As celebrations of women’s history take place across the country this month, Haddonfield Memorial High School’s Gender Equality Club and the Haddon Fortnightly teamed to host an art show celebrating and commemorating the observance.
Titled “Through a Woman’s Eyes,” the show was held at the Fortnightly clubhouse on March 8. That date also marked International Women’s Day for 2025.
The art show has been held annually since 2017, with the exception of a few years during COVID. Margaret Gammie is a history teacher at the school and adviser for the Gender Equality Club.
“It’s something that I always look forward to as a day that’s very uplifting,” she explained, “and I think it’s cool to see how proud the students are of each other at the end of the show, and of themselves, because there’s a lot leading up to it … And then when we get to the day of the show, it’s just everyone’s smiling, everyone’s happy.”
For this year’s show, a donation of $10 for Girls Learn International – an organization that aims to give middle- and high-school students the tools to advocate for equality between genders, human rights and equitable education – was recommended but not required of guests.
Women artists from around the South Jersey area joined the show and their works ranged from paintings, ceramics and photographs to quilted tapestries; a three-dimensional, crocheted anatomical heart; and mosaics.
Lily Doyle, a local artist and art teacher, displayed a large, colorful painting of a tree she called, “Women: On the Winds of Kaleidoscopic Power.” The piece utilized re-used materials like magazines, bubble wrap and plastic bags to create a wide range of colors and textures.
“The branches represent the women reaching towards equality, towards diversity, and reaching upward and skyward,” Doyle noted. “The different colors represent the diversity, and the different textures within all the different colors just represent how unique each and every one of us are and how we have a different story behind our past and what our future holds.”
In addition to her own art, Doyle went on to explain why the show was important to her.
“Basically, the theme of this show is just so important,” she said, “just to remind people that we still have to keep fighting for what we believe in, and we can’t feel hopeless and helpless.”
Awards named for famous and significant women from history and pop culture were handed out at the show, including the Malala Yousafzai Award for best student art; the Frida Kahlo Award for best painting; and the Jeannette Rankin, Sandra Day O’Connor and Kamala Harris awards for best 3-D art, among others.
Lauren O’Leary and Cassidy Maeyer are seniors at Haddonfield Memorial and co-presidents of the Gender Equality Club. They helped set up the show, as well as creating and naming the awards.
“We kind of thought about famous women that we all know,” O’Leary said. “We kind of wanted to do first names. If you say their first name, you know immediately who it is, like Kamala for Kamala Harris. So we wanted important women now and also from the past, too, who just really show innovation … doing things beyond their time.”
Among students who entered work in the show is Sage Bittner, winner of the award for student art, who had three pieces on display that all used real-life elements of their subjects.
“Childhood Wonder,” a drawing of a young girl wearing a flower crown, feature real flowers; “Domesticated,” a pencil drawing of a one-eyed cat, uses catnip and a mouse toy glued to the frame for a multimedia display; and “That’s None of Your Beeswax,” a crayon drawing of a bee flying toward a honey dipper with a honeycomb pattern in the background using real beeswax.
Another piece earned the Amelia Earhart Award for best alternate medium, a mosaic called, “A Tree Grows in Camden.” Sharon Ritz, the artist behind it, was inspired while volunteering with the New Jersey Tree Foundation to plant trees in Camden. While planting, the volunteers discovered an old terracotta pipe in the soil that Ritz took with her and used as part of her piece.
“I just wanted to point out that there’s great things …” she noted. “That by bringing something like a tree into Camden, which clearly is an underserved community, you’re bringing not just nature, but you’re also bringing beauty and hope, and the fact that people are planting it there also brings love.”
Gender Equality Club members did most of the work that went into preparing for the show, hanging the art, contacting artists and putting flyers out around the area to draw artists.
“I like organizing and helping,” Maeyer observed. “It’s great to be a part of the community and helping with the Fortnightly women and just working with them. It’s just such a great experience, and it’s really impactful seeing how much we can empower women in our own community.”
