{"id":5520,"date":"2018-01-26T03:59:05","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T08:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=5520"},"modified":"2018-01-26T03:59:05","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T08:59:05","slug":"narya-marcille-womens-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/01\/26\/narya-marcille-womens-march\/","title":{"rendered":"Narya Marcille Couldn\u2019t Attend the 2017 Women\u2019s March. Instead She Designed A Poster That Became A Surprise Icon Of The Protests."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Women\u2019s March was coming,\u201d Narya Marcille recalls, \u201cand I was furious about the outcome of the election and I had nowhere to put that energy. I so wanted to march.\u201d She wanted to go to Washington, D.C., for the first national march, a year ago, but she felt she couldn\u2019t take her 4-month-old son with her and couldn\u2019t go without him, so she decided to stay at home in North Smithfield, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n

\"Nara<\/a>
Nara Marcille’s design for the 2017 march attracted more than 87,000 likes on the Pantsuit Nation Facebook group. Courtesy the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then she saw a contest from Amplifier.org for posters it would print in mass quantities and distribute for the march. She created a design featuring Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a crowd of women marching on the U.S. Capital under pink clouds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked nonstop on that one. I did the math and I think it ended up being 72 hours [over eight days] to get that one done,\u201d Marcille says.<\/p>\n

But Amplifier passed on her design. What to do? \u201cI ended up posting it on the Pantsuit Nation Facebook group,\u201d Marcille says. \u201cThen a lot of people responded to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her graphic\u2014which reads \u201cWomen Unite\u201d across the bottom\u2014attracted more than 87,000 likes and nearly 3,000 comments in the closed Facebook group of Clinton supporters. She turned it into a digital download that people could print out and carry at the 2017 Women\u2019s Marches. It became one of the icons of the protests.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe craziest part was people getting in touch with me and saying how the artwork made them feel,\u201d Marcille says. \u201cThat it made them feel stronger or more confident. \u2026 I never thought my art could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Afterward, the Library of Congress got in touch and added it to their prints and photographs collection<\/a>. \u201cI sent one to Ruth Bader Ginsburg,\u201d Marcille says, \u201cand she wrote me a really sweet note back and she told me she was going to have it framed and put up in her chambers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nara<\/a>
Nara Marcille and her family at the 2018 Women’s March at the Rhode Island state capital in Providence. (Courtesy the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marcelle hadn\u2019t planned on getting into graphic design when she studied at the University of Rhode Island. Instead she graduated with a degree in photography in 2005. But after working a series of odd jobs\u2014bartending, selling jewelry, working at a kitchen and bath place\u2014around 2010, she took a month-long, online course to learn the graphic design program Illustrator.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started doing portraits of friends and family, trying to get to learn the program better,\u201d Marcille says. And she began designing advertisements for some of the places she worked. A year after the first of her two sons was born in 2013, the now stay-at-home mom got back to graphic design by creating monthly events calendars and other graphics for a local baby things shop.<\/p>\n

After her 2017 Women\u2019s March design became a viral hit, things slowed down again. Until \u201ca week before Christmas, I started getting messages from this guy I didn\u2019t know from every platform I was on,\u201d Marcille says. He said, \u201cI work for a company in charge of creating special editions for Newsweek [magazine] and would you be interested in creating a cover?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nara<\/a>
Nara Marcille’s design on the special edition of Newsweek’s cover. (Courtesy the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI had a week to complete the whole design,\u201d Marcille says. \u201cI stopped cooking. I stopped cleaning. I stopped wrapping presents. Everything. \u2026 I stayed up all night on Christmas because I had so much to do.\u201d (She thanks her husband for keeping everything together.)<\/p>\n

The magazine\u2014a celebration of the women\u2019s movement under the headline \u201cShe Persisted\u201d\u2014arrived on newsstands on Tuesday. \u201cI went to pick up the magazine,\u201d Marcille says, \u201cand my youngest when he saw it on the rack he started pointing at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so exciting,\u201d Marcille says. \u201cAnyone who goes to school for art, you have to do it because you really want to. You\u2019re going to get a lot of criticism. Honestly, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve had anybody in my life who\u2019s not told me to get a real job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy philosophy now is I\u2019m going to just try to take every opportunity I can,\u201d Marcille says. \u201cI\u2019m going to try to not say no.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Narya Marcille with a rack of Newsweek magazines with her design on the cover. (Courtesy the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

Help us keep producing our great coverage of local activism and arts by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Women\u2019s March was coming,\u201d Narya Marcille recalls, \u201cand I was furious about the outcome of the election and I had nowhere to put that energy. I so wanted to march.\u201d She wanted to go to Washington, D.C., for the first national march, a year ago, but she felt she couldn\u2019t take her 4-month-old son […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5565,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,100,115],"tags":[98,229],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5520"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5572,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5520\/revisions\/5572"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}