Duane Bryers grew up in rural Minnesota and worked in the circus, painted murals, and sculpted giant ice figures before becoming most well-known for creating Hilda, a voluptuous pinup girl in the mid-1950s. Before becoming known as the "Norman Rockwell of pinup art," Bryers won 2nd place and $150 in the Proctor & Gamble National Soap Sculpture competition for carving a woman out of a single bar of Ivory soap in the late 1930s and started his girlie art career painting sexy ladies on the sides of military aircraft and went on to create poster art and comic strips for the air base.
After working as a commercial artist in Chicago and moving to New York to pursue his fine art career, "I got the idea for a plumpy gal pinup and thought I'd like to make it into a calendar series," Bryers said in an interview with the Arizona Daily Star in 2012. "But how was I going to sell a plump girl?" He took his series to Brown & Bigelow, then the country's top calendar maker, and "they reluctantly put it in the line and figured it would last a short time," he said. "It went on for 36 years."
My own body positive take on this Hilda image, swapping out her diet book for the much more radical and feminist Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Dr. Linda Bacon.
Hilda calendars were the most popular in the 1960s, surprisingly, but waned in the early 80s and were almost forgotten until someone recently dug them up from the archives and collective memories of Americans. According to Bryers, Hilda was a mash-up of several larger models he'd worked with over the years and his own imagination, hence her imagery and features varying quite a bit from image to image and her face and body varying from calendar to calendar.
While Hilda was laughing at the comics, I'm getting a chuckle from a 2006 article from the Idaho Statesman calling me a mix between Cyndi Lauper and "I Love Lucy" as a quirky and powerful new curator at the Boise Art Museum.
There are at least a hundred images of Hilda resurfacing from over the years and they are all silly and cute and feature her in a bikini doing a variety of sweet, sexy and often clumsy things. Her imagery has been shared repeatedly in fat activist/body positive circles and pages and posted on my wall and private messaged to me over the past few years, as news of her existence was shocking and celebratory. Here was a body that looked more like mine than many others I'd ever seen revered as something sexy enough to be on a flirty calendar. Her imagery has been a positive breath of fresh air in the body shame and sex shame filled media we've been used to consuming for so long.
I've written before about my love of using self-portraits and social media as a radical tool in the feminist revolution over the past few years and I thought Hilda's imagery could use a little more feminism and body positivity. So using things I had around the house, my tripod, my iPhone timer and a few supplies I purchased at the Dollar Tree down the street (plus a few $2.99 watermelons from Trader Joe's!), I embarked on a little fun summer project recreating some of her most iconic images.
Much like the art of Norman Rockwell, Bryers' Hilda reminds us of playful, sweet, and carefree days gone by. But she recalls more than that, too. Hilda shows us that at some time someone else found big girls' curves sensual, silliness sexy, softness endearing, confidence bold and bare skin beautiful. And that maybe, just maybe, we can find that in ourselves, too.
Thanks to Dr. Brown for his help snapping this pic on the top of Bogus Basin on the eve of our 17th wedding anniversary with beers, a lotta wind, and too many cars for the stripping down roadside I did. Also thanks to my friend Angie for bringing the plus-sized jeggings to our annual Boise Rad Fat Collective clothing swap that I cut up for this outfit.
(Scroll down for more fun with Hilda. You didn't think I'd stop with just FIVE recreations did you?! She's too good and it's too much fun. All photos mine, all images of Hilda courtesy a Google images search for Hilda pinup, copyright with Brown & Bigelow)
While I totally believe plumbing can be fun, I'm really into reading feminist texts these days and the just-released Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement by Charlotte Cooper is next up on my summer reading list.
While the rest of my family are stellar skiers, I hate being cold. Much like Hilda, I'm pretty clumsy, but I'd most likely screw up my foot/ankle hiking in the Foothills than gliding down the mountain. Reading The Hiker's Guide to Greater Boise by Scott Marchant.
When you live on an urban farmette and your friendly yard animals consist of three wily chickens, a kitten, bees, a hummingbird and squirrels, these critters were the most willing to sit still and listen to cautionary tales of the king of the neighborhood - the raccoon.
>>>> This project has turned into a long time love affair with Hilda and re-creating her images. They have become a fun and beloved part of my activism and you can see all the new Hildas as they are posted both here on my website and here on my Facebook page. Also Café Mom wrote a piece about this series when it first began which you can read here. And my Reviving Hilda project recently got a BUNCH on international press during the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020 - you can find links to it in all sorts of languages here. I also started a plus-sized pinup calendar with these images in 2018 and the proceeds fund my body image camps and classes for girls and teens in Idaho!