“Women need to take up more space, and I find the work of the Sheroes Project helps us do that. One, by amplifying the women I paint, but also, when a woman wears the dress in public, she immediately becomes more visible and takes up more space. Even if she’s carrying a tote bag, it draws attention.” ~ TL Duryea
By She’s Legend Staff
TL Duryea has always been an artist. She’s always been politically active, too. But it wasn’t until the last presidential election that the two personalities collided.
“After the 2016 election, I was pretty discouraged. As an artist, I had been painting a lot of pretty landscapes and colorful abstracts. After the election, I didn’t feel inspired by that, and I struggled through most of 2017. I decided to jump-start my work by doing a month of daily portraits in January 2018 of people who inspired me in politics. I wanted to refocus my mind to looking at the positive, and I hoped it would help a few other people along the way. By the end of the month, I realized: 1. I was painting mostly women, and 2. I wasn’t going to stop,” says Duryea.
Several months later, Duryea uploaded one of her images from the portrait series to Redbubble.com to create a phone case. That’s when Redbubble inadvertently nudged her in another direction. “When you load an image to one of the items they make, it loads the image to all the items at the same time, including the dress. I didn’t think anyone would want the dress (or any of the other clothing options) but figured I would leave it up for fun. My friend Kara Baekey, who is a leader in the gun violence prevention movement, bought the dress and wore it to a conference on gun violence, and it basically took off from there,” she says.
Although Duryea has always considered herself civic minded, she says she never owned the title “activist” before November 2016.
“It was only in 2018 that I found a way to really combine the political activism and the art. It was really important for me, in these dark times, to create art that inspired others to stand up to the darkness. It was also really important for my work to amplify the hard work women do that is so often forgotten,” she says.
Her friends’ children are her inspiration. “I don’t have kids of my own, but I love my friends’ children fiercely. As Hillary [Clinton] says, ‘There’s no such thing as other people’s children.’ I can’t accept that the path our world is currently on is the one they are going to have to live on. We must all work to fix the current mess,” says Duryea. •