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PaperCity_Dallas_September_2021

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had devoted 10 years to reconstructing our country's first Civil Rights movement, the perilous Underground Railroad, traveling 1,400 miles to photograph sites along the route from the Deep South to freedom in Canada. The resulting exhibition, "Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad," with a companion book, is on a decade-long tour through 2027. In 2016, Michna-Bales began thinking about her next project and the upcoming centenary of the passing of the 19th Amendment. She encountered Inez Milholland by accident while reading historian Robert P.J. Cooney Jr.'s Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Suffrage Movement. A postcard dropped out of the volume, promoting another Cooney book: Remembering Inez: The Last Campaign of Inez Milholland, Suffrage Martyr. Further research showed an image of Milholland bearing a parade banner emblazoned with the text, "Forward Out of Error, Into Light." The synchronicity with her previous book's title was uncanny, and Michna-Bales took it as a sign that the suffragist's journey would be her next book. An iconoclast with celebrity clout in her time as a crusader for women's rights, Milholland was the most famous of her Vassar class of 1909 and that generation; but she has subsequently faded to an obscure figure, known only to feminists who have dug deeply into the historical record. To change this, Michna-Bales has devoted five years of meticulous research and intensive travel to bring to light the woman who was the glamorous, stirring poster image for passing the 19th Amendment and women winning the right to vote, radiantly robed in white, accessorized with cape and crown, astride the white horse Grey Dawn, upholding the banner Forward Into Light. In her day, her fame was comparable to Gloria Steinem's. To relay Milholland's forgotten narrative, Michna-Bales visited archives from Boston to Washington, D.C.; dug into more than a thousand historical newspaper and magazine articles; combed through vintage photographs and ephemera; and decoded her subject's barely legible letters to retrace her tragic final journey: a 12-state Western tour undertaken because women there had won the right to vote decades earlier but were being urged to pressure President Wilson to grant national suffrage. Milholland's tour, on behalf of the National Woman's Party, drew thousands to exhaustive speaking engagements and rallies that would be her undoing. A case of pernicious anemia, coupled with lack of sleep and sheer exhaustion, led to her collapse in Los Angeles. Her final words to the crowd were: "Mr. President, how long must we wait for liberty?" Hospitalized in L.A, she died within a month, generating headlines across the country. She was the first woman to have a memorial in her honor at the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall, a tribute attended by thousands on Christmas Day 1916. Giving Image to Inez "The more I learned about Inez, the more my respect for her grew," Michna- Bales says. "She was the epitome of the movement in that time period; she was definitely not the fainting flower in that corner of the room." What the viewer will see at PDNB Gallery are images that poetically retell Milholland's Western trek, restaged and reenacted by women whom Michna-Bales cast as subjects. Tracking down newspaper accounts of 1916 to learn the suffragist's exact itinerary and speaking engagements, the artist made a date with the past — which holds power for the present — while bringing to life the movement and its remarkable protagonist. "Jeanine Michna-Bales, Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage," through November 13, at PDNB Gallery. Artist talk Saturday, September 18, 2 pm. Signed books $45. pdnbgallery.com. Inez Milholland at the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade in Washington, D.C, March 3, 1913 Jeanine Michna-Bales' Telegram from Eugen, Salt Lake Union Pacific Railroad Station, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2018 55

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