Updates

I have been delayed in posting for the past few weeks due to travel and settling into a new house. Though, that doesn't mean that I have neglected my research in these past few weeks. Rather, I have gathered a lot of information that I am just now beginning to understand.

I've been told that three years from now I will still be making new revelations about what I have learned this summer. I certainly believe that, because I am learning so much at once that it is fairly hard to process in this short amount of  time.

Since this post is about updating I'll keep it to the point, and hopefully I can go into greater detail with other posts soon.

At the beginning of July I returned home from California and began working on drawing major connections between the artists I had already encountered. I mentioned some of the connections in a prior post, but I will rehash some of the "buzz" words that keep coming up in my research.

Empathy, Healers, Organizer, Efficacy, Authorship, History, Collaboration, Missionary Work, Class, Gender, Marginal, Context, Isolation, DIY, Queer

I have also been drawing connections between women of a certain generation and how the feminist movement has paralleled their actions. I am interested in whether the first generation of women activist artists influenced the next generation. In addition, I am asking whether the younger generation of women artists were even aware of the feminist art movement when they began their practice. So far I have heard mixed things from the generation of women in their 30's. When I was speaking with Ginger Brooks Takahashi the other day in Braddock, PA, I asked her if she had been influenced by the older feminist artists.  She told me that when she was an undergrad at Oberlin, she discovered a pile of Heresies journals and that set her off into researching the feminist art movement.

Oh yes, so the other day, I went to Braddock, pa, to interview Swoon, the infamous street artist. We had a wonderful conversation over thai food, which continued into the night. My friend and roommate at Pratt Institute had actually introduced me to Swoon's work. Then when we heard that she was to speak at TEDx at Pratt, my friend Catherine and I bought tickets right away. It was then that I really saw how passionate she was about the work she was doing, and her strong conviction to create social change. I attached a link to the talk, and I strongly suggest that people should watch it.  Anyways, I had asked for her email at the talk and we spoke a few times over the past few two years. When I decided to do this project I reached out to her and her assistant to see if Callie would be interested in having a conversation about her work. Luckily she agreed, and I was able to go out to see her this past week.

Also this week I met the other incredible women she has been working with in Braddock. The group called Transformazium, (including- Ruthie Stringer, Callie Curry, Leslie Stem and Dana Bishop-Root,) has been working in Braddock for the past few years, finding ways to integrate themselves into the neighborhood and create a sustainable community of sorts. After speaking with some of the group members, I realized that doing a large scale project such as this, is a lot harder than the media has made it out to be. There are issues of bureaucracy, community, and time, there are issues with participation and respect, there is the label missionary.... But these women have been dealing with these things in stride and taking on challenges that are much larger than themselves, which is a hard task.

The group is currently enrolled at PSU under the MFA for Social Practice.

In addition to meeting these women, I met with Ginger Brooks Takahashi. We were standing in the kitchen my first night there and someone mentioned that Ginger was doing a pickling workshop the next day. Ginger turns around and starts talking about something and I ask her what she does, she was a little tired at the time and wasn't necessarily in the mood to chit chat. Once she leaves the kitchen, I ask Dana what Ginger's last name was and she said "Brooks Takahashi"
I said "oh...wait... what! I have been trying to contact her for the past two months!"

So that is how I got that conversation in place, a little bit of serendipity.


I really thought this post was going to be much shorter.

When I got back to Philadelphia, I had to speak at a poster session for the Diamond Scholars Program. Being exhausted from the drive, and lack of sleep, I was not as well prepared as I should have been. However, I ended up talking about my project for a long time, and got asked some great questions. There was of course the question of "where I go from here." The person who asked it was an economics professor. He was keen on getting a straight answer, and I was determined to explain that this is a process based work that ties together academics and creative practice. I am not sure how successful I was convincing him. Mierle Ukeles was determined to call cleaning--- art- maintenance art. I am finding my own way to call this research process based art, tying together art history, theory, primary based materials, performance, and visual art.