Badaas woman #7



a man thinking not conforming

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

An artist who fights against street harassment. In Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s portfolio, you’ll find lush oil paintings of notables such as Amy Winehouse, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Fazlalizadeh also designed the City of Philadelphia’s official mural of its homegrown heroes, The Roots. Still, the Brooklyn-based image-maker is best known for her powerful posters that shame street harassers. Each piece in her series Stop Telling Women to Smile features a black-and-white drawing of an everyday woman who Fazlalizadeh has interviewed about street harassment. Underneath each portrait is a slogan such as “You are not entitled to my space,” “My outfit is not an invitation,” and, of course, “Stop telling women to smile.” Since she started the project in 2012, she and her volunteers have wheat-pasted scores of these posters on abandoned buildings and clean walls throughout Brooklyn, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Mexico City. “Women need to start talking about their daily moments because it’s the smaller stuff that affects the larger things, like rape, domestic violence, harassment in the workplace,” Fazlalizadeh told The New York Times last year. “I don’t mind being thrust into an activist role. Art is very important for that.”

a powerful Black woman who fights against street harassment,
Tatyana Fazlaizadeh by Refinery 29