Look Again: Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath
Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women by Julie Lapping Rivera is an homage to exceptional, pioneering women working across centuries. In a series of hand-carved, woodcut and collage prints, Leverett-based artist Julie Rivera (American, b. 1956) highlights the lives and achievements of women who defied the status quo. Each print is accompanied by a poem, written specifically for the series, by local and international women poets.
Look Again is sponsored by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts
The life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1933 – 2020) symbolizes to many a feminist success story. Prior to becoming the first Jewish woman to serve on the Court, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and participated in more than 300 legal cases for women’s rights. As a lawyer, Ginsburg charted a strategic course to overturn sex discrimination by targeting statutes and, eventually, building towards the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While a judge, Ginsburg’s rulings defended abortion rights, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage. Her face and nickname— the “Notorious R.B.G.”—have become an icon for women’s liberation and the beliefs that she stood for.
Weeks before her death by suicide, Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) received rejections for the publication of her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Editors explained that the first chapters were dazzling, while the second half, depicting darker themes, provoked feelings of discomfort. “To be quite honest with you,” one secretary wrote, “we didn’t feel that you had managed to use your materials successfully.” What would become Plath’s most famous works—including The Bell Jar and the collection of poems, Ariel—were published after her passing. In 1982, Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously and The Bell Jar went on to sell more than three million copies internationally.
Woodcut of Sylvia
by Rebecca Hart Olander
There are others in the series of photographs
the artist could have chosen. The one where her smile
is a cracked-open geode. Radiant. Or the one beside him
on the couch, her crown of thorns necklace partially
visible there too, Hughes looking like a tired old man.
Here, her armored jewelry is prominent, showing
she won’t shy from hard edges. She’s interior, but she’s not
looking at nothing. She’s just not looking at you, or me.
She’s training her mind’s eye to make miracles.
She is witch-magician, yet only thirty when she dies.
Still 1959 here, neither child born yet. Curl of girlish
bangs, crosshatch cheeks, cardigan, and briar patch dress
on which the nettle-like necklace makes it seem
she’s fastened a tidy explosion just below her clavicle.
Dangerous adornment, she’s a woman avoiding a gaze.
What can’t be seen is sea, rain, the slick rocks
of the North Shore, the insistence of blue skies and bulbs,
the exhaustion of spring, the incessancy of clouds.
Her brilliance is rooted there, in the formative spaces,
before nappies and milk mind. But not before poetry.
That was manifest in the salt-cured hometown,
the fierce mind admiring other gods, the heights to which
they understood expanse and wrote that way to match,
though she outmatched them all. Hairshirt necklace,
hairball amulet. Destined for domestic and divine.
About the Artist
Julie Rivera is inspired by the meditative practice of woodcut printmaking. She began her career in New York, working as a teaching artist with the Studio in a School Association, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Lincoln Center Institute. Rivera earned her MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Drawing and received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Rivera is a Leverett-based artist. She teaches printmaking at Smith College and at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, MA.
About the Poet
Adin Thayer, of Northampton, Massachusetts, won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award in 2021 for her book, The Close World (Tebot Bach, 2021). She has worked as a psychotherapist, a peacebuilder in eastern Africa, and a teacher at the Smith College School for Social Work.
About the Poet
Rebecca Hart Olander is a poet, teacher, and editor based in Western Massachusetts. She is the editor and director of Perugia Press and has published collections of poems including Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021).
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