Erykah Badu—the queen of neo-soul and arguably one of the coolest women on the planet—is hitting the road this summer on a 25-city tour starting June 11. Can’t wait to see her go on and on (and on and on)? Go to unfollowmetour.com to find out if she’s hitting a town near you.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by UNICORN Mutant Cobra jumpin time lines (@erykahbadu)

2. The Blackening

Photo Credit: Glen Wilson

Co-written by Tracy Oliver (who previously brought us Girls Trip), this horror/ comedy flick follows seven Black friends who go away for a weekend in the woods where there’s a killer on the loose. They can’t all die first, so they rank their Blackness and use their knowledge of horror movie tropes to survive. Piss your pants laughing when it comes to theaters June 16.

3. TLC Forever on Lifetime

Photo Credit: Dennis Leupold

Which one are you? Crazy, Sexy, or Cool? Follow the drama and tragedy that came with fame for TLC’s Left Eye, Chili, and T-Boz as they become one of the most iconic girl groups of the ’90s in this Lifetime documentary airing June 3.

4. Survival of the Thickest on Netflix

Photo Credit: Winnie Au

Michelle Buteau stars in this Netflix series based on her autobiography. Written and produced by Buteau, the show, which hits the small screen July 13, follows her as she goes through a breakup, gets her styling career off the ground, and plunges back into the dating pool with help from her two besties.

5. Ahsoka on Disney+

Photo Credit: LUCASFILMS

Star Wars fans first met Rosario Dawson’s character, Ahsoka, in the second season of The Mandalorian, and now she’s back in her own series premiering in August on Disney+. The story follows the former Jedi knight as she tries to save the galaxy. Fingers crossed we get another Lizzo and Baby Yoda moment!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ahsoka (@ahsokaofficial)

6. I Inside the Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey

Photo Credit: Steve Gullick

Indie-rock goddess PJ Harvey is bringing her spooky vibes, unique voice, and harrowing lyrics back to the mic with her 10th studio album, I Inside the Old Year Dying. Bask in her melancholy magic when it drops July 7 on Partisan Records.

7. The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

For as long as humans have been making art, there have been women artists. Yet, until recently, they were glaringly excluded from history. This bothered Katy Hessel, so in 2015, she launched the IG account @thegreatwomenartists and then a podcast of the same name. Now, her new book from W.W. Norton & Company is continuing this important work by digging up all the forgotten women who mastered their crafts and finally giving them their due.

A teaser of the book debuts on her podcast: Listen now

8. Mosswood Meltdown featuring Bratmobile and John Waters

Wow, wow, wow! The legendary riot grrrl band Bratmobile is reuniting after 20 years at the Mosswood Meltdown festival in Oakland hosted by John Waters. The lineup also includes BUST faves Le Tigre, the Rondelles, and Gravy Train!!!!, so grab tickets for the July 1 and 2 dates asap at mosswoodmeltdown.com.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mosswood Meltdown (@mosswood_meltdown_i_love_you)

9. Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page

The Umbrella Academy star is speaking his truth. This memoir, out June 6 from Flatiron Books, takes readers from Elliot Page’s breakout role in Juno to being forced into the Hollywood starlet mold to his transition—allowing him to finally navigate Tinseltown on his own terms.

10. “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby”

Photo Credit: Ben King

Hannah Gadsby shot to fame with her groundbreaking one-woman show, Nanette, and now she’s sticking it to the man. Well, one man in particular—Pablo Picasso. Opening at the Brooklyn Museum on June 2, this exhibit, co-curated by Gadsby, will feature works by Picasso alongside those by feminist artists, including the Guerrilla Girls and Cindy Sherman, and plenty of pointed commentary.

Check out Hannah Gadsby introducing “It’s Pablo-matic” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/brooklynmuseum/hannah-gadsby-picasso-introduction?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Top Image: Photo Credit: Fred Yonet

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @alisonbechdel

Featuring some of our fave queers including Roxane Gay, Carrie Brownstein, Jane Lynch and many others, this fictional auditory adventure brings the “strange world of semi-suburban sapphics seeking out a deviant existence in the shadows of decent society,” to life through a series of episodes available on Audible.

The story starts in June of 1987, Ronald Reagan is president, the Iran-Contra hearings are all over the news, it’s “ten years before Ellen, five years before the founding of the lesbian avengers,” and while some of the references may be a little old school, the concerns, the controversies, the political climate (unfortunately) and the emotions are all still incredible relevant for modern queer audiences.

The main character Mo, who is voiced by the acclaimed Carrie Brownstein, starts the series off by looking for love (or maybe, just a little fun) while exploring vulnerability. In the era of Reaganism, her “hypersensitive moral compass” has caused some friction between her and her peers. She knows that queer is more than just an orientation, it’s a basis of intersectional liberation from poverty, war, racism, and capitalism, but can’t turn off the lecture when her friends just want to have fun. “If you think assimilation is liberation, you’re either delusional or a sell out,” Mo says to her friends during the Pride Parade.

“When I was young and freshly out, I pored over my paperback copies of ‘Dykes to Watch Out For,’ dreaming that I would one day get to live in a world as progressive, funny, sexy, and frankly dykey as the incredible community Alison created,” said Madeleine George, who wrote the adapted script. “Spending time immersed in this world has been like getting to move into my dream world. To hear the beloved characters brought to life by this gang of superstars has been too good to be true.”

Dykes to Watch Out For ran from 1983-2008 in Funny Times and various lesbian newspapers and online. According to the New York Times, Bechdel herself has called the strip “half op-ed column and half endless, serialized Victorian novel.” Full of cultural reflection, social commentary and political references, the strip built a semi-fictional world for lesbians to engage in, reflecting the everyday conversations that were happening in queer circles. Bechdel, who is also known for her books Fun Home, Are You My Mother, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength has spent decades capturing her iteration of the queer experience, sharing it with eager audiences from across the country.

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

She is also the creator of the Bechdel Test, a media evaluation method that analyzes how well a work of fiction represents women characters. The criteria includes: at least two women are featured, these women talk to each other, and they discuss something other than a man. That’s it– just three small objectives that a surprising number of films, books and television shows completely miss.

“I am blown away by this podcast; it’s such a great gift to hear the characters and their world come to audio life, talking and kvetching and playing softball and going to marches,” said Bechdel in a press release. “Often when I was drawing the comic strip I would wish it could have the extra dimension of a soundtrack – and now it does. The podcast is set back in the day, 1987, which makes it a fun history lesson, but at the same time, it’s a completely contemporary-feeling romp. I’m absolutely speechless and fortunately these actors have plenty to say, and they do so with dykey aplomb.”

All episodes of Dykes to Watch Out For are now available on Audible!

Top Photo is a screen grab from “Jane Lynch and the Iconic Cast of ‘Dykes To Watch Out for’ in Conversation” from the official Audible Youtube channel

Talented photographers from around the world are donating their art for a good cause, and you can be a part of the effort. The artist collective SIX.TWO Editions is selling incredible photography prints from over 200 artists, with all proceeds going to organizations that provide earthquake aid to the people of Turkey and Syria.

Earlier this year, devastating earthquakes ravished communities in Turkey and Syria. The total death count is more than 50,000, with an estimated 44,000+ deaths in Turkey and 5,000+ in Syria, making it the deadliest natural disaster in Turkey’s modern history. With days of aftershocks and another earthquake in the Turkish city of Hatay, millions of people are in dire need of basic supplies including food, clean water, hygiene products and shelter. 

Organizers hope the print sale, which runs through Monday, March 20, will help bring a sense of relief to the survivors. Each print is priced at $150 (plus shipping) and is printed on 10×12″ paper. Only $25 from the $150 price point will cover production costs, $125 will be donated to one of several organizations. 

The shop features one-of-a-kind shots of just about every subject matter, including celebrity portraits. All of the artists, including contributors like Michael Lavine, Jody Rogac, and Wanda Martin, gave their works over to the cause and will not see any of the revenue of the sale. 

SIX.TWO Editions has partnered with Turkish Philanthropy Funds to process and transfer all net proceeds equally to Ahbap, Ali İsmail Korkmaz Vakfı, Darüşşafaka Cemiyeti, Kırkayak Kültür, and Purple Solidarity, all organizations who are supporting the Turkish and Syrian communities through donations of live-saving supplies and other high-impact social investments.

SIX.TWO Edition shares that “our support for minorities and marginalized communities among earthquake survivors is a priority,” and “we are actively exploring opportunities to expand our support network for minorities and marginalized communities among earthquake survivors.”

The sale is an incredible opportunity to purchase stunning art for a fraction of the cost, all for an important humanitarian cause. If you want to make a direct donation, the Turkish Philanthropy Funds offers U.S.-based givers a tax-deductible donation option.

Top photo: screengrab from sixtwoeditions.com 

Valentine’s Day can be so gross, but if you’re in LURVE you might really want to send something sweet to your beloved. And thanks to Art of the Algorithm, we have a variety of AI-generated cute cards to share with you for your downloading pleasure!

All of these images were created by text-to-image AI technology. These particular designs were created in Midjournrey AI with the following prompts, which you can use and modify to create your own designs: cute stylized young couple, valentines day motif, simple clean vector shapes, graphic poster design, muted colors, character design, concept art, digital art, vector art

For more about creating designs in AI, visit artofthelagorithm.com

Click on any image  below to see a larger version and download for yourself. 

{igallery id=785|cid=44|pid=11|type=category|children=0|addlinks=0|tags=|limit=0}

Pamela Smith Hudson is an internationally renowned topography painter whose work has been praised for its captivating detail and vibrant colors. Her paintings are inspired by the topographic features of many of the places she has visited, from the mountains of the American West to the lush jungles of Central America. With a passion for exploring the beauty of the natural world, Hudson has created an impressive body of work that captures the subtleties of the environment. From vivid sunsets to graceful waterfalls, her artwork transports viewers to far-off places and invites them to explore a world of enchantment and beauty. Art critics and fans alike are in awe of Hudson’s ability to draw out the beauty and complexity of the earth’s landscapes and create vivid, memorable works of art.

Read the full interview with Pamela Smith Hudson, by Shana Nys Dambrot, on our sister site, LA Weekly, here.

Photo Credit: Pamela Smith Hudson

The film follows Pussy Riot, dressed in black slips and their iconic balaclavas, (this time all red) marching while carrying a giant button labeled “This button neutralizes Vladimir Putin.” Leading the group is Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riot, who is dressed in black and wears a white balaclava. As Pussy Riot ends their march, Tolokonnikov slowly reaches towards the button, and presses it. The video then cuts to a giant portrait of Putin being burned. 

This burned portrait created what is referred to as “Putin’s Ashes” which Tolokonnikova then bottled up the ashes of the portrait, which were also displayed in the gallery.

To enter the opening night event, guests had to be adorned in balaclavas, which was a powerful sight to see. Throughout the dozens, if not hundreds of covered faces, you at first could not tell who was an official member of the group Pussy Riot, and who was a member of the general public. According to Tolokonnikova, “We wanted people to feel like they were a part of the performance.”Photo by Pussy Riot

As Tolokonnikova explains, she wanted to build a piece that would create a lasting memory of both the artwork and what the artwork represents. Her use of ashes was a clear indicator of her accomplishing this goal of creating a lasting memory of the piece. While many people keep enclosed ashes on mantles to remember the legacies of their loved ones, Tolokonnikova subverts this common practice by displaying “Putin’s Ashes” to symbolize a brighter future free from tyranny, and to make sure we do not forget about the atrocities he has committed. This subversion, as well as Tolokonnikova mandating our participation with our balaclavas, helped to create an extremely effective piece of feminist protest art. 

The Pussy Riot song that played over the short film echoed throughout the entirety of the small building, creating a solemn, yet empowered atmosphere. The lyrics of the song translate to: 

“We will find you everywhere/ your ashes are smoldering in the dark

I’m not myself and you’re not yourself/ Putin’s ghost is with me

Virgin Mary is marching with us/ we will eat you alive

Sharpening a knife for Putin/ I will not forgive your evil

You burn burn to the ground/ I’m taking you to hell”

The event concluded with a musical performance by Pussy Riot. The concert itself took place in a seemingly random parking lot about a block down the street from the gallery, set up perfectly for the group to perform their signature protest music. As always, Pussy Riot kept the crowd energized, and through their pounding drum beats, haunting melodies, and in-your-face vocals, you could truly feel the entire gatherings’ collective anger toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the many other countless acts of oppression that have been occurring in Russia. 

Photo by Pussy Riot

The event served as a reminder of how important art is in activism. As many feminists have argued (one source being the book This Bridge Called my Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color), liberation can only be achieved if we combine multiple forms of knowledge, equally value different life experiences, and utilize any and all activist tools we can. Art, whether that be music, a visual piece, or poetry, is an important piece of this puzzle. Through this event, Pussy Riot was able to create a space for feminist solidarity and community building.

The exhibit will be on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery through this Friday, February 3rd. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, make sure to see it before it’s gone!

Top photo: Pussy Riot

Joan Brown was an American figurative painter whose work stood out among the abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century. Her bright colors, bold brushstrokes, and whimsical subject matter made her a beloved artist in San Francisco, where she lived and worked for most of her life. Brown’s painting style was heavily influenced by the Expressionists, yet she also incorporated aspects of surrealism and Pop Art. Her work is often characterized by her use of bright colors, her dynamic compositions, and her exploration of the universal themes of love, loss, and identity. Brown’s art has been exhibited in numerous galleries throughout the world and has gained a large following of admirers. Her life and work continue to be celebrated and her legacy will undoubtedly live on for generations to come.

Brown’s art is currently on display at SFMOMA. Read more about her work and the exhibit on our sister site, the Marina Times, here.

Top photo Photo by Laura Adai on Unsplash

The feminist protest group Pussy Riot will be at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles on January 27th to unveil their new piece, Putin’s Ashes. The short film, created, produced, and directed by the founding member of the group Nadya Tolokonnikova, will be on display at the gallery until February 3rd. 

Tolokonnikova was sentenced to 2 years in a Russian prison in 2012 following an anti-Putin performance. She then went through a hunger strike protesting devastating prison conditions and ended up being sent to a Siberian penal colony. There, Tolokonnikova was able to maintain her artistic activity with her prison punk band.

Pussy Riot, as a group, “stands for gender fluidity, inclusivity, matriarchy, love, laughter, decentralization, anarchy, and anti-authoritarianism.” The piece, Putin’s Ashes, began in August, in which Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10-foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Tolokonnikova then bottled up the ashes of the burned portrait, and incorporated them into other meaningful objects that will be presented in the gallery alongside her film.

Photo by Pussy Riot

Pussy Riot is inviting the public to view their performance art on the opening night of their ceremony. On opening night, only members of the public wearing balaclavas will be allowed to attend. Balaclavas will be provided, but guests are encouraged to bring their own. 

You can RSVP for this event here.

Top Photo: Pussy Riot

Swedish-American conceptual artist Michele Pred is taking the movement for women’s rights to a whole new, brighter level (literally). Beginning September 8 and running through November 5, 2022, Pred’s latest exhibition entitled Equality of Rights will be on display at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. There will be an Equal Pay performance at 7pm on September 15 and a reception open to the public held that same evening from 6-8pm. 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Nancy Hoffman Gallery (@nancyhoffmangallery)

Pred became known for her vintage designer handbags featuring feminist statements, in addition to her impactful sculptures and assemblage pieces. 

Let Freedom Wave, Cast resin Abortion Pills, 2022

Pred’s exhibition not only sheds light on the inequities that women have faced historically and presently, but also serves as an activist show promoting social and political change. In light of Roe v. Wade being overturned, through her exhibition, the artist is focusing on pushing for reproductive rights, as well as equal pay. Reportedly, this “show is a continuation of her previous work on Equal Rights for Women” and aims to “uncover the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects, with a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security.” In her work, Pred utilizes dollar bills, birth control pills, neon signs, justice scales, vintage purses, and more to emphasize her point that the time for justice (in terms of equal pay and abortion rights) is now.

Bans off our Bodies, Vintage purse and Electroluminescent Wire, 2022

Equal Pay, Dollar bills and acrylic on wood panel, 2022

Sexual Revolution, Vintage Quilt and expired birth control pills, 2021

Pred’s work not only emphasizes the issues that women are facing today, but also successfully pays homage to the women who came before us and paved the way to fight for gender equality. The artist’s work is both eye-catching, inspiring, and intellectually stimulating.

Abortion Pills, High-density urethane and enamel. 26″ x 56″ x 8″, 2022

Learn more about the show here. 

All photos by Donald Felton 

The video was introduced on Love’s Instagram page in November 2019 and went mega-viral; it was viewed almost three million times. Together with other videos it helped the 34-year-old Love garner over a million Insta followers. “I did a whole series of personal Instagram projects a few years ago, and it was just a way for me to experiment with my technique and see what people respond to,” she says. Still, even a 15-second video is a major undertaking: it can take a whole day to create the felted items, a few days to shoot the animation, and then a few more to edit and add sound. But Love’s efforts paid off. “Once I built my [Instagram] audience I was able to get representation, and that has opened the door for me for more commercial work.”

Baskets of wool fiber ready for felting

The popularity of her Instagram account has led to work in other ways, too. Zooey Deschanel is a follower and recommended Love to singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson when the two were looking for someone to create a video for their song, “Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.” The beautifully crafted video, released in 2021, features an adorable bunny couple (designed by illustrator Phoebe Wahl) who live in a cottage in the woods and celebrate the holiday with other cute forest creatures. It’s the second project that Love collaborated on with Wahl, their first being Tulip, an animated short based on the story of Thumbelina, which continues to be screened at film festivals around the world.

The set for the “Cooking with Wool” series

Although she studied film in college, Love is a self-taught animator. As a result, she was willing to do whatever it took to get the experience she needed. “I got my start working for local businesses, and they don’t have big budgets but also I didn’t have the skills yet, so I just kind of looked at it like graduate school, getting paid a little bit to learn and experiment,” she says.

Needle-felting a goblet

Love only discovered needle-felting after she’d already been dabbling in animation, but it quickly became an obsession. However, the idea to create a career from her two interests took a while to gel. “There was a moment in 2016 where I was working on my first fully felted animated piece, called ‘Revolution’—it’s all about hand spinning—that made me realize there was something really special there, and that’s what I wanted my niche to be,” she explains. “I love just looking at the world through the lens of felt, and it lends itself so well to what’s called particle animation—fire, water, smoke. All of those things just look really delicious made in felt.”

Felted characters from Tulip

Love’s stop-motion animation studio in action

Based in Port Townsend, WA, Love does all of her work—felting, animating, and editing—from home. “I started working in my bedroom, graduated to a closet, and then bought a house in 2015 and moved into the basement, not realizing what a great space this was going to be for me,” she explains. “I’m amazed [that] I can make my sets in a little basement, and it just looks like a huge world.” –Debbie Stoller

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Spring 2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

photos: SARA WRIGHT

Welcome spring with your own hand-painted botanical art—no talent needed!

If coloring books are too simple, but drawing is just a bit too hard, then Sarah Simon’s Watercolor Workbook: 30-Minute Beginner Botanical Projects on Premium Watercolor Paper ($22.99,) is the perfect happy medium to help you get your art on. A true workshop in book form, it includes not only step-by-step lessons on basic watercolor techniques but also pre-sketched projects on real watercolor paper alongside color-mixing recipes and methods to use so you can achieve finished pieces you’ll be proud of. Need more help? Simon offers monthly virtual watercolor classes ($65, studiolifeseattle.com) to complement the workbook. For additional info—and inspo—check out Simon’s site, themintgardener.com. –Debbie Stoller

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Spring 2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Sarah Simon (@themintgardener)

1. Björk’s Cornucopia

Björk’s most elaborate theatrical production to-date, Cornucopia—based on her album Utopia and featuring fungi-inspired stage designs, a 50-member Icelandic chorus, and immersive visual effects—earned raves when it debuted in 2019. Now, it’s back, with five California dates between Jan. 26 and Feb 8. Grab tix at axs.com (for L.A.) and ticketmaster.com (for San Francisco). 

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group

2. Scream 

The beloved meta-slasher Scream franchise is back for an eponymous fifth installment featuring original horror heroines Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox alongside new blood Jenna Ortega (Jane the Virgin) and Melissa Barrera (In the Heights). Brace yourself for Ghostface jump-scares, and take a stab at it in theaters Jan. 14. 

Courtesy of Showtime Documentary Films

3. Cusp on Showtime 

During a road trip across America, filmmakers Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt met a wild trio of teenage girls at a Texas gas station. They all became fast friends, and together created the verité documentary Cusp—an all-access pass into the complicated social and cultural terrain these young women are navigating today. Starts airing November 26 on Showtime.

4. Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at the Met 

Helmed by lead curator Hannah Beachler, Before Yesterday We Could Fly is a new long-term installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y.C. A former 19th-century domestic interior, the space was transformed with diverse works from The Met collection—including Bamileke beadwork, antique American ceramics, and contemporary design pieces—to create a room inspired by Afrofuturism and the Black imagination. Plan your visit at metmuseum.org. 

 Courtesy of Meredith Traux

5. Melanie Charles’ Album Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women 

Out now on Verve Records, Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women by jazz/soul/R&B chanteuse Melanie Charles features genre-bending reinterpretations of songs made famous by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, and more. A tribute to the resilience of Black women, the album takes timeless tunes and gives them an avant-garde spin. Learn more at melaniecharles.com. 

6. Encyclopedia Womannica Podcast 

Hosted by journalist Jenny Kaplan, the Encyclopedia Womannica podcast profiles a new, fascinating woman from history in under ten minutes every weekday. Grouped into monthly themes like “Educators” (featuring Maria Montessori, inventor of Montessori schools) and “Troublemakers” (including Japanese murderess Sada Abe), each episode is a bite-sized delight. Listen at wondermedianetwork.com/encyclopedia-womannica.

 Courtesy of NEON

7. Memoria 

Co-winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Memoria stars the riveting Tilda Swinton as an expat investigating the origins of a mysterious sound through the jungles of Colombia. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul created the film for cinema audiences only and will tour it through different art houses “forever” starting Dec. 26 in N.Y.C. Watch the trailer and more at neonrated.com/films/memoria. 

8. “Las Panteras” Video by Los Bitchos 

If you’re looking for a wacky throwback track and a video brimming with retro style and cute cat cameos, press play on “Las Panteras” by London-based, instrumental quartet Los Bitchos. From the group’s debut album, Let the Festivities Begin! (out Feb. 4), this lead single is the perfect accompaniment for those moments when life feels like a movie.

 Courtesy of Ebru Yildiz

9. “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” Exhibit at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

On view at The Hirshhorn in D.C. through July 31, “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” is the largest-ever U.S. exhibition of artwork by the groundbreaking multimedia artist, performer, musician, and writer, who is perhaps best known for her surprise 1981 electronica hit, “O Superman.” More info at hirshhorn.si.edu. 

10. Taschen’s Witchcraft 

The third volume in art book publisher Taschen’s Library of Esoterica anthology series, Witchcraft features over 400 occult images, essays, and interviews with practitioners of magickal traditions all over the world. From ancient goddess worshippers to modern pagans, this gorgeous volume has got the craft covered. Flip through at taschen.com.

-By Emily Rems 

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Winter 2021/2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

Top photo: Courtesy of Parisa JonTaghizadeh / Warren Du Preez and Nick Thorntones

Growing up in Montgomery, AL, mixed-media pop artist Ashley Longshore, 46, was taught that the “best way to be a woman” was to marry a rich man. But “that felt really awkward to me,” she says. “I wasn’t out blinking my eyes at my boyfriend to buy me a purse. I was tryin’ to figure out how I could never have to depend on anybody but myself to get those things.”

Longshore’s fascination with what it means to be a self-sufficient woman eventually became the subject of her new art book, Roar!: A Collection of Mighty Women, out now from Rizzoli. The collection features vivid original portraits of such powerhouses as Toni Morrison, Jane Goodall, Dolly Parton, Wonder Woman, and Cleopatra, interspersed with sparkling affirmations from the author, including “Standing ovation please” and “The bend and snap is a hoax.” (IRL, Longshore’s speech is similarly sprinkled with colorful phrases, like “I’m like a big, wild, colorful Care Bear,” and “I love me some me, so there ya have it.”)

Nina Simone

Longshore herself wouldn’t be out of place among the “mighty women” in Roar! She’s a self-taught artist whose career began in 1994 with a paint kit she bought while studying English at the University of Montana. She’s also a self-made woman; after years of “rejection and bein’ broke as hell,” she built a strong enough following through social media to open her own gallery in 2006 on Magazine Street in New Orleans, and to launch a series of collaborations with celebrity clients and fashion institutions—which is how Roar! Began.

In the fall of 2018, Longshore was summoned for tea with Diane von Furstenberg at Claridge’s Hotel in London. The fashion designer and philanthropist gave her a list of women to paint for an exhibition at the DVF headquarters in New York’s Meatpacking District. “There’s something about being surrounded by ginormous portraits of gorgeous, iconic, strong women that makes you feel brave,” Longshore says of the finished product.

