“When the third-grade teachers asked students how they could bring art into their study of Lexington, it was clear that they could see the need for more public art representing women,” says Georgia Henkel, lower school art teacher, “and it didn’t take long for these wise young artists to conclude that they could change that.”
The students created a 9-by-16-foot wheat-pasted public mural celebrating Lexington women in history who represented innovation, courage, and intelligence. Among the women featured are three outspoken crusaders for civil rights: Mary Ellen Britton, a highly educated African-American woman who became the first female physician in Lexington; Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, a progressive reformer and fearless leader of the women’s suffrage movement; and Mary Todd Lincoln, who as the wife of President Abraham Lincoln supported her husband and the Union in abolishing slavery, even though Mary’s brothers served in the Confederacy and her parents were slaveholders.
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