Ghost Girls by Student

The "Radium Girls" were factory workers. Each day they would carefully paint the numbers onto various timepieces and clocks. The paint, primarily composed of a new radioactive material called "radium," slowly poisoned the young women. Their lawsuits were long and unforgiving. The Ghost Girls exhibition unearths the names and faces of the Radium Girls through a diverse set of physical data visualizations, and seeks to highlight these women's contributions in the fields of science, healthcare, and labor rights. The acrylic tombstones compare the hiring practices of dial painting companies to the death rate of their employees throughout the 20th century. Each tomb contains data from one decade at a time and a short description of progress made in the legal battle against those companies.