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The Girl I Left Behind Me
Born: Lovell, Maine 1824
Died: New York, New York 1906
oil on canvas 42 x 34 7/8 in. (106.7 x 88.7 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase made possible in part by Mrs. Alexander Hamilton Rice in memory of her husband and by Ralph Cross Johnson
Smithsonian American Art Museum 2nd Floor, East Wing
Exhibition Label
Gallery Label
Eastman Johnson imagined a soldier's wife standing on the hill where they parted. The crimson lining of her wind-whipped cape suggests their passionate love for one another, while her wedding ring, appearing almost at the center of the painting, ensures the young bride's devotion. Johnson had witnessed the Battle of Manassas in 1862, and the painting's title refers to an old Irish song that became a popular regimental ballad during the Civil War. His viewers might have recalled the lyrics: My mind her full image retainsWhether asleep or awaken'd hope to see my jewel againFor her my heart is breaking.Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Artwork Description
The Civil War defined America and forever changed American art. American artists of this era could not depict the conflict using the conventions of European history painting, which glamorized the hero on the battlefield. Instead, America's finest painters captured the transformative impact of the war. Through landscapes and genre paintings, these artists gave voice to the nation's highest ideals and deepest concerns — illustrating a time that has been described as the second American Revolution.
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Commemorative Guide. Nashville, TN: Beckon Books, 2015.
Figure female
United States
State of being
Born: Lovell, Maine 1824
Died: New York, New York 1906
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Hi y'all! I'm Tami. Thanks for stopping by! Do you want to know a little more about me?
Well grab a cup of coffee and pull up a comfy chair because I like to talk a lot ... maybe a little too much sometimes. If you stick around for any length of time you will find that out very quickly.&
Anyway, let me get to the point.
I'm a Texas girl, born and raised. But a little something called the USMC has had me living away from my beloved home state for over 15 years now. First in North Carolina, then in Africa (YES- Africa!!) and then the Middle East. After three years overseas, we lived in sunny San Diego for another 3. We are finally back where we started our married life together: North Carolina. We've been back just under a year and we are loving it.&
I married the love of my life (and high school sweetheart) at the tender age of 19. Yes, yes I know. I was super young. But guess what? Here we are 15 later and we are still going strong!&
We have two beautiful daughters, Emerson and Adelyn. Emerson is 5 and in Kindergarten. She's tenderhearted, loves to draw, and she has a smile that will light up a room.&
Adelyn is 3 and she is our spitfire. She gets into everything and can't leave a room without making a mess but man she can make us laugh. She's a&cuddle bug and a wild child rolled into one.
I've been a stay at home mom since Emerson was born and it has been such a blessing to our family.&&It's&definitely not always easy but I'm so thankful for the time I've had with my sweet girls. Big changes are happening for our family in 2017 and I can't wait to share more about that with you very soon. :) In the meantime, feel free to take a look around and learn more about me and my sweet little family.
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I'm Tami. Marine wife and momma to two precious girls. I love Jesus, coffee, crafting and the occasional workout. Join me as I share our little moments.
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Copyright ©114网址导航The Woman Behind the Scenes - Education Week
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Published in Print: October 6, 2004, as The Woman Behind the Scenes
The Woman Behind the Scenes
Meet Nancy Noeske, a headhunter for big-city school districts searching for leaders.
Nancy R. Noeske monitors the scene in the Hilton Garden Inn’s sun-drenched lobby like a watchful parent. Over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and turkey sausage, she strains her neck, anticipating the arrival of the four anxious candidates to be this city’s next schools chief.
“There’s Sheila,” Noeske says, swiftly excusing herself from the restaurant table. She greets Sheila M. Austin, the chief of staff for the Toledo, Ohio, public schools, with a reassuring smile. One by one, the other candidates arrive and are quickly spirited away by car for a 14-hour marathon of interviews and public appearances.
The aspirants are front and center on this September day in Alabama’s state capital, but it’s Noeske who has carefully shepherded the complex process from its inception to these final chapters. Increasingly, school boards nationwide are turning to headhunters like Noeske to unearth superintendent candidates to solve every problem, from the achievement gap to labor-management woes.
Gone are the days when boards simply placed advertisements in trade publications and newspapers and waited for a flood of résumés in the mail. While people debate whether the pool of applicants has dried to a puddle, there’s no disagreement that districts have to work hard to hire top-notch superintendents.
So executive search firms have taken the offensive. Recruiters send e-mails and letters, make telephone calls, and conduct detective work. They’ll track potential superintendent candidates for years, watching their careers from afar, poised to pounce when the right opportunity emerges.
