In 17th century Rome, painter Artemisia Gentileschi fought to get her rapist convicted.
She was “one of the most remarkable women in the history of western art,” says Richard Savino, a professor at Sacramento State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Born in Rome in 1593, she led an epic and often tragic life during an age when the city was trying to become the liveliest in Europe, says Savino, also a musician, who has recorded songs from Gentileschi’s time.
During her life she faced repeated tragedy, including rape. “Her life consisted of a series of battles. Battles with authoritative figures regarding the rape. Battles with the rapist. Battles with the bureaucracy of Rome. And then battles with the different groups of artists that dominated the working environment for the different cities within which she lived,” Savino explains.
But Gentileschi, the daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, lived an incredible life. She traveled extensively — which was rather extraordinary for a female painter in that time.
Savino says after her rapist was convicted, “she basically decided and was given, more-or-less, permission to travel and take commissions. From Rome she went up to Florence, where she became a sort of integral part of the Medici court.”
She went on to Venice, Naples and as far as London. It’s believed she died in Naples during a plague that swept through the city.
Savino was inspired by Gentileschi’s travels in leading his musical ensemble, El Mundo, which recorded music written when she was alive.
Learn more about this ~*Baroque kween*~ and hear the music she inspired, here.
We traveled to Laikipia, Kenya to meet the Masai women who, “tired of relying on husbands,” created a women-only community that farms + sells aloe plants to @lushcosmetics.
To celebrate, organizations around the world are showcasing their sound and moving image collections to remind us all that these records of collective memory are both wonderful and fragile.
Here at NPR, the Research, Archives & Data Strategy team (RAD, formerly the NPR Library) protects and preserves NPR’s audio archives. Our programming was first heard on-air on April 20, 1971, starting with Senate hearings about the war in Vietnam. (C-SPAN had yet to be created.) NPR’s first episode of All Things Considered debuted a few weeks later on May 3, 1971.
In 1972, NPR created the Program Library, with a mission to make programs available for production and broadcast purposes, as well as for historical and scholarly research. In 1976, NPR entered into partnerships to make the Program Library publicly accessible. The ‘Public’ part of National Public Radio is really important to us, and it’s a big part of why we do the work we do to make sure people now and in the future can listen to and learn from our collection.
Over the past 45 years, NPR has used several new types of audio media, from open reel tape to optical CD to digital WAV files. These formats reflect the best available materials of the time period in which they were created, but they are also in danger of degradation. Right now, almost 94,000 hours of NPR audio are at-risk, stored on either tape or CD.
NPR’s RAD team continues to collect, assign metadata and create access to programming like All Things Considered, keeps track of NPR’s latest podcasts, and looks to the future for what will come next. RAD collections also include raw audio, images, documents and objects related to NPR journalism and radio broadcasting. Our digitized and born-digital collections are accessible in our in-house content management system, Artemis, and are starting to grow beyond program audio as NPR content expands into music videos like Tiny Desk Concerts and live social media video on our Facebook pages.
When we say the ‘Public’ part of NPR is important to us, we mean it. We are making every effort to allow for wider public access to our collections. But first, we must preserve and digitize!
Donated my 1999 Honda Accord Ex through Car Talk to benefit KPCC 89.3. It was picked up yesterday. The car was originally a high school graduation gift for my sister and was purchased new. I got the car from her, in 2016 when she bought a new car. It was time for it to serve a better purpose so I decided to donate it. It was a great car, the last of the great Japanese made ones. The trunk was huge and the drive was smooth. Goodbye my little Honda, thanks for always keeping me safe!
“There’s a very famous phrase in the Captain America comics. It’s the ‘No, you move’ quote. And it’s more relevant today than I think ever before. And it’s basically about the one premise that is most important to this nation and that is to stand up for what you believe no matter the odds or consequences. So when the whole world tells you that something wrong is something right, you tell the whole world no you move.”
Kristin James, Arlignton, Va.
“My sign says legalize love because I think we really need love in a time, state like this. We need to all come together and love each other, love the universe, love our planet, the sun. We are all here in this together. And we need to just bring out the god in each other and uplift each other and be the people that we were here to be. The people that god wants us to be, ultimately. And the root of that is love and not hate, and we can move forward.”
Melissa de Rueyes, Chicago
“I’m here because I’m not afraid and I’m here to support the women’s march. I’m a woman and human rights are also undocumented rights.”
Soumeya Benghanem, Fairfax, Va.
“The struggle we have today, we’ve had before, so that’s what my sign is about. ‘We the resilient have been here before.’”
