Meet three mission-driven women who turned their creative vision into reality.
Over the last three decades, Becker has taken The Conservation Center from a small art restoration shop to an internationally recognized conservation laboratory.
After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the International School of Art in Italy, Becker was inspired to pursue a career in art preservation. At age 22, she began working under Barry Bauman, prominent art restorer and the founder of what was then The Chicago Conservation Center.
After years of working together, Bauman shared with Becker his desire to sell her the company. While she did not have formal business training and saw herself more as an artist, Becker accepted the challenge. With the help of Norm Bobins of then LaSalle Bank and Marshall Field V, the founding supporter and mentor of Bauman, Becker purchased The Center with a small business loan in August 2003.
In the years to follow, Becker took the business to a place she dreamed — turning The Conservation Center into the largest and most comprehensive art restoration firm in North America.
“I surrounded myself with an incredible team and great advisors,” Becker said. “As a young entrepreneur, their advice was invaluable.”
In addition to preventative maintenance and restoring aging works, The Center plays a vital role in the conservation of artwork damaged by fires, floods and other natural disasters. For example, during Hurricane Sandy, they helped save over 2,000 works of art (5,000 works after Hurricane Katrina).
“I come to work every day and am surrounded by works that I feel proud to preserve for future generations,” Becker said. “We’re not just restoring artwork, but the stories behind them and the lives of people.”
Outside of the lab, Becker is an accomplished artist focusing on figurative paintings and drawings whose work has been shown locally and internationally for over 30 years, including at Art Miami and EXPO Chicago.
After spending more than 10 years providing mentorship and scholarships to the next generation of women and girls through her company My Social Canvas, Mayer saw an opportunity to further her mission through an emerging technology.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a form of cryptocurrency that enable creators to sell one-of-a-kind digital work. However, the rapid rise in the technology has been largely dominated by men. In fact, just 26% of females hold crypto, according to a recent Gemini survey.
To bring more women into the digital fold, Mayer founded Boss Beauties, an NFT startup that promotes the work of next-gen artists. With every NFT sale, Boss Beauties funds programs for female leaders, creators and innovators.
To launch their first collection, Mayer asked her community to imagine digital portraits that capture the women they want to see and be in the world.
“As always, they rose to the challenge,” Mayer said. “They submitted vision boards that featured beautifully diverse women in positions of power, successful women in STEAM fields, and next-generation style inspiration.”
The result was 10,000 colorful digital artworks of female characters — selling out in just over an hour on the OpenSea NFT marketplace. The collection also became the first of its kind to be displayed at the New York Stock Exchange.
“The results are nothing short of beautiful,” Mayer said.
One of Boss Beauties’ most recent projects was The Role Models Collection for International Women’s Day. The collection features NFTs of 25 of history’s most notable women, from Cleopatra to Maya Angelou to Princess Diana.
Less than a year since its inception, Boss Beauties now is partnering with Barbie, Hugo Boss, Rolling Stone, Neiman Marcus, Coinbase and Marvel, to name a few. Together, they are broadening their impact and proving that NFTs are not just an all-boys club.
While artist Amanda Williams had been exhibiting her work since the early 2000s, it wasn’t until she returned home to Chicago more than a decade ago and started a new project that she would set the art world on fire.
Over a two-year period, working with close friends and family, Williams painted eight condemned houses in and around the neighborhood of Englewood in hues that had been part of daily life in the South Side Chicago African American community when she was growing up. The result was structures that existed in a provocatively engaging space between vibrancy and desolation. Why were these particular homes vacated? How were they valued, and by whom? And who had cared enough about them to coat them in one more, final, layer of paint in such familiar, lively tones? Eventually titled Color(ed) Theory, the project made waves across the national art landscape.
“It was very much a turning point in terms of people paying attention to what I was doing,” says Williams. “But it really was a long, natural progression.”
With praise coming from corners near and far, Williams was in high demand. In addition to many museum acquisitions of her work, the list of exhibitions, collaborations and projects she was asked to join over the two years that followed is too extensive to detail here.
“I think what will stick with me most from this period is how historically rare it is for a woman artist of color to have several high-profile opportunities to simultaneously test out evolving ideas in real time and at full scale,” Williams said. “Even though these recent projects take on different visual forms, they’re questioning the same ideas. Normally, artists develop concepts at the scale of a sketch model or a drawing — not physically occupiable by a human. To have so many avenues presented all at once to practice in public is a huge privilege and honor. It’s not something I take lightly.”
Recently, Gagosian Gallery announced a solo exhibition of Williams' work organized by director Antwaun Sargent to be held in early summer at the gallery’s location in New York. She will exhibit new works from What black is this, you say?, her ingoing series of poignant oil and watercolor paintings produced as an identity-affirming response to the tumultuous racial events in the summer of 2020.