“We need to be surrounded by these women, not only to see their beauty and their accomplishments, but also to understand how they’ve overcome hardships and rejection.”

Jane Goodall

Longshore’s handiwork has also been stamped upon silk scarves, drawer pulls, and across the walls of the Bergdorf Goodman Cafe. But with all this glamour has come an understanding that being a successful woman is about more than fancy accessories. “Success is not a Gulf Stream and 100 Birkin bags,” she says. “Success is being able to look at yourself at the end of the day and go, ‘I tried as hard as I could. I did the best I could.”

Indira Gandhi

During the pandemic, Longshore bought a farm an hour north of New Orleans. There, she raises swallowtail butterflies and watches them hatch and metamorphose from “little bitty pupa.” “You need no money to watch a butterfly land on a flower and to see the beauty in it,” she says. In fact, butterfly imagery appears throughout Roar!—both Malala and Mother Teresa are depicted haloed by monarchs. It’s a well-worn but apt metaphor: The “best way to be a woman,” is to embrace all stages of metamorphosis. Success stories begin with inexperience, involve periods of pupa-esque inactivity and, after a struggle, end in mightiness. –Molly Macgilbert

Peggy Guggenheim

© Ashley Longshore, c/o Rizzoli New York

TOP PHOTO: Mary Ellen Matthews

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Winter 2021/2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

Six months ago, my friend Kate texted me a photo of her local community center’s class schedule featuring the days and times for “Adult Tap.” (She also sent a gif of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber tap dancing like a total goob in a bright orange tux.) I knew it was half dare/half invitation, and a few weeks later, we were shuffle-ball-changing our hearts out with a welcoming group of mostly older women on the stage of a suburban rec center. Did I have visions of making Ryan Gosling fall in love with me á la Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine? Maybe. Was I enticed by the allure of adorable tap shoes? Definitely. But this weekly ritual has become so much more than a lark. Getting my feet to do what my brain is telling them is an ongoing challenge that is immensely enjoyable, both mentally and physically. And when I land a difficult transition, or nail every singular sound of a particular step, it’s so freaking fun.

Maybe it’s just because I now feel personally invested in the dance form, but it seems like tap is popping up everywhere these days, from the opening ceremony of the recent Tokyo Olympics to the collection of tap stamps the USPS just released. Feel like dipping a metal-tipped toe into the world of tap? All you need are some shoes and a dose of humility. And a hardwood floor helps (learn from my mistakes: concrete will mess up your taps, tile is slippery AF, and slate is easily scratched, oops). Here’s some inspiration to get you started. Or, you could just check your local parks and rec schedule for an “Adult Tap” class near you. –Lisa Butterworth

via GIPHY

Cheap $

Ladies Dance Now Student Tap Shoes

Patent leather Mary Janes: iconic. Plus, they’re super affordable so you won’t feel like you’re making a huge commitment.

$25.90, blochworld.com

Splurge $$$

So Danca TA805V Women’s Professional Leather Tap Shoe with Leather Sole and Red Heart

Wear your heart on your heel with this classy shoe. 

$242, dancewearcorner.com

Affordable $$

Unisex Microfiber Leather Flats Tap Dance Shoes

 Oxfords are a classic tap style and this blue two-tone pair is a vintage-inspired dream. 

$53, jjshouse.com

Mega-Splurge $$$$

Custom Hand Painted Galaxy Tap Dance Shoes

Not sure my skill level will ever warrant these airbrushed beauties, but a noob tapper can dream! 

$500, beargallery.etsy.com

Social Steppers: Tap These Follows

Miss Kelli Dance

@misskellidance

youtube.com/misskellidance

 

 

 

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miss Kelli (she/her) (@misskellidance) • Instagram photos and videos

One of my favorite YouTube teachers is Miss Kelli Dance. She hasn’t uploaded since last year but her oeuvre of videos is easy to follow (especially her “Tap Dance Dictionary” posts), plus, she’s cool as hell.

Chloe Arnold

@chloearnoldtaps

 

 

 

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chloe Arnold (@chloearnoldtaps) • Instagram photos and videos

Whether she’s honoring Beyoncé or Prince, tapping in a studio or in front of the Eiffel Tower, Emmy-nominated choreographer Chloe Arnold has mesmerizing moves. Be sure to follow her tap dance band Syncopated Ladies (@syncladies), too!

Sarah Reich

@sourtaps

 

 

 

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Reich (@sourtaps) • Instagram photos and videos

If you’ve ever watched vids from Postmodern Jukebox (the music collective that puts a vintage spin on Top 40 pop songs) you’ve probably seen Sarah Reich dance. But she’s also a star outside of jazzy Lady Gaga covers.

Online Tutorials For Beginners

TOP PHOTO: Illustration by Ash Beyer

PHOTOS: (Miss Kelli ): Jennifer Jones; (chloe arnold): Lee Gumbs Photography. Courtesy of SILLAR Management; (sarah reich): Jeff Xander

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Winter 2021/2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

Once upon a time, two girls played a prank that got way out of hand. A century ago, long before Photoshop, the pair fooled the world with photographs of what they claimed—and what eminent men believed—were fairies.

“The fairies are on the plate—they are on the plate!” That, reported Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a young girl’s excited reaction as she watched a photograph that she and her cousin had recently taken being developed. In an article titled “Fairies Photographed,” which he wrote for The Strand magazine in 1920, Doyle—best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes—explained that the two girls, ages 9 and 16, “claimed that when they were together, [they] continually saw fairies in the wood and had come to be on familiar and friendly terms with them.” Eventually, one of the girls’ fathers lent them a camera so they could photograph the magic they had witnessed. “The result was the picture of the dancing elves,” Doyle wrote. Delighted by the fairies, he noted, “What joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance!” For readers who might question the authenticity of the image, and a second one like it, Doyle assured them that “every objection has been considered and adequately met,” and that he himself had studied them “long and earnestly with a high-power lens.” For Doyle, a devoted believer in spiritual phenomenon, these pictures had the power to change the world. “The recognition of [fairies’] existence will jolt the 20th-century mind out of its heavy rut in the mud.” The astonishing photos, he concluded, “mark an epoch in human thought.”

Strand Magazine, December 1920 Credit: The Collection of Leeds University Library Galleries

It all began in the summer of 1917, when nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother moved from Cape Town, South Africa, to the picturesque town of Cottingley in Yorkshire, England. There, they moved into a cottage with Frances’ Aunt Polly, Uncle Arthur, and cousin Elsie Wright, 16. Despite their age difference, the girls had a few things in common. They were both only children, a rarity for the early 20th century. And they had both lived outside of England—Frances in South Africa and Elsie in Canada—thus, both had accents that marked them as outsiders in a time and place that judged class by the way one spoke. 

Elsie was “young for her age,” according to Joe Cooper, author of The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1997). She “liked to play with Frances’ dolls,” and she was more than happy to romp with her on the banks of the beck (local lingo for “stream”) that ran behind the house. The beck lay at the bottom of a narrow, deep ravine at the back of the Wrights’ garden, its banks covered with willow trees, greenery, and mushrooms, with a waterfall splashing over the rocks. The girls liked to spend hours there together, and sometimes they packed a lunch, even though the house was only yards away. Enchanted by the dreamy atmosphere, Frances more than once fell into the stream, soaking her long woolen stockings and lace-up leather boots. But no matter how many times her mother “slapped and scolded” her, Frances couldn’t keep away from the beck.

There came a day when Frances, soaking wet again, faced interrogation from both her mother and her aunt: Why, why, why did she keep going to the beck so often? Ashamed and on the spot, Frances, according to Cooper, burst out with, “I go to see the fairies! That’s why—to see the fairies!”

In a bid to cheer up Frances, Elsie suggested that they borrow her father’s camera to take pictures of the fairies. Photographs would prove the fairies’ existence to disbelieving adults.

Even before Frances had moved in, Elsie had spoken of seeing fairies at the beck. As later reported by The Westminster Gazette in 1921, her parents considered this “a childish fancy, and let it pass.” So it wasn’t surprising that, while the grownups remained skeptical of Frances’ claim, Elsie rushed to take her cousin’s side. 

“Do you believe in fairies?” Peter asks the audience in a famous moment from Peter Pan, a 1904 stage production based on author J.M. Barrie’s character. In fact, fairies had long been part of British folk lore and pop culture. Fairies, pixies, brownies, elves, goblins, and boggarts populated folk tales throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. A Celtic revival in the late-19th century, along with the establishment of the Folklore Society in London in 1878, brought renewed attention to fairies. There were even Victorian painters who specialized in “the iconography of fairyland.” Beginning with The Blue Fairy Book in 1889, Andrew Lang published 12 volumes of collected fairy tales, each title corresponding to a different color. The staged version of Peter Pan was so popular that a novel, Peter and Wendy, was published in 1911. Elsie Wright was artistic and enjoyed drawing and painting fairies. Frances Griffiths brought with her from South Africa a copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915), an illustrated volume of stories and poetry. One poem appeared on a page surrounded by drawings of dancing fairies. Both Elsie’s talent and Frances’ book would soon come in handy. In a bid to cheer up Frances, still weepy after her latest scolding, Elsie suggested that they borrow her father’s camera to take pictures of the fairies. Photographs would prove the fairies’ existence to disbelieving adults. Decades later, Elsie told Cooper: “I didn’t think we’d go on with it. It was just to take her mind off things.” But Frances latched onto the idea, so Elsie begged her father to borrow his new camera. Though amateur photography was a thriving hobby by 1917, supplies weren’t readily available during the war. Arthur Wright was understandably reluctant to relinquish his prized Midg to his daughter’s clutches. The Midg was a smallish box camera that used 3 ¹/₄” x 4  ¹/₄” glass plates. The exposed plates were developed in a darkroom, and paper prints were made from these glass negatives.

Mr. Wright finally gave in on a sunny day in July 1917. He loaded the camera with a single plate and explained to the girls how to take “a snap,” according to The Westminster Gazette. Elsie and Frances were in a state of “high glee” when they returned in less than an hour, and asked Mr. Wright to develop the plate. Elsie followed her father into the darkroom under the stairs, while Frances eagerly listened at the door.

As Elsie watched, swirling forms appeared on the glass plate swimming in its chemical bath. There was Frances, staring intently at the camera, as a group of winged beings danced on the moss in front of her. Mr. Wright thought the wispy images might be sandwich wrappers, but the girls assured him—they were fairies! 

Published photograph of Frances with a leaping fairy 1920 From the collection of Leeds University Library Galleries

In September, the girls borrowed the camera again to take another photograph, this one showing a stylish, hat-wearing Elsie beckoning a gnome to her knee with her oddly elongated hand. But despite the photographic evidence, the adults remained skeptical. Speaking to a reporter in 1921, Elsie’s parents “confessed they had some difficulty in accepting the photographs as genuine, and even questioned the girls as to how they faked them,” writes Cooper. Even though Elsie and Frances had always been truthful girls, and denied trickery now, Arthur Wright refused to let the girls use his camera again.

Everything would have ended right there, if Elsie’s mother Polly, and Frances’ mother Annie, hadn’t attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in 1919. Founded in 1875, Theosophy followers believed in reincarnation and karma, along with more esoteric concepts such as the astral plane and the human aura. They also believed in elementals, nature spirits, and, yes, fairies. Along with Spiritualism, Theosophy’s emphasis on life after death especially appealed to those grieving the loss of loved ones in the aftermath of the bloody First World War. 

Gardner had the duplicate glass plates retouched… The papery wisps were now clearly recognizable as fairies. 

When a lecturer at the Theosophical Society mentioned fairies, Polly approached them and asked if they’d be interested in seeing some odd photos her daughter and niece had taken a few years ago. They were indeed interested—and so began a chain of events that brought the Cottingley fairies to the world’s attention. The photos eventually made their way to Theosophist Edward L. Gardner, who was a fervent believer in fairies, and immediately and unquestioningly accepted the photos as genuine. He also realized, however, that they needed some work. According to Cooper, he wrote to Polly Wright in February 1920, asking if he could borrow both original glass plates to make duplicate negatives. He had these duplicate glass plates retouched, the one of Frances substantially so. The papery wisps were now clearly recognizable as fairies. 

Gardner also showed the original glass plates and sepia prints to photographer Harold Snelling, who pronounced them as free of trickery. They were single exposures, he said, and the images that appeared in front of Frances were not made of fabric or painted on a background. What’s more, according to Snelling, the fairies had moved during the exposure.

This was proof enough for Gardner, who shared the news with Doyle. In addition to being an esteemed author, Doyle was a trained physician. He was also a Spiritualist, who just happened to be writing a feature story on fairies for The Strand magazine. While cautious at first, Doyle found Gardner to be “a solid person with a reputation for sanity and character,” and he found Snelling’s professional assessment of the photos’ genuineness compelling. Doyle wrote to Elsie’s father and asked to use the girls’ fairy photos for his upcoming article, in exchange for a £5 cash payment or a three-year magazine subscription. (Doyle received £500 for the article.) 

Elsie with a Winged Gnome 1917. Credit: From the Collection of Leeds University Library GalleriesExcited by their discoveries and curious for more, Gardner and Doyle supplied Elsie and Frances with a new camera and a supply of glass plates. By this point, Frances’ family had moved away from Cottingley, and Elsie informed Gardner that she and Frances had to be together to take fairy photographs. Rather than finding this suspicious, Gardner wrote to Doyle that the need for two people was “fairly obvious,” the better “to assist in the strengthening of the etheric bodies” (the Theosophical concept of the aura that separated the physical body from the astral). Doyle concurred. Elsie and Frances needed to be together to take the photographs because, he later wrote in The Coming of the Fairies (1922), “the associated aura of the two girls” produced “a stronger effect than either can get singly.”

Privately, Doyle and Gardner were worried that, at ages 19 and 12, Elsie and Frances were already too old to make contact with the fairies. Gardner wrote in a letter reproduced in The Coming of the Fairies: “I fear now we are late because almost certainly the inevitable will shortly happen, one of them will ‘fall in love’ and then—hey presto!!” 

Doyle also feared that, after three years, the girls’ ability to photograph the fairies might be compromised as “the processes of puberty” were “often fatal to psychic power.” Nevertheless, Frances obligingly returned to Cottingley in August 1920, and together, she and Elsie took three more photographs of fairies. The photos showed Frances and a leaping fairy, a fairy offering a harebell flower to Elsie, and an enigmatic, nest-like object that Gardner described as a “fairy bower,” which he speculated was used for rest and hygiene. 

The original Midg camera used by Elsie and Frances. Credit: The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London

In the words of historian Alex Owen, “It might have taken youth and femininity to create the Cottingley fairies, but it was power and privilege [from men like Doyle and Gardner] that made those fairies fly.” Now, with the three new photos as “proof,” the fairy-making machine went into overdrive. Doyle’s article, “Fairies Photographed,” featured the first two images and made the cover of the December 1920 issue of The Strand with the headline, “An Epoch-Making Event.”

Once the public at large saw those photos, fairy-mania took hold. Though Doyle used pseudonyms for Elsie (“Iris”) and Frances (“Alice”), a reporter tracked down Elsie in January 1921 at the Christmas card factory where she worked, describing her as a “tall, slim girl with a wealth of auburn hair.” Elsie did not want to talk to the press, claiming she was “fed up” with the thing, but eventually she relented. She could not explain where the fairies came from and “was equally at a loss to explain where they went after dancing near her and was embarrassed when…pressed for a fuller explanation.” She first saw the fairies in 1915, she said. No, she hadn’t told her mother. No, nobody but she and Frances had seen the fairies. “If anybody else were there,” she said, “the fairies would not come out.” The reporter dug further, but his questions, “were only answered with smiles and a final significant remark, ‘You don’t understand.’” 

Not everyone was impressed with the photographs. Why did the fairies have Parisian hairstyles and gowns that were the height of fashion? Why was Elsie’s hand so big in her photo with the gnome? Just how foolish was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle anyway? Surely, Arthur Wright was not the only person to lose respect for an author he previously admired in the face of Doyle’s willful inability to see what was right in front of his face. 

First photograph of Frances and the Fairies, 1917. Credit: From the collection of Leeds University Library Galleries

In August 1921, 20-year-old Elsie and almost 14-year-old Frances were brought together again to take photos, but the magic was gone. Hoping to strengthen their aging auras, Gardner sent a psychic medium, Geoffrey Hodson, to sit with the girls this time. Not surprisingly, no photos were taken. Elsie and Frances, nevertheless, said they saw fairies, and according to Doyle, Hodson confirmed the glen was “swarming with many forms of elemental life…not only wood elves, gnomes, and goblins, but the rarer undines [aka nymphs], floating over the stream.” (In 1976, writes Cooper, middle-aged Frances and Elsie collapsed in giggles when a television interviewer asked them about Hodson. He was “a phony,” they said, who looked where Frances and Elsie pointed and agreed that he saw the things they said were there.)

Doyle, however, was on a roll, and in 1922 he published an entire book about the girls and their photographs, titled The Coming of the Fairies. On some level, it seems he knew the photos were fakes. “Elsie could only have done it by cut-out images…fashioned and kept without the knowledge of her parents,” he briefly speculated in The Coming of the Fairies, before dismissing this as “a large order!” for a teenage girl. Clearly, Doyle didn’t know teenage girls. He and Gardner simply couldn’t accept that a pair of “country” girls could or would perpetrate such a fraud, let alone keep it secret in the face of scrutiny from a pair of educated men such as themselves. 

Reviews of the book were brutal. “Poor Sherlock Holmes—Hopelessly Crazy?” was the title of one syndicated article from The Pittsburgh Press that was reprinted all over America. “Conan Doyle, Who Has Been Victimized by Transparent ‘Spirit’ Frauds, Now Offers Photographic Evidence That Fairies Really Exist, Just Like the Story Books,” was the sub-heading. But undeterred, Doyle and Gardner claimed to believe in fairies for the rest of their lives. (Doyle died in 1930, Gardner in 1969.)

“The Coming of the Fairies,” 1922, by Arthur Conan Doyle. Credit: Leeds University Library Galleries

 The young cousins grew up, and both married and had children. Elsie lived in India for a time before returning to England, where Frances was the matron at a boys’ school. They began a long process of public confession in 1965, though they didn’t fully come clean until the 1980s, finally admitting that the fairies were merely paper cutouts. Elsie had drawn them while looking at Frances’ copy of Princess Mary’s Gift Book. They used long hat pins to hold the fairies in place, and the drawings’ hands looked like fins, because hands are hard to draw. Paper cutouts stuck to hat pins fluttered in the gentle breezes of the beck, thus accounting for the motion that so impressed Harold Snelling. “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle–well, we could only keep quiet,” said Elsie in a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television’s Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers. “I never even thought of it as being a fraud,” said Frances on the same program. “It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in.” A year later, Frances died, followed by Elsie in 1988.

Speaking to the BBC in 1983, Frances said, “People often say to me, ‘Don’t you feel ashamed that you have made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you.’ But I do not, because they wanted to believe.” This may have even been true of Frances herself. Until her dying day, Frances would occasionally claim that she had actually seen the fairies, and that the fifth photo, the one of the “fairy bower” was genuine.  

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Winter 2021/2022 print edition. Subscribe today!

River Phoenix’s most enduring performance may be his portrayal of Mike Waters, the narcoleptic sex worker, in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Written and directed by Gus Van Sant (Milk, Good Will Hunting) and starring Keanu Reeves as Scott, Phoenix’s character’s best friend and love interest, the film is a seminal piece of queer cinema with a cult following. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry V, My Own Private Idaho follows Mike and Scott as they travel from Portland, Oregon to Idaho, to Italy in search of Mike’s mother.

My Own Private Idaho turned 30 in September and to celebrate the film and her brother’s legacy, Rain Phoenix, through LaunchLeft, has orchestrated a unique tribute to the film by creating an NFT gallery space. LaunchLeft is an alliance of “left-of-center” artists, led by Phoenix, herself a musician, actor, and artist, with the goal of established artists working to provide opportunity and launch new artists into the public sphere. 

Phoenix had planned to do a soundtrack to mark the film’s 30th anniversary, but wanted to find a way to include and celebrate the crew members and not just bands who weren’t involved in the experience of making the film. “That was what guided me toward NFTs. I really wanted to explore this space, I thought this is such a cool way to engage the crew, and then how do we give back to them? We’re all experimenting together, but how can I ensure that everyone did take something home,” she says.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are perhaps most known for their growing presence in the digital art world. An NFT serves as something of a certificate of authenticity and has a growing presence in the digital art world, in 2021 NFT sales exceeded $2 billion.

Phoenix began reaching out to people involved in the film, with the idea that they would contribute artwork, to be turned into NFTs, and sold in the LaunchLeft Foundation gallery. The gallery features artwork by production designer David Brisbin, a collaborative piece by LaunchLeft which includes Van Sant, and Flea, who played “Budd” in the film, as well as Phoenix, the film’s producer Laurie Parker, and never-before-seen photos from set photographer Abigayle Tarsches. All the NFTs are one-of-a-kind and 20% of LaunchLeft’s split will be donated to Camp Enlightenment, a deep immersion photography and film program targeting at-risk, disadvantaged youth (LGBTQIA+, unhoused, runaways, and foster youth).

“River was a big inspiration for LaunchLeft to begin with. To create a space much like what we were brought up in, supporting kids to make art and be creative and do it from a place of giving in the hopes of creating joy for others and not just for monetary gain or fame. LaunchLeft is a platform for cultivating that kind of intentional space for everyone,” explains Phoenix. 

Phoenix was excited that none of the crew members had worked in the NFT space before. LaunchLeft brought in experienced digital artists to teach the participating crew members and artists about NFTs, and set them up with artist profiles on Foundation, giving them the option and opportunity to continue creating digital art beyond this project.  

In addition to the NFT gallery, LaunchLeft has released an hour-long podcast episode, hosted by Phoenix and her sister Summer, full of interviews with cast and crew like Van Sant, actor Mickey Cotrell, and Michael Parker, who was the real life inspiration for the character Mike Waters. They also hosted weekly “Campfire” chats on Discord inspired by the iconic campfire scene in the film, which Phoenix says have turned into more hybrid conversations, “[W]e get to talk more about what LaunchLeft is doing and the artists that are minting NFTs, and not so much about the film and the past, but bringing My Own Private Idaho into the future.”

“The whole idea of a nostalgia-fest doesn’t really appeal to any of us, we were more interested in looking at the film as a point on a continuum of queer representation in media,” said Laurie Parker. 

Parker focused her efforts on the sequence in My Own Private Idaho in Italy. “We shot in Italy, we had an Italian financier so we had a lot of Fellini-esque distribution stories, and then the film premiered at Venice.”

Separate from the NFT drop but part of the larger celebration of My Own Private Idaho’s 30th birthday, Parker directed a music video with singer Caroline Kingsbury covering Rudy Vallée’s “Deep Night”, featured in the film. “LaunchLeft was looking at some artists to do covers of each of those songs and Caroline was the perfect choice for the ‘Deep Night’ one. That voice of hers? The whole idea of night, this mysterious, dark, secret place and Caroline just brought that instantly,” says Parker.

Abigayle Tarsches traveled from New York City to Portland in 1991 to shoot behind the scenes photographs. Her NFT offering includes never-before-scene photos from the set, “I would not have gone into this space on my own, but I have the support of LaunchLeft and Rain. I feel like I’m aligned with the values coming with it and that’s amazing to me.”

Phoenix’s NFT is a tribute to her brother and My Own Private Idaho’s impact on queer cinema. Featuring a quote by River about queer representation, set to “Too Many Colors”, a song by their band Aleka’s Attic, the piece ties the threads of the project together. 

The full gallery launches November 12. 

Top Photo: River Phoenix & Gus Van Sant by Abigayle Tarsches
Watercolors of Dutch Boy Set by MOPI Production Designer David Brisbin
Laurie Parker & Gus Van Sant photo courtesy of Laurie Parker

If you’ve got an eye for the strange and unusual, put it to paper. Accessible and affordable, all you need to make beautiful paper collage art is a pair of scissors, a bottle of Mod Podge, and all those magazines you’ve been saving (even this one!). Artist Maria Rivans literally wrote the book on it (Extraordinary Things to Cut Out and Collage, Laurence King Publishing, Laurence King Publishing), and here she shares her top tips—from organization to composition to her favorite tools—for making the cut.

Finders Keepers

Comb through vintage books and magazines, children’s books, and postcards for materials. Second-hand shops and websites like Etsy can be gold mines. Looking for a specific image? Find it online and print it on acid-free paper with good quality colorfast ink.

The Flex Files

Create a system to save time hunting for the perfect image. Rivans uses a file box with sub-sections for each subject, like a box for animals with files for insects, birds, mammals, etc: “I have to be organized because searching through all the thousands and thousands of images I have collected over the years is the most time-consuming part of the process.”

