Seated Woman with a Child -this Maya artwork is dated to AD 600-900.
This small clay figurine depicts an elegantly dressed female, seated cross-legged and holding a baby in the crook of her right arm. Her close-fitting garment covers her left breast but leaves the right exposed for the child to suckle. She wears copious jewelry–two bracelets, a necklace, and large earrings–and a highly elaborate headdress. The figure may represent the moon goddess, who was also worshipped by the Maya as a patroness of fertility and childbirth. The figurine was most likely a grave offering, perhaps for a woman who had died in childbirth. The hollow clay object could also function as a whistle, and a few notes may have been blown at the funeral before the figurine was placed in the grave.
Courtesy of & can be viewed the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, USA. Via their online collections: 1958.15.10.
Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker (1906-1975) would go on to become one of the first African-American women celebrities in France and in Europe more broadly in the 1920s, gaining notoriety for her beauty and innovative performance style but also for her contributions to the French Resistance movement.
Josephine Baker in Zouzou (1934)
At the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, Baker became a member of the French Resistance movement. Performing for and socializing with members of the German military, Baker used her celebrity to gain confidential information about Nazi strategy and passed this back to the Deuxième Bureau, the French counterintelligence unit.
Additionally, her status as a travelling performer provided cover for her travel to the United Kingdom, where she carried notes about German military operations written in invisible ink on her sheet music to the British authorities. After the war, she returned to global stages with bolstered success. Although she remained in France, Baker was an outspoken activist in the American Civil Rights Movement, often refusing to perform in segregated venues and appearing at demonstrations in Washington, most notably alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. Though some American activists criticized her involvement in the movement, arguing that her lifetime in France had made her disconnected from the contemporary political issues in the United States, Baker argued that her social status in France and experience of relative racial equality in Europe had made her even more aware of and engaged with the fight for equal rights. Josephine Baker continued to be an outspoken advocate for civil rights in appearances around the world up until her death in 1975.
In 1951, the NAACP named her “Outstanding Woman of the Year.”
Baker was highly supportive of the civil rights movement and she spoke directly before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
"I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad."
Following King’s death in 1968, his widow, Coretta Scott King, asked Baker if she would be open to taking the minister’s place in the Movement. She declined, citing concerns for her young children. (she had 2 children & adopted 10 more).
For her wartime contribution, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor by Gen. Charles de Gaulle himself.
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