On the job: Nancy Noeske, a headhunter for urban school boards looking for superintendents, uses a network of contacts to turn up qualified candidates.
—Allison Shelley/Education Week
Noeske, a former Milwaukee science teacher, has done 18 superintendent searches and built a reputation as an aggressive, effective recruiter of both women and candidates of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Three years ago, she struck out on her own, founding proact Search to specialize in finding big-city superintendents.
“I’ve always been good at finding the right person for the right job at the right time,” says Noeske, who wears oversize gold-rimmed glasses and has a penchant for sparkling jewelry. “You make mistakes along the way, but you get to the point where nobody can really fool you.”
As the hunt for a superintendent for the 32,500-student Montgomery public schools was under way, Noeske was wrapping up a long and difficult search for the District of Columbia’s next superintendent. And she was hired by the St. Louis school board to find that city’s schools a new leader.
“Every superintendent search is different,” says Noeske, who hasn’t lost the soothing schoolteacher tone in her voice. “And they’re all plagued with problems. But you know, you work through them. And everybody stays happy.
“Well,” she adds, pausing, “most of the time.” She lets out a deep laugh.
One part sleuth. Two parts adviser. Three parts psychologist. Add a hint of peacemaker and a dash of politician. That’s Noeske’s recipe for a recruiter.
Search firms traditionally have been run by men—most of them former superintendents or university professors. But Noeske’s route to recruiting was almost accidental.
After spending almost two decades in education, she launched a second career handling communications and community-building for Wisconsin Power and Electric in 1979. She put off retirement in 1994 to serve as the Milwaukee school board’s liaison to then-Superintendent Howard L. Fuller. Later, she helped the district work with a private company as it sought Fuller’s replacement. Noeske eventually joined that firm to lead executive searches in education, before founding her own company in 2001.
She employs nine staff members and contracts with current or former educators, charging up to $45,000 a search, plus expenses. She says she often forgoes a salary from the firm.
“I don’t have to work,” says Noeske, who is in her 60s and wears five gold rings, none of them a wedding ring. (The timing was never right, she later explains.) “But I’ve always had this drive, this idea, that I could do better than I’ve done before.”
Superintendent searches are high-stakes affairs. If it’s a good match, a school system can see its fortunes improve and an educator’s reputation soar. A bad match can lead to a messy divorce.
“Every search is a competition—like running a race,” says William J. Attea, a founder of the Glenview, Ill.-based Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, one of the nation’s largest education search firms. “We want to do it right. We want to win. By winning, it’s putting someone in there who’s going to succeed.”
“We recognize it’s tough work,” Attea says. “Sometimes people say we’re crazy.”
Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest city school systems, says Noeske is “very hands-on, and in that case, it gives her firm an edge.”
Superintendent searches are high-stakes affairs. If it’s a good match, a school system can see its fortunes improve and an educator’s reputation soar.
Observers say Noeske’s not out to find jobs for friends. Her supporters point to her down-to-earth, straightforward ability to communicate as a strength, describing her as knowledgeable but not all-knowing, firm but not abrasive.
“She’s been universally received here,” says Dave Borden, a Montgomery school board member. “And for a woman from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to be universally received in Montgomery, Alabama—that’s saying something.”
Noeske’s searches haven’t been without controversy. Determined to keep candidates’ identities concealed for as long as the law allowed, Noeske and the Cincinnati school board conducted a top-secret search in 2002. The local newspaper unsuccessfully sued both Noeske and the board for what it charged were violations of its First Amendment right to freedom of the press.
“We all respect that the public needs to know,” Noeske says, while adding that she always carries a paper Pick’n Save grocery bag to place over candidates’ heads. (She hasn’t had to use it yet.) “The question is, when does the public need to know?”
The months-long search for a superintendent in the District of Columbia this year was plagued by a threatened mayoral takeover of the schools, media leaks, and failed public flirtations with former New York City Schools Chancellor Rudolph F. Crew and former Long Beach, Calif., schools chief Carl A. Cohn. Noeske was forced to try to salvage the search, recruiting a second slate of prospective hires.
By the time Clifford B. Janey, the former Rochester, N.Y. superintendent, was hired last month for the job in Washington, Noeske sounded weary but relieved during a telephone conversation from her Milwaukee office.
“The whole issue of trust—that’s what drives candidates away,” she says.
Noeske’s search in Montgomery had rocky beginnings.
Poised to promote a district administrator to replace its retiring superintendent this past May, the school board came under fire from city residents and district employees and even faced an unsuccessful lawsuit to block the decision.