A Cut Above

Because proper cutting is integral, use super-sharp tools. Rivans recommends Xcut scissors, tiny craft scissors with a non-stick grip, and a #3 scalpel handle with a 10A blade. “But,” she says, “there are many types of knives, blade shapes, and sizes, so experiment to see which one is more comfortable for your hand.”

Put it All Together

Rivans suggests using heavy-weighted, acid-free cotton paper and reusable putty like Blu-Tack to hold elements in place: “That way your piece of art won’t be destroyed by a sudden gust of wind or your cat deciding to sit on it.” Finagle the finer bits with tweezers. Once complete, use a matte gel medium (like ModPodge Matte) or PVA glue—which won’t crack or yellow—to secure each piece and then coat the finished project so your work will last for years to come. – Stephanie Ganz

More Collage Artists We Love:

christa david @christadavid.art. christa david weaves nostalgic and moody dreamscapes that connect the dots from past to present.

By christa david

Johanna Goodman @johannagoodman. Johanna Goodman explodes the notion of portrait art with meticulous juxtapostions of color and texture.

By Johanna Goodman

Beth Hoeckel @bethhoeckel. Brace yourself for bold and bizarre stories from the wild mind of Beth Hoeckel.

By Beth Hoeckel

Top Image: By Maria Rivans, Courtesy of Laurence King Publishing 

When looking for an alternative to the grind of city life in L.A., artist Lorien Stern, known for turning subjects such as sharks and death into adorable and joyful creations, was pleasantly surprised by the tiny town of Inyokern in California’s Mojave Desert. “When we first started coming out here it was like, ‘OMG we’ve arrived on Mars!’ It’s an otherworldly experience,” says Stern. It was here, on her family’s plot of land—which Stern lovingly describes as a junkyard “full of good deals and forgotten dreams”—that she and her fiancé Dave discovered a trailer among the piles of abandoned cars and mountains of debris. “It looked really scary, there was no bathroom and all the windows had screens stapled on the wall,” recalls Stern. “It was pretty crazy, but had a lot of potential.” 

On Stern’s desk sit one of her ceramic rainbows and a ghost tile, two of her most iconic motifs. “I feel like this house allows us to experiment and take risks and not stress too much about having forever items.”

Cobbling together found resources—the yellow and blue paint in the kitchen and bedroom was discovered in an old storage container; a stock feed container became a pool (pictured above)—and flexing their DIY skills, they transformed the once-scary trailer into their home. It’s now a welcoming artists’ retreat, filled with color, whimsy, and the vibrant work of their equally talented friends. It’s been eight years since they moved to the desert to pursue art full time and Stern couldn’t be happier. “I feel so lucky,” she says. “It’s such a great place to take risks and take advantage of the space and the quiet and the nature. I really like it out here.” 

 –Nina Karina

Stern and her fiancé built the tree-shaped dining table, duck head cabinets, and strawberry coffee table. “Neither of us really have any background making stuff with wood so we just learn as we go. But we have a lot of fun and just try to make things that make us happy.” The big ceramic eye and alligator are Stern’s creations.

Stern’s latest home project was retiling her kitchen and living room with a fun green and white design “inspired by old-fashioned mansions and Moroccan courtyards.”

A large painting by her friend Kindah Khalidy hangs on the office wall; Stern’s pink-and-gold jack-o’-lantern sits on the desk next to a lamp of her cat Bob made by another friend, Katie Kimmel.

Stern’s pets include a cat named Bob, three ducks (Beaker, Ice Cream, and Slim), and a tortoise named Myrtle.

The light blue of the bedroom helps keep it cool despite blistering desert heat and complements the bedding and pillows Stern designed.

Stern designed the bathroom’s seal rug, and handpainted watermelons on the walls and ceiling; the Dusen Dusen shower curtain and towels (by her friend Ellen Van Dusen) add even more color.

Several of Stern’s ceramic pieces—a shark, a ghost, and a three-eyed alien—watch over the living room. “It’s really satisfying that we’ve put so much work into [our home], almost every square inch,” Stern says. “It’s kind of like a big collaborative art piece in a way.”

Photographed by Petra Ford

This article originally appeared in BUST’s Summer 2021 print edition. Subscribe today!

Lanna Apisukh started her Everybody Skate photo project in 2018 to highlight the diversity of New York City’s skateboarding scene, in particular, to show off the growing numbers of female and queer skaters around the city. Now, in 2021, her skateboarder photography feels particularly relevant in a time in which the pandemic has created a resurgence of public space and forced personal re-negotiations of identity. Skateboarding parks offer the perfect intersection of the two: a public place for connecting with a community while performing one’s own burgeoning individuality through personal style, skateboard stickers, even cool tricks. Apisukh manages to miraculously capture both the communal and the individual and the rare way they roll into each other on the ramps of a New York City skatepark.  

BUST had the privilege of chatting with Lanna about her project, the rising popularity of women’s skateboarding, and the artistry of skating. Check out more of Everybody Skate on Instagram or its recent feature in The New York Times. 

(This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Tenzin Bromberg/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

First, were you able to catch any of the Olympic skateboarding, and what were your thoughts? 

I did, yeah. I watched a lot of it actually. And I watched the women’s park competition, which was on a couple of nights ago. And that was amazing. Literally, it was swept up by 12-year-old and 13-year-old skaters. So that just was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. 

 Having begun as a kind of underground thing, how do you feel about skateboarding growing in popularity, but also in prestige? 

Yeah I mean there’s so many feelings about skateboarding being in the Olympics. I know some of the attitudes are a little divided. There’s like one camp that’s like, ‘no skateboarding is an art form and we shouldn’t be commercializing it’. And then there’s like another camp that has the attitude of this is like a really positive thing, especially for women’s skateboarding, which I totally agree with. I think that women’s skateboarding hasn’t been in the media nearly as much as men’s in skateboarding. I had done some research [on] Thrasher magazine, which is like a massive [skateboarding] media outlet. And I think out of like four hundred and eighty-eight magazine issues, only three of those issues had females on the cover, which is like crazy, because if you look around, there’s like so many amazing, talented female skaters.

So it just kind of shows how much women just haven’t had enough exposure in the media and also the opportunities for sponsorships and contests and things like that had been lacking for a while. But we’re headed in the right direction now. So it’s really, I think, a positive thing to see women’s sport in the Olympics and just having it on the world stage and spotlighted. It’s been really exciting.

Erin Yamagata/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

What was the idea for this project? Was there any kind of light bulb moment? I know that you started skating when you were younger, so you have a personal attachment to this, obviously.

Totally, yeah. I picked up my first skateboard in the late 90s when my brother started. First, I watched him and his friends doing tricks on our driveway as a kid. And eventually, I just learned how to ride it on my own in the driveway. But I didn’t really get into it because there wasn’t that many women skating or girls skating. It wasn’t until college. I went to college in Seattle, and I met three or four other young women that skated. And at that was like pretty much like the light bulb moment. I was like, ‘wow, this is amazing. There are other girls out there skating too.’ It was literally like three or four of us on campus and that was it. That’s kind of how I got my first taste of it, like going to the skate park, skating street, learning how to do different tricks.

And as I changed careers and got into photography, I just was really inspired by seeing all of these females take to skateboarding in the last twelve years I’ve lived [in New York] now. It was just amazing seeing everyone get on boards and with such style, grace, and confidence was nothing like I’ve seen before. So I’ve always been involved in skateboarding. It’s always been a part of my life, a part of who I am, always been fascinated with the culture. It’s just so rich with culture. There’s like the athletic side of it: learning new tricks and skills. It also helps bring me into the public space. So I felt like skating was really connected me to a community. It’s always fun to see how skaters creatively express themselves through their clothing, like the way they dress, the fashion, and then also they’ll draw on their skateboards. And I always just thought that was so cool. 

Desiree Billett/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

Well I wanted to ask because it does seem like a sport—I know you said other people call it more like an art form than a sport—that is so apt for visual expression and self-expression, and different kinds of gender expressions, as your photographs showcase. And I wonder why you think that is? Is that because it’s such a communal thing?

I think so. I think skateboarding is inclusive. And so I think it attracts also people that are inherently creative and different, and maybe that’s why there’s a queer community, nonbinary, trans skaters. You’re seeing them a lot more than you did 20 years ago. They feel comfortable in this space now. And a lot of that has to do with some of the women-led organizations that have created a safe space for skateboarders to come into these public spaces and not feel like they’re going to be made fun of or threatened in some way. Also, it takes genuine skill and talent to like do some of these crazy tricks that these skaters are doing: turning a space that looks just like garbage cans or a ledge to a normal person, but skateboarders are going to see that as something that they skate on. So I feel like it always attracts these creative, radical minds. And then also the way that skateboarders dressed, as I said earlier, it is a creative form and a form of self-expression and an art form for sure. 

Yasmeen Wilkerson/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

When you photograph the skaters, do you feel like you’re kind of like collaborating with another artist?

Yeah, absolutely! I think it’s definitely always a collaboration when I’m shooting with another skateboarder. When I go to the skate park, oftentimes I’ll skate around a little bit to be comfortable in space and talk to people. I’ll have a camera with me, have a little conversation where I start shooting with them. But it’s always a collaboration. They might have like an idea for a photo; I might have an idea for a photo. And then we just make a photo. 

Do skaters approach you and are like, ‘Hey, I want to be part of that.” Or is it you going up to them? 

It’s a little bit of both. I think in the beginning it was me more approaching first. And then once they realized that I’m not here to do any harm, I’m here to make photos with them and sharing them with their community. They started approaching me more after that. And then eventually a lot of them come to me now for photos or some of them come to me now like, ‘Oh, I need to get headshots for this thing.’ Now that they know that I’m a photographer, they’ll ask for even lighting tips or help with photography. Skateboarding is just a very visual activity. So already I feel like a lot of these skaters have a natural eye for photography and most of them are filming each other at skate parks, filming their progress on their iPhones. So it feels like they kind of go hand in hand: photo/video and skateboarding.

 Kennedy Pony/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

I guess a skate park is kind of like a place to see and be seen. So maybe it’s perfect for photography in that way?

Yeah, totally. It definitely feels like the perfect subject for photographers. Because it’s a spectacle. You’re in the public space for one. I mean sometimes people do feel uncomfortable or shy in front of the camera. So it’s always good to ask, I don’t like to shoot unless I have consent from a skateboarder. I’d rather that than like going and shooting and then running away. And I always share the portraits with them so that the skaters can share them on their social media or use them for their personal use. That’s kind of like a nice favor in return, exchange.

What is their reaction usually?

Oh, it’s all mostly positive. Which is great. I think a lot of them are really just excited because the way an image looks when you see it on film is a lot different than just shooting with your iPhone. So there is some satisfaction in that most of the time. 

Natalie Thomas/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

I want to ask about the New York community specifically? Because I know you mentioned that it is very different from Seattle. 

It’s certainly more diverse now in Seattle than it was when I first started skating. I think it’s just demographics too, Seattle is very white, there are some Asians out there, too, and it’s becoming more of a diverse city. But, I think New York City is just like a melting pot of people. And they’re all gathering together and supporting each other. And it just feels so inclusive. And so that’s just that really caught my eye and my attention, which is why I started the project. 

Olivia Homolac/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

I was wondering if you started it with the idea of wanting to make it more inclusive, or did you just want to showcase the diversity that already existed? 

I started out shooting events first in like 2016 and then eventually I started making more portraits, just individual portraits with each and skateboarders that I would meet. And yeah, I wanted to showcase some of that diversity that I was seeing bubbling up to the surface here in New York City, especially showing marginalized genders in my work. 

Jada Cooper/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

I just have one last question, which is what you’re planning on doing with it next or what your thoughts are for the future of the project. 

Yeah, that’s such a good question. I have thousands of photos now, so I think eventually I would like to exhibit the photographs, I’ve done one smaller exhibit, but I haven’t done anything specific to Everybody Skate. I did an exhibit last year for just the general local skateboarding community, but I really to exhibit the photographs and maybe even make a book sometime and so everyone can enjoy it.

That’s great, I look forward to seeing the book sometime!

Oh my gosh I yeah. That’s like a whole other thing, yeah I definitely want to do that.

Top Photo: Cami Best/Photo by Lanna Apisukh

“Because porn may not be considered art, but some art can definitely be considered porn.” Or so Pornhub declares in its introduction for “Classic Nudes”, the porn platform’s new interactive website and app designed to guide visitors through some of the world’s most famous erotic art. 

Meant (in part) to encourage the return of museum visitors as covid restrictions ease up around the world, the site features tours of some of the world’s most famous museums and the nudist art they contain for both in-person visitors and online peekers. From The Met to The Louvre to Uffizi Gallery located in the birthplace of the Renaissance, Florence, each museum page provides a spread of notable artworks from their collection accompanied by audio (narrated by adult entertainers themselves), visual, and written guides on the piece as well as brief analysis into its pornographic nature. (There are also hardcore pornographic videos recreations of six of the paintings featured.) The site also provides “Another Perspective” that features sexual artwork from cultures not widely- or well-represented in Western art such as Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro’s woodblock print of a naked Geisha (1802-1803) or works from the Kama Sutra (1690).

Descriptions include sincerely-provided education in art history as well as tongue-in-cheek references to modern-sexual understandings. Describing The Louvre’s Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (1594), which showcases the two sisters topless, glancing at the viewer while one pinches the other’s nipple, Pornhub notes of the performative nature of the nipple-squeeze as having “early cam girl energy”. 

Photo Credit: Uknown author (School of Fontainebleau), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Scroll over to The Met and you’ll find Cezanne’s Bathers (1874-1875). Pornhub informs viewers of the painting that it was created without the use of nude models and instead Cezanne used only his imagination to conjure the naked women bathing by a river, to which Pornhub says its “kind of like what you’re forced to do when you’re internet is down”. The interactive site not only equates some of the world’s most prestigious artwork to the pornography contained on Pornhub’s main site but does so with a wink and smirk at the viewer of both the “porn” and the “art”, ultimately asking us what is the line between the two?

Nudist art has been in existence for as long as art itself has. Take Venus figurines for example. These Paleolithic-era statues (the oldest of which dates back to 35,000-40,000 years ago) depict the exaggerated female form, large breasts, hips, and butt on top of slender legs and carved genitalia. The discovery of the oldest of these statues (dating back to 35,000-40,000 years ago) prompted news outlets to label the figurines pornographic, an example of our primal obsession with sex, and even as a “pre-historic pin-up”. Many archeologists and historians have since pushed back at the contemporary, sexist framework such an assertion relies upon. 

Photo Credit: CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Whatever the intentions of the paleolithic people who carved the figurines were can never truly be known to us, but our own intentions in naming them “Venus” and insisting on their pornographic nature can be. The goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility is a common feature in Western art, notably including The Birth of Venus (1485), which depicts the goddess’s birth as a perfect, beautiful, and fully-formed woman and is likely the most well-known painting Pornhub includes in its collection. Its inclusion on Pornhub’s website may feel less shocking when you considered their common purpose as art made for and by the male gaze. And although nudist depictions of women in art or pornography itself are not inherently male serving, many/most of those that Pornhub features on its “Classic Nudes” website and on its main one certainly are. 

For its part, the museums and collections that Pornhub has centered on its site, have been less than pleased about their artworks’ inclusion. The Louvre and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery have both sued Pornhub for unauthorized use of its works, and a representative for The National Gallery of London told Hyperallergic that they “will not be taking action that directly or indirectly raises awareness of this project,”—a less than subtle snub of Pornhub’s apparent equation between masterful porn and masterful art. 

What then is the dividing factor between the two? Is it in the judgment of the creator’s intentions: to inspire or to titillate? Or is it in the censure of the audience’s response: for appreciation or for masturbation? Both seem impossible to wholly account for. So maybe it just comes down to in what form do we wish to consume erotic art? Through a screen or in a gilded museum.

Top Photo Credit: Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Saneun Hwang is a visual artist and graphic designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Hwang moved to New York City from Seoul, South Korea eight years ago to pursue a degree in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. There, she learned how to channel her passion for drawing and crafting into new mediums, like graphic design, mixed-media art, and photography. Her latest exhibition, “Concrete Utopia,” opens Friday, July 23 at Local Project Art Space. BUST sat down with the artist to discuss her creative process, the disillusion of New York City, and her latest projects.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

 After living in New York for a few years, art naturally became a part of my daily life. I love seeing art in museums and galleries but I also find joy in going to local bookstores, too, and being inspired by other artists’ work — Printed Matter is one of my favorites. 

I see potential in everything: posters, ads, typography on the street. I discover something new every day on routine trips to the grocery store or afternoon walks. When I see something that inspires me, I collect it. You should see the stack of prints, brochures, and flyers I’ve gathered over the years.

I enjoy the choreography of everyday life. Most of my photoshoots happen impromptu on my regular commutes. Through my work, I want to present an empowering narrative of daily life. Sometimes the seemingly ordinary holds something incredibly special.

How has living in major urban environments impacted your art?

 I’ve lived in cities my whole life. I’ve witnessed how rapidly urban development can devour a city’s history and culture. In Korea, I wanted to escape the homogenous high-rises and constant competition to move up the social ladder; I thought New York City would provide an escape from that but shortly after moving, I realized there’s no such thing as a utopia. When I accepted that, it put things in perspective for me. Instead of seeking a perfect place, I began to focus on capturing perfect moments.

 What influenced “Concrete Utopia?” What was the goal of this project?

 I was heavily influenced by the Constructivism movement of 1920s Russia. That style aims to reflect modern industrial society and capture urban spaces. As a graphic designer, I love how color, geometry, and text play off one another in that kind of work. I decided to reinterpret that genre using photo-based imagery and concrete poetry.

In this project, I made New York City my subject. I photographed building facades, glass, construction sites, and layers of concrete landscape, emphasizing how the interplay of texture, color, and material creates compelling patterns of urban imagery.

I wanted to capture the city as it was at the moment. Every block of New York is under construction, altering our surroundings so they’re unrecognizable. It made me wonder about the identity of a city. What is it becoming? What’s next? I felt the need to document it before it became something else entirely, something unfamiliar.

What role does poetry play in “Concrete Utopia?”

 As an immigrant and an artist, I’ve often had trouble communicating my thoughts. It’s frustrating and sometimes I find myself afraid to speak up for fear of not getting it exactly right. I felt like I was drifting in a sea of abstractions that I had no way of articulating. In an attempt to shape my thoughts into words, I started keeping a visual journal and filling it with concrete poetry.

In “Concrete Utopia,” the juxtaposition of photography and poetry serve as two very different communicative tools that help me both ask and answer questions I may have trouble vocalizing.

How has your experience in New York City shaped you as an artist and person?

 Before I moved to New York City, I was under the false impression (as many of us are) that it was a glamorous dreamland. As a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and an artist, it hasn’t always been easy.  But it’s made me more resilient and confident in my abilities and my creative pursuits. I’ve learned so much since I moved here and I appreciate the community I’ve made for myself. It inspires me to give back in return through my art.

What other projects are you working on right now?

 Recently, my creative partner, Keiko Nabila Yamazaki, and I jointly received the 2021 Queens Art Fund, a New Work Grant from the Queens Council On the Arts. We were accepted with our proposed project “Queens: a Culinary Destination,” an art exhibition in Long Island City that will feature illustrations, photography, and drawings. The theme is to explore the culinary diversity of Queens, shedding light on the different cultures and the influence of food in order to promote Queens as a culinary destination.

Keiko and I both love food and experiencing new restaurants. In 2020, it was really saddening to witness so many small restaurants close their doors. Those that remained open were forced to downsize their operations in order to survive. The way we approach food has shifted as well. The communal aspect or joys of a shared dining experience have been replaced in favor of the convenience — and isolation — of take-out. That disconnection is what’s inspired us to capture the love and togetherness that food can inspire.

What are you looking forward to for the rest of the year?

Getting back to pre-Covid (or surpassing post-Covid) life has been really hard. But the other day I stopped by Human Relations, a local bookstore in Bushwick, to say hi to my friend. I ended up staying there just chatting with a few other people I didn’t know for about three hours! We laughed about how awkward it was at first since moments like that have been few and far between, but we realized just how much we missed spontaneously getting to know strangers. I can’t wait for more of that — throwing myself into a new environment, meeting new people, having exciting conversations, capturing special moments of our daily life.

I’m also excited to be releasing my book “Two Parallel Lines,” a project I’ve been working on for the past eight years. This photo book captures everyday moments I encountered on the subway and will be available both in local New York City bookstores and online.

I’m grateful to have so much to look forward to.

To see more of Saneun’s work, head to studiosydneysaneun.com or follow her on Instagram @thisissaneun

Historic art forms and stories are on full display at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park. A new addition to the museum is an exhibit on the Jingle Dress, a traditional Native garment typically worn during ceremonies. 

The Jingle Dress and its dance are believed to be a source of healing for Indigenous communities. In addition, it sheds light on violent crimes committed against Native American women. For April Carmelo of Redding, a guest curator and citizen of the Greenville Rancheria, this exhibit is personal.

“This exhibit is personal to me because I lost a sister, Mary Carmelo, (who was murdered) in 2013,” she said to Record Searchlight. “Her remains were returned to me in 2018.”

The exhibit contains five women’s dresses and two kids’s dresses. The centerpiece, a scarlet jingle dress, is a symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement, Carmelo explained. “The Star Quilt that hangs behind the garments — a symbol of honor and generosity — also includes the image of a woman in a red jingle dress and the MMIW movement’s logo,” Record Searchlight reported.

Carmelo gathered the dresses from Yaqui, Wintu, Pit River, Wailacki, Yana, Taos Pueblo and Rarámuri dancers.

The Jingle Dress originated in the early 1900s when the granddaughter of a medicine man became sick. As the man fell asleep, he dreamt of four female spirit guides wearing the Jingle Dress and dancing. His spirit guides taught him how to make the dress and the dance. They claimed that making the dress and performing the dance will heal his granddaughter. 

After the man woke up, he quickly made the dress. Once he finished making the dress, he had the entire tribe watch the sick girl dance. At first, she was weak and was supported by the tribe, but she slowly gained the strength to dance. Wearing the dress and performing the dance on her own cured her of her illness, The National Congress of American Indians documented.

Indigenous women are murdered at 10 times higher than any other group. According to the CDC, murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, and more than half have experienced sexual violence. The Jingle Dress exhibit aims to bring awareness to these ongoing issues.

“The Jingle Costume is a real story about therapy and the assumption and energy of prayer,” Carmelo said. “I hope (museum friends), too, consider within the energy of prayer.”

UPDATE: 

This exhibit concluded September 6, 2021 but an in-person performance of the  traditonal jingle dress dance, Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project, is on at Birmingham Museum of Art on October 16th. 

Top photo: screenshot via YouTube

More from BUST

For Centuries, Some Asian Women Have Chosen To Live Communally, Preferring To Take Care Of Each Other Rather Than Rely On Men

Khadijah Robinson’s ‘The Nile List’ Is The Easiest Way To Discover And Support Black-Owned Brand

Hair Art: The Morbid Trend That Dominated The Victorian Era

As controversial as she is celebrated, Kara Walker is a prolific artist who helped define an entire generation of Black creators. Now, her collected works on paper from 1992 through 2020 have been gathered together for a new book and exhibit—Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be. Here are a few selections from that book, along with a brief essay by curator Anita Haldemann, explaining how Walker’s drawings are a “dance of skepticism and faith” 

“Untitled,” 1997–1999 

In the early 1990s, while she was a graduate student working toward her master’s degree in fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, Kara Walker made two very important decisions. In her art, she wanted to take on the perspective of a Black person and a woman actively: “Everything is a black woman. That was the proposition,” she told BOMB Magazine in 2014. She turned the acceptance of her own origins, along with the—subjective—limitations that accompany this, into her strength. This stance opened up to her a perspective on the history of colonialism, on the idea of America, and naturally on slavery—not only in terms of its history and its images, but above all its paradoxes and contradictory mechanisms of power structures, and the consequences they have had to this day. 

“Untitled,” 2019

“Only I Can Solve This (The 2016 Election),” 2016

The acceptance of the self, of one’s own subjectivity, and with it the questions surrounding one’s identity, had consequences for Walker’s artistic practice, and led to her third foundational decision—namely, to give up painting. She associated painting on canvas with a patriarchal and white tradition to which she neither wanted nor could belong. What remained to her was drawing, working on paper, and looking for a pointedly “weak” medium, which she found in the silhouette. The silhouette cutout has a bourgeois, feminine tradition and was also practiced in the United States in the 19th century by African Americans. It was considered a handicraft, a humble art form. “I searched for a form that had a historical effect and found the Victorian romance with all its detachment and cleanliness, a form which—flat as it is—also appears as if it were impossible to speak of anything essential. But the form is also a kind of snare: people take a peek simply because it looks nice and pleasurable. And then, suddenly, they may start seeing a few things that aren’t quite so nice,” Walker explained in Kunstbulletin in 2000.

