To Our Suffragist Forebears


Heirs Come to Pass, 3 Today is Women's Equality Day, the anniversary of the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted national women's suffrage.

As heirs to women's democratic participation, we honor those who fought for it with Martina López's Heirs Come to Pass, 3.

After her father's death in 1986, López began using photographs, first from her Mexican American family albums and later from second-hand stores, to create anonymous family histories.

In Heirs Come to Pass, 3, she placed people in Victorian clothing across an unfriendly landscape. The title is a play on words. López has said that "Heirs are the children who receive the heritage and accumulated wealth of their ancestors. The word 'heirs' is also a homonym for 'errors' … the mistakes that dot a family's history. Heirs inherit the errors as well as the fruits of an ancestor's life."

This work is included in our traveling exhibition Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Martina López, born 1952, Heirs Come to Pass, 3, 1991, silver-dye bleach print made from digitally assisted montage, 30 x 50 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company Foundation.