Women are the world: Anita Kunz’s fascinating foray into history

George Bush wearing blinkers while riding a galloping horse. A toddler-sized Kim Jong-un playing with weapons of war in a sandbox. Comedian Jim Belushi wielding a sword dressed as a samurai. You know the art. But you may not know the artist. Anita Kunz is a Toronto-based illustrator whose work has graced countless magazine covers, from the New Yorker to Time to Rolling Stone. The Order of Canada recipient was the first woman and the first Canadian ever to have a solo show at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., among many other distinctions. Kunz has spent the pandemic painting a portrait a day of women who made significant contributions to world history, a number of them queer and trans. Not surprisingly, many of these women’s stories have been overlooked or actively suppressed. Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, published late last year by Pantheon, features more than 300 of Kunz’s portraits. (There is an accompanying exhibition of 40 portraits at the Iona Studio in Toronto continuing to March 12.) The following is an excerpted version of the foreword to the book written by Roxane Gay. The art and bios are by Kunz.

As you read the biographies of the women of Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, you will notice an unsettling connective tissue. These women are all accomplished and fascinating, but many of their stories were lost to history, or their greatness was not appreciated until now, or men tried and often did take credit for their bold, brilliant work. So much of women’s history has to be excavated or rediscovered because for far too long, women’s contributions have gone unrecognized, disrespected, underestimated. 

Original Sisters is a powerful act of feminist reclamation. It is a necessary corrective. From one entry to the next, I delighted in how much women have contributed to the world we live in and how we live in that world. I was surprised by how much I didn’t know, by how much has been ignored, and to what end? The word empowering is overused, and it is often diluted to the point of having no meaning at all when people suggest that a woman doing anything reasonably sentient is empowering. And yet. There is something incredibly empowering about reading Original Sisters, about learning the breadth of what women have made possible. This book, as a whole, offers the reader possibility and promise.

These original sisters span the prehistoric era to the present day. Some of the names in these pages will be familiar, but 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. You will learn about artists and activists, rulers and rebels. There is a portrait of Ching Shih, a Chinese pirate who commanded 70,000 men and a massive fleet of ships. Peggy Jo Tallas was a notorious bank robber who committed acts of well-mannered thievery. We have Irna Phillips to thank for soap operas and serial storytelling. Gladys West’s calculations were key to the development of GPS, which allows us to travel without the anxiety of getting lost. 

As interesting as the biographies are, the portraits are visually arresting, beautifully rendered. They demand our attention, and Anita Kunz reminds us that women’s history is the world’s history. She reminds us that so much of the culture we take for granted exists by the grace of women’s ingenuity. Original Sisters makes way for us to do the ongoing work of excavating as much of women’s history as we can. This is also a book that demands that we continue to interrogate why women and their historical contributions are, all too often, overlooked. Why are their contributions dismissed? How do we ensure that the women who make history from this moment forward don’t suffer the same fate as too many of the women in these pages? 

From the women who drew on cave walls of the prehistoric era to those who shattered the highest of glass ceilings, these original sisters illuminate the path for the rest of us to follow. 

Excerpt from Original Sisters by Anita Kunz. Copyright © 2021 by Anita Kunz. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.