Few artists have done more to reconstruct the course of contemporary culture than Patti Smith (b. December 30 1946). Celebrated as the “Godmother of Punk,” her musical influence reverberates across acclaimed artists from Garbage to Morrissey to Madonna, and Michael Stipe famously cited her as the core inspiration for founding R.E.M. As a poet and visual artist, she has explored with lyrical poignancy issues of irrepressible urgency, ranging from foreign policy to mortality.

Among Smith’s greatest feats it the systematic demolition of the the perilous and artificial divide between “high” and “low” culture. In 1978, her song “Because the Night” from the groundbreaking album Horses reached #13 on the Billboard 100 chart; in 2010, her remarkable memoir Just Kids earned her the National Book Award. William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud have inspired much of her music, which has moved generations of hearts and bodies across dance floors and mosh pits. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture; in 2006, she brought down the house at CBGB’s with an extraordinary 3½-hour masterpiece of a performance. The following year, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Allen Ginsberg once bought her a sandwich in the East Village after mistaking her for “a very pretty boy.”

In the decades between Horses (1975) and Banga (2012), Smith recorded nine other studio albums, delivered countless poetry readings, and authored a number of books, including the breathtaking The Coral Sea, which chronicles her grief over the loss of her onetime lover, lifelong friend, and comrade-in-artistic-arms Robert Mapplethorpe.

In Just Kids, which documents how Smith found her creative voice during her early life with Mapplethorpe when both were aspiring artists in New York City, she articulates the singular duality of her muse:

It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

Learn more: Just Kids | Wikipedia

For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.

In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.

But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:

A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’

Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia

Few have done more to make women feel visible, heard, and included than Mary Thom (June 3, 1944 – April 26, 2013), founding editor of legendary feminist magazine Ms. and editor-in-chief of the Women’s Media Center, the think-tank co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and reconstructionist Gloria Steinem.

In her role as editor extraordinaire, Thom deliberately avoided the limelight herself while selflessly amplifying women’s voices and championing equal rights in all aspects of life, from career to sexuality. In the very first issue of Ms., “in a campaign for honesty and freedom,” fifty-three women signed a petition stating that they had had an abortion or standing in solidarity with others who had. Long before the era of digitally-driven political transparency, Thom created a system of grading politicians and their position on reproductive rights, which went on to become one of Ms. magazine’s most popular features. What reconstructionist Ursula Nordstrom did for the voice of children’s literature, Thom did for the voice of feminism.

To honor Thom’s legacy, the Women’s Media Center has announced a Mary Thom Art of Editing Award. Steinem, Morgan, and Fonda reflected on the award and its inspiration:

A first-rate editor practices a craft demanding great skill, one that doesn’t impose external meaning or agendas on a work but elicits the content and the creator’s voice all the more clearly. Mary Thom did this and more.

For that and so much more, thank you, Mary.

Learn more: Women’s Media Center | Brain Pickings

When asked, a good portion of people would admit in charmingly sheepish self-consciousness to have at one point believed that Ray Eames (December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) was a man. Ray, of course, is not a man. She is the remarkable painter-turned-designer-and-filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, revolutionized not only the aesthetic of modernist design but also its popular understanding as an omnipresent bastion of contemporary culture.

While Charles arrived at design through architecture, Ray did through painting — and as the two intertwined their singular talents at that shared intersection, they ushered in a new era of design, pioneering not only new technologies like their now-iconic fiberglass and wire mesh chairs, but also a new ethos that held design to now-sacrosanct standards of utility underpinned by elegance, simplicity, and beauty. Their films, most notably the inventive Powers of Ten explainer of the scale of the universe (which was even turned into a flipbook), enlisted principles of design in illuminating various aspects of how the world works.

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the Eames Office at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice served as a haven for a number of notable designers, including Harry Bertoia and Gregory Ain, the Eames’s engineer during WWII, who marveled at Ray’s ability to “bring things into relation with one another [and] find the inner order in whatever she touched.”

The work and legacy of the Eameses was profiled in the wonderful PBS documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

Learn more: Eames Designs | Brain Pickings