Accused of trying to “appoint and anoint” a white assistant superintendent without considering a racially varied pool of applicants, the seven-person Montgomery school board reversed itself over the summer and announced plans for a national search. More than 75 percent of the district’s students are African-American. The district has never been led by a minority superintendent.
But doubts lingered about the caliber of candidate the Alabama district could attract. With a star already in town, credited with boosting reading scores, why look elsewhere? Could the board be trusted to conduct a fair and racially inclusive search? Tommie L. Miller, the school board chairman, says: “My only concern, frankly, was that we would get the also-rans and the has-beens looking for some place to land and cruise into retirement.”
Over lunch at Bistro Bis in Washington, Noeske chats with Russell A. Smith, left, the executive director of the District of Columbia school board, and policy analyst Eric S. Lerum. The difficult search for a schools chief there took months.
—Allison Shelley/Education Week
Instead, Montgomery had its pick of 39 highly qualified candidates, many with doctorates and connections to the city or state. Noeske delivered the diversity that the board sought: Nearly two-thirds of the applicants were members of racial or et 31 percent were women. Of the finalists, two were black women and two were white men.
“This is a case where we can’t go wrong,” says Ann Sippial, the local staff representative for the Montgomery County Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association.
Noeske prides herself on tailoring each search to the client’s needs. Lengthy discussions with school board members, community and business leaders, parents, and teachers help her craft a detailed candidate profile to help screen applicants.
Borden, the school board member, stresses that the relationship between the board and the headhunter is crucial when part of the search is conducted in private, to shield candidates’ identity and protect them from ramifications in their current jobs.
“The search firm is more knowledgeable and has a better background on the candidates than you do,” Borden says.
After the first series of private interviews with nine superintendent hopefuls, Borden says he clashed with Noeske because he felt she was advocating for certain candidates to be brought back for the public phase of the search. Borden wonders: “Where does the board’s role pick up and the search firm’s end?”
Noeske bristles at the suggestion that she favors one candidate over another. “I can’t make a decision for the board,” she says later, back in her Milwaukee office. “But I don’t want them to make a mistake and eliminate someone for the wrong reason.”
The morning of the first round of interviews, members of the Montgomery school board are visibly impressed by their “Final Four.”
The exhausting itinerary for each hopeful resembles the jam-packed class schedule of an overachieving high school senior: Candidate No. 1 meets with the superintendent’s staff. Candidate No. 2 meets with the school board. Candidate No. 3 meets with principals. Candidate No. 4 meets with the mayor of Montgomery.
Every hour, the candidates switch and shuffle off to the next phase of the public round-robin tournament. Following a brief lunch with board members, there’s a school visit, interviews with the local media, a pta reception, and a community forum. The next day, meetings with business leaders, county commissioners, and education foundation representatives are on tap.
Gone are the days when boards simply placed advertisements in trade publications and newspapers and waited for a flood of résumés in the mail.
At first, the board interviews are a tightly scripted affair, with board members relying mainly on suggested questions written by Noeske. But some members have their own priorities: Student discipline. Magnet schools. And Noeske grows frustrated when members don’t ask the same questions of all the candidates, which she sees as an issue of fairness.
Once each interview ends, Noeske bends over the seated candidate and delivers her assessment of the performance in a whisper. All did well, but one candidate spoke in a monotone voice. Another talked too much about the candidate’s current district and how things were done there.
Arnold Woodrow Carter, the deputy superintendent of the Oakland, Calif., public schools, says that after his first interview with board members in August, Noeske encouraged him to be more concise and stay on point. “Those little tweaks make all the difference,” Carter says.
Clear favorites emerge when the candidates go before board members the second day. Some sit through a grilling, while others are tossed softball questions. Noeske signals one board member to move along when her comments veer toward an endorsement.
“I want to thank you for opening my mind and making me think outside the box,” Vickie Jernigan, the board’s vice chairwoman, tells candidate Paul M. Hankins, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who serves as a consultant to the city government and the chamber of commerce.
Noeske sighs.
Later, over plates of fried green tomatoes and salads at a local eatery, three school board members dream the impossible with Noeske. The day-and-a-half interview process is finally over, but the candidates’ words still echo in their heads. Do you think we could get two of them, they ask Noeske—a superintendent and an assistant superintendent? Word is that two of the candidates are having lunch together.
Instead, the school board makes history Sept. 23 and unanimously appoints Carlinda Purcell as Montgomery’s next schools chief, pending contract negotiations. Purcell, the associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Cumberland County schools in Fayetteville, N.C., will be the first woman and first African-American to lead the district.
Satisfied that another search is over and elated about the consensus vote, Noeske has moved on to tackle the St. Louis job. Last week, she packed her battered suitcases for yet another round of forums and meetings.