“A Shocking Declaration of Independence,” 2018Now, Kara Walker has opened up her personal archive for the first time, revealing a spectacular and staggering abundance of over 600 works on paper from the last 28 years. Sketches, studies, collages, silhouettes, rolls of paper several meters long, elaborate large format works, diary-like notes, thoughts typed on index cards with a typewriter, and records of dreams are all a part of the archive. Looking at them, one could think that one is wandering through Walker’s studio, and at the same time, through her personal history. The drawings give rise to the feeling of observing the artist in the very act of making. Many of the sheets are like pages taken from a diary or sketchbook. Every stroke and every word has a poignant immediacy and power. Humor and rage, joy and frustration, love and hate—the entire gamut of emotions comes to the fore. 

“Untitled,” 2002–2004

The spontaneity of drawing suggests a moment of something that cannot be postponed—an unrestrained need to express oneself and communicate. In an interview on the occasion of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast in 2014, Walker described this impulse as a “huge need to continue to draw, that’s where I get my desire to be an artist.” The aesthetics of a sketch can also be understood in connection with Walker’s identity as an African American artist. Her drawing practice implies the unfinished, the sketched, the not-yet-completed: an interim state that she also applies to herself as an artist and a person. Walker has repeatedly stated that she considers herself to belong to the margins of art and society, that unambiguous identification is not possible for her, that she is neither activist enough for African American artists nor truly subsumed into the patriarchal structures of the white establishment and is thus just as “unfinished” as her drawings. 

“Untitled,” 1997–1999

For an artist such as Walker, who is not seeking to cement her identity, but rather to understand and investigate its genesis and transformation, drawing is a medium that offers the ideal space. “Drawing is a process, a dance of skepticism and faith,” Walker wrote in the exhibition catalogue for her show, “The Ecstasy of St. Kara,” mounted by the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio in 2016. “Perhaps the drawing is preparation for a more solid objective or event. Drawing sets the stage for the future. Perhaps it’s a meditation on its own flawed being, existing as a series of spontaneous decisions, strung together and then selectively erased out. Perhaps the drawing remains in a state of suspended potentiality, never to be a ‘real’ painting, but striving to be all the same, pencil mark by pencil mark.”   

By Anita Haldemann

Top artwork: “Untitled,” 2018

A version of this essay was originally published in Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be, by Maurice Berger (author), Aria Dean (author), Anita Haldemann (editor), and Kara Walker (artist), JRP|Editions and Kunstmuseum Basel, 2021.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2021 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Jennifer Mack-Watkins’s Newest Exhibit Is An Ode To The Beauty Of Black Youth

Corita Kent Was A Pop-Art Pioneer—And A Catholic Nun

Culture Critics Kimberly Drew And Jenna Wortham Commemorate This Moment In Time With Their New Book Black Futures

Typically, when we ruminate over the inspirations behind some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, we tend to assume that artists are always drawn to the extraordinary. However, there are some who seek out simpler subjects, and through them, achieve something just as grand. London-based artist Gianna Dispenza’s solo exhibit, Overcome by Joy—being presented at the Charles Moffett Gallery in New York through June 5—is a celebration of the sentiment that there is beauty in the small things. In the following conversation with Dispenza, we discuss the inspirations and emotions behind her stand-out pieces. 

I am curious to learn more about a place in London called the Ladies Pond and its connection with the pieces you will be presenting for the exhibit. What personal emotions came about when you originally set out to visit this space?

Honestly, I was skeptical of the Ladies Pond at first. These are wild swimming holes segregated by Mens, Ladies, and Mixed and it felt a little daunting and strange to operate in partitioned spaces. Plus, it’s a serious issue, but women aren’t always set up to trust one another. There are a lot of ways we are actually taught to perceive each other as a threat or to distrust. But spending time there and in the company of all of these women was reassuring almost in a primal way. It was a privilege really, and the whole experience was unexpected. For one, I couldn’t have anticipated the relief of swimming or lounging around without being sexualized. Then, I was quite moved by the sense of equality connecting everyone at the pond. This Pond is open to anyone who identifies as a woman, and despite the many people there whose difference might pose challenges outside—because of class or race or body type or age—the pond felt like a place where difference had no hierarchy, it was just enriching. It’s rare to share such comfort and fondness as a stranger among strangers. And so I’ve continued to go back to the Ladies Pond because, in the middle of London’s metropolis, buried in heath and enveloped in greenery, there is this fortuitous, mysterious, little pond that is perhaps the most generous place I know in London. 

How much of your work do you feel is reflective of the structures you encounter in your daily life?

I’m most interested in the breaking points of structures. This can be capitalism or patriarchy or religion or beauty—structures can be interpreted in so many ways, but what intrigues me most is the moment those biases lose traction; the moment we realize we’re behaving in line with someone else’s ideas and making judgments and projections based on something more like propaganda than empiricism and understanding. For me personally, when the tension between expectation and experience reaches a breaking point, it’s a really wonderful and beautiful thing. It’s precisely at that point that growth and productive conversations can happen. And so in my work, I try to orbit those moments of slippage; to open up the possibility of more than one valid answer and emphasize the value of different interpretations or multiple interpretations, sometimes simultaneously. 

Have there been physical spaces, such as the Ladies Pond, that have inspired other works?

The Pond affected me because it revealed some tension between what I thought and what I experienced and this happens all the time, usually with a connection to place, but also in culture, beliefs, or recurring images in art or media. Those moments are the seedlings for most of my work. The Pond series started because this unlikely oasis in the middle of a city offered some relief from being sexualized while bathing and it also offered a simple but vital experience of camaraderie. It feels good to depict this as a woman painting other women. I’d be the first to admit that my work incorporates elements of modernism, but it also reconsiders tropes around women bathing in art, specifically associated with male modernist painters, from the perspective of a woman. But I find culture, belief, and recurring images just as fertile as physical spaces—much of my work draws directly from newspapers and media, the sports section in particular. I find the sports section to be an unusual space of extreme emotion and intimacy among men. Another series is about women literally sitting backwards on chairs. And this series, which is ongoing, is the product of tensions between the iconic image of Christine Keeler seated nude and backwards on a chair, and a watch ad of the motorcycle racer Marc Marquez seated in the same position, to a strikingly different effect. A few years ago, my paintings had a strong connection to Beirut where I also lived for several years and where my daily experiences were constantly editing what I had—often unknowingly—absorbed about Lebanon simply by consuming American culture. 

Do you feel that the medium you use is related to how you felt about your subjects? 

The medium and the feelings or ideas behind these pieces work very much in unison. For one, they are created primarily in grayscale, which removes some of the emotional associations with color and gives prominence to the role of context. The limited palette and strategically placed colors help open the work to multiple readings. “Swimmer,” for example, could also be interpreted as drowning, transcending, or something else entirely. In “Overcome by Joy,” there are red, yellow, and blue wedges of oil stick which are used sculpturally to describe confetti, while the rest of the palette almost has a pious, Renaissance, feeling and is muted in graphite, buff clay, and terracotta. “The Bathers” is built largely with industrial materials and is sturdy enough that if you wrap your knuckles against the piece, it sounds like knocking on a door. I appreciate how physically robust this particular work is, especially in relation to the strength of the central figure and the nudity of the other figures. At the same time, there are more temporal materials like pollen and citrus buried into it. So color and medium are used somewhat strategically, playfully, and experimentally—often added, buried, and excavated multiple times until I find the right balance.

 In honor of the title of your exhibit, what has been making you feel “overcome by joy” these days? 

It’s a tricky question to answer when there is so much challenging us all, but in some moments, I really do find peace and comfort in swimming. I’ve left London for the summer, and am staying in Maine where I live on a tidal inlet called the Salt Pond. The 46 degree Atlantic plunge suspends my thoughts and feelings (I literally go numb). It’s a kind of full-system reboot, and it allows me to return to the world a little more energized, clear-headed, and rooted in my environment. It’s a kind of euphoria, if not by way of shock.  

How do you feel the creation of these pieces has impacted you? 

The thing that affected me most might have actually been showing the body of work. I’ve spent this past year working in solitude, usually at night between about 4 p.m. and 3 a.m. I worked very privately and as a result, I think this has been one of the most intimate relationships with a body of work yet. Not only because these pieces served as my company but also because the sheer scale and weight of the work required my entire body to engage, all the time. A lot of physical energy was put into these pieces. My hands and body are impressed and folded into the mark-making. So to show them and speak about them to so many people so suddenly has felt vulnerable and revealing at times. And at the same time, bringing them out of my studio, sharing them, and especially seeing all the works displayed together in Charles Moffett’s luminous New York gallery, has been pure joy.

The full exhibit can be viewed here. 

Top Photo Courtesy of Gianna Dispenza studio / Photos Courtesy of Daniel Greer and Charles Moffett Gallery

More From BUST

“Little Amal,” A 12-Foot Syrian Girl Puppet, Will Travel 5,000 Miles As Part Of A Public Art Project About The Plight Of Refugees

Robin Frohardt Sends A Powerful Message About Plastic Waste and Climate Change Through “Plastic Bag Store: The Film”

Jennifer Mack-Watkins’s Newest Exhibit is An Ode to the Beauty of Black Youth

Nine-year old Amal is not a typical girl. Standing almost 12 feet tall, “Little Amal” is a puppet that’s set to travel across Turkey and Europe in search of her mother.

This ambitious public art project, called “The Walk,” was created by a humanitarian theatre group called Good Chance. In this project, Little Amal will travel to 70 different towns, cities, and villages, including those based in Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and France, until she reaches the U.K.

The Walk Project was meant to have taken place between April and July of 2020, but was delayed by the pandemic, The Guardian reported. Amal’s journey will begin near the Turkish-Syrian border. Along the way, she will perform a number of acts, all of which are designed to bring attention to the stories of real-life refugee children.

In Paris, Amal will explore the refugee camps. Once she arrives in London, Amal will celebrate her 10th birthday. She will venture throughout different cities in London until she eventually finds her mother in Manchester and concludes her journey.

One of the project’s main goals is “to celebrate the potential of refugees, children [and] grownups,” and to uplift their stories and voices.

The Syrian civil war began in March 2011, forcing millions of Syrians to choose between living through war and embarking on a dangerous journey to a new country. At least half of the children were displaced during the war. 5.6 million Syrians were refugees, and 6.2 million were displaced throughout Syria, Global Citizen reported. As time passed, however, people worldwide started to become indifferent. Humanitarian efforts were still in effect, but people became apathetic about the crisis. 

Good Chance co-founders Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson came up with the idea for “The Walk” when they visited a refugee camp called Calais in 2015. From there, Murphy and Robertson wanted to share stories of the refugees, thus creating the critically acclaimed play The Jungle. 

Amal’s journey will begin on July 27 and finish on November 3 of this year. According to the Evening Standard, people can follow the progress of the project online and on social media.

Top photo: screenshot via YouTube / Good Chance

More from BUST

This Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy Treasure

This Accessory Artist Is Reclaiming Her Cherokee Heritage One Bead At A Time

Jennifer Mack-Watkins’s Newest Exhibit Is An Ode To The Beauty Of Black Youth

Film director and artist Robin Frohardt sends a powerful message through her short film, Plastic Bag Store: The Film. Using colorful objects and puppetry, Frohardt’s film depicts how wasteful humans are, and how we’re destroying our planet.

The curtains open, introducing us to a market called “The Plastic Bag Store.”  Colorful, delectable items are on full display: cupcakes, cereal, fruit, vegetables. At first glance, these items appear to be real. But upon closer inspection, we see that the items are made of plastic, with names like “Yucky Shards” and “Caps N’ Such.” The employees stop what they’re doing to move the shelves. They take a seat and the story begins.

We are taken back to ancient times where a man named Thaddeus invents a device called “knowledge water.” The water is bought in a vase and tossed in the outskirts of town. Realizing the effects the disposable vases are having on the environment, he paints a warning on a vase, where it is found in a museum 2,000 years later.

Helen is a custodian who is constantly picking up trash at the museum where she works. Through her body language, we see how appalled she is with how much plastic is wasted. This leads her to write a note to the future about how wasteful people are, apologizing on the present’s behalf. From there, she seals the note in a bottle and wraps it in a plastic bag.

Centuries later, we’re blasted into the future, where the planet is a desolate wasteland from the “robot wars.” The note in the bag is discovered by a man while fishing near the Earth’s equator, which is now made of ice. He comes across the plastic bag, which intrigues him. Opening it, he discovers that the note inside is from the past. The film ends with the man searching for more “messages” from the past, fishing out a bunch of more plastic. 

Long before this film, Frohard had created “The Plastic Bag Store” itself, which was originally staged in the Carolina Performing Arts’ CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio in Chapel Hill, NC. The store resembles an actual grocery store, stocked with goods—but every item is made out of single-use plastic bags. “The idea came to me many years ago, just watching someone bag and double bag my groceries which then went in another bag,” she told The Guardian during an interview, “I realised how absurd it was. And so I decided that I would make a grocery store that was even more absurd.”

Overall, Plastic Bag Store: The Film beautifully paints the global consequences of humanity’s carelessness about plastic waste. The puppets and colorful plastic will mesmerize both children and adults alike, while teaching them about climate change. The film was released on Earth Day, and is available to stream on demand from now until May 2 on the website of the Center of the Art of Performance UCLA.

All pictures via Robin Frohardt’s Website

More from BUST 

This Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy Treasure

Mexico City Implements Ban On Single-Use Plastic — But People Who Menstruate Face The Consequences

“Same Love” Songbird Mary Lambert Shares Tips For Making Art During Traumatic Times On BUST’s “Poptarts” Podcast

It’s the time of year when poets of all backgrounds come together and are celebrated for their work. National Poetry Month was created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, in the hopes of uplifting and showcasing work capable of capturing the imaginations of the general public. And in that same spirit, here are some amazing women writers who speak to the soul and will make you want to tap into your highest self.

1. Amanda Gorman

There’s no question that Amanda Gorman should be first on the list. She has had such an impactful year, and it’s only April. Becoming the youngest poet to perform at President Biden’s inauguration and the first-ever poet to be on the cover of Vogue magazine, Gorman is living proof that it doesn’t matter how young you may be, you have the power to break barriers. 

Her most notable work: “The Hill We Climb” 

2. Rupi Kaur

From self-publishing her iconic debut poetry collection, milk and honey, at 21 to performing her first-ever one-woman show (out April 30), Rupi Kaur is a literary powerhouse in the poetry community. Kaur’s work speaks to all women about femininity, loss, breaking generational cycles, and more. 

Her most notable work: “Timeless” 

3. Ebony Stewart 

Touring poet, performance artist, coach, mentor, sexual health activist, and playwright, Ebony Stewart is a woman with a purpose. Described as one of the most “decorated poets in Texas” according to her website, this Woman of the World Poetry Slam champion will leave you feeling empowered and seen. 

Her most notable work: “Box”

4. Jae Nichelle

Performing in poetry slams since she was a teenager, Jae Nichelle’s contributions to spoken word have been making waves over the past few years. With work featured in Refinery29, Best New Poets 2020, and ColorBloq Magazine, Nichelle is an accomplished poet and author and writes articles centered around mental health within the Black community. 

Her most notable work: “Friends with Benefits”

5. Emi Mahmoud

“She has debated with presidents, been confronted by the Dalai Lama, and been called one of the world’s most inspiring women, ” The Guardian writes about poet and activist Emtithal Mahmoud. Mahmoud focuses on advocacy and triumph while expressing her insights on the pain and beauty that come from living in Sudan. Her vulnerability will leave your heart wrenched and your spine tingling. 

Her most notable work: “For Anyone Who Feels Alone Out There”

Top Photo: Screenshot of Jae Nichelle – “Friends with Benefits” via YouTube 

More From BUST 

From “Killing Eve” to “I May Destroy You,” These 8 Women-Led Shows Should Be On Your Watchlist

5 great female-focused French films to watch tout suite!

VOTE: 7 Artists Personally Invite You To Make History

Art is a medium that has the power to bring people together and to share the lives and experiences of those who may feel unheard and forgotten about. With her talents as both an artist and a storyteller, Jennifer Mack-Watkins’s exhibit “Children of the Sun” provides a look into the world of being a Black child growing up during an era of struggle, fear, and uncertainty. This exhibit is meant to provide a space where Black children can be celebrated and uplifted. 

According to her press release for the exhibit, Mack-Watkins’s inspiration came from both the early 1920s and a story from 1891 centering around an African-American schoolgirl who was told to “recite a white-written poem while holding a caricatured Black doll…,” and thus decided to use doll-imagery as the basis for her central theme. Such pieces will include the beautiful prints of “Faith,” “Carter,” “Black Boy Hope,” and “Emma.” 

The exhibit will be presented at The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in New York from March 18 to June 13, 2021. It will feature 14 various-sized works all centering around the magazine, The Brownies’ Book. Mac-Watkins’s states that her intention for creating these art pieces was to “further her ongoing investigation of the beauty, importance, and complexity of positive representation of African-American children in literature, media, and pop-culture.” She also credits her experience as a mother of two children for the drive behind creating her work. 

You can access the virtual tour for the exhibit here.

Photos provided courtesy of Elizabeth Brooks 

More from BUST 

Join Artivist Dani Slocki As She Showcases Her Annual Fundraiser Dedicated to Brooklyn Creatives

Gwen Smith’s “The Black Women Project” (Vol. 1 & 2) Reimagines What A Portrait Can Be

Cartoonist Ellen Forney Wants You To Stay Informed And Get Out To Vote

Here is a list of 10 more women on TikTok who are inspiring their followers with their authentic and down-to-earth content. It’s a take on that meme “What’s a scene from a movie or TV show that just makes you go like: WOMEN” (@ana.gir.fer), except it’s a listicle. Read on for some really cool real-life women. 

@amayahlilwolf

I couldn’t forget about Amy putting Laurie in his place! ##littlewomen ##amymarch ##fyp @ana.gir.fer

♬ sonido original – ana.gir.fer

1. @taylor_chilton18

If you’re looking for body-positive encouragement and really cool haircut inspiration, look no further than Taylor Chilton. Her new series, “Have Lunch With Me,” is a conversation about her journey to body neutrality. She sits on her porch in a bikini while eating and sharing her testimonials on different facets of the weight loss and diet industry.

@taylor_chilton18

i love you!

♬ Lofi – Domknowz

 2. @chrissychlapecka

Are you a bimbo? Do you hate men? Do you genuinely like pastels? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might want to follow your friendly neighborhood, self-proclaimed misandrist. Once you move past Chrissy Chlapecka’s divine eyeshadow and soothing voice, you’ll see someone who will remind you every day that men sometimes suck. She won’t let you or the catcallers she records forget that she loves women and that we are allowed to take up space.

@chrissychlapecka

these guys kept following me so ##stopmen ##ugly ##ihatecapitalism ##bimbo

♬ original sound – chrissy

3. @headofthehoochies

Queen Hoochie is a bisexual sex worker queen. Her boyfriend Trent won’t kiss her when she’s wearing lipgloss. Her cats don’t belong to the streets but think they do. She will break your neck if you try to come for her opinions on “snow animals.” Many of her videos shine a light on the daily discrimination and racism she sees on TikTok and in real life. She responds to comments often and holds nothing back when reprimanding other users for their ignorance. Follow for makeup inspo.

@headoftheehoochies

fuck no

♬ original sound – Hoochie GOD

4. @whatsonvisface

Calling all skincare addicts! If you need new products, follow Vi. If you’re looking for someone cracking jokes about their own mental health, follow Vi. If you like to watch Mia Khalifa stan videos, follow Vi. If you want to have the same content on your feed as AOC, follow Vi. She dispels myths in the beauty and skincare industries, takes no shit from haters, and will spice up your list of Asian-American content creators.

@whatsonvisface

hate crime explained by @thekoreanvegan ##stopasianhate ##stopaapihate ##hateisavirus

♬ original sound – Joanne L. Molinaro (이선영)

 5. @thegodmutha

If you aren’t already one of Dennie Augustine’s 1.5 million “god babies,” you should be. Prepare to be woken up with a raspy Staten Island voice screaming motivation into your soul. Her series, “A Dennie for your Thoughts,” reminds her followers to prioritize their personal well-being before focusing on others. After getting her start on MTV’s “Families of the Mafia” and “Made in Staten Island,” Dennie has created a “commun-tity” of sex-, body-, and soul-positive followers who lean on her as if she wrote the Bible. When you start watching her content, you’ll probably think she did, too.

@thegodmutha

good morning baby!! You’re gonna have a good day! ##fyp ##foryou ##confidence ##advice ##doyou ##liveforyourself ##selflove ##positivevibes ##truth ##ily

♬ original sound – dennieaugustine

 6. @glamdemon2004

Comedian and finance-bro scammer Serena will show you how to get your bag from men in New York and look good while doing it. Her takes on pretty much everything are always aggressively accurate. If you also hate Joe Rogan and don’t know what it means to short stocks, follow her. She’s also a student at a fashion school in New York, so you can trust her advice on how to look glamorous while breaking hearts.

@glamdemon2004

I’m his grimes

♬ Elon is a BARB – Bruh4368536

 7. @nothanksalex

Nothanksalex has a degree in ethnic studies with a focus on mass incarceration and police brutality, so please don’t question her when she speaks about BLM, the hate crimes against the AAPI community, or anything else. Other reasons to follow her are her entertaining personal stories on being bisexual and her general hatred of old creepy men. If you are looking for a place to debate any topic in the comments, her platform is your new home.

@nothanksalex

 

♬ original sound – not emmy rossum

 8. @miadio

More popularly known as TikTok’s favorite Russian Sugar Baby, Mia Dio spends most of her videos sharing with her followers how to pwn (hello 2010) old rich men into giving you money. She also provides really cool astrology content through her sponsorship with Nebula. Her main message is to never let any man bring you down.

@miadio

##fyp ##advice

♬ original sound – Mia Dio

 9. @vella

Gabriella Valdez, or “Vella,” is a woman whose voice is somewhere between Janis Joplin and Amy Whinehouse and gives every song she covers the rock-and-roll rasp it needs. Since building a robust following on TikTok, she is making waves in the music industry after releasing her debut single and announcing her tour this week. She’s not even 18 yet and already breaking barriers. 

@vella

I See Red- @everybodylovesanoutlaw ##CTCVoiceBox##DayInMyLife##OikosOneTrip##rock##soul##fyp##cover##365days##iseered##sing##singer##foryou##viral##trending##xyzbca

♬ original sound – VELLA

10. @gibz_

Hailing from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Gabby Depietro focuses on realistic mental health content as well as funny takes on trends and popular dances. She talks about her past traumas and how they have impacted her journey to loving her body. And she has jokes, too!

@gibz_

♬ follow me lol – kaydin?‍

On Sunday, April 11th, 2021- PROPHETS OVER PROFITS [P.O.P], the Brooklyn based art collective is back for its annual fundraiser, this year as a virtual online event to raise money and awareness for 50 different artists and art collectives. Every year musicians, DJs, producers, bartenders, and allies volunteer their time and talents making Prophets Over Profits possible. This year, with Covid hitting these communities hard, P.O.P has partnered with fiscal sponsors, Brooklyn Arts Council , Ilegal Mezcal  and Founders Brewing Co to fundraise for those 50+ local volunteers,artists, and activists a.k.a ARTivits. (full disclosure, BUST is one of the artivists!)

Founded by Dani Slocki a.k.a SLOWKEY, this year’s event (the 4th annual) will be hosted on the 3D platform, vSpace. Anyone wanting to join the virtual space, can RSVP at www.popdonate.com  and will have access to a wide variety of content such as music videos, performances from artists like Lion Babe, Kat Cunning, Tony Award Winner Lena Hall, DJ set by Jadalareign, drag performances by Madame Vivien V,  poetry, and much more. You can also catch the streamed event on BUST’s Instagram and House of Yes’s IG. For those less tech-savvy, you can view on the P.O.P website via Youtube for a limited time as well.

In the past, P.O.P has raised money for organizations like Planned Parenthood, Willie Mae Rock School for Girls, and Peace Boat. This year SLOWKEY states, “To lose these ARTivists we’d lose the vibrancy of our great city. If the government won’t cancel rent, provide healthcare, or increase minimum wages, we have to take care of our neighbors ourselves”

Be sure to tune in on April 11th at 6pm EST and dontate! Graphics by Sarah Lillz

More From BUST

Social Justice Illustrator Shirien Damra Re-Envisions A Better Future Through Art: BUST Interview

Calling All Aesthetes: 10 Activist Artists Who Should Be At The Top Of Your Instagram Feed

This Unapologetic Street Art Series Puts Queer POC Front And Center

When 33-year-old artist Shirien Damra first learned about the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was gunned down while jogging in Georgia last year, she, like many of us, was angry and heartbroken. As a gesture of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and as a way to raise awareness about what happened, she created a portrait as a tribute—one that would display his humanity. Shortly after, she illustrated similar portraits for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, two Black Americans who were killed by police. “Throughout history, we have seen victims of anti-Black violence demonized in the media as some kind of justification for their murders,” Damra says. “I wanted to challenge that demonization by creating something soft and loving for Ahmaud, Breonna, and George.”

