I discovered Judith Love Cohen through my crush on Jack Black. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. But what started as a fun celebrity rabbit hole stopped me cold when I learned who his mother was and what she had done with her life.
In late 2024, I started reading about her. The more I read, the less I could put it down.
Judith Love Cohen was an aerospace engineer who worked on NASA’s Apollo 13 abort guidance system – the backup system that helped bring those astronauts home alive. She went to her office the day she went into labor with Jack. Took a problem she was working on to the hospital. Called her boss afterward to tell him she’d solved it. Oh, and the baby was born too.
That’s a remarkable woman. But it wasn’t what made me pick up a brush.
What got me was the books.
After retiring from engineering, Cohen’s husband – a fourth-grade teacher – noticed something that broke his heart a little. When he asked his students about their futures, his male students reached for the sky. His female students reached for the floor. He told his wife.
She looked at what existed for those girls and decided to build what didn’t. Together, they created a publishing house from scratch and put books in girls’ hands that said: you can do this. You can be a woman engineer. You can be a woman astronomer. You can be anything.
She was a girl’s girl. Plain and simple.
I knew I had to paint her.
The painting is called Tribute. It’s 72×96 inches – big, the way I work – acrylic on canvas. It depicts a woman standing in darkness, blowing stardust into the sky. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are hidden in the night sky above her. I hide things in my paintings.
Stars, silhouettes, structures. Things that reveal themselves only to the people willing to really look. I painted those constellations for Judith because she spent her life doing exactly that – hiding possibility in plain sight for the girls who were willing to look for it.
When I finished it, I cried.
Because it wasn’t just a tribute to her. It was a tribute to all of the women who have stood up for and supported the dreams of other women. We stand on the shoulders of the women who came before us. I have always believed that.
My grandmother was one of those women. Sassy, fierce, completely convinced that the women around her were capable of more than the world was telling them. She believed in me before I believed in myself. I think about her every time I paint.
Judith Love Cohen never met my grandmother. But I think they would have recognized each other immediately. That particular kind of woman always does – the ones who refuse to let other women shrink, who find the girls whose dreams are getting smaller and quietly, fiercely push back.
Mother’s Day is complicated for a lot of us. It’s not always about the woman who raised you. Sometimes it’s about the women who showed you what was possible. The ones who built something so the next girl wouldn’t have to start from nothing. The ones who went to work in labor and solved the problem and then had the baby, because that’s just who they were.
Judith Love Cohen saved three astronauts and then spent the rest of her life trying to save girls from a world that was telling them to dream smaller.
Tribute is my thank you. To her. To my grandmother. To every woman whose shoulders I’m standing on.
They taught us to look up. The least we can do is stay looking.
Name: Cheryl Russell
Professional Title: Artist
Bio: Cheryl Russell is a Houston abstract painter whose large-scale work excavates worth from everything the world has scripted for us. She earned her BFA summa cum laude from Texas State University in 2023 and works from her public studio at Silver Street Studios in Sawyer Yards.
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