of connection.
• Investigate: many living “Brown Girl” artists today are carrying on this legacy of voice and representation. Here are a few: share some others with us on Brave Sis’s social media platforms!

​Zineb Sedira explores the lives and dislocations of Algerian communities through film and installation.

​Tanya Lukin Linklater creates gestures of mourning and resistance rooted in Indigenous matrilineal traditions.

​Shirin Neshat, Mithu Sen, Morehshin Allahyari, and Bouchra Khalili confront censorship, surveillance, and erasure in different ways.

​Firelei Báez and Torkwase Dyson use abstraction to map stories of movement, power, and historical weight.

Are there other artists you'd like ME to know about? Drop a line!​

Like Etel, Zarina, and Pacita before them, these Brown Girl artists do not seek to offer easy answers. But they make space—for memory, for resilience, for those still seeking home—and for more inquisitiveness. From all of the artists mentioned here, and many others, we can be inspired and encouraged.

Keep asking questions, and don’t be satisfied with half-truths or untrue answers!

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