March Ends, But Their Work Does Not: Women of the Village
March, which is celebrated as Women’s History Month, comes to a close. But the women who shaped the Village do not fade with the calendar. Their work was never seasonal. It was lived, carved into streets, studios, stages, and sidewalks. What they made still moves through the neighborhood, if you slow down enough to notice.
Helen Levitt, the quiet witness of the streets
Helen Levitt did not chase spectacle. She followed life as it unfolded. In the streets South of Union Square, she found her subjects in children at play, chalk drawings fading into pavement, neighbors passing each other without ceremony. Nothing staged. Nothing forced.
Her camera worked like memory. Quick, attentive, human. She captured the small theater of the city, moments that would have disappeared without her. A girl mid-laugh. A boy balancing on a stoop. Chalk figures that would be gone with the next rain. These were not grand scenes, but they carried truth.
Levitt helped define what street photography could be. Not distant observation, but intimacy. Not perfection, but presence. Through her lens, the Village becomes less of a place and more of a living rhythm.
Read more about her life and work here: Helen Levitt: South of Union Square Poet Laureate of Photography
Selma Hortense Burke, shaping form and future.
At 88 East 10th Street, Selma Hortense Burke built more than sculpture. She built space. A place to work, to teach, to insist on presence in a world that often tried to deny it.
Her hands shaped figures with weight and dignity. Her influence extended beyond her own work into the lives of the artists she mentored. She did not separate creation from responsibility. Both mattered.
Selma Hortense Burke with her relief plaque of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, National Museum of the U.S. Navy via the Government and Heritage Library of the State Library of North Carolina; 88 East 10th Street
(A) Selma Hortense Burke with her portrait bust of Booker T. Washington, 1930s, Smithsonian Archive of American Art (B) U.S. Dime, 2017
Her legacy stands in what she made, and in who she lifted.
Read her full story here: Groundbreaking Artist and Educator Selma Hortense Burke’s Home at 88 East 10th Street
Peggy Bacon, drawing the world as it was
Peggy Bacon, photo by Peter A. Juley & Son; Peggy Bacon painted by Alexander Brook
Peggy Bacon had a way of seeing people clearly, sometimes uncomfortably so. Her illustrations and writing captured the personalities shaping American modernism, not with reverence, but with precision.
She was part of the scene, not standing outside it. Her work documented a turning point in art, where experimentation and identity collided. She drew what she saw, and what she saw was honest.
Peggy Bacon, “Lady Artist,” 1925, etching on white wove paper, Brooklyn Museum
Peggy Bacon, “Aesthetic Pleasure,” 1936, drypoint; Peggy Bacon, “The Chosen Few,” 1972, lithograph
Read more about Peggy Bacon here: The Birthplace of American Modernism
Martha Graham, rewriting movement
Martha Graham (A) Portrait of Martha Graham by Paul R. Meltsner, 1938 (b)
Martha Graham (1894–1991) changed how the body speaks. Over more than 70 years, she built a new language of movement rooted in tension, release, and emotion.
Her work was shaped in Greenwich Village, where her studio at 66 Fifth Avenue sat within a community alive with art and activism. That energy carried into pieces like Chronicle, which responded to war and political unrest with urgency and force.
Martha Graham, Heretic, 1929
Graham rejected the distance of traditional ballet. She turned inward, using the body to express conflict, desire, and strength. Her choreography often drew from mythology, but she shifted the focus to women, complex, flawed, and powerful at the center of their own stories.
Her influence still moves through dance today. Not as tradition, but as foundation.
Read more about Martha Graham and women’s history South of Union Square here: Martha Graham: Dancer of the Century
These women did not wait for recognition. They worked anyway. They built anyway. They created something that outlasted the moment.
The Village still carries them. In its texture. In its contradictions. In its refusal to be one thing.
March ends. Their work does not.
If you want to understand this place, start with them. Then keep going.
Many of these women appear on a list of 22 unprotected women’s history sites within our proposed South of Union Square Historic District, urging city officials to act on preserving them. Since we’ve done so, one has been landmarked, with no action — or even sign of possible action — on any of the remaining locations. This failure to recognize and protect women’s history is unacceptable.