Shirien Damra

After posting those portraits to her Instagram feed (@shirien.creates), they immediately went viral and were shared by countless people, including well-known figures like actor Mindy Kaling and Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Damra even received positive feedback from the victims’ relatives and was asked by Georgia’s NAACP chapter to create an illustration specifically for Arbery’s family.

Coming from a family of Palestinian refugee immigrants, the Chicago-based designer has always known what injustice and racism look like. Art was one of Damra’s first loves, but after earning her master’s degree in sociology, she became deeply involved in community organizing and social justice advocacy. Her life reached a turning point in 2015, however, when she was diagnosed with cancer. Since then, Damra has been committed to using her art as a form of self-care and healing. “Creating is a great tool to help me process the dif-ficult emotions [that come with] social justice work and life in general as a woman of color,” she says. “The art I create helps bring together my passions for self-care, healing, and social justice to re-envision the world I want to live in.”

In addition to her portraits, Damra has also created illustrations to support and raise awareness for other important social movements, including Survivor Love Letter, Immigrants Are Essential, and #EndSARS. She believes artists like herself have the power to help people visualize change. “I hope to continue to use my platform to uplift marginalized communities and challenge systems of oppression through my art as much as possible,” Damra says. “I hope people can be inspired to do the work, whether it is internal work or bringing about systemic change. True healing requires both.”

By Safire R. Sostre
Illustrations provided by Shirien Damra
Photo: @Whim_Q

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2021 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Calling All Aesthetes: 10 Activist Artists Who Should Be At The Top Of Your Instagram Feed

This Unapologetic Street Art Series Puts Queer POC Front and Center

Meet the Next Generation of Superstar Activists: Exclusive BUST Interviews

While social media is primarily used as a tool for keeping updated on the lives of friends, acquaintances, and your favorite celebrities, it can also be an impressive device for keeping yourself updated on social issues. Platforms like Instagram offer the opportunity of an intersection of art and activism. Check out these pages which use the power of representation to advance compelling advocacy.

1. C.hroma
   Salomée, who runs the C.hroma account, describes herself on her Patreon as “creating murals and art for the revolution.” On her Instagram account, Salomée intersperses minimalist text-centered posts with the occasional selfie and mural. The art that she does share is mostly reflective of BIPOC-related social initiatives; she was even one of the organizers of a fundraiser for securing holiday gifts for BIPOC youth who have been affected by COVID-19 (which you can still donate to). Salomeé’s art also dabbles in issues that affect indigenous peoples and undocumented immigrants. Moreover, her aesthetic is both bold and psychedelic, a welcome splash of iridescence for your timeline.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by salomée (@c.hroma)

2. Jenny Holzer
   Jenny Holzer is an old-school text artist, her art splashed across the walls of pretty much every major modern art museum. Following her on Instagram is a whole other experience though. Holzer often posts animations of her art, similar to a credit roll of her snappy phrases, and she shares photographs and videos of her art projected on buildings and on billboards. Famous for such pieces neo-conceptual pieces as “RAISE GIRLS AND BOYS THE SAME WAY” and “ABUSE OF POWER SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE”, Holzer concisely lays out intersectional feminist ideas. There’s no elitism here, her audacious, austere words providing a break from the usual scroll of picturesque photos.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by JENNY HOLZER STUDIO (@jennyholzerstudio)

3. Anjali Mehta
   Anjali Mehta’s social media presence is saturated in jewel-tones. Based in New Delhi, India, Mehta’s art doesn’t always focus on activism, but many of her illustrations are revelatory of social issues–both in India and globally. Most of her posts are gouache-based paintings that feature people going about their daily lives, though many feature hand-lettering, as well. Alongside her more socially conscious pieces, Mehta includes captions that delve into her thoughts on the issue at hand, bringing an element of personal wisdom to her Instagram. You can check out her website to purchase her illustrations as prints for some dynamic home decor with a message.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Anjali Mehta (@anjalimehta92)

4. Dear Darling Design Studio
   For a groovy, vintage aesthetic, I highly recommend giving Dear Darling Design Studio a follow! Founded by Darra Sargent, this art collective brings good vibes and pertinent information right to your phone. Incorporating a bright pastel color palette, funky lettering, and a distressed overlay, Sargent’s account is one that feels like a nostalgic blast from the past, bringing in more general text-based activism that doesn’t make you feel like shit.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Darra Baltimore Artist ? (@deardarlingdesignstudio)

5. Village Idiot
   If you’re looking for a monochromatic art-style built on pointillism, this is the place for you. Village Idiot is run by a guy named Mike whose approach is a bit blunter than most. His posts are cartoon-like in nature, and he often includes matter-of-fact text that doesn’t shy away from expletives. If you’re the type of person that appreciates straightforwardness and starkness in your art, definitely give him a follow. This account is full of dotwork that denounces white supremacy and supports the recent wave of protests against police brutality and racism. If you’re interested in purchasing prints, you can just DM the account!
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Comrade Idiot (@village__idiot_)

6. Futura Free Design
   Futura Free Design is run by Quentin Swenke, and it’s an exploration of graphic design and letter blocking more particularly. Experimenting with ratios and fonts, this Instagram account is another one for textual art lovers. Of his activism posts, there’s a lot more than just catchy slogans and taglines in favor of specific movements. Some are slideshows that include key information about the issues that Swenke cares about, like racism and the death penalty. For those who enjoy learning from their feeds in a way that still satisfies a lust for art, Futura Free Design will be a very refreshing addition to your follow list.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by futura free design (@futurafreedesign)

7. Side Dimes
   Created by Brooklyn-based artist Mikayla Lapierre, Side Dimes is an exploration of pure anachronism. According to her website, Lapierre takes reproductions of 17th and 18th-century paintings, then uses digital technology to paint over parts of them with references to contemporary pop culture. This concept is unique, to say the least. Lapierre’s posts give voices to women of the past who were often voiceless, and also heightens the culture of modern trends. Regularly, these art pieces also include allusions to modern political and social issues. For some pop culture amusement with a classical feel, check out Side Dimes.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Side Dimes (@sidedimes)

8. Johanna Goodman
   Johanna Goodman is something of both a digital and traditional collage artist. Her pieces have even been featured in the book Every Body: An Honest and Open Look at Sex from Every Angle, an inclusive, diverse compilation of stories about sex. On her Instagram, Goodman usually features pieces that utilize a feminine silhouette, various images appearing across a larger-than-life female body. More often than not, these images are politically focused.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Johanna Goodman (@johannagoodman)

9. Youngmer
   In her Instagram bio, artist Mer Young dedicates her account to “Elevating Indigenous Natives Black & Brown Lives,” and her page certainly lives up to this ambition. She aims to “inspire, celebrate and elevate repressed indigenous, first nations and native cultures and women of color” through her work. Through each of her posts, Young dips her toes into different color palettes, leaping from rich earth tones to a subtle grayscale to vibrant iridescents. Each art piece features a photographed individual or a few individuals of color (primarily of indigenous origin) in the foreground, the background a visionary collage relevant to the message that Young seeks to propagate. Alongside each post, Young includes a caption that explains the meaning behind her post, more often than not with accessible messaging.
   

    

    

    

    

   View this post on Instagram

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   A post shared by Mer Young (@youngmer)

10. Guerilla Girls
    Is it possible to talk about art activism without talking about the iconic, ever-anonymous Guerilla Girls? With a focus on opposing racism, sexism, and discrimination within the elitist art world, the Guerilla Girls have been around for more than 30 years. However, they’ve made the jump from exclusively physical demonstrations and productions to sharing their work on social media and highlighting the voices of other, less anonymous art activists. The inequality within the art world is vaster than what meets the eye, and it’s worth holding a magnifying glass to.
    

     

     

     

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    A post shared by Guerrilla Girls (@guerrillagirls)

     
    Header image via Side Dimes, Salomée Souag for Graphic Arts Center, and Anjali Mehta.

    More from BUST:
    These 20th Century Female Tattoo Artists Changed The Game
    This Unapologetic Street Art Series Puts Queer POC Front And Center
    How Women And YA Are Changing The World Of Comics 

There are certain people who live their lives naked. We have all met someone like this, or maybe we wish that we could live our own lives this way. They carry a willingness to open themselves up to the world, to find connection wherever they go. Catherine Cohen is one of these people.

Cohen, who is 29-years-old, is best known for her candid comedy. In 2017, she began hosting Cabernet Cabaret at Club Cumming in the East Village with musician Henry Koperski. She brought her show, The Twist?…She’s Gorgeous, to Edinburgh for the Festival Fringe in 2019 and has performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Her debut collection of poetry, God I Feel Modern Tonight, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2021.

BUST spoke to Cohen about overcoming a need for validation, finding her own definition of confidence, and the therapeutic power of writing.

How did you get started in comedy? Was it always your plan to move to New York and pursue comedy after university?

Bravely, my dream was always to be an actress in NYC. I fell into comedy after taking an improv class with some UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] teachers at the Williamstown Theater Festival one magical summer. Unfortunately, I was instantly addicted.

You have such a specific style of humor. What inspired you to explore this candid self-deprecating but simultaneously self-obsessed comedy?

I had no choice! It would be so glamorous to keep a single, solitary thought to myself, but I do find that impossible to do.

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by catherine cohen (@catccohen)

Were there any specific writers or comedians who inspired your style of humor, who made you want to work in that style?

I grew up seeing Molly Shannon do Superstar and thinking that was the funniest thing I had ever seen in my entire life and losing my shit. As I got older I got more into confessional poetry and writing. So that silliness combined with revealing real stuff about myself. I always felt most connected to people who were just totally honest and open about what they were going through, cause it always made me feel less alone. Just reading Nora Ephron and Maggie Nelson, not even comedians, just writers.

A lot of your work is based on your experiences with dating and sex. Sometimes people wrongly have a negative view of women who speak so honestly about these things—that maybe they shouldn’t be taken seriously on an intellectual level, or even just as a person. Do you ever find that the perception of your comedy persona bleeds into how people perceive you as yourself? Do people have certain presumptions about who you are?

I think people might assume I’m a self-absorbed bitch and I absolutely am…but I’m also very kind and fragile. Kindness is all that matters to me, fuck the rest.

Do you find that you weren’t taken seriously when you first started in comedy? Is this still an issue that comes up?

I think men are very scared of women who like themselves. Oftentimes a bro will come to one of my shows and I’ll feel like I have to win them over. I feel like I do, and then after they’re like “Woah, that was actually cool.” And I’m like “Yeah…you’re late to the party, bitch.”

There are always obviously going to be people who don’t like what I do and I can’t change that and, obviously, I would love it if everyone liked me, but it’s not realistic. I grew up being told I can do anything I want and I never felt at all like I can’t do this cause I’m a woman.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed just how subtle and nuanced the misogyny can be sometimes and how there are often things you accept as normal and then when you unpack it, you can tell it’s rooted in hatred of women or fear of their power. It’s a little disheartening, but it’s also important to recognize and talk about. I think I also have been lucky to know and work with many men who love women. I think it’s possible to be a good guy but there’s a lot going against you. It’s tricky.

I think it’s kinda insidious. You don’t notice it’s happening, and then you realize or look back. I especially look back at myself in college and realize how often I was trying to change or behave a certain way to impress a man. That used to be such a big part of where I got my value. Now it matters less to me. It just goes back to if someone doesn’t like my work, there are so many people who I like connecting with, I don’t need to worry about the ones who don’t.

What has been the biggest challenge, as a performer, in shifting your shows online?

I miss the crowds so much I am losing my mind! Doing the online shows is so fun, but nothing compares to the rush of a live crowd. The biggest challenge is that I’m lonely and sad…can anyone relate?

In your comedy and on Seek Treatment, you’re very open about your personal life, discussing dating, body issues, mental health, and anything else that’s on your mind. Do people who know you personally ever judge you for being so honest? How do you respond to this?

It can definitely be tricky sometimes. It’s like…do my parents need to hear about me having anal sex via Instagram live? Absolutely not, but that’s what’s happening. What’s a girl to do? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and die, so might as well go for it!

You’ve spoken before about how the comedy character of Catherine Cohen is a heightened version of your real self. Do you ever feel a burden to maintain the performance of this character outside of your comedy, in your regular life?

I’m only now learning how important it is for me to have time alone where I can just chill and not try to make anyone laugh. Obviously, I hate being alone (very healthy!), but if I’m too burnt out and exhausted, I won’t be able to write and perform. Now I spend lots of nights in—I like to watch murder shows, eat popcorn, get texts and ignore them, drink inhuman amounts of CBD seltzer, which does nothing but tastes good actually.

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by catherine cohen (@catccohen)

The observations you make in your comedy really hit on something so real about being a young woman navigating life. Can you speak about your writing process?

I just write whatever is on my mind. My new therapist says “you can’t solve an emotion” (rude), but that’s what I try and do through my writing. And if nothing is coming, I don’t try and force it. I just kind of stream of consciousness vibes until something makes me giggle alone in my room.

During quarantine, you started a newsletter—My Sexy Little Email. All proceeds from the subscriptions go to The Loveland Foundation. Can you tell us a little more about why you chose this organization?

Yes! Therapy has been huge for me and The Loveland Foundation is an amazing organization that funds therapy for Black women and girls. Everyone deserves access to therapy, particularly Black women and girls who often face discriminatory barriers when it comes to getting the healthcare they need.

Can you speak about the importance of being so open about your experiences?

It’s very therapeutic for me. I don’t know where I’d put all this shit if I didn’t have some kind of outlet. It’s just how I process things and how I cope with being alive. I know how other writers have helped me feel less alone, and that’s what I kinda hope to do when people read my stuff. There’s so much that we think is embarrassing, but isn’t, cause we’re all feeling the same stuff.

Header image of Catherine Cohen by Bea Helman 

More from BUST

Merle Dandridge On Having The Necessary Conversations In Kaley Cuoco’s New Series, “The Flight Attendant:” A BUST Interview

Sunita Mani Talks New Comedy “Save Yourselves!”: BUST Interview

Aya Cash On Horror, Humor, And Feminism In “Scare Me”

Gwen Smith enters her New York City studio, takes a near full body selfie, finds a reference photo of a Black woman she admires, and then gets to painting. The result of this continued studio practice of two and a half years are two, 240-page hardcover books entitled The Black Women Project (Vol. 1 & 2) available for purchase at gwensmithprojects.com. These pages are a documentation of the impact and influence of the Black women that Smith admires in her artistic practice and her definition of self. Smith considers each portrait a reflection on her selfie and an admired Black woman including Nicki Minaj, Kimberly Drew, and Maxine Waters. (Volume 1 even includes portaits based on BUST Magazine covers!)

The Black Women Project is a compilation of Smith’s painted portraits in a sleek black hardcover book designed by Wolfy Part II & Jef Scharf. Between 2018 and 2020, Smith treated each portrait as a progress marker, doing the same practice everytime she was in the studio. Quickly, the process morphed into what is now Volume 1 of the project. Then, in just six months during the COVID pandemic, Smith completed Volume 2, inspired by the eruption of Black women’s visibility during Black Lives Matter protests. 

Smith worked as a photography research editor for 15 years at Colors, Vogue, and the New Yorker to name a few. Her personal work’s entitled Tropic, Cancer, and Edgy are photo books that meditate on Smith’s relationship with leisure and her environment. One of her most written about works, a zine called The Yoda Project, is a compilation of 16 years of family photographs with her partner Haim Steinbach and son, River. 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by a Gwen Smith production (@theblackwomanproject_gram)

Smith’s new work, The Black Women Project draws on both of her past practices, taking the intimacy of The Yoda Project and the inner meditations of her photo books to create a documented exploration of the self in relation to those who have come before and those Smith walks alongside. This incredibly intimate journey shown through both volumes is like anthropological work, keeping a record of the contributions and influence of Black women in Smith’s life, including now her own influence on the art world. In an October 27 Instagram caption, Smith wrote, “It’s been an unbelievable honor to bring this project into the world- at this moment- after three years and many lifetimes in the making.” 

Smith’s work is a practice in taking back the space that is rightfully hers to boldly venerate the Black women that inspire her self-exploration and artistic expression. To watch her process, check out these mini films: Volume 1 and Volume 2. Find the project on Instagram @theblackwomanproject_gram and get your own copy online at gwensmithprojects.com or at Dover Street Market New York 

Header photo courtesy of Paradigm Publishing

More from BUST

Ida B. Wells To Be Honored In Art Installation At D.C. Union Station Next Week

5 Black Womxn Artists You Should Be Following On Instagram

Meet Dena Cooper, The Artist Making (Well, Stamping) Her Own Harriet Tubman Bills

Martha Haversham will forever change how you see street trash—the U.K. artist designs high-fashion outfit collages using litter. With the help of scissors, paper, glue, and staples, a cupcake wrapper becomes a pleated skirt, sugar packets are made into cropped pants, and a wilted strawberry top is transformed into a delightful fascinator. She works on the floor while listening to music, then captures her work as a still-life photograph. “The found object always dictates the outfit,” Haversham explains of her series called “Smallditch” (also her Instagram handle and a play on Shoreditch, the name of an artsy London neighborhood). “I will immediately see the garment. I don’t want to do anything forced—the object is used as found.” 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Martha Haversham (@smallditch) on May 19, 2020 at 12:38am PDT

Haversham transforms natural objects too, turning flower petals, dried leaves, and tiny feathers into gowns, collars, and incredibly elegant sleeves. She’s particularly inspired by the Victorians’ love of nature, and specifically, Pteridomania, the 19th-century British craze for ferns that gave women a means for creative expression and social freedom because “fern hunting” was often allowed sans chaperone. Other influences are equally significant. “I have a muse, my much-loved Palitoy Pippa doll,” Haversham says. “She is a pocket fashion dolly from the 1970s, and my collages are built around her proportions.” Her parents were also hugely influential. Haversham’s mother was a ballet dancer—the artist has her own dance degree—and her father a photographer. “He worked for Vogue in the ’50s and ’60s, and introduced me to the photographs of Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson, to name two,” she says. 

When asked about what she wants viewers to take away from her work, Haversham says, “First, relatability; we all wear clothes. Second, speed; I work spontaneously, so I like to get my work ‘out there’ for a reaction. I am interested in this concept both technically (collage is quick) and socio-environmentally, given the appetite to consume imagery and products.” Playfully exploring what it means to add value to seemingly worthless items is an undercurrent throughout her work: “I enjoy making attractive images out of discarded natural beauty and trash.” 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Martha Haversham (@smallditch) on May 12, 2020 at 2:11am PDT

As for her future plans, Haversham says she’s found “a rich source of fabric” in the plastic garbage people leave on beaches. Perhaps we’ll glimpse that collection soon? In the meantime, the artist declares, “I will keep my head down and find my treasures, knowing that my best image is still to come.”

By Anna Gragert

More from BUST

DNA Artist Turns Found Trash Into Peculiar Portraiture

VOTE: 7 Artists Personally Invite You To Make History

How These Women Cartoonists Shaped The Flapper Image In The Roaring ’20s

Legendary cartoonist and author of bestselling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me, Ellen Forney is using her latest comic to inform readers about the importance of voting in the upcoming election.

Along with championing voting, Forney’s work has given voice to other important issues such as mental health in her graphic memoir, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. 

Check out Forney’s comic below to stay informed and get excited about voting! 

-Comic by Ellen Forney

To see more of Forney’s work, visit www.ellenforney.com

More from BUST

Book Review: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me

DC Comics’ Latest Event Showed The Necessity Of Diversity In Superhero Media

Danielle Paige Is Bringing Women’s Stories To The Forefront Of Comics

“What started as an annual public exhibition of womxn-made art films in storefront windows is now a mission to support global cross-cultural dialogue,” says Zehra Ahmed, the curator behind “Womxn in Windows,” a new exhibit on Canal Street in New York City. The show is part of a multi-city screening series in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Shanghai. In New York, “Womxn in Windows” is now showcasing the films of Rémie Akl and Sylvie Weber in the storefront window of 321 Canal Street in association with ON CANAL by Wallplay—a district with over 20 storefront spaces dedicated to hosting short-term projects

In each city, the films are placed in storefront windows to subvert the notion of women as objects by presenting their emotions, experiences, and intellect in spaces where mannequins are usually displayed. The films deal with subjects lincluding culture, religion, history, and gender. And in this unique time of globally shared experience because of COVID-19, “Womxn in Windows” also aims to present perspectives from outside of America that showcase resilience in other parts of the world. “Through the platform [“Womxn in Windows”] we believe we are learning from one another’s cultures and experiences in a way that can contribute to a world with more equality, freedom, and respect,” says Ahmed.

Director Sylvie Weber is of German-Dominican descent, and her film on display is called The Prophetess. It is an award-winning exploration of spirituality, sisterhood, and the female body as a weapon of war. Set in the South Kivu region of the DR Congo, The Prophetess is based on the true stories of Furaha and Venantie, two women who experienced sexual terrorism. “I made a conscious decision to avoid the use of triggering imagery,” says Weber of her film. “On the contrary, I wanted to focus on female strength and the healing effect of community.”

Director Rémie Akl, an artist from Lebanon, is showcasing three of her films. Each deals with themes surrounding the ongoing revolution in Lebanon and highlights the need to “restore humanity…regardless of belief.”

Weber says that upon viewing her work, she hopes people will feel, “hope, empowerment, and maybe even smile a little despite the highly sensitive topic. If I can evoke any of that in a few people,” she continues, “I’m happy.”

Both Akl and Weber’s films will be playing 24-hours-a day from now until November 15, 2020. They can also be watched online.

Top Image: Still from Sylvie Weber’s The Prophetess, courtesy of the artist.

Second Image: Still from Remie Akl’s A human, an animal or a thing, courtesy of “Womxn in Windows.”

More from BUST:

This Unapologetic Street Art Series Puts Queer POC Front And Center

How Crystal Nelson’s Character In Netflix’s “Grand Army” Inspired Her To Be Her True Self: BUST Interview

Diane Guerrero’s Seductive Voting PSA, “Safe Voting Feels So Good,” Hits Just The Right Spot

In a place like the U.S., where the stories of queer people of color are continually erased, 30-year-old artist Johanna Toruño aims to center and celebrate them. Born in El Salvador, Toruño was displaced by war and migrated to the U.S. at age 10. After being incarcerated as a teen and spending three years on probation, she began searching for ways to express herself and connect with others. “Having these experiences of displacement and not speaking the language, and then having the experience [of] living as a queer migrant in this country, forced me to find a way to communicate with folks who have similar feelings,” she says. So, in 2016, she founded the Unapologetic Street Series (theunapologeticstreetseries.com), a multi-media public art venture and community project created by and for people of color, specifically queer POCs. 

The idea first began on SoundCloud, where the Latinx artist recorded her own spoken-word poetry. Wanting to do something more radical and familiar, she drew inspiration from the political street art that she saw in El Salvador. “Growing up and seeing all of that work, and also seeing all of the violence, stayed with me,” she says. “So, for me to put up a poster on the street is perfect, ’cause I can put it up and it can have a life of its own.” 

“I want kids to grow up in a world where they see queer art and they see powerful revolutionaries taking up public space, because we remember them.”

Now based in D.C., Toruño has also taken to the streets of N.Y.C. and L.A., putting up posters that make powerful statements—like “Honor Your Queer & Trans Ancestors Year Round.” She often uses the Unapologetic Street Series to take a stand on political issues, such as police brutality, and to honor important women of color, like New York Congresswoman AOC and trans icon Marsha P. Johnson. Some of her other projects include community workshops, a TEDx Talk, and a special trio of posters she titled Niñas Sin Vergüenza (Girls Without Shame)—depicting Toruño and her partner in three intimate, non-sexualized poses meant to convey pure, unapologetic love—that she pasted on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2018.

Through her art, Toruño hopes to start a conversation and inspire queer people to not only create their own content, but also share the realities of their lives. “I want folks to have their own experiences with the work, [and] maybe encourage them to look further into what they’re seeing,” she says. “I want kids to grow up in a world where they see queer art and they see powerful revolutionaries taking up public space, because we remember them.” 

By Safire R. Sostre
Photos courtesy of Johanna Toruño

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2020 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Juliana Huxtable On Her Genre-Crossing Art, Her “Hibernation” Creative Process, And Instagram Vs. Tumblr

This Street Artist Uses Yarn To Create Unforgettable Images

Artist Jilly Ballistic Makes Literal Underground Art — In The New York Subways

The exhibition was conceived by MWTH (Medusa With The Head), an artist-led project that reimagines classical artists and their work. The sculpture was created in 2008 by Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati but has amassed newfound fame in recent years. After Garbati posted a picture of his statue on social media in 2018, it went viral. Bek Andersen, the founder of MWTH, explained over email, “In my own art practice I have investigated flipping the script of power and gender roles, and in that moment, Garbati’s unapologetically revisionist Medusa spoke to my interests by reimagining the outcome of the myth of Medusa.”

