Commission on Women in the Profession

American Bar Association

Margaret Brent Award was commissioned in 1991 to honor and celebrate the accomplishments of women lawyers.  The work is representative of the precarious and fragile balance of justice.  Two beveled pieces of clear glass, representing the balance of justice through their angled shapes, intersect a pyramid filled with shards of glass.  There is a half round piece of mirror on each inside face of the pyramid halves and the work sits on a mirrored base.  The mirrored base brings the two half circles together into a whole.  Glass is a unique material in that is both delicate and strong, vulnerable yet structural.  The award visualizes the strength of women in the profession and their ability to create wholeness from the fragility that is life and the law.

Past recipients include:  Hillary Rodham Clinton, Janet Reno, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bella Abzug, Anita F. Hill, among others.

The Appreciation Gift is awarded each year to those who have served the Commission on Women in the Profession in an exemplary way.  The work represents the individual as a pyramid filled with fragile shards of glass rising above the chaos of an environment of broken glass.

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Pro Bono Publico

The Pro Bono Publico Award is awarded to individual attorneys who do not obtain their income delivering legal service to the poor.  The work is entitled “Growth Through Protection”.  The triangle is the most structurally stable of the geometric forms.  Because of its structural integrity, the shape is seen repeatedly in built forms from vernacular tents to contemporary industrial urban architecture.  Used in the Pro Bono Award the “house” of glass represents the strength though protection while expressing the fragility and vulnerability of that protection through its transparency.  The form the glass structure is protecting is one which represents growth.  The triangular shape appears to be growing from an asymmetrical to a fully upright balanced solid form.  While the glass house offers real protection it does not shadow the figure it is sheltering but allows a full view of the world around in which we all must live and be responsible for.  The house and figure sit on a mirrored platform rendering the sculptural forms as complete within themselves as well as part of the world around.  The growing forms are solid aluminum, protected by a beveled glass house, all on a glass platform mounted on a stainless steel base to be engraved.

© 2001 Joy Wulke