plentyotoole:

Alicia Reyes McNamara emailed me back in December telling me that she and her friend, Kat Burdine would be taking part in JR’s Inside Out Project in Honduras. I asked her to give me a holler when she completed it. And she has! Here’s what they’ve done in her own words:

La Fuerza Silenciosa or in English, The Silent Strength is a public art instillation I did in Honduras with my friend, Kat Burdine. We are working in collaboration with the Inside Out project founded by the French artist, JR.

Between both Kat and I, we have lived and work in El Progreso, Honduras for six years and though we worked with various demographics, we were continuously struck by the silent strength of women in the community. We have photographed these women and have pasted their portraits up in the center of town as well as their neighborhoods to give homage to their strength and struggles. With this citywide instillation we hope to start a dialogue about all that women have accomplished. Las Progreseñas, or the women of El Progreso are the foundations of their communities.  They are the teachers, mothers, nurturers, and fighters for future of this town.

We wheatpasted 50 black and white portraits of these incredible women the third week of March of 2012, knowing the first week of April is “Semana Santa,” Holy Week or Spring Break, when many people coming from out side cities and even internationally pass through El Progreso to get to the coastal beach towns.  We figured this would be the best time to take advantage of the heavy traffic so more people will have the possibility of seeing this project.

(Source: plentyotoole)

Since the African-American women Thomas portrays in her paintings are in control and decidedly done up—dressed to the nines and posed in studio spaces full of busy fabrics—there’s clearly an ironic twist in the exhibition title, She’s Come Undone! Thomas’ daring use of color and her obsessive, almost painstaking deployment of rhinestones highlight the pleasures these women take in adorning and displaying themselves. So her exhibition’s title should be read as an exclamation of relish, encouragement, and abandon.

via Mickalene Thomas, She’s Come Undone! - The Brooklyn Rail

Artist Angela Ellsworth has been getting a lot of attention for her gorgeous and horrifying Seer Bonnets … Angela works from her Mormon background and ancestry to comment on and critique polygamy, forced communal domesticity, and the idea of sister wives. The work re-examines the experience of pioneer Mormons. The first image includes 9 bonnets nodding to Angela’s great, great grandfathers 9 wives.

Reminded of this by photos of Danya Spinners ‘Widow’ going around. Ellesworth does performance and drawing also. 

(via Welcome to CherrieMoraga.com)

San Francisco, CA (December 7, 2011) – After a fifteen-year hiatus, Brava Theater is proud to welcome award–winning writer and director„ Cherríe Moraga, back to its stages to celebrate its 25th anniversary with the world premiere of her new play, New Fire – To Put Things Right Again.

Co-produced with cihuatl productions, and conceptually created and designed by Celia Herrera Rodríguez, this new work follows the sacred geography of Indigenous American mythologies to tell a 21st century story of rupture, migration and homecoming.  Countering new-age apocalyptic predictions for 2012, NEW FIRE takes a mythic and modern-day look at the conditions of our times.   The play follows one woman’s dreamscape ceremonial journey upon the eve of her birthday, expertly interweaving humorous encounters with tricksters and allies of every ilk who act as her guides on the road to remembering a stolen past.  New Fire will inspire and challenge its audiences to regain an American history erased in post-colonial textbooks.

The world premiere production runs January 11 – 29, 2012 at the Brava Theater (2781 24^th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110).

I’m so envious of anyone in SF who got to see this [review links pretty pls.??]. Guessing/hoping it’ll be performed elsewhere eventually though. 

I have found The One – performance 25 March 2011 

amira.h.’s performance, The One, is an act of rebellion. Raised as a Muslim, much of amira.h.’s adolescence was spent thinking about, talking about, and fighting about the issue of marriage. Now, at age twenty-seven, these same issues are still making their presence felt in her life-the contradictory life of an unmarried queer Muslim visual artist. Intrigued with instruction and ritual, as well as testing the limits of the body and how much it can endure, amira.h. presents herself, alone, as both bride and groom performing one of the rituals of marriage.

