By Charlize Althea Garcia, May 13, 2025
“Women’s Rights are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-Based Inequality, Violence and Discrimination” the current exhibition of the Don B. Huntley Gallery features 100 posters, bringing light to a subject pertaining to women’s issues around the world.
Of the 100-piece collection, 24 posters are featured in the gallery.
“It opens up a dialogue, the kind of dialogue that you would want to have in a university setting where there is supposed to be free speech and free thought,” Resnick said. “And students have to develop critical thinking skills no matter what they’re thinking.”
Guest curator Elizabeth Resnick, professor emerita of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, formulated the idea from the moment Hillary Clinton was running for president. At the time, she recalled, women displayed the urge to demand power, equal rights and reclaim what was rightfully theirs.
The exhibit has traveled around the world, to locations such as the Warsaw Poster Museum and a range of community galleries and universities. In the U.S., the posters have found their way to both red and blue states.
The collection display is entirely under the volition of the gallerist, as they know their community, the issues of the community and what the community needs to hear right at this moment according to Resnick.
Collaborating artists Joe Scorsone and Alice Drueding have three of their graphic art pieces displayed: “Fistula,” “Acid Violence Against Women” and “Quanto Project: Sexual Slavery.” Each piece highlights a subject matter not often spoken about in the mainstream.
“Fistula,” created in 2014, came to fruition when artists Scorsone and Drueding read the book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book highlights the many oppressive behaviors toward women in developing countries.
Obstetric fistula is a hole that can develop between the vagina and bladder or rectum that leaves a woman incontinent of urine or feces or both. Women who have pregnancies too early and/or are victims of sexual violence are mostly affected.
As mentioned by the artists, this medical condition doesn’t necessarily need to exist because there is medical treatment for it. But because of the lack of resources or attention for the matter within other countries, women are left untreated and often ostracized from their communities with no means of sustaining themselves.
The piece named after this condition is hand-drawn, showing explicitly a woman urinating simultaneously shunned by pointing fingers. There was no metaphor appropriate to depict an issue such as this; it was necessary to be forthright to educate the audience, according to Scorsone and Drueding.
“Quanto Project: Sexual Slavery” was created after a realization to the ever-present issue of slavery. Scorsone and Drueding wanted to take their consternation and instill the feeling into the viewer.
This piece acts as a metaphor for a meat market. A woman is found hanging on a chain, pierced through the skin of her back, with her body slumped. Attached is a price tag with a barcode and the words “Over 1,000,000 sold.”
“I have spent my life as a woman thinking that there was progress, and that it was hard-won, and that the battle was still continuing, and that we were still moving forward,” Drueding said. “But now, at this moment, I feel like women have lost a lot of ground. Women are losing agency. Women may be disenfranchised and may not be able to vote, and certainly women’s health care is coming under attack.”
Concerned about the stagnancy in change since their premiere of their artwork in early 2000,
Scorsone and Drueding noted the issues concerning women’s rights are even more prevalent, especially with the current administration.
“I think it’s very important that young people, I include men obviously, become active participants in civil society, that they don’t live passively, that they become informed, informed from sources that are reliable and unbiased,” Drueding said.
“Against Violence to Women,” created in 2000 by artist Lourdes Zolezzi Horiuchi, highlights the female homicides in Ciudad Juarez in 1993. Women who lived there worked in maquiladoras, factories that produce tariff-free products. Workers of these factories were subject to exploitative labor conditions that also led to a surge in drug trafficking, organized crime and femicides. More than 350 bodies between ages 10 and 22 have been found since 2003. Some were raped, slashed, strangled, crushed, maimed, dismembered and mutilated.
“I feel freedom, freedom to talk,” Zolezzi said.
Zolezzi was kidnapped herself during the events in Juarez. She noticed the anger for society when she spoke with her kidnappers and saw the social issues, not only in women but the whole community and that human rights are interdependent with women’s rights.
The idea first came to her in a dream and eventually materialized as a poster. She digitally uploaded to the internet with the intention for it to be seen by all.
After uploading her work, she received responses from all around the world, with people of different backgrounds and dialects finding meaning in her piece.
“It’s an opportunity to talk, an opportunity to draw things, to ask,” Zolezzi said. “One image is an opportunity to consider a new idea.”
The scissors are meant to represent a household item everyone has in their homes. But it can do two things: create or destroy. Zolezzi wanted it to speak to younger generations and remind them they have a choice and the capability to build and change.
“With one image, you can change everything,” Zolezzi said.
Feature image courtesy of Joe Scorsone, Alice Drueding, Lourdes Zolezzi and Elizabeth Resnick