Placed across from the storied courthouse, Garbati says that Medusa’s location is important because the statue explores themes of justice. Yet, questions have been raised about why, then, would Medusa not hold the head of her rapist. Andersen explains that her initial inspiration for the project was sparked by a more specific event in recent history, the Kavanaugh hearings. “A man abuses his power… gets called out on it, and the woman is the one who ultimately suffers the fallout. And the man goes on to (gain) fame and acclaim,” she explains. Soon after, Andersen wrote a patron of the arts and proposed to bring the sculpture to New York and organize an exhibition featuring works that focus the center of power away from the patriarchal structures.

Andersen points out that Medusa is familiar enough to engage a broad population in the dialogue, but with popularity comes criticism, this time about the nudity of the sculpture. Medusa With The Head of Perseus, which was sculpted by a man, is thin, pube-less, and perky-breasted raising criticisms that the work is yet another iteration of the male gaze. “But really she’s still the total object of the male gaze here,” explains Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine, “not of thought, fear, admiration, pathos, power, agency, or anything other than male idiocy.” Saltz goes on to say that this sculpture is business as usual: another naked female figure made by another white male artist. In all fairness, on Medusa’s behalf, Jerry Saltz is also a white male. “The criticism directed at Medusa comes as no surprise,” says Andersen, “whether or not intended, the style of mannerist sculpture is provocative in the context of our western puritanical value system. For a woman to be nude, to be beautiful, for no one’s gain, she is no person’s property.” Andersen explains that this reimagined Medusa is an independent agent, acting in self-defense.

Feminist theorists (see: Hélène Cixous) argue that men’s retelling of Medusa narrative is driven by fear of women’s agency. This sculpture just doesn’t do anything to challenge that. If anything, it reinforces a false #MeToo narrative about rage/revenge —vs. power/justice.

— Anne Connell (@AnneMartinConn) October 10, 2020

Although controversial, the discussion surrounding the sculpture which depicts one of the most famous mythological characters of all time is neither unfounded nor surprising. In 2017 as the #MeToo movement took off, the media’s spotlight was mostly focused on A-list celebrity accusations despite the original call to action being created by a Black female activist, Tarana Burke, in 2006. “The women of color, trans women, queer people—our stories get pushed aside, and our pain is never prioritized,” said Burke for Time Magazine. “We don’t talk about indigenous women. Their stories go untold.” However, Andersen doesn’t see MWTH’s new exhibition as an ending point. Instead, “a movement forward in a long and imperfect journey toward an embodied cultural understanding of equality.”

Despite it all, Andersen welcomes criticism. She explains, “It is exciting that images of the work have generated a dynamic conversation. I don’t take issue with anyone’s response, and I don’t think any reaction could be considered wrong.” She continues to say that this sculpture is a reaction to an antiquated ideology. “My goal with MWTH project,” Andersen says, “is to provoke conversation and action that examines the narratives that shape our worldview.”

Medusa’s rebirth as a victor makes a statement, especially as it sits across from the place where many abusers during the #MeToo movement faced the court, but may we not forget about the women who aren’t famous, and don’t have cultural influence whose stories have not been told and whose abusers have not been held accountable.

Top Image: Luciano Garbati Medusa With The Head of Perseus, 2008-2020 Installed at Collect Pond Park. Courtesy of MWTH Project.

More from BUST:
Anita Hill Is Continuing To Fight For Survivors

Watch 100 Women Protest At Harvey Weinstein Rape Trial

Murder Of Mexican Feminist Sparks Outrage, Reflects Deeper Issue In The Nation

While the world is on fire both literally and figuratively, we have adapted. Adapted to Zoom University, six feet apart dinner dates, distanced learning, sourdough starter kits, really long baths, more therapy sessions… the list goes on. We know this year is unfortunately unforgettable, but how do we remember our unforgettable good parts of 2020? Our new found joys, inner power, and strength? Our communities that comfort us especially during these unprecedented times?

Lucky for us, we have artists whose storytelling reminds us that we are never alone. That who we are is enough.

Art In Odd Places 2021: NORMAL, a public and performance art festival, will be featured along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC on May 14 – 16, 2021. Founded and directed by artist, curator, Libra, and educator Ed Woodham back in the ’90s, the festival has been showcasing art since 2005, challenging the idea of public space and personal liberties through art.

This year’s theme, NORMAL, revolves around the idea of normalcy, one that has been challenged distantly by 2020. And it’s not the normal of a pre-COVID world. It is a normalcy that has allowed white supremacy, racism, police brutality, transphobia, and systemic violence to continue to be unchecked and unscathed in the United States. Sonya Renee Taylor’s quote says it all: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was…”

The festival’s curator, NYC artist Furusho von Puttkammer (also a Libra) and her team have taken AiOP to a whole new level.

“When I was first approached by Ed to curate Art in Odd Places 2021, I honestly felt like there was no other choice but to make the theme of this year’s festival a critique on NORMAL,” said Furusho.

 Furusho, “a queer, mixed race weirdo art kid from the cookie-cutter suburbs,” says, “I was bullied, harassed, and abused by my peers because I didn’t fit into what “normal” was supposed to mean.”

She adds, “When putting together the team for AiOP 2021, I wanted to make sure I was working with artists whose work was socially conscious and who could relate to me on an individual level.” When it comes to the idea of normal, Furusho calls bullshit. “NORMAL meant the American Dream. The pandemic has finally given a mainstream spotlight to how the American Dream is more like the American Myth. If you are poor, if you are a person of color, if you are queer, and especially if you are a mix of those things, the American Dream does not apply to you.

“The American Dream, basically the American Normal, is bullshit, and finally American mainstream audiences are paying attention. It would be very un-American to not capitalize on this opportunity.”

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You asked, and we have answers!! Art in Odd Places is made up of a group of volunteer staff who produce the festival each year. This festival is a labor of love and most of the organizing happens around busy work/ life schedules . . . . . . . #aiop2021normal #performanceart #aiop #artinoddplaces #faq #artfestival

A post shared by Art in Odd Places (@artinoddplaces) on Sep 14, 2020 at 3:29pm PDT

Ed Woodham supports and honors this vision – as one artist would do for the other. For Woodham, it’s about best case scenarios, autonomy, and trust. “I felt an urgency to reinvent Art in Odd Places (AiOP). AiOP is an ongoing experiment of what art in public space can be each annual iteration,” he said. “It’s an ongoing exercise of letting go. Furusho has worked with Art in Odd Places for two years prior so we began with a collection of experiences that gave us a working knowledge of understanding, trust, and a shared language. NORMAL is her vision.”

And with this vision, the festival expands. A growing legacy and tradition that artists come together on 14th Street to share, celebrate, and hold space for each other.

Yasmeen Abdallah, AiOP 2021’s Curatorial Assistant, sees art as necessary, especially right now. “I think perhaps now, more than ever, we need to find forms of connecting to one another during these isolating times. The fact that it’s outdoors and along the length of 14th Street makes it more feasible to create and experience art in a socially distanced way.” Abdallah loves that every part of it is free, from the application to the festival to the experience itself. The crux of the matter is about community engagement, public art, and accessibility. “14th Street is an especially significant area, with a dynamic history and importance, while also easily accessible for people geographically and ideologically.”

With “normal” in mind, Sonya Renee Taylor’s quote is all the more powerful. Known for her writing The Body Is Not an Apology book and founding the movement by the same name, AiOP found it more than fitting to feature her words as part of the festival.

“I noticed Sonya Renee Taylor’s quote being passed around the internet within the first few days of the NYC lockdown. The quote immediately struck a chord with me. Everything about Sonia Renee Taylor and her work aligns perfectly with the message we are trying to get across with this festival,” says Furusho.

Furusho saw that the American “normal” is deadly, from student loans to the inability to pay medical bills to the protruding violence of racism, police brutality, and homelessness. Furusho experienced this too, with the effects of marginalization and otherness, as she calls it. Regardless, Furusho knew she had the power and the privilege to support and create a space for marginalized communities. “Though my family isn’t rich, I come from a supportive, loving, and economically stable household,” she says. “That support and stability has given me access to opportunities that others don’t have access to. I feel it’s my responsibility to help create spaces where marginalized peoples can come together and share their experiences in an open and accessible platform.”

For AiOP Curatorial Assistant Lorelle Pais, this quote resonates deeply. “As a fellow queer woman of color, I relate to the misportrayal of normalcy as something that seemingly anyone can achieve, but in reality is not obtainable by someone like me,” Lorelle says. “Normal never has been an option for some people. Normal is so relative that it cancels itself out: ten different people will have ten different answers to what normalcy is. I love the clarity of this sensation, this wake up call, this reminder that the American dream is only just a dream.”

One thing’s for sure: art plays an important role in our society. And it is something that can’t be done alone.

“Art is just philosophy and experience made visual, in my opinion. It gives us the invaluable opportunity to see the world through another’s perspective, which allows us to learn something new or find someone to relate to. Art in Odd Places acts as a platform to communicate those different perspectives to an audience who might otherwise not be interested,” says Furusho.

Woodham calls artists “the canaries in the mine” that warn of the dangers ahead. “Art is at the core of inquiry and understanding as we collectively confront the inequities, isms, and phobias that disregard and colonize peoples, cultures, and ideas,” he explains.

“Artists are cultural producers. It’s our job to understand the time we live in, and the contexts of words and actions,” says Abdallah. “I think that Art in Odd Places is a really thoughtful way to bring out many different perspectives, voices, ideas, and creative avenues of engagement to communicate in real time and space with people so that we can have these conversations, honestly and openly.”

Amanda Wu, AiOP‘s Social Media Manager and an artist who focuses on the climate crisis and social justice, describes artists and time as coexistent. “I think that artists mark a pinpoint in time. We showcase what is happening currently and challenge the viewers to truly see and notice what is happening.”

Art in Odd Places 2021: NORMAL festival is a celebration. Maybe not so much in the traditional way, but perhaps in the sense that communities never die. Traditions are constantly being reinvented and the resilience and joy of people, especially marginalized communities, is vital and need to be recognized. Always.

To fellow artists and those who dabble in the creatives (whatever that looks like) AiOP’s team offers some insight to combating burnout, fatigue, and overall hopelessness when it comes to being creative and surviving this world.

Furusho von Puttkammer: Let yourself simmer in the chaos for a while, then go on autopilot and get things done. Forget perfection, just do it. Believe in yourself enough to figure it out along the way. Look inwards, start small, forgive yourself, and forgive others. As environmental activist Shelbi Orme says, “You can not do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that you can do.”

Ed Woodham: Do not judge your strange behavior and your berserk newfound daily patterns based on the Pre-Pandemic archaic modalities. Those were put in place by the ‘homogenized cis heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy’ to restrict self-realization in order to block access to personal power(s). So, no wonder we are uncomfortable, at odds with what to do and who we are – as these obsolete systems and imposed mores FINALLY crumble into dust. It’s okay to do nothing, not knowing what to do – as it’s a reasonable response in the initial stages of reinventing ourselves.

Yasmeen Abdallah: Release that stress however you can. Try not to suppress it, because that’s toxic. Slow down, take it in, feel those awful feelings, then turn that negative energy into something cathartic that will free you of it. I really believe that we have to practice what we preach. Keep protesting, creating political art, reading, learning, growing, and fighting oppression.

Lorelle Pais: Pushing through burnout is painful, but it gives life to so many powerful ideas, a lot like a phoenix cycle of burning and rising from ashes. The advice I would give is to allow time for the cycle to flow naturally, to let yourself rest and let the ash settle. There is no time, so why worry about time?

Amanda Wu: I also think it is important to take the time to do nothing, we don’t need to be constantly creating. Though sometimes if I want to make something but I’m not sure what I just sit in front of some paper and materials and create anything. It doesn’t have to be good, it could just be a doodle. Not every piece needs to be a masterpiece, it could just be something pretty that you like so you get some creative expression out. Your voice matters, your art matters, even if it is to just one other person.

With 2020 coming into a close (three months left!), art and community solidarity is what is keeping us present and positive during this unprecedented times. “Now, more than ever, it’s important for us as artists to continue to share our perspectives on the state of America,” says Furusho.

AiOP 2021: NORMAL will be live May 14 -16, 2021 on14th Street in Manhattan, NYC. Applications are open July 24 – December 1 at 11:59 PM EST. On December 21, applicants will be notified of their decision.
To connect more, you can visit AIOP’s Instagram @artinoddplaces and/or website www.artinoddplaces.org.
AiOP is looking for volunteers to help out during the festival! Please contact them via email or Instagram.
To donate to the artists for their amazing work, find them on Venmo: @Furusho-vonPuttkammer, @EdWoodham, @Yasmeen-Abdallah, and @Amanda-Wu-6.

Top photo courtesy of Ricardo von Puttkammer
Second photo courtesy of AIOP Team

More from BUST
Virginia Bill Will Finally Ban Sex Between Detainees And Police Despite Claims Of Consent
This Sarah Paulson Dancing Trend On TikTok Cured My Anxiety, I Swear
The Women’s Prize Excludes Akwaeke Emezi With Transphobic Requirement 

Latin-Canadian artist Claudia Gutierrez feels there’s a strong connection between her print, paintings, and textile pieces and her heritage. Gutierrez finds inspiration for her work in literature, poetry, culture, and her memories of life in Canada and her visits to Latin America, and has woven together a beautifully winding path towards her present work in the studio, which she now does full-time. With years of working at the grassroots level, Claudia brings a thorough and thoughtful understanding to the arts community. Below, she shares with us about her creative process and her hope to uplift and inspire others with art during these uncertain times. 

What’s your first memory of art?  

My childhood home was full of relics from my parents’ homelands Mexico and Uruguay. The house was full of artisan works: painted gourds, leather bolas from Uruguay, and embroidery works made by my abuela. We were surrounded by images and objects from their cultures and I always saw them as treasures. 

Did you do any formal studies in art?  

I studied English Literature before switching to Fine Art. I then specialized in printmaking and painting and went to a small private school that was very studio intensive. It wasn’t until four or five years after graduating I craved a pivot in my practice and that was when I started considering textiles as a new form of creating. 

You focus on the following mediums: textiles, printmaking, and painting. What is the draw to these three forms? And how do they differ or interconnect for you as an artist? 

The through line with these mediums, I find, has been my relation to the medium when it comes to the handling of materials. All three mediums have a sensuality I find absolutely necessary to feel stimulated when creating pieces. Whether I am carving or cutting a print plate, pulling and pushing paint or manipulating the tactility of wool, silk, or linen, I am always present with the materials I am working with. Their characteristics dictate where the piece will go especially in relation to the temperament of my hand on a particular day in the studio.  

There’s a lot of repetition and patterning in your work.  

I think that has a lot to do with my love of literature and textiles. An open page of a novel is simply patterns of shapes, letters, just like a geometric pattern is on a blouse. I used this notion in my last body of work to explore ideas of language and how patterns can portray qualities of communication. A piece I did called “Serape,” a Mexican blanket often used as a shawl, looks much like Morse code, for example.  

You’ve done two residencies, one in Canada and the other in Oaxaca, Mexico. How did the two experiences differ?  

The residency in Ottawa was very independent — I was given a studio space for three months and curated a print show at the end of the time there, whereas the Oaxaca residency was an instructional residency. I learned from a master weaver backstrap weaving, toured different weaving studios in Oaxaca; it was very immersive.  

Let’s talk more about your experience in Mexico. Oaxaca is known for its folk art, museums and galleries. Is there one experience during your time there that stands out?   

I was there just a month. I have visited Mexico and Uruguay, where my mother is from, my whole life and have traveled to many Latin American countries so this particular residency felt like a culmination of all of my family visits and collecting of memories: it was the first time I visited my father’s country with an artistic lens rather than a visitor’s. While there wasn’t one particular moment that stands out for me, this time felt like a crescendo for me — my memories, my present, the future of my practice were coming to a head and it was the first time since I left art school I gave myself the time to observe, contemplate and synthesis. 

You tend towards a more neutral color palette in your work. Is this intentional? 

Very! My influence from poetry and literature is represented here. The starkness of black and white really helped me compositionally as well as I moved into this new medium. I also fell in love with undyed pure wool, seeing the tone of the sheep it came from was really exciting to me — sometimes I think about the animal it came from and wonder what it would think of our collaboration. I do juxtapose this with synthetic black yarn, however. The stark artificial contrast is not just jarring to the eye but during the process of creation as well — the wool is delicate and can unravel easily, so I need to handle it with care whereas the acrylic yarn I use can be contorted every which way and is left intact.  

You’ve said that you’ve been an active advocate and cultural worker for the local arts community for the past decade.  

Once I graduated from art school, I saw a pocket I could fill in my arts community. I started off as a fundraiser- writing grants, putting on events, et cetera then joined boards, volunteered, taught, wrote for a local arts and culture magazine — oof looking back on all of this makes me want to take a nap. I had such an urge to serve my local community and became addicted to it really. I worked for an art school, galleries and a performance art theatre and became really entrenched in the local scene; so it wasn’t until about three years ago when I was burning out that I realized it was time to get back to my practice and give myself the chance to create. 

What is the importance and benefit of advocacy for the arts, for artists and for society as a whole? 

I think it was important for me to do what felt right at the time and what felt right at the time was not to make art but to learn about the people, the history and goings on of the scene I was in. Admittedly this stemmed from fear and insecurity of making my own work and, of course, that stemmed from being a young Latinx woman in an industry dominated by old white men. So, I took steps to educate myself and gain the experience I needed and, more than anything, find my people in the scene. I think whatever industry you are working in there will be elements of advocacy and I learned that by existing and excelling in this industry I was changing it and helping it thrive. 

You mentioned that you’ve recently moved to doing art full-time. What were you doing prior and how did circumstances open up this opportunity?  

I’ve always worked for arts organizations, in many capacities — I’ve been a Swiss army knife type for over a decade in this industry. It taught me versatility and adaptability so as I incrementally started dipping my toes back into the scene with my work I was prepared to be flexible — flexible with my own time and resources and ask for flexibility from my day job so that I could produce work, apply to galleries and funding. It’s a balancing act.  

Did COVID factor into this new shift for you? 

In a way, yes. I opened a show three days before everything was shut down and I think the community really rallied behind me because of that. The opening night of the show was fantastic, and I think the momentum of that support carried through for months for me to continue producing and pushing my work. Several artists friends of mine completely shut down their practices for a while, especially at the beginning of quarantine, but I was in a unique position of really launching my practice days before everyone closed so I was feeling that fire to keep going and to be forced into my creative space — my studio is in my home — was a gift. 

What do you wish or hope for people to take away after viewing your art? 

CG: What a great question. I hope folks see my work and find it odd and familiar at the same time. I hope they feel the contradictions in the works, the hypocrisies, and settle in them and find a bit of solace in that. I play with my medium and titles quite a bit. Calling pieces on canvas stretchers blankets or pillows; placing hand embroidered pillows on ornate shelves as if they were an artifact in a museum. My intention here is to not only give reverence to these objects but to also play with our ideals about value and hierarchies that we place on ourselves and the world around us. 

Any upcoming projects? 

I am currently working off of the essays of Octavio Paz for a series I will be showing at my commercial gallery in early 2021. I’m looking at his essays on love, eroticism and sex and looking to link this with new textile pieces. I am also really looking forward to a group show with two of my favourite people and artists Guillermo Trejo and Marisa Gallimet that will be opening in spring 2021. The three of us have a great bond when it comes to our perspective on objects, design, and culture, so I think our work coming together will be really dynamic.  

What can we look forward to from you in the near future? 

Color. I am so excited to be drawn to color again. While I will always be creating works that explore the natural characteristics of the materials I am working with, I am looking to start working with naturally dyed wools from Mexico. I have found a wonderful non-profit supplier who works with artisans in Oaxaca and am looking forward to diving into these new materials that will hopefully do these beautiful wools justice.  

How can art help us heal as a global community? 

I have been asked this a few times since the pandemic hit. I think it speaks to the fact that humanity has turned to creation at this time in order to keep our sanity (whether it has been out of necessity or pleasure). I think the authenticity of creating, and by that I am mean when you are in the act of creating something (and especially when what you are creating from your imagination) you are vulnerable to the very real and exciting elements of life — chance, sensation, and process; the result is art and that is very beautiful. 

Photos by Pat Bolduc

More from BUST

This UK Artist’s Lifelike Animal Dolls Will Tug At Your Heart

9 Independent Mask-Makers You Should Support Right Now

This Bling’d Out Biodegradable Glitter Brand Serves Up Sustainable Sparkle

A group of around 20 FEMEN activists gathered topless outside Paris’s Musee d’Orsay after a woman was banned from entering the museum for showing cleavage. Protesters immediately showed up at the scene chanting breasts “are not obscene”, determined to confront the sexist discrimination that took place. 

TOPLESS PROTEST IN PARIS: Watch Femen Activists Hold “Flash Demonstration” at Museum – **WARNING: EXPLICIT NSFW** – https://t.co/QCxzZG5RYr pic.twitter.com/oZjpXsiNxO

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 14, 2020

 The student, alias Jeanne, who was turned down by the museum’s security personnel came forward in an open letter on social media, saying she felt discriminated against on behalf of the museums “sexist dynamics.” And in an interview with the Daily Star, Jeanne described the dress she was wearing, saying, “I wore it all summer. I feel good wearing it and it’s pretty… I am not just my breasts, I am not just a body.”

Lettre ouverte @MuseeOrsay

Ci-joint la robe de la discorde (photo prise quatre heures plus tôt) pic.twitter.com/FTIXQKsdRZ

— Tô’ (@jeavnne) September 9, 2020

According to Mirror, Musee d’Orsay issued a press release saying they “deeply regret this incident.” As well as apologized to Jeanne on behalf of the receptionist’s inappropriate behavior.

Top Image: Screenshot from video

More from BUST

Women-Led Protests In Belarus Met With Violence

Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg On “Unpregnant” And Abortion Access In America: BUST Interview

Florence Howe, “Mother Of Women Studies” And Founder Of The Feminist Press Dies At 91

Two weeks ago, The Whitney Museum of American Art cancelled its exhibition after obtaining Black artists work at a discounted price, which was initially indented to raise money for racial justice charities. The exhibition, “Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change,” planned to feature artists whose work focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of the work displayed was stolen from BIPOC artists, without their knowledge and without any credit given. As museums are beginning to reopen, artists and activists are fighting for a structural change in museum leadership and representation. The Whitney, one of New York City’s most renowned institutions, has become yet another example of the structural racism that continues to cohabitate within the art industry.

Now, several youth programs are working with their local museums to foster inclusivity in the art world. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s (MCA) leadership program, Teen Creative Agency (TCA), came forward when they discovered MCA’s police funding initiative. In an open letter, TCA urged the museum to invest in BIPOC artists and change their security models.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A LETTER FROM THE TEEN CREATIVE AGENCY TO MADELEINE GRYNSZTEJN. Sign our petition! Link in Bio!

A post shared by The Teen Creative Agency (@tcaatmca) on Jun 2, 2020 at 10:23am PDT

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Hashim Kysia, a TCA alum, said “The tactics of art museum security are discriminatory and taken from police tactics…I obviously look ‘other’ than the expected museumgoer, and I feel discrimination walking through exhibits and gift shops. It’s more than the MCA. I feel it at the Art Institute. When I went to MoMA, I was followed and told not to touch things when I wasn’t touching them.” Other initiatives such as NYC’s InterseXtions internship program with the Brooklyn Museum, explores gender expression and identity in the art industry, urging interns to speak with community leaders to push for a structural change. Akir Stuart, an InterseXtions intern, remarked on the program’s inclusivity, saying,

“NYC museums in general, I don’t feel there’s space for me, being a Black and queer person… The department gives authority to kids who normally don’t feel they have power anywhere else. It’s crazy to me all the stuff we get to do.” 

Amidst the pandemic and ongoing racial injustices, these teen councils are holding museums accountable when it comes to inclusivity and leadership, expressing the pertinence of identity representation in the art industry.

Header image courtesy of Youth Teen Creative Agency website

More from BUST

Topless Protests Sparked After Paris Museum Turned Away Visitor For Cleavage

Mistakes We Made At The Grocery Store: An Excerpt From “Tuca And Bertie” Creator Lisa Hanawalt’s New Book

How This Brooklyn Sign Painter Is Keeping Activism And The Art Of Hand Lettering Alive

This article originally appeared in Lisa Hanawalt’s book I Want You, published by Drawn & Quarterly and out now. It has been reprinted here with permission.

More from BUST

I’m Queer And A Survivor Of Assault. Here’s How ‘Tuca & Bertie’ Make Me Feel Seen

‘BoJack Horseman’ Illustrator Lisa Hanawalt Shows Us Her Studio: BUST Interview

This French Photographer Illustrates Wastefulness Like You’ve Never Seen

I first became aware of the artist/sign painter Olive Panter when I saw her 6 FEET MEANS 6 FEET signs up in a row of residential windows in my neighborhood back in March, when the pandemic hit hard here in Brooklyn. Soon afterwards I noticed a new hand painted sign on the same block at a restaurant that was offering free food for covid-impacted restaurant workers. I wondered who was making these great signs and found out it was the 29 year old artist. Since I love traditional sign painting, and we are practically neighbors, I reached out and asked if we could “meet” on zoom to chat about her work.

