Suffragist

About this artwork Suffragist is an homage to Lucy Burns, a leader in the movement to win the right to vote for women. She was the most-jailed activist in the U.S. movement, and along with her friend, Alice Paul, started the National Woman’s Party in the early twentieth century. Burns was arrested multiple times for protesting outside the White House in Washington, D.C. and sent to the Occoquan Workhouse. She considered herself and the other women inmates political prisoners, and helped organize protests, including hunger strikes. In 1917, after her third arrest, she was sentenced to the maximum sentence, and (along with others) tortured and tormented by the guards, including being stripped naked and chained with her hands over her head for an entire night. On hunger strike, she was force-fed through her nostrils when the guards couldn’t pry her mouth open. The ghostly portrait of Lucy Burns (made from a photo taken of her when she was at the Occoquan Workhouse) was printed onto silk o