Two years ago, See All This published the first volume of our Pretty Brilliant series. Serving as a means to fill the negative space left between the many men in the art canon, the Pretty Brilliant issue was a response to an almost complete absence of womankind from the authoritative books on all matters art history: Janson’s History of Art and Gombrich’s The Story of Art. Far from complete, our mission continues this year with the second of three volumes in the Pretty Brilliant series which together will form a sister to these titles, cumulatively equalling the latter in thickness.

If art history is a chronicle of events and art made by great men—including war, politics, economics, floodings, fires, and so on—underpinning that chronicle is this other story made by women: it concerns the everyday that is most often dismissed as mundane, not to be noticed. It is her story of pregnancy, of birth giving, of feeding, caring, clothing, protecting, educating, of children, of family, of aging, of wrapping the death, the whole life cycle, and it is overlooked as common place, as humdrum. Yet, it is the matter of art. In A History of Civilizations (1962), Fernand Braudel rejected the traditional event-based narrative as the basis for a history course which only attributed importance to the surviving historical sources from the literate wealthy classes. Instead, he emphasized the crucial significance of the ephemeral lives of people in the margins, from the serfs to the peasants to the urban poor. With his focus on the longue durée, he stated that underneath there is another hidden story—I would like to phrase it as her story—which is the local story, the petty dealings of the everyday, of the women sustaining the world with their daily work.

Women have had to go against the grain to be accepted within the male-dominated world of art, and for many of these women artists a meaningful life of expression has been attributed to their work in the margins, within disciplines that were not considered important, or to a departure from the centers of power. Pretty Brilliant Vol. II will give prominence to these artists. To those who often sought to create alternative ways of living, within stubborn places like islands, deserts, and craggy mountainsides, and with nature’s forces to contend with. To trailblazing women who have submitted to the elements: earth, fire, water, wind, and space (considered by the Japanese Buddhist tradition as the fifth). Dividing the second volume into five chapters, each element will hold space for women artists from all over the world and of all time, who have created works within their scope.