Olive is the daughter of famed Art Director Helene Silverman (Metropolis) and artist Gary Panter (RAW, set designer for Pee Wee’s Playhouse). She grew up in Brooklyn, and attended Cooper Union and more recently Trade Tech in LA, which is the last sign painting school left in America. She has since moved back to Brooklyn.

Since March Olive has done lots of other hand painted storefronts in Brooklyn, as well as #BLM related pieces, so keep an eye out for her work or follow her on Instagram. 

Tell me about the Olmstead Restaurant sign.

I live right across the street (from the restaurant Olmstead) and I saw that they were still open when everything was closing and I was actually getting really angry that they were still open. I was watching people go in and out and not social distancing. I made friends with the woman who runs the restaurant downstairs through my window, which has been like a very funny Avenue of community facilitation because I started smoking again within the pandemic. I just sit there and talk to people on the street all the time.

She told me that Olmstead was doing restaurant relief and I was like, Oh, okay. So they’re doing good stuff, it wasn’t totally obvious. They were looking for someone to make them a sign and they probably would have just installed vinyl if I hadn’t inserted myself in the situation.

I’m so glad you did, it looks great. How did you get into sign painting?

I got my BFA from Cooper in 2014, and my work always revolved around language and communication, women and gender and trauma. And I’ve always been super into signs. Like, you know, my dad was a cartoonist and a painter. My mom’s a typographer, so it very much added up to me being who I am. Then I moved to LA because the last sign painting school in the country, Trade Tech is there. They have an insane [sign-painting] program there that the same dude’s been teaching forever. He’s in his late seventies, his name’s Doc Guthrie. He was a civil rights activist, and I’m a loud Jewish woman from Brooklyn! (laughs)

Community college was my way of trying to get an MFA that I would build with no core cohort or critique structure, but with community college prices. But I didn’t really bargain on all of a sudden having an actual trade.

Have there been women sign painters of note?

Oh yeah, yeah, totally absolutely. And it’s like any other system, you know…

We just don’t hear about them.

Yeah, exactly. Betty Willis, the person who designed the Las Vegas sign was one of the most prolific neon designers, her drawings are just mind blowing.

There have always been women sign painters, but how new is the advent of women being allowed to go out and work on their own? I mean at least in a commercial industry like that, it’s from World War II, you know? Sign painting is super, super old. But yeah, in terms of women’s liberation, that’s such a new thing that it’s still a weird trickle down system. But in terms of Trade Tech, the program had almost died in the early 2010s but people started getting more into sign painting again, I think that it’s related to kind of more of the farm to table stuff and you know, hipster aesthetic.

Panter, with chef Lani Halliday of Brutus Bakeshop

And people being sick of digital, digital all the time.

Yeah. And postmodernism, you know, like what comes after that? There’s only so much institutional design and industrial design that a person can take. So the school really had a giant resurgence. And now they have too many kids. They have like 70 kids per semester but it’s really a program built for like tops, 15 people. But there are ton of women in my class. And each semester that I took there were more and more women and l’d say that the gender divide is getting close to 50/50 at this point.

So tell me about the 6 foot window sign

I was just watching all of these people not taking this seriously enough. And I hadn’t left my house in a month or something and my mom was like, “You need to go for a walk!”

So, I went for a walk and I immediately started sobbing because no one was respecting my space. And I had PTSD for a long time from being raped and it was like very much me having gotten to this place where I understand my boundaries and there was absolutely no way that I could vocalize them enough for someone to pay attention. And it was a really funny thing. People will give you a six feet clearance if you’re sobbing in public. That’s the thing that I learned. I think in my head I was like, no, it means no. Six feet mean six feet. Now is the time to turn my trauma into a PSA and you can see it on the street who’s jumping out of whose way, you know, it’s very clearly luckier people not giving enough awareness to more or less lucky people.

I feel like your next sign/window should be “Wear a fucking mask!” because I’m really annoyed with that!

My next sign ­—once I got time to do it, which at this point will be a month, but it’ll still fucking apply because we’re about to go straight into another surge— is “Privilege, won’t save you, but it’s hurting your community.” I got a bunch of big gold leaf to do it. That’ll be an interesting experiment.

Tell me about the Fuck Cuomo T-shirt?

It started actually from the New York Nico best New York t-shirt contest. So there was this one tee shirt submission that was Cuomo and Fauchi and it said “New York Tough.” And my brain immediately just went to “New York abusive!” Fuck Cuomo.

I don’t trust Cuomo…

Budgets passed under Cuomo’s long-term authority have shuttered public hospitals in low-income areas and we’re watching the results of this play out in real time with shortages of beds for those infected and heart-breakingly higher death rates in minority populations across the state. As a result of the ACA, more NY’rs were able to access health care than ever before, putting strain on state budgets. Instead of raising taxes on the wealthiest NY’rs to fill these gaps, he proposed cutting Medicaid and funding to H+H public services in this year’s budget, attempting to pass them DURING the pandemic. This was put on hold after his changes threatened NY’s eligibility to receive emergency federal funding, but was re-written with language that carefully ensures once this is over, he can still make those cuts without penalty. He did manage to quietly roll-back last year’s cash bail reform, which disproportionately keeps black and brown folks in increasingly high-risk, abusive systems. Cuomo holds the power to freeze and roll-back rent and has stated that it’s been handled. It has profoundly not been handled. After being threatened by a Working Family’s Party campaign last election cycle, he enacted higher thresholds for third-party candidates to make it onto ballots, effectively stymieing NY progressives’ ability to enter a two-party system that doesn’t represent the desires and needs of large swaths of its constituency. He has refused any institutional help to NYS’s large population of undocumented workers, stating it is a federal job, even though the president built his campaign on racist rhetoric, even as Cuomo parades on TV as the president’s foil, even as many undocumented folks continue essential work they will not receive benefits for. He’s demonized the unhoused class, which overwhelmingly relies on a functioning NY economy and social system to trickle into their pockets and mouths, creating a false dichotomy between the homeless and essential workers, who are all hi-risk and need more help and safety-nets than those of us able to stay home.

He is not your daddy, he is not your darling, he is not the antidote to the failure of our federal government to protect us.

I was really mad and I was like, okay, I can paint this thing. I can raise money. We’ve raised close to 4k to be split evenly between the Coalition for the Homeless, NYLSC which is a youth undocumented led coalition that funnels money directly towards undocumented families in need, and the National Bail Project.

That’s great! Well in these difficult times, you’ve certainly brightened up the neighborhood with your signs.

Olive: Honestly, it’s all hard and everyone’s exhausted and I’m so happy to be here. There’s nowhere else I would rather be than here.

All images courtesy of the artist.

More from BUST

During the roaring ’20s, cartoons featuring flappers were all the rage. And some of the best were actually drawn by the era’s most talented women

WHEN FLAPPERS TOSSED their corsets and shore their locks in favor of short, slinky dresses, crisp bobs, and bold cosmetics in the 1920s, they introduced the world to the modern woman. These middle- and upper-class young ladies, newly armed with the right to vote and opportunities to work outside the home, were free in ways previous generations could only dream of. They proudly thumbed their noses at the bourgeois conventions of American life, openly defied social and sexual norms, and gleefully made art documenting their glamorous lives. But while men like F. Scott Fitzgerald are known for chronicling the lives of flappers in print, there was another category of folks putting pen to paper and illustrating these lives at the same time: female cartoonists, many of whom were flappers themselves. Their comics not only echoed the culture, they also informed it, helping to shape the aesthetics, aspirations, and dreams of millions of young American women.

“The newspaper was where you found out what was going on at that time, and contrary to what people think, there were lots of women drawing comics for the newspapers,” says Trina Robbins, author of new book The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age, out July 7 from Fantagraphics. These rising art stars—including Nell Brinkley, Eleanor Schorer, Edith Stevens, Ethel Hays, Dorothy Urfer, Fay King, and Virgina Huget—would establish themselves as some of the most influential illustrators of the day, thanks to their strips’ popularity. “There’s this myth that women didn’t draw comics or that they had to change their names; this is untrue. If you were good, they published you,” says Robbins. “Women were drawing comics and people loved them. Just as many women read newspapers as men, and the editors were smart enough to carry the strips the women liked.”

Women of the ’20s reclaimed the title “flapper” from a slang term previously used to describe both very young prostitutes and theatrical dancers. But by the time the Charleston craze hit the nation in 1923, the word flapper had transformed into the perfect description of a young woman who had mastered the dance’s high-speed, flapping arm movements. It was also at that time that comic strip flappers became the go-to heroines for readers of daily newspapers, offering a captivating glimpse of a new female archetype: a liberated creature free to indulge her every whim and fantasy. “As a feminist and a historian I am fascinated by the ’20s, because if you take pictures of women from 1915 and compare them to photos of women from 1925, the 1925 women are smoking and drinking, putting on makeup, wearing dresses that go above the knee,” says Robbins. “While in 1915, any woman who did that would have been considered loose.”

Nell Brinkley draws Fay King in 1924

The flapper comics inspired and empowered these newly liberated women. One of the most prominent cartoonists of the time was Nell Brinkley, and in her strip, Dimples’ Day Dreams, the heroine imagines becoming an aviator, a futurist artist, a chorus girl, a movie star, a socialite, and President of the United States. “Before women got the vote, there were anti-suffragist cartoons, and feminists were portrayed as these dour, ugly old maids,” Robbins says. “Then women got the vote and Dimples fantasizes she is President; she is cute as a button and she’s even wearing a pantsuit!” Brinkley herself was something of a cartooning prodigy. Already an accomplished illustrator by age 16 in her native Denver, she was recruited by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst when she was 21, moved to Brooklyn with her mother, and went on to illustrate for newspapers and magazines for almost 40 years.

The Hearst syndicate was also home to another darling of the flapper comics scene who would later collaborate with Brinkley. Just as adventurous as the flappers she drew, Fay King was one of the first women in her hometown of Portland, OR, to drive an automobile. And when she divorced her famous boxer husband Oscar Matthew “Battling” Nelson in 1916 at 27, it was a scandalous event widely covered in the press. By the time the flapper craze came around, King was based at Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, where she became an early creator of autobiographical comics. She depicted herself as a flapper with an independent spirit, clever banter, progressive women’s-rights ideas, and an Olive Oyl silhouette, long before Popeye creator E.C. Segar popularized it. Her gangly, big-footed avatar appeared in a crossover with a Brinkley comic in 1924 in which Brinkley drew King and offered these words, “Don’t you worry about that pic of her she makes…. She tells the truth about everything but her own self.”

Detail from Virginia Huget’s “Monday’s Child,” from Sunday, 1936

Unlike Brinkley and King, who were both well into their 30s when the flapper craze took hold, Virginia Huget, who first started publishing in 1926 at age 27, was more of a contemporary of the young, liberated women she became famous for illustrating. A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was perhaps the flappiest of them all with her euphoric figures drawn with sharp elbows and knees, as was the fashion. Unlike the other strips, Huget’s girls came from working-class homes. There was Molly the Manicure Girl (1928), and Babs in Society (1927), a department-store clerk who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and is thrust into café society. “The flapper was a star at the dawn of pop culture,” Robbins says. “She was a revolution. She was free. She was in control.”

Nell Brinkley’s “Another Step (in Imagination) and She Becomes President” from “Dimples’ Day Dreams,” 1928 

detail from Ethel Hays’ “Flapper Philosophy” from Sunday, 1928; upper right and bottom: details from Nell Brinkley’s “Dimples’ Day Dreams,” 1928

As the popularity for women-centric strips rose throughout the ’20s, some publishers started recruiting female artists from unexpected places to meet demand. In 1923, H.B.R. Briggs, editor of the Cleveland Press, sent 31-year-old artist Ethel Hays an invitation to work at his paper after he saw some work she had submitted to a cartooning correspondence course. Hailing from Billings, MT, Hays taught painting to convalescing soldiers in Army hospitals during World War I, and it was those soldiers who first introduced her to comics. Once established, Hays was extremely prolific, producing a daily panel, Flapper Fanny Says, and a one-panel comic, Ethel. Her flappers were on the cutting edge of radical chic, their daring style matched only by their bravado, pluck, and willingness to openly confront the passé mores of patriarchal society.

In a similar vein, Edith Stevens—the only woman cartoonist at the Boston Post— got her start when she entered the paper’s cartoon contest at age 29 in 1928. Although she didn’t win the $50 prize, the Post scooped her up and put her on staff, starting her on a career that would last nearly four decades. Her daily comic, Us Girls, was dedicated to women’s fashions, hairstyles, and pithy commentary on current events. Although she started Us Girls just seven months before Black Thursday, Stevens’ comics brilliantly captured the last hurrah of the flapper era.

Ultimately, the Great Depression put an end to the flappers’ youthful frolics, but these groundbreaking artists kept working, albeit on different subject matter. “When you make gains, you try to keep them. You don’t go back,” Robbins explains. “Maybe she couldn’t dance the Charleston anymore because she was too busy earning a living—but the flapper generation opened the door. The women now knew what they could do. They had to stand up for themselves and they did. They were proud of it.”

Autobiographical Fay King strip, 1928

Edith Stevens’ “Cuts” from “Us Girls,” 1929

By Miss Rosen

Images courtesy of The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists Of The Jazz Age by Trina Robbins, Fantagraphics, 2020

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

A Brief History Of Flappers, Some Of The Original Rule-Breakers

Girdles May Have Been Uncomfortable, But They Sure Beat Corsets

The Legacy Of Clara Bow, America’s First Sex Symbol

Montgomerie creates her figures with mostly recycled materials—old dolls and doll clothes, for instance, that she finds at flea markets and second-hand shops. She sculpts a new head for each doll—which range from 16″ to 25″ tall—then layers fabric on top to create the figure’s face. “I use lots of different textiles to achieve the desired patina for the head,” she says. “The process is quite time-consuming.” Although she works on more than one figure at the same time, each individual doll can take from one to two weeks to make.

The clothes are sewn by Montgomerie herself, or upcycled from old doll’s clothing. She makes them out of a variety of fabrics, preferably vintage, but that’s not all she works with. “I have used old rubber swimming caps, beach balls, leather gloves, and vintage toys—if I can get a needle through it, I’ll sew it,” she says.

“Childhood is a magical place with magnified emotions, and I try to capture this in my work.”

Her figures often carry tiny versions of themselves—cats hold miniature stuffed kittens; a dog clings to a well-worn primitive doll in the shape of himself—signaling that these creatures are young and innocent. Yet they also look somehow world-weary and forlorn. “I want my work to evoke memories of childhood, and all the emotions one has as a child—feeling awkward or inadequate, disappointed, or upset, but also cheeky, hopeful, and happy. Childhood is a magical place with magnified emotions, and I try to capture this in my work,” she explains.

Adding to the figures’ emotional pull is the fact that they seem to come from the past; that they already have a long, long history. Some outfits appear to be straight from the depression era; hearkening to a simpler time, when children played with dolls rather than screens. “I love looking at old school photos, a class of slightly glum looking children maybe wearing an itchy jumper or a moth-holed skirt,” she says. “The era between the 1930s to the 1970s is my favorite. This, along with being an avid vintage collector, has a strong influence on how I dress my figures.”

But with so much beautiful detail in every character, each with their own personality and name, is it difficult to let go when they are sold? “I do grow particularly fond of some pieces,” Montgomerie says. “I usually have them on display around my house for a while before they go so I can enjoy their presence for a short time.”

By Debbie Stoller

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

5 Black Womxn Artists You Should Be Following On Instagram

Meg Stacker King Celebrates The Joy And Power Of Motherhood In “We The Mamas”

Filmmaker Erin Derham Brings Taxidermy To Life On BUST’s “Poptarts” Podcast

It was early April when I stumbled upon the fresh and spirited images of Brooklyn-based photographer Meg Stacker King on Instagram. Her feed offered up a much-needed infusion of fun and hope for a brighter, better future amidst the COVID crisis. A series of black and white photos that highlight the love and connection between parents and their children are part of Stacker King’s quarantine inspired project titled We the Mamas. 

Stacker King is a woman whose passion for both her craft and humanity presents a positive take on our current world situation. Her unique eye and ability to evoke emotion with every project she works on is evident in the breathtakingly beautiful realness and warmth of the images she produces.  

In our interview, Meg shares about the many ways in which photography and humanity intertwine in her editorial work, commercial work, and Piga Picha Project with One Vibe Africa, whose aim is to inspire and empower youth. Truth is at the core of this artist’s vision. 

This interview has been condensed for clarity.

What is your first memory of photography?

I was introduced to photography in grade school where I was on yearbook staff. My first actual memories of photography are in the dark room, developing and printing. This has always been my favorite place.

You were gifted your first camera at age 13. Can you remember the first photo you took?

My father gave me his old 35mm Nikon film camera with multiple lenses and a grey canvas camera bag. I felt like a pro! One of the first photos I took was of my neighbor, an elderly lady, and she was holding my cat in her living room. It was the photo that many years later my dad would reference and suggest that I do this for a living. It was at his urging that I went to Maine Photographic Workshop for a two-week intensive to see if I really loved photography enough to make it my profession.

Are you a self-taught photographer or did you do any formal training?

I had formal training, but my style was not accepted by the professors, so I fought for my portfolio review and acceptance. The day I was told by my portfolio review instructor that I wouldn’t make it, I went straight downtown to Barnes & Noble and sat for hours going through magazines and came back to class the next day with multiple examples of publications that reflected my style. It’s a shame to have teachers that only see in a box of their comfort versus using imagination or trusting an artist’s vision.

I definitely do not think that artists need formal training, [and] some of the most brilliant photographers that I know are self-taught.

How would you describe your shooting style?

I strive to document the real, the in-between moments, the strength, the spark, the peace, finding that authenticity. I definitely direct throughout my shoots, but it is an attempt to keep a subject moving if they are reserved or slow them down to tap into their core. I want to allow their truth to emanate. I’d say my overall work definitely leans more towards editorial. The kid fashion could be considered commercial, but it definitely still has more of an editorial vibe to it. 

Camille with Luca (@killahcam)

You have a young son, Tau. Has being a mom changed the way and what you shoot? 

He’s almost 2, I cannot believe it, he’s currently about to hit 21 months in a couple of weeks! Being a mom has changed me for sure! What I shoot is still generally the same: Commercial and Fashion Editorial with a focus on kids. However, I have never photographed so many mother/child portraits prior to the launch of We the Mamas. This series is entirely inspired by my journey as a mother and the gratitude that I feel for everyone that has been a part of my journey personally or shares the experience of motherhood. Prior to COVID-19, Tau would be on set for about half of my shoots, depending on the client. At such a young age, he already has a knack for directing! I shot all the way up to 2 weeks before he was born and got back in the studio when he was just shy of 2 months old. It’s incredibly important to me that he sees me working, creating and is exposed to the experience.

What inspires you and your work?

My work is fueled by storytelling, passion, and emotion. I’m incredibly inspired by our younger generation, which is why I gravitate towards photographing them. Especially in this crazy year we’ve been having, their ability to adapt, articulate their experience, continue to learn, educate peers on voting, organize and lead protests, the list goes on. This next generation is pure power!

Now that I have a son, he inspires me on the daily. I want him to know that he should never stop striving, that he should always work hard, push himself, and trust his vision. The list of people that inspire me could go on and on, creatives and thinkers of all disciplines, because there’s an incredible arsenal of artists out there and through these times it has been the creatives that keep the energy flowing!

Charlotte with Neriah and Micah (@charlottebetts)

What inspired your first trip to Kenya in 2012? Was this your first time in Africa? How did this experience move you?

MSK: Yes, 2012 was my first trip to Kenya. It was with a dear friend who is from Naivasha, Kenya, whose parents ran an orphanage. I was initially going for fun, just as a tourist, with no plan other than to visit her family and adventure around with her. About a week prior to leaving I felt like I was missing something, a lot of thoughts and notes on bar napkins and I realized I wanted to do a camera project and take disposable cameras with me to teach photography to the kids. We spent 2 weeks exploring, teaching, experiencing the students’ vision and seeing them improve and expand each day that they picked up the camera. With disposable cameras you can’t control too much on the camera itself, so it was all about exploring the subject, the perspective, the proximity, the composition, the light, the pose. I can’t tell you how magical it was to see them improve with each frame they shot. Each day we would only allow them a set number of frames, so that they didn’t shoot through the film in 5 minutes, to encourage them to think before they shot. I fell in love with the country and the people and was lucky enough to return a few years later with a youth arts education organization, One Vibe Africa, and launch my program, Piga Picha Project. This time I raised funds and arrived with digital cameras, memory cards, and all the necessary equipment for the students to continue shooting after I had gone. While there we also hosted a music festival and filmed a documentary. It was a whirlwind month! 

I had the chance to work with a handful of students over the course of these weeks. A few were so natural it gave me chills, then there were kids that were incredible students and writers. It reminds you that we all work together to tell these stories, whatever the story may be. I love teaching and am excited for where Piga Picha Project is headed next!

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of work did you do? How has the pandemic affected you professionally?

As a freelance photographer and producer, my son Tau and I were on the road constantly for work. We were a week away from a couple of months on the road for jobs, then within one week everything on the books evaporated and life came to a screeching halt. I spent that first month adjusting, grieving what was, disinfecting, listening to conversations with creatives, looking for inspiration, squeezing in workouts (often consisting of downward dog with a toddler under me), just trying desperately to maintain some semblance of sanity in this unknown world full of unrealistic expectations. 

We thought we were going to leave New York for a bit when everything started ramping up, but we decided to hunker down here in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. As this pause seemed to be carrying on in a never-ending groundhog fashion, I lived for the 7pm cheer for the essential workers, sunny Fort Greene Park mornings with the little man and then, of course, these virtual shoots. I am definitely looking forward to getting back out to travel and work with people in real life! 

You’re currently at work on a photo project titled, We the Mamas. What was the inspiration behind this? How do you connect with potential subjects? What has the response been like? And what are your plans post-pandemic with the stunning and moving captures of families?

This project is one filled with gratitude for the role we play in keeping each other sane in this journey of motherhood and to recognize the power that we possess as we experience and adapt to all that is happening in the world. As if being a mom isn’t challenging enough without all of the current events to take things up a thousand notches! About a month into the alternate reality of quarantine, inspiration struck and We the Mamas was born. It has since then evolved from being solely focused on the experience of COVID-19, quarantine, and social distancing to encompass all that is front and center in this world right now, from a pandemic to a revolution. Our community is what reminds us that we are not alone. We the Mamas is a way for mamas to share their voice and perspective with each other and the world. 

Mamas are absolutely incredible, and we are doing a great job, hour by hour, day by day. Hopefully this serves as a reminder that we are not alone. I have been able to shoot over 30 mothers and kids via FaceTime, pacing my house holding my laptop or sitting down with my mini assistant in my lap. It has been a fun challenge, a much-needed creative outlet, a reason to connect and a nice change of quarantine pace.

I will definitely keep shooting this series. There is always a story to tell, a connection to be made, it’s just the landscape of the challenges that may change. I have currently expanded the project into We the Kids with virtual shoots of our youth, accompanied by a voice recording of them sharing their message and thoughts of the current state of affairs.  

Camille with Luca (@killahcam)

Charlotte with Neriah and Micah (@charlottebetts)

I imagine it’s a totally different approach and vibe shooting in person compared to shooting via Facetime. How does the experience differ? What are the pros/cons? Have you learned anything new through this experience?

Totally different! But it’s a fun challenge. We figure out when and where the best light is in their house, often moving and rearranging furniture, and then I direct them to inspire movement. It’s a whole different scenario directing as a talking head than as a body showing them the movements in person, but it offers an element of organic, authentic movement and energy since they are in their own space. There is not as much control over shutter speed, blur, exposure… so I have embraced these elements to help set the mood and the story. It is a true collaboration with the subject, which is a really cool dynamic.

What do you think will be the new normal in your industry post-pandemic?

Wow! I honestly have no idea! The pandemic and the fight for equality has and will continue to dramatically change the landscape. I know drones have become a new fixture in fashion shoots, then there are virtual shoots over FaceTime (as I have been doing), but honestly nothing can replace that in-person, team collaboration. I know that there will be some anxiety that comes with getting back in the studio with full teams, that budgets will have new line items for COVID prevention.

2020 is a year of pivoting and realignment for many companies and industries. The growth is not without pain, this is a marathon and not a sprint on all fronts, but I am hopeful the people will stand strong until change is realized, that this momentum will bring lasting change, that the truth and strength will persevere and the long overdue diversity in this this industry, in front and behind the camera will be realized. The time is now. 

