A Word About Our Logo

By Dr. Molly McClain, Professor, Department of History, University of San Diego

The logo of the Wednesday Club, a Portuguese caravel (featured above), represents the spirit of discovery and the desire of early twentieth-century women to adventure, intellectually, beyond the limitations placed on their sex.

The Portuguese caravel was a small and maneuverable sailing ship that allowed Europeans to venture beyond the Mediterranean at the start of the Age of Exploration. During the Renaissance, it came to represent the advance of knowledge and the discovery of new worlds. The frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration (1620) shows a caravel heading through the Pillars of Hercules, which, in Greek mythology, marked the limits of human knowledge.

By the seventeenth century, Europeans had surpassed the knowledge of the Ancients and felt optimism about the future of the arts and sciences. The image was captioned, “Many will pass through, and knowledge will be increased.”

The logo was created by Wednesday Club member Alice E. Klauber (1871-1951), an artist who studied under William Merritt Chase and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia. Donal Hord, the sculptor, described her as an original, one of the “moderns” who promoted avant-garde art from an early date. Together with her fellow Wednesday Club members, she advanced art and culture in San Diego, making possible many of the institutions that we know and love today.