My current work in progress, Painting Her Into History: 10 step from Blocked to Freedom includes the activists Diane Nash. The book is designed to help you overcome an artistic block and includes steps and illustrations to help. It also gives historical information about the women in the portraits used as examples.
This is from the two page spread about Diane Nash and her portrait:
In this portrait of Diane Nash at the lunch counter, the influence of Henri Matisse’s Interior with an Etruscan Vase appears through color, pattern, and decorative transformation. Rather than copying Matisse’s interior, the painting borrows selected elements and reassigns them to the figures and background.
The clearest connection is Diane Nash’s orange blouse. Its color and dark ornamental markings echo the large Etruscan vase in Matisse’s painting. By transferring the vase’s color and pattern onto Diane’s clothing, the portrait makes her the visual center of the composition. Her blouse becomes a symbol of presence, strength, and focus.
The man’s green suit draws from the dense greenery surrounding the vase in Matisse’s interior. Its deep color and leafy marks give the right side of the painting visual weight. The repeated background pattern also comes from a decorative element on the left side of Matisse’s painting, transformed here into a rhythmic backdrop.
The historical lunch counter photograph grounds the work in civil rights history, while the Matisse-inspired colors and patterns bring beauty, structure, and energy. Diane Nash remains the emotional center: calm, alert, and powerful in a moment of quiet resistance.
Left: Henri Matisse,Interior with an Etruscan Vase (Intérieur au vase étrusque), 1940. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art. , Right: Image credit: Photo by Gerald Holly / The Tennessean. Matthew Walker, Peggy Alexander, Diane Nash, and Stanley Hemphill at the Post House Restaurant, Nashville, 1960.
About Diane Nash (1938 – )
Diane Nash is an American civil rights activist who was a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement.
Diane’s campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters , the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel, co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project, she worked on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.