¹ If you want to see the whole panoply of achievement, check out my website, www.nellpainter.com, or look at my Facebook page.

² Valerie Smith is now the president of Swarthmore College.

³ By “The Art World” I mean the important museums and galleries that bestow visibility and money on selected artists, virtually all white men. Without caps, the phrase means everything in and around art, regardless of sex and race and wealth and prestige.

⁴ Now renovated and rechristened “Ironside Newark” in gentrifying fashion.

⁵ Paper is one of artists’ basic supports, the thing you make your image on, such as paper, canvas, linen, and board. Paper is what you use for drawing, the others, for painting. Tooth refers to the texture of paper’s surface, the more tooth, the less smooth. Laid paper has a grid of fine lines in its surface, watermarks from the way the paper is made. Wove paper has no such marks.

⁶ Interestingly, Lucas Cranach’s names are instrumental. His family name was Maler, or “painter,” and Cranach is a rendering of his birthplace of Kronach. If I lived in Cranach’s time and town, Maler would be my last name, too.

⁷ In case you want to know, in 1676 the Zaporozhian Cossacks, having defeated the Ottoman Empire’s sultan, sent him a letter full of profanity. In the painting, the uncouth Cossacks revel in their crude insults to a highly civilized sovereign.

⁸ Nell Irvin Painter, introduction to The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889, edited by Virginia Ingraham Burr (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

⁹ Pregnancy changes hormonal balance and saps calcium from the mother’s body to nourish the growing fetus. Unless the mother is well nourished enough to replace the calcium in her body, pregnancy’s cost to the mother is paid by her teeth and bones.