SALT LAKE CITY — “Champions of Change,” a new book that highlights important women in Utah history, has come out just in time for Women’s Equality Day. Celebrated on Aug. 26 each year, the day marks the adoption of the 19th Amendment, which secured the right to vote for white women. The book highlights several Utah women who were instrumental in the fight for women’s suffrage, such as Emmeline B. Wells and Emily S. Richards.
But it’s a book that might never have been made, since Brooke Smart, illustrator of “Champions of Change,” never planned to get into illustration.
“My dad was an artist,” Smart told the Deseret News. “So I was always drawing and painting … (and) I knew that I wanted to do something with art, but it was kind of luck of the draw that I stumbled into illustration.”
Smart studied illustration at Brigham Young University — mainly choosing it because of the wealth of painting classes in the art department and the fact that Utah artist Robert Barrett was teaching there — but even after finishing her degree, she was firmly in the fine art world, selling her work through galleries rather than to companies.
“After five or six years of selling my work through galleries, I made a big change in my career,” Smart said. “I got divorced, and my daughter was 1, so I had to figure out how to make a living but still do what I had been trained to do. … So for the last six years, I’ve devoted everything career-wise toward illustration instead of fine art.”
Smart’s latest illustration project is one with a big goal.
Working with Better Days 2020, an organization formed to celebrate both the anniversary of women’s suffrage and educate Utahns about the impact women have had on the state, she designed a pack of trading cards featuring some of important women from Utah’s history.
“We started with 30 women, … (and) they hired me to do these portraits that tell more of a story than a static, black-and-white photo, which is all we have of some of these women,” Smart said.
As they worked on the trading cards, Smart, along with Naomi Watkins and Katherine Kitterman, who did the research and writing for the short bios of the women, wanted to expand the cards into something bigger and more permanent.
They decided to turn the trading cards into a book, titling it “Champions of Change.” The book features larger prints of Smart’s portraits as well as more detailed — but still short and accessible — biographies of the women included.
Illustrating the women included was no small task. Smart wanted to understand what these women were really like before representing them on the page. She hoped to capture their personality in her paintings.
“We have a lot of photographs, and then we have some … journals,” Smart said. “I was able to really get to know some of them through their own writing … (and) through their photographs.”
But as for women about whom information was not so readily available?
“I also researched and read about them,” Smart said. “I was just trying to find even … just one word, or a description about them, or something that they had written that caught my interest. And then I would create an illustration and a personality around that.”
For other women, their descendants were able to provide Smart with information. “They could give us more of that personal background, which was really great,” Smart said.
Before any illustrations could be done, however, Kitterman, Smart and Watkins had the mammoth task of choosing which women to include in the project.
“Sometimes we would be deciding between some, especially when we had three or four spots left and we had like 10 women that we wanted to include, we would all talk about to see which one was maybe a more unique story,” Smart explained. “We wanted to have women from all backgrounds. We tried to reach out to all the tribes in Utah to have someone represented from each tribe.”
All of Better Days 2020’s projects are focused on Utah — the organization was started to celebrate women’s suffrage in Utah. Their main focus is education, and they aim to help Utah’s schools teach residents about the incredible women in the state’s history.
These trading cards and the “Champions of Change” book are a vital component of that goal. The authors want these women’s names to become as recognizable as those of important men from history.
“These women did such great things in their lives,” Smart said. “They are definitely relatable to all children, especially girls, that are looking for strong role models.”
The book’s purpose is to celebrate the massive accomplishments of these important women, but it also teaches young students that small things can lead to big results.
“There are five to 10 famous women that we all know about — (women like) Susan B. Anthony and Marie Curie — but I love this book because these women didn’t have to make a huge scientific discovery or be someone really huge in politics,” Smart said. “Some of them did very simple things in their lives, but they made an impact, and you can see the impact that they had on their families, and on our state of Utah.”