I’ve written before about experiences I’ve had regarding my mother’s artwork, and women and art in general. It would seem that it is more of a rule than an exception that women’s artwork is downgraded, ignored, hijacked, or stolen by men. This tradition dates back hundreds of years. In the case of cave paintings and rock art: tens of thousands of years.

My mother Sterling Sturtevant was one of the first female animation art directors. In response to a studio-wide contest at UPA in the 1950s, she did the successful redesign of Mr. Magoo. She won Academy Awards, Cannes Golden Palms, and many other industry awards. My mother didn’t invent Magoo, but the Magoo everyone knows and loves was not only designed by her, he was based on my father.

I never knew her. My mother Sterling died of pancreatic cancer when I was three months old. I was also born three months prematurely.

I was both a late and an unexpected baby. Many times, I wonder why on earth I am here. I wonder if my mother had not stopped taking cancer treatments upon learning she was pregnant with me, whether she might not have lived many more years and created many more memorable cartoon characters and much more beautiful art.

What Does Recognition Mean, Anyway?

I worked for someone who was obsessed with public recognition and awards. My former boss wanted me to make a Wikipedia entry for her. On a daily basis as well as for short-term and longer-term goals, her primary motivation was receiving some type of recognition or award, either for herself, or organizationally.

I know a lot more about what my mother did as an animation art director by talking with animation historian Amid Amidi, corresponding with my mother’s friend Bill Melendez, the producer of the Peanuts cartoons, and being interviewed by Mindy Johnson, who is an expert in animation art history and who is writing a book about women in animation.

Mindy dropped the information on me that my father’s second wife Barbara, a lady I had barely known, was also an animation artist at UPA Studios. “Oh gee,” I told Mindy. “No, I didn’t know that.”

So, my mom had won Academy Awards, Cannes Golden Palms, and Advertising Art Directors awards for her work on short cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing, Magoo shorts, and advertisements, such as for the Ford Dog. I had a little ceramic savings bank made like the Ford Dog. I had little soft plastic Peanuts dolls with Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy, because my mom had gone to work for Charles Schulz a few months before she died.

But by the time I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles in 1996, I’d already seen Magoo VHS tapes and DVDs with my mother’s name completely removed from the credits. At this event, I was talking pleasantly with a bookseller about Magoo books that he had, and two men interrupted to tell me in loud voices that my mother could not possibly have had anything to do with Magoo: his character was invented by Jim Backus, the famous voice of Magoo. Another one chimed in with another man’s name: one of the owners of UPA Studios. These men didn’t even know the director, Pete Burness but were happy and confident to loudly proclaim I didn’t even know anything about my own mother.

Well, she had been gone a long time. And as I was only a small baby barely home from the hospital when she died: what could I say?

I have the things that were on my mother’s drawing table in her studio when she died. They are still in an archival portfolio. It’s a tiny fragment of her work. What you see now, online, because students are studying her work — these are things in the archives of the different studios: UPA, Playhouse Pictures, Charles Schulz.

I think for me, this isn’t about the recognition or awards, it’s about existence. For many decades, it seems that people were taking pieces of all of the work my mother did. For themselves. Whether to put a credit for the studio owners on a recorded tape or DVD, or to yell at someone at a convention that you know better —

It’s the same song and dance we’ve heard forever.

So, yesterday some people did something extraordinary: something I thought I would never in my lifetime see.

They put up an accurate and appropriate Wikipedia page. For my mother.

This is The Rule, But the Rule is Changing

When we see or feel change after a long time without it, it can be hard to recognize, and perhaps even to accept.

Many people, not just Amid, not just Mindy Johnson, have been researching studio archives and records to find out who really did what, when. My mom wasn’t the only female animation artist by any means. She did a good job; obviously today people love her work. Whether anybody knew she was the artist or not over the years, they were influenced by the art itself.

It seems to me to be similar to what women artists faced in prior centuries. The Dutch artist Judith Leyster’s work was credited as another, better-known artist’s — Frans Hals. If you look at the two artists’ work next to each other, it’s clear to most people the paintings are similar, but have hallmarks of different taste, emphasis and abilities. The French artist Marie-Denise Villers was a contemporary of the more famous painter Jacques-Louis David. A beautiful portrait of a thoughtful young woman painted by Villers, was credited as being by David of an “unknown woman” for years.

I never faced the discrimination and probably near-impossible work situations that my mother certainly faced working in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood animation. She was lucky she went to one of the forward-thinking studios, UPA, and on to another sophisticated and more open studio, Playhouse Pictures. I was told (apocryphally) that when she started at Disney immediately after art school, she was given responsibilities to make and deliver coffee to the male animators, who sat around and smoked cigars and drank whiskey at 9:00 a.m. in the morning. After a year, she and her friend Mr. Melendez left and went to UPA.

Losing Your Life For Your Art

I often think about all of these intertwined factors, the good along with the bad. One day while I was an art major in drawing class with my favorite art teacher and mentor Paul Darrow, who had attended Choinard Art Institute with my mother and remembered her, he brought me a copy of Art Forum with an article titled and highlighted. It told the story of many artists, particularly animators, who had worked with the early acrylic paints.

And lost their lives to pancreatic cancer.

My mother has often been described in the animation histories as a “chain smoker” and so was my father. And until June 2014, so was I.

In court, my mother’s pancreatic cancer would certainly be linked to her cigarette smoking. They would skirt the contribution of the toxic metals (cadmium) and “forever chemicals” in acrylic paints. Oh, those acrylics. So easy to use. So easy to ingest.

I was angry with my father for the better part of ten years when one day, talking about my mother’s artwork, I said, “She was so talented, Dad. I’ve got her school sketchbooks, she was 100 times better than I was. She would have been an incredible fine artist.”

“Your mother never could have made it as a fine artist,” my Dad said. And he didn’t explain.

I thought for a long time he was just saying she wasn’t good enough.

I didn’t realize that he knew everything I’ve just written here: the deck was stacked against women in fine art to the point that only the most determined and single-minded self promoter could get ahead. Anyone else would run the gantlet of users, abusers, scammers, and misogynists and would be sidetracked or sidelined along the way. My mom had a good job working for UPA and Playhouse Pictures and was in demand for animation art design. She wouldn’t have been able to move to Manhattan and work in that world.

Miracles Still Happen

Today my friend Geoff Landis showed me that more than one person had gotten together and written a truthful, accurate Wikipedia entry for my mother.

“Geoff,” I said. “That is a flat-out miracle.”

Things are changing. Maybe faster than we expect, and better than those of us in the older generation would have dared to hope.

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