Annette Lemieux is your go-to girl for a good, wholesome protest piece.

The prime example of this is when Lemieux requested that one of her works at the Whitney be turned upside down in response to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. The work is called Left Right Left Right and depicted the raised fists of 30 people, some famous – Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, Jane Fonda, and Miss America – and some not famous, pulled from books and newspapers at the time. The fists represented how depressed and defeated she and many Americans felt after the election. This mindset didn’t just pop up when Trump was elected, though. She recalls having seen prejudice as a young girl and knowing it was wrong. She states, “I just knew that there was something wrong with [my hometown], with this type of mentality. So that fuels the work and the news fueled the work and current observations fuel the work…it’s not a pretty land.”

Born in 1957, in Norfolk, Virginia, Lemieux is the daughter of a Marine and a homemaker obsessed with antiquing. When her father was shipped off, Annette’s mother moved their family to Torrington, Connecticut, where she had grown up. After she and Annette’s father divorced, she worked in a five and dime store in order to support her children. Annette attended St. Francis of Assisi School and when she told them that she wanted to be an artist, they laughed in her face and suggested she be a secretary. She responded by burning her school uniform on graduation night. A girl after my own heart. She went on to attend University of Hartford in Connecticut, where she claims to have found her “tribe,” and it was not in the secretarial school.

Annette then she did what most young artists do. She moved to New York. She was pretty much broke at the time so to make money she apprenticed for Jack Goldstein and David Salle. From there her art took off and “she became a darling of the Manhattan media.” But then fate stepped in. In 1984, Lemieux was run down by a truck in front of the Flatiron building in Manhattan, an accident from which Lemieux took years to recover. Large scale painting, her preferred medium at the time, was no longer an option. She started working on a smaller scale with found objects, sculptures and prints. Luckily people were super into her new style and her first show back was a triumph, though Lemieux said that, “It really had no theme, no branding, as they call it today. In fact, people thought it was a group show, which it wasn’t.”

Now Lemieux has so many grants and awards under her belt that she probably couldn’t even name them all. Among these awards are grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Brown University, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ $10,000 Maud Morgan Prize. Her work has been exhibited basically everywhere and she is on par with people like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince. She currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard (pronounced *Hahh-vahd) University.