Exorcising a tradition that will not take place in her life, the solitary figure portrays a sense of mourning, pathos and loneliness, with the end result being strangely celebratory. amira.h. invites the viewer to consider and question their own assumptions and expectations concerning gender, sexuality and power whilst she stands on the dichotomous altar of her identity. Come along and celebrate The One. amira’s work questions the roles of young women in the Muslim/domestic sphere and (expectations placed on them); fat/queer/feminist politics and rituals (in marriage and religion) and transgression of these/contradiction/failure.

via art gallery adelaide - artoom5

The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina.

Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

via Write With Your Spine: A Poet Sings: Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split

thegang:

Each year, QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA ARTS PROJECT offers 4 free Filmmaking Workshops through our award-winning Training Program. Our workshops serve teenagers to elders. 

To better serve our community, QWOCMAP has conducted Training Program workshops specifically for youth (ages 18 to 25), queer folks of color who are butch/genderqueer/transgender, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black/African descent, Chicanas/Latinas, and Native American/Indigenous/First Nations queer women. We also offered a workshop focused on queer immigration. We do this to deepen the dialogue and address issues specific to each community’s needs. 

Intermediate workshops (and soon, advanced workshops) are available to participants who have completed a film through our QWOCMAP introductory workshop. Information regarding intermediate workshops will be announced through our filmmaker listserve and on this page when available. Please contact TRAINING@qwocmap.org with questions or inquiries. 

Jump to QWOCMAP FREE Video WORKSHOP FOR YOUTH 2012 Jump to QWOCMAP FREE VIDEO WORKSHOP 2012

(via etiquette-etc)

via Carolina Mayorga

‘The Miraculous Artist’ Carolina Mayorga, Interactive performance, 2011.

Artist statement: Social issues related to my culture have always been the theme of my art: My culture related to Catholic rituals, the political situation of my native Colombia, issues of migration as a response to my bi-cultural experience of living in Colombia and the United States, and most recently, my perspective on the current global war that has shaped the beginning of the 21st Century.

Many of these themes have resulted in sculpture/installation projects involving audience participation and the changing qualities of nature. I am also interested in sculpture that involves time as part of the concept and leaves no sign of existence after completion of the process.

fyeahwomenartists:

Lesley Dill
Dada Poem Wedding Dress, 1997
Photo litho on muslin and Hindi newspaper 

(via LESLEY DILL : PRINTMAKING : LANDFALL PRESS)

(via boystown)

utnereader:

(via Designboom)

“The Mending Project’ by Chinese-born artist Beili Liu is a performance art and installation project that consists of hundreds of Chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling in a shimmery cloud. Put on at the Women and Their Work gallery in Austin, Texas, USA earlier this year, the piece involved the artist sitting in front of a small black table, hand-mending patches of fabric together which visitors are encouraged to cut themselves near the entrance. As the performance continues,
the piece grows as one continuous cloth and lays spread on the floor. 

tobia:

“WHAT DO YOU DO WITH BEING A TOKEN?”—CHERYL DUNYE asks us to ruminate on our first day in her “Intersectionality, Identity and I” course.  

(via fuckyeahbrownandbutch)

textilenerd:

awesomenesssaveslives:

alexandraemeric:

Sarojini Naidu & Bhagat Singh, dye, ink, cotton thread, hand painted warp, double weave 16”x20” Fall 2008

curate:

“My work has a deep concern for the mother/ daughter relationship. Relentlessly documenting encounters with Grandma Ruby (b. 1925), Mom (b. 1959) and myself (b. 1982) enables me to break unspoken intergenerational cycles. We are wrestling with internalized life experiences and perceptions of ourselves and familial personas developed by sociopolitical baggage.” - LaToya Ruby Frazier.  via llapen: thegang

More intergenerational photography! The persistent theme of the importance and contradictions of matrilineal attachment across generations.

ladyfresh:

Hélène Amouzou was born in Togo but has been living and working in Brussels for a while now. Some years ago, she took up photography. The results are self-portraits taken “mostly in her attic”.

(via ourcatastrophe)

tanglad:zuky:tanglad:curate:

…

Ellas, Filipinas, a documentary film by González on Filipina domestic workers who appropriate urban spaces in Hong Kong on their day off.  Photo by González of the HSBC Bank’s inside/ outside ground floor on a typical Sunday. Read more at Pruned. via megat

(via curate)