Google celebrated the anniversary of sculptor, documentary filmmaker, and inventor Altina Schinasi’s 116th birthday on Friday with a pair of orange cat-eye glasses framed around the company’s logo.
Born on August 4, 1907, Schinasi was a native New Yorker who later studied art in Paris. She began her creative career as a window dresser for New York’s Fifth Avenue luxury storefronts.
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In her role as a window dresser, she helped Salvador Dalí to fully realize and execute his window designs at Bonwit Teller & Co. department store. She also took art classes at the Art Students League of New York, where she was instructed by artists Howard Warshaw and George Grosz, during this time.
After noticing the lack of options for women’s glasses, she invented the Harlequin-shaped, or cat-eye, glasses for which she is probably most known. One shop owner supported her invention and grabbed the rights to the frames for six months. Schinasi saw the huge success of her glasses as a must-have fashion accessory among American women in the late 1930s and ’40s.
For her invention, she was awarded Lord & Taylor’s American Design Award in 1939 and received recognition from notable magazines such as Life and Vogue.
Not unlike her iconic frames, Schinasi’s sculptures contained both refined aesthetics and functionality. Her “chairacter” sculptures, made from plaster and fiberglass, depicted figures and could be sat on by the viewer. She was also known to draw and paint.
In 1960, she ventured into filmmaking with the production of her 1960 documentary George Grosz’ Interregnum, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and honored at the Venice Film Festival.
Schinasi was actively involved in the Civil Rights campaign, having met with Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy, in an effort to secure funding for the unrealized film Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
She was also the subject of the documentary Altina (2014) and penned a memoir The Road I Have Traveled (1995).
Schinasi died at age 92 in 1999 while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Past Google doodles have honored established artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Pacita Abad. They have also been used to commemorate dates, events, and holidays.
Source: artnews.com