“I’m going to end my life running down an airport concourse, trying to catch a flight,” she says with a laugh.
Coverage of leadership is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at .
PHOTO: During a school tour, Nancy Noeske, center rear, peers out from behind Carlinda Purcell, a candidate for the superintendency of the Montgomery, Ala., schools.
—Jamie Martin for Education Week
PHOTO: Above, Noeske talks to Tommie L. Miller and Vickie Jernigan, members of the Montgomery school board, during a PTA reception for the four finalists to head the city’s schools.
PHOTO: During a business trip to the District of Columbia this past summer, Noeske is interviewed by phone from her room at the Phoenix Park Hotel for a job helping the Houston school district find a new superintendent. She doesn’t get the contract.
—Allison Shelley/Education Week
Vol. 24, Issue 06, Pages 27-29
September 15, 2004.
September 8, 2004.
June 23, 2004.
June 16, 2004.
February 25, 2004.
February 11, 2004.
January 7, 2004.
April 16, 2003.
October 2, 2002.
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read .
, the company founded by Nancy Noeske, describes its .
, one of the largest education search firms, posts a list of its .
for superintendents.
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June 25, 2005
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Pamela Rabe in the play Woman-Bomb.Photo: Supplied
Ivana Sajko's work is highly political, which is not
surprising given that she grew up in war-torn Croatia,  writes
Susan Shineberg.
As might be expected of a young Croatian playwright, 29-year-old
Ivana Sajko's work is highly political. Her play, Woman
Bomb, which will be performed in English for the first time
tonight at the Malthouse, is an electrifying and convulsive
monologue from a suicide bomber in the last minutes before the
explosion.
Ivana Sajko is a striking figure, clad in comfortable, flowing
clothes, her tall, slim frame elegantly folded into her wooden
"writer's chair". This is her haven, where she comes to escape the
noisy capital of Zagreb, with its constant thunder of passing
traffic and disco music from the clubs. Her small apartment is
crammed with microphones and lights - her partner is an
installation artist - CDs and books.
By contrast, the steep meandering lanes and cobbled squares of
Rovinj, an old baroque city on the Croatian coast, offer a serene
glimpse into past centuries. Sajko's large, virtually empty attic
room here - the picture-book writer's garret - offers a splendid
view over the small harbour, which is dotted with fishing boats and
And beyond an extensive garden is the old city dominated by St
Euphemia, one of Croatia's oldest baroque churches. Atop the spire,
the city's patron saint turns on a spindle, showing sailors the
direction of the wind.
Although at this moment it's not exactly quiet in the attic.
Seagulls screech loudly as they circle and swoop overhead. "Chaos
follows me everywhere," says Sajko laughing, and brushing aside a
mass of long auburn hair. "I have two special wooden chairs for
when I write, one in Zagreb and one here in R they have to be
very comfortable because I'm so thin. And as a truly obsessive
person, I don't like anyone sitting on them except me. My other
fetish is the music stand. I approach the text as a musical score.
Sometimes I put a text on the stand and sing it, or scream it, or
do all kinds of voice and melodic modulation with it. This helps me
return my sentences back to my body. When I read or perform
publicly, I always ask for a music stand."
when there are no rehearsals she
writes every morning from eight until one or two o'clock.
"I set aside time for thinking then, too. I drink tea and read
theory - not newspapers - in preparation for writing," she says.
"It's a sort of brain gymnastics."
The rest of the day is consumed with Sajko's many other
activities. She is a guest lecturer at the Zagreb Academy of
Dramatic Arts, the editor of an international contemporary
performing arts magazine, Frakcija, and a director and
dramaturge of her theatre group BADCo, which she co-founded in
2000. Her company has toured throughout Europe and she has given
countless theatre workshops for other dramaturges and performers.
She writes on performance research for several international
magazines, and has collaborated with many other theatre groups and
artists, including Australian director Barrie Kosky, who remembers
her as "very charismatic, very complex, outspoken and stylish".
"Stage performance is tremendously important for me," says
Sajko, "although my work as a theoretician is fundamental, too. But
when I write I always use the experiences I have as a performer and
director. For example, the feeling of exhaustion during the rapid
speaking of lines gives me a physical experience which I can later
produce in text that I write, knowing that it will not only have
structural but also emotional value while being performed." Her
brow furrows as she articulates the process. "And vice versa,
thinking about the body of text I can understand my own presence on
stage and the layers I multiply there - as a writer, a performer,
as a character." Her intensity suddenly evaporates as she laughs.
"Rather a schizoid condition sometimes."
