This past August, six bright-orange, life-sized statues appeared in New York City’s Central Park Zoo. Each depicted a trailblazing woman who is currently working in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM), as part of #IfThenSheCan— The Exhibit. The full exhibit contains 122 statues.
To create each piece, the female scientists and engineers stood inside a giant scanning booth. The booth took hundreds of pictures generating a 3-D digital image of each individual. The life-sized images were then printed by a 3-D printer— a device that builds up layers of material to make solid objects.
Very few of the statues in major U.S. cities are of women, says Nicole Small, chief executive officer of Lyda Hill Philanthropies, the charitable organization behind the project. “We wanted to put really cool role models in front of girls and tell their stories in ways that would resonate,” says Small.