A Golden Triangle artist has been in the national spotlight after a sign she created for the recent women’s marches went viral.
Hayley Gilmore, a Columbus native and 2008 fine arts graduate of the Mississippi University for Women, created a design that she planned to carry at the Jackson Women’s March, putting the sign on her website for other individuals to download.
The sign became an overnight sensation with the volume of downloads crashing her website within a few days.
“By Saturday (Jan. 21) the print had spread all over Facebook and Twitter, and the site had crashed, so I had to deal with that,” Gilmore said. “I didn’t even get to go to the march because I was helping people get things printed.”
She said national media outlets soon began reaching out to her, and that she had been interviewed by the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New York Observer and Wired.
“I was not expecting it at all,” she said. “It was just insane how it spread, just in a day, really. People were sending me messages and photos from all over the world. It was wild.”
The design was created in Adobe PhotoShop, and features a 1977 promotional photo of Princess Leia, played by the recently deceased actress Carrie Fisher under the phrase “A woman’s place is in the resistance.”
“Especially during this election cycle, she (Fisher) had been so honest and open, and she was a champion for women’s rights,” Gilmore said. “When she passed away that was really hard for me, and for a lot of women. That was one of the main reasons I made the poster.”
Following the success of the print, and to a lesser extent, the three others in the series, Gilmore plans to become more politically active with her work.
“From here on out I want to get more involved, especially with women’s organizations here on a state and national level and create work that inspires more women to kind of take up the resistance and fight for what they want,” Gilmore said.