Sajko's generation grew up in the air-raid shelters of Zagreb.
"We were listening to the new chart entries on the radio together
with the alarms," she says matter-of-factly. "I tried my first
drugs while waiting for the we were
demonstrating in the streets. Many of the boys went to war, and
when they came back they were shooting off guns in the disco clubs
and carrying bombs in their jeans. It was a strange period, with
values turned upside down."
By the late '80s, Croatia was in political turmoil and the fall
of the Berlin Wall was just one more trigger that intensified the
desire for national independence.
"But the war came so quickly after the wall fell that the event
paled in comparison to the butchering of thousands and thousands of
people in a country that has fewer citizens than that of Berlin,"
says Sajko. "Can you imagine that intense proximity to death?"
During the '90s, under the authoritarian, nationalistic
government of Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's cultural institutions came
under aesthetical and political pressure from the regime,
engendering in turn a highly politicised and vibrant independent
arts scene. Sajko and her young contemporaries launched "Project
Buffalo" during the turbulent election campaign of October
"The city was plastered with election posters," recalls Sajko,
"and we put up our own posters of heads with horns, no text or
anything, we put them everywhere, even on statues of national Croat
heroes." She smiles. "Perhaps it doesn't sound like much but you
can't imagine the outcry, the reaction they produced in that kind
of charged environment. It was actually quite dangerous for
The arts scene that grew out of these initial alternative
sources is today very vivid and active. "In Zagreb, for example,
there is a great number of interesting choreographers, many very
serious platforms for performance research, as well as a highly
informed and curious audience.
"There's strong support for non-commercial projects and critical
approaches to art and exploration, and we do a lot of
co-productions with groups in other countries."
Sajko's writing reflects all of this and is well represented by
the subject matter and delivery of Woman Bomb, in which the
protagonist struggles with all kinds of moral and practical issues.
"Any act of rebellion, from terrorism to the national fight for
freedom, provokes the question 'is it an act of heroism or an act
of pure aggression and evil?' It was the question I asked myself
while growing up, while writing Woman Bomb. Who possesses
the truth? And almost always, it's the one who possesses power."
The hazel eyes flash. "That's what I learnt. Truth changes,
depending on need."
Sajko leans back in her chair, more reflective now. "I also
learnt to respect life. You know, it's a very luxurious position to
be able to lament wars, conflicts, traumas, fear, Yugoslavia, Iraq
and so on, from a sober and intellectually balanced position. But
there is a different point of view, that of being inside.
There are hundreds of consequences you can draw from that
experience. One of those is being forced to inflict hurt, or being
forced to live in circumstances that humiliate you, or - and this
is a very important issue - being forced to hate, and desperately
trying not to.
"There are two driving forces in my writing, and they are
equally important to me," Sajko says. "The first is a structural
exploration, to challenge my own means of expression and break
through norms or a priori structures. The second is my need to
understand the world and position myself in society. The questions
I ask are always very basic - is it possible to be free? Is it
possible to love? Is it possible to live - forever?"
Sajko's writing offers a different kind of theatre from the
heart of Eastern Europe, a different perspective from that of most
Australians. As it happens, she's been to Australia once before, in
1999 while still a student, gaining a, well, rather limited view of
the Antipodes. "We went to Townsville," she says, dissolving into
laughter. "People couldn't believe it - 'you only went to
Townsville?' We were at a festival of playwrights there. I was
completely lost, it was crazy. Then we went to an island - but I
was totally broke. It was just wild, the people I met. A really
crazy two weeks."
This time Sajko will visit Melbourne and Sydney and give talks
in both cities. She knows that Melbourne has the reputation of
having a strong theatrical tradition and is keen to compare it with
what her Croatian compatriots now enjoy, as the wounds of war
slowly heal. Though she has little time for those of her
compatriots who succumb to the role of "victim".
"I teach at the academy of dramatic arts and I have these
students who are the children of the generation that doesn't really
exist anymore - in that they are the product of a thinking that is
lazy. Yes, it' in a sense it's very
easy to be the victim, you know, because then you have an excuse
for everything, not to undertake anything.
"There's mainstream theatre in Zagreb, like any normal city,"
she says. "Things are functioning there like everywhere else in
Europe, the arts are funded by the ministry of culture and city
councils. But the independent scene is far more interesting and
Previews of Woman Bomb tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday
at the Malthouse Theatre. The performance opens on Wednesday. The
season runs until July 17.
Sajko will give a talk tomorrow at 2.30pm (with music stand)
at the Malthouse. Inquiries phone . Her partner, Goran
Petercol, a well-known installation artist in Europe, has an
exhibition at RMIT.
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