While conducting research for the Delaware Art Museum exhibition, Fraleigh came across several first-edition feminist texts from the 18th and 19th centuries with unique marbled endpapers and some with unexpected provenances. She points to one book in particular as a source of inspiration: a copy of the “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft, which featured a gift inscription to "Mrs Horace Brock with Dr Henry Biddle's respects and best wishes, January 1915". Mrs. Brock, was the President of the Pennsylvania Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and Dr. Henry Biddle was a known suffrage supporter.
Fraleigh states, “I love that this gorgeous marbled cover, from a male suffrage supporter to a female anti- suffragist, came to represent something uniquely different to both of them, and that something so benign as a marbled cover could come to be a stand in for a revolutionary subversive text."
In Fraleigh’s two newest paintings figures emerge from a similarly hand- marbled background, but at a massive scale of 5.5 x 7.5 ft. In Take root among the stars, a work whose title references Octavia Butler's novel “Parable of the Sower,” three black women loom large, emerging from the marbleized paper and communing as the mythological goddesses the Fates. In both paintings, Fraleigh presents her women as archetypal, powerful figures who share and hold knowledge.
The title of Fraleigh’s second work, With Ready Eyes, references transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller, whose book “Woman in the 19th Century” is thought to have inspired the women's suffrage movement. In Fraleigh’s composition, we see two female figures listening intently to a third figure reading aloud. Perhaps they are scheming with seditious intent or telling the tale of the hallucinatory feminist utopia that unfolds in the main gallery.
