Roberta Achtenberg (born July 20, 1950)

Roberta Achtenberg (born July 20, 1950) is an American politician. She currently serves as a Commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She served as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the first openly lesbian or gay public official in the United States whose appointment to a federal position was confirmed by the United States Senate.

Before becoming a public official, Achtenberg worked for more than 15 years as a civil rights attorney, nonprofit director and legal educator. Her activity included co-founding the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Achtenberg unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1988. She was elected as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1990 and resigned in 1993 when she was appointed Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by President Bill Clinton. Achtenberg left the post in 1995 to run for mayor of San Francisco. She served as Senior Vice President for Public Policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce until January 2005. In 2000, she was appointed to the Board of Trustees of California State University by Governor Gray Davis, becoming chair of the Board in May 2006.

On January 26, 2011, President Barack Obama named Achtenberg to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.



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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Achtenberg

The Democratic National Convention in New York City marked a coming of age for the movement, with 133 lesbian and gay delegates and alternates inside Madison Square Garden—and a winning candidate supporting their cause. In another testament to the establishmenfs new commitment to equal rights, the president of CNN, the executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, and the
publisher of The New York Times all served as honorary cohosts of a reception held by the National Lesbian and Gay Iournalists Association on the eve of the convention.
Roberta Achtenberg, a former head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who had become a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors- and an early Clinton supporter—and Bob Hattoy, a gay environmental lobbyist suffering from AIDS, both addressed the convention. When Hattoy exhorted the hall to “`vote this year as if our lives depended on it,” there were tears in the eyes of many delegates. And after a last minute intervention by the gay adviser David Mixner, Clinton included gays in his list of those groups deemed outcasts in the politics of division.
Outside of the military, Bill Clinton completed the decades-long process of prohibiting discrimination against gay people in every other federal agency. He also appointed nearly a hundred open lesbians and gay men to his administration, including Roberta Achtenberg,
who became an assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Despite lesse Helms’s attacks on her as a “damn lesbian,” she was easily confirmed by the Senate by a vote of fifty-eight to thirty-one. --The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser.

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Yannis Tsarouchis (January 13, 1910 – July 20, 1989)

Yannis Tsarouchis (13 January 1910 – 20 July 1989) was a Greek painter.

Born in Piraeus, he studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1929–1935). He was also a student of Photios Kontoglou, who introduced him to Byzantine iconography, while he also studied popular architecture and dressing customs. Together with Dimitris Pikionis, Kontoglou and Angeliki Hatzimichali he led the movement for the introduction of Greek tradition in painting.

From 1935 to 1936 he visited Istanbul, Paris and Italy. He came in contact with the Renaissance art and Impressionism. He discovered the works of Theophilos Hatzimihail and met influential artists such as Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti.

He returned to Greece in 1936 and two years later he produced his first personal exhibition in Athens. He later fought in the Greco-Italian War in 1940. In 1949, he and other artists, including Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Yannis Moralis, Nikos Nikolaou, Nikos Engonopoulos and Panayiotis Tetsis, established the "Armos" art group. In 1951 he had exhibitions in Paris and London. In 1958 he participated in the Venice Biennale. In 1967 he moved to Paris.

He filled his canvases with images of vulnerable men and (to a much lesser extent) strong women.

In 1982 the Yannis Tsarouchis Museum in Maroussi, Athens, was inaugurated. The Museum is actually hosted in the house of the artist. There is also the Tsarouchis Foundation.

He died in Athens in 1989.



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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yannis_Tsarouchis

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More Artists at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Art