Charlotte with Neriah and Micah (@charlottebetts)

All photos by Meg Stacker King, We the Mamas

More from BUST

Excellent Coats On Irritated Women Is The Instagram Account We Both Need And Deserve

This Photographer Takes Beautiful, Powerful Shots Of “Nude Grandmothers” (NSFW)

20 Years Later: Reflections From A Photographer Who Shot The Strokes, Sonic Youth, And More

Yulia Tsvetkova has become a symbol of the consequences of Russia’s push for “traditional family values” at the expense of free expression. Her case is sparking resistance across Russia and beyond, @samberkhead reportshttps://t.co/i5332bYf3V

— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) July 11, 2020

Tsvetkova faces charges of “spreading pornography” for promoting body-positive artwork on her social media group, “Vagina Monologues.” Mostly flowery imagery of vaginas and women displaying their pit hair captioned with phrases like “Real women have hair on their bodies—and that’s normal,” the group’s mission was to celebrate the female body and protests taboos around it. Seems innocuous enough—but in Russia, not so much. 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Вы видите здесь порнографию? А она есть! За эти рисунки художнице и ЛГБТ-активистке Юлии Цветковой грозит от 2 до 6 лет лишения свободы. ⠀ Подробнее о деле Юли вы можете прочитать по ссылке в шапке профиля. Пожалуйста, распространяйте эти рисунки и информацию о Юле, чтобы как можно больше людей узнали об этом абсурдном деле. Юля должны быть на свободе! #заюлю

A post shared by Открытые (18+) ?️‍? (@ozine.ru) on Jun 9, 2020 at 12:14pm PDT

As an outspoken LGBTQ+ activist and feminist, Tsvetkova has been battling gender oppression since her beginnings as a director of youth theater. In 2019, police started an investigation of her play The Blue and The Pink, which explored gender stereotypes. The artist was arrested on November 20 2019 and put on house arrest two days later, charged with “production and dissemination of pornographic materials.” She was also accused of spreading “homosexual propaganda” to minors and was later fined $730.  

“I am from a small Russian city in a remote region, the whole place is censored by the city administration,” Tsvetkova said in an article with The Art Newspaper. “I set up a theatre and community center, and have actively spoken out on social media, so I went against their censorship. The persecution of activists, LGBTQ people, and feminists is a state policy, it’s happening all over Russia.”

When prosecutors confirmed on June 9 that Tsvetkova was still due to stand trial, a fiery wave of feminism befell Russia. On June 27, the national day of youth in Russia, over 50 media outlets organized a “Media Strike for Yulia,” demanding Tsvetkova’s prosecution be stopped. In Moscow, 40 people were detained for holding peaceful protests in solidarity with Tsvetkova. Influential artists, activists, actors, and journalists flooded social media with posts with the hashtag #forYulia and #FreeJuliaTsvetkova. Now, close to 233,000 people signed an online petition calling on authorities to drop the case against her. If you’re looking to mobilize with the Russian, you can sign the petition here.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

«Тело — не порнография. Юля — не преступница». Фотографии с одиночных пикетов в поддержку Юли Цветковой. #ЗаЮлю

A post shared by Открытые (18+) ?️‍? (@ozine.ru) on Jun 9, 2020 at 6:43am PDT

Header image via of Change.org

More from BUST

Aisha Dee Of “The Bold Type” Talks The Power Of Female Friendships And Her New EP: BUST Interview

Valentina Sampaio Becomes The First-Ever Trans Woman To Appear In “Sports Illustrated’s” Swimsuit Issue

It’s Time To Stop “Stanning” Politicians

With platforms such as Instagram, these days it’s much easier to engage with artists from across the globe. While it’s imperative to continue to #AmplifyMelanatedVoices one must also consider also how difficult it is to combat algorithms on a platform with one billion users. The works of these womxn are mesmerizing to say the least, yet still engaging. They educate us on experiences beyond our own, while in search for their own voice through their art. 

@blackcollage_ 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Thais Silva (@blackcollage_) on Jun 5, 2019 at 9:14am PDT

Thais Silva is an 18 year-old Artist from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work primarily focuses on getting in touch with her ancestral roots. These captivating collages are a form of understanding the origins of her identity, being both Black and Indigenous. She explores these topics through the use of old black and white photographs and reimagining them in a contemporary way with beautiful colors filling the background. Creating an immersive yet powerful view into Afrofuturism.

@jadepurplebrown 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Jade Purple Brown (@jadepurplebrown) on Jan 2, 2020 at 9:01am PST

Jade Purple Brown is an artist currently working in New York. Her work is strikingly bold and vibrant, making your eyes dance across the waves of color. Brown’s work is about the empowerment of being unique in a world where we might seem small. Through the use of playfulness with lines, form, and color, she creates an environment that feels so inclusive and beautiful that we never want to leave.

@uzo.art

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Uzo Njoku (@uzo.art) on Dec 12, 2018 at 7:50pm PST

Rich in color and pattern, works by Uzo Njoku, are worth the search. She is a visual artist from Lagos, Nigeria but grew up in the United States. Her work mainly focuses on women of color and she creates these vivid portraits emphasizing beauty in the collective, as well as individuals.

@edey_

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by charlotte edey (@edey_) on Oct 23, 2018 at 11:25am PDT

Charlotte Edey is a multimedia artist from London, focusing her work around identity and spirituality. Working as an illustrator and a textile artist her work is both harmonius and beautiful as it is Political. It depicts the experience of womxn of color, creating a place in which to identify yourself and immerse in the softness of the colors and form.

@cigherette

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled 7 (2019) – Holding a pen to create feels like holding the full power of the universe in one hand. I often question my own strength, am I strong enough for this? How must I feel, and articulate these stories, but then I remember…. the people behind the stories. Those 10 thousand stand with me. – Reworked and rebranded Acrylic and Matt emulsion on Canvas 40x45cm – #strongblackwomen #barkleylhendricks #kerryjamesmarshall #supportblackartists #londonartcollector

A post shared by Linnet Panashe Rubaya| Artist (@cigherette) on Nov 15, 2019 at 2:33am PST

Linnet Panashe Rubaya is an artist from Zimbabwe, her primary focus is on telling stories based on experience by Black African descendants. Creating a modern take on what it’s like being a result of the African Diaspora. In search of her identity through painting, based on the stories of her ancestors. Yet with her take of finding the feeling of home in new places and creating her own narratives.

header image complied of work by Thais Silva, Uzo Njuko, and Linnet Panashe Rubaya 

More from BUST

Here’s How Community Members Of Spokane, WA Are Responding To The Aftermath Of The BLM Protests

Bring Spring Inside With This Flower-Pressed Cookie Recipe 

20 TikToks That Will Bring You A Moment Of Joy During Quarantine 

Following the protests occurring throughout the United States ignited by George Floyd’s murder, it is not uncommon to walk down the streets and be met with sights of shattered glass, damaged buildings, and broken windows. Responses to these changes in our cityscapes have been varied: some choose to focus on its destruction, while others have espied it as an opportunity for creativity.

In the wake of protests, there has been a surge of graffiti artists taking to the streets to spread the movement’s message. Boarded-up windows bearing the words “Black Lives Matter,” “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Say Their Names,” have begun to saturate city sidewalks, bringing a touch of beauty to communities that are hurting.via George Floyd Mural Map/Twitter

While most of these murals have sprung up organically, Spokane Arts, a women-run non-profit that partners with public and private entities to support the arts in Spokane, WA, decided to take things to things up a level. Executive director Melissa Huggins identified broken storefronts as places to employ local artists and bring some brightness to the city, which has been filled the past few weeks with thousands of protestors and thus borne the brunt of the resistance’s residue.

For the boarded-up entrance to a Nike store downtown, Spokane Arts funded local artists Susan Webber and Shelby Allison to design a mural. These two women, who had already worked together to grace the streets of Spokane with a 160-foot long mural of two women’s bodies, decided to make a memorial for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of police brutality.

This boarded storefront, once a relic of pandemic-meets-protest sobriety, is now covered with the work of this artist duo in commemoration of those who have lost their lives to police violence. The artists made sure to donate the majority of the proceeds from Spokane Arts to Black Lives Matter. Their work, alongside that of many other artists who have bedecked our streets with beauty, serves as a reminder that it takes all kinds to make a movement.

Check out these organic murals that have appeared too.

In George Floyd’s home state of Texas:

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by YOUNG ICEBOX RAMBO (@aqicebox) on Jun 2, 2020 at 8:29pm PDT

In New York, New York:

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Dragon76 (@dragon76art) on Jun 8, 2020 at 7:23am PDT

East Village, Manhattan

Went for a walk in East Village yesterday. Photo: George Floyd mural at Houston & the Bowery. #georgefloyd #StreetArt pic.twitter.com/eqkSYWtYjG

— Patrícia Vasconcellos (@patricia_vasc) June 15, 2020

Oakland, CA

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Cultured OGs. (@cultured.ogs) on Jun 13, 2020 at 4:05pm PDT

Los Angeles, CA

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by M (@mariomedina.m) on May 31, 2020 at 1:44pm PDT

Houston, TX

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Bruce Kish (@tharealbruce) on Jun 2, 2020 at 7:38pm PDT

Brooklyn, NY

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by First Class (@famecitykings) on Jun 9, 2020 at 9:06pm PDT

Top image via Emma Epperly on Twitter

More from BUST

Ditch Your White Savior Complex: 10 More Documentaries To Watch About Racism Instead Of “The Help”

“Breonna’s Law” Banning No-Knock Warrants Signed In Louisville, Kentucky

Don’t Understand #DefundThePolice? Here Are 8 Online Activists And Resources That Might Help

Guess we won’t be able to virtually view this painting for a while. Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 painting, titled “Spring Garden” of the vicarage garden in Nuenen, was stolen around 3 am on Sunday night after thieves broke in during a Coronavirus lockdown.

No other art pieces were stolen. Not much is known about who the burglars are, but we do know that they broke a glass door of the building to get in.

Van Gogh’s painting was on loan to the Singer Laren museum from Groninger Museum. Evert van Os, general director of the museum, said that they are “angry, shocked, sad” at the theft of the painting.

The Groninger Museum said in a statement: “The work from 1884, oil on paper on panel (marouflé), is the only painting by Van Gogh in the collection of the Groninger Museum.”

The Singer Laren museum is closed to try to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. Other events have been cancelled or postponed because of fear of Coronavirus contamination. Broadway, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York City have been shut down for the time being. The NBA, the NCAA and the French Open have been suspended or cancelled.

Ironically, March 30 is van Gogh’s birthday. This year keeps getting crazier and crazier; it feels like something out of a movie. I wonder what else 2020 has to hold?

Header image of Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Spring Garden” courtesy of Wikipedia.

More from BUST 

Need A Mask? These Women Are Grabbing Bras Instead

Sexual Assault Trials Postponed At Universities Due To COVID-19

Elizabeth Warren And Ayanna Pressley Advocate For Reduced Prison Population In Light Of Coronavirus

Taking up a new hobby while stuck inside for an indefinite amount of time seems like a great idea, until you realize that maybe you while you totally have the capacity to teach yourself guitar, you don’t actually own a guitar. Lucky for you, we’ve come up with some ideas about hobbies you can get into — no new purchases necessary. Even better, you probably already have the tools to get started on any of these. So if you’re dying of quarantine boredom, read on. 

1. Become the master chef you never thought you could be 

Okay, I’ll admit, getting into cooking during quarantine might not be the most opportune time due to the whole don’t-leave-your-house-unless-absolutely-necessary-seriously-for-the-love-of- god-just-stay-inside thing, but why not take this time to get creative with your cuisine? Maybe you aren’t totally clueless about how to prepare those seven cans of chickpeas you bought, but it’s time to break the mold and stop preparing them the same way you always have. Look up some new recipes! Improvise when you don’t have ingredients! Go nuts and throw something in the recipe doesn’t call for! Film it all for your friends like you are a cooking show star, and bask in the delicious fruits (vegetables or entrees) of your labor. 

Unsplash / picoftasty

2. Lean into nostalgic vibes and play some video games 

I’ll go ahead and say video games are a hobby. They require skill building and can challenge your creativity, plus they’re fun as hell. Currently, my Twitter feed is half “world is on fire” news and half people obsessing over the new Animal Crossing. But if you’re like me and sadly have not invested in gaming systems prior to locking yourself indoors, fear not. A mobile version of Animal Crossing exists on the app store, and while it’s not quite the same, it’s still adorable and relaxing. If you want something a bit more competitive, try Mario Kart Tour, which allows you to race against other players online — beware, it’s surprisingly addicting. The best part? Both games are completely free. If you are open to spending a little money, the website Steam has a ton of games you can purchase (and even some free ones) and download to your computer directly. Personally, I’ve been playing a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon, which lets my brain escape all this word for a while and create and manage a kickass theme park.   

3. Get playful and experimental with your makeup

If being in self-isolation isn’t an excuse to finally try my lime green eyeshadow, I don’t know what is. Of course, you should rock whatever look you want no matter the circumstances, but now you have the time to test out and get comfortable with your more playful makeup products without fear of judgment. The stakes have never been lower! Or you can take this time to perfect an old classic. I myself have been finessing my winged liner skills and now, when my wings don’t perfectly match, I don’t have to scrub my eye in frustration 50 times over! I just flaunt the mismatched wings around my house, judgment free, though I have to admit, my wings have been matching more and more with all the practice time I’m getting in. No matter what route you go, have fun looking up inspiration (check out some below) and getting artistic!

4. Quarantine…but make it fashion 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about wearing sweatpants all day, but once or twice a week I like to put on a nice outfit, even if only for half an hour. Think of it like adult dress-up. Remember how much playing dress-up slapped as a kid? Take this opportunity to rock all your fancy clothes you wish you had more opportunities to wear, or reimagine the possibilities of your wardrobe. Obviously, you can’t go shopping, but you can take some items from your wardrobe and wear them in ways you haven’t before — throw that shirt over that dress! Who knows! Could be chic! Just like with the makeup, this is a low risk scenario. And the best part? Once we’re finally through pandemic-hell, you will emerge from your home with what appears to be a fresh wardrobe, all through the power of reinvention. If you need some inspo, check out this video from bestdressed, a thrifty fashion queen on YouTube. 

5. Develop your green thumb 

You know that sad looking house plant that’s been drooping in the corner of your apartment for the past month? It’s time to bring her back to life, baby. Nothing like prettying up your living space makes being trapped inside of it more bearable. Carve out a little time each day to take care of your plants. The routine will help add structure to your routine and have the benefit will be beautiful decorations. A friend of mine, who’s bedroom looks like a jungle paradise, unwinds by doing research about how to best care for her plants. She helped me pick out three easy to care for plants that have been an absolute game-changer for my bedroom. If you’ve already got a lush garden of a home, try propagating some of your plants!  

6. Work on your photography skills 

Did you know there are approximately a zillion photo editing apps you can download right on your phone? I’ve downloaded some and deleted them because they confused me, but this ends now. I am going to redownload these apps and actually sit and spend time on them (because I have nothing but time now) and post gorgeous pictures, dammit. Draw inspiration from your surroundings and capturing different angles of your home. Best part — you can post your favorites. While I’m certainly no authority on photography, here are a couple apps the internet recommends that aren’t VSCO: Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor, Photoshop Express and Snapseed (all apps are also available for Andriod). 

7. Discover your inner artiste (must pronounce with bad French accent)

I am a horrible artist. But this morning, I received a picture from a friend who watercolored a bunch of flowers on a piece of printer paper with her Crayola paint set, and it straight up looked like something I would spend $20 on Etsy for. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve added the picture below (with permission from my friend of course). The best part was, it doesn’t look particularly complicated. In fact, she just followed a YouTube tutorial. Think about it — there’s probably a YouTube tutorial for any type of art you’ve always been a bit curious to try, so why not take advantage of them now!

No matter what you choose to do, try to make the best of a crap situation and learn a new skill just for the pleasure of learning it. It feels better than you think, not trying to maximize every moment of every day. Let us know what you end up doing! 

Header Photo: Unsplash / steve_j

More from BUST 

Bring Spring Inside With This Flower-Pressed Cookie Recipe 

9 Virtual Activities To Do Inside When Netflix Can No Longer Save You 

20 TikToks That Will Bring You A Moment Of Joy During Quarantine 

The first time I experienced Zilia Sánchez’s artwork was in 2018, and I’m furious about it. Lot 250: El silencio de Eros (Antigona) rose off the stark wall as if animate with breath beneath the canvas “skin.” (Sánchez calls the surface “bodies” of her signature stretched paintings.) There, showing briefly in a Sotheby’s contemporary art auction, before transferring from one private collection to another, I saw her. Lines, distinct as sculpted marble, formed a whisper of the tragic mythological figure Antigone. Her presence a flushed pink against a steely blue, silent no more. I heard her, felt Sánchez’s hand pull me toward the epic form, hanging 72 x 41.2 x 9 inches; one in her series Topologías eróticas (Erotic Topologies). Sensual. My heartbeat in my ears. First, I felt awe, then fury. The piece before me was dated 1990. How had I not encountered Zilia Sánchez before?  

At age 93, Sánchez, who currently lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has been making abstract art for decades. Long overlooked, her first retrospective of over forty bodies of work is now showing at the El Museo Del Barrio. Soy Isla (I Am an Island) showcases artwork by the prolific Cuban artist from the 1950s to present, including her stretched canvases, paintings, works on paper, sculptures, graphic illustrations, and ephemera.

“There’s a current fetish of the elderly artist,” Susanna Tempkin, Curator for El Museo, says in an interview, noting Sánchez long overdue recognition, along with noting Carmen Herrera and Luchita Hurtado’s lauded exhibition, I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn, now showing Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

“It is my responsibility,” Tempkin continues, “to stop the phenomena of discovering artists in their nineties. We are overdue to celebrate these figures. But it is our responsibility to be providing support, especially to women artists, who have systematically and institutionally been neglected, and to start really embedding that in our practice of looking at their work, while they are younger, and helping them by creating platforms to support them in our institutions.”

Born in Havana in 1926, Sánchez learned to love painting sitting beside her father, who she describes as a “Sunday painter.” She was mentored by her neighbor Víctor Manuel, a first-generation vanguard Cuban painter. She grew to become an artist, exhibiting at the revolutionary Sociedad Cultural Neustro Tiempo and prestigious salons in Cuba. 

Azul Azul (1956)

Upon her father’s death, in 1955, the vision for her signature sculptural paintings was inspired by a bedsheet, drying in the wind on rooftop of her childhood home, blown around a pipe the fabric retained its form. Sánchez applied that technique to stretching canvas around armatures and then painting the geometric surfaces. Material holding shape became Sánchez’s medium to explore concepts, indicated by the titles of works and series, of loss, silenced women, cycles of the moon, and the topology of eroticism. 

In Embodied Spaces of Zilia Sánchez, the exhibition’s accompanying catalog, Dr. Vesela Sretenović, the lead curator for Soy Isla, describes Sánchez’s work as “lingering between the intimate and the epic.”

Under Tempkin’s curation, the Soy Isla retrospective diverted from the exhibition previously shown at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. Instead of presenting the work chronologically, El Museo presents a more thematic grouping of heroines and women warriors, tattoos, many moons, a self-portrait, and vitrines quietly showcasing poetry books Sánchez contributed illustrations and covers to in the 60s and 70s, one on Cosmic Feminist Poetry.

Walking through the galleries of Amazonas (Amazons) and Toyanas (Trojan Women), the bodies of works are unmistakably and delightfully physical. There’s Construcción: Topología erótica (Construction: Erotic Topology), dated 1973. Then Lunar con tatuaje (Moon with a Tattoo) dated first in 1968 and then again 1996, revealing Sánchez’s penchant to continue to work on a body, giving more life to lunar’s multiple meanings of either a beauty mark or the moon and the evolving natures of tattoos. Subliminal is breathtaking. Amidst the artwork, the surrounding undulation, I feel as though I’m enveloped in Sanchez’s topologies.

Lunar con Tatuaje (1968-96)

Like two plumes of smoke rising on a bright day, Juana de Arco (Joan of Arc) (1987) features two painted panels billow nearly to the ceiling. The immensity of the body brings to mind the historic magnitude of the title’s heroine, and as I look closely at the curves, crevices, lips, and nipples, the sensation of surveying the landscape around the open legs of a love with whom I want to forget time. 

Lest I read too much into the artwork based on my own point of view. In her essay, “Decoding Homotextuality in the Work of Zilia Sánchez” Carla Acevedo-Yates, associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, delves into the idea of a work’s narrative being coded with sexuality. 

“A homotexual work is one that, although it may not be intentionally created as homosexual, reveals a complex, codified hermeneutics in which desire and sexual and gender difference are inscribed,” she writes. Homotexuality, a word coined by Rudi C. Blyes in Images of Ambiente: Homotexuality and Latin Art 1810-Today (2000), embraces artwork’s potential “reception as a site of homosexual meaning,” regardless of the overt intentions of the artist. 

Topologia erotica (1960-71)

Sánchez, who identifies as queer, once referred to her paintings as bisexual. She calls herself una furia, a fury, in an interview with Sretenović, joining the howl of contemporary feminist artists declaring that “eroticism is a pledge of equality and gender liberation, a power to speak.”

Hear her before Soy Isla retreats on March 22, 2020.

Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island) will be on view until March 22 at El Museo Del Barrio. Curated by Dr. Vesela Sretenović, Phillips Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art // Organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Visit EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO: 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street // New York, NY // 10029

More from BUST

Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer Is Fighting Jewish Stereotypes With Art

“For Neither Love Nor Money”: Artist Sawyer Rose Shines A Light On Women’s Invisible Labor 

“The Plastic Age We’re Living In”: Artist Portia Munson on Her Environmentalist Art & the Power of the Color Pink

Yesterday, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara became the first women ever to win the Pritzker prize. Often referred to as the Nobel of architecture, the Pritzker is the most prestigious prize in the profession. The Dublin-based duo have been cited for their attention to detail, their ability to design both large and small buildings with varying budgets and for their sensitivity to nature.

In an industry that has always been and still is male dominated, this is a huge win for women architects and for women in art and design as a whole. McNamara stated on the topic of their win, “We’re not afraid of monumentality and making important gestures when necessary, but we’re also not afraid to recede and be in the background. We think about a heroic space and at the same time think about how a human being feels in our space. We think about our agenda as being a humanist agenda, and that’s at the forefront.”

These two architects are keeping intimacy and the human experience in mind when creating their work. With the well-being of the residents in mind, the duo designed an inner courtyard for the North King Street Housing bulding in Dublin in order to provide an quiet oasis away from the busy street. When designing the Urban Istitute of Ireland, they mixed various colors, textures and materials in a move to craft a building that was visually appealing for the average passersby. From both their craft and their ideals, it is clear why they won this award. McNamara even stated in reference to their practice, “Architecture isn’t just about design and sophistication and accomplishment, but it’s also about how it makes you feel as a stranger.”

Farrell and McNamara have been working together for the past 40 years and have accumulated many accolades such as the Silver Lion Award. This historic win, however, is huge. But they want you to remember that despite this, it is not about the starchitects behind the architecture they create. For McNamara and Farrell, their architecture is all about highlighting the beauty of the world around us and the connections we all share. “It’s important to remember that the Earth is beautiful and sunlight is liquid gold,” she stated. “A lot of architecture excludes natural phenomena — the rising and setting sun, the power of springtime moving up through the soil.”

Image via Architectural Record on YouTube

MORE FROM BUST

Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer Is Fighting Jewish Stereotypes With Art

“For Neither Love Nor Money”: Artist Sawyer Rose Shines A Light On Women’s Invisible Labor

Artist Camilla D’Errico On How Women Are Finally Claiming Their Space At Comic Cons

Ancient vagina goddess Baubo is the perfect symbol of feminine power for our troubled times.

Even to modern eyes, the terracotta statuettes are bizarre. Found in 1896 in the remains of a 5th-century BCE temple at the ancient Greek city of Priene, each figurine is different, but all feature a woman’s face, bedecked with an elaborate hairdo, situated directly atop a pair of chubby, childlike legs. In place of a chin, there is the well-defined cleft of a hairless vulva. But for one of the German archeologists working on the dig, the figures looked familiar. He quickly concluded that they were images of Baubo, a mythological character—some say goddess—whose main claim to fame was flashing her genitals to cheer up the agricultural goddess Demeter. “Surely we are dealing with a creation from the context of the grotesque-obscene aspects of the Demeter cult,” he declared.

Today, we turn to resources like The Vagina Bible or Pussypedia.net to answer questions about “down there” that we are otherwise too shy to ask. Meanwhile, powerful men brag that when it comes to subjugating women, all you need to do is “Grab ‘em by the pussy.” Obviously, we need a vagina goddess now more than ever. So why isn’t Baubo more well known? 

One reason may be that scholars differ widely in their interpretations of Baubo-related texts and artifacts. Did her name mean “belly,” “cave,” or “vulva”? Was she a goddess of fertility, sexuality, or mirth? Or was she even a goddess at all? And when it comes to those weird statuettes from Priene, there’s no agreement about who they are or what they represent, even though they were found in the remains of a temple dedicated to Demeter, the ancient goddess of grain and agriculture, with whom Baubo is so closely associated. 

Adding to the confusion, there are many versions of Baubo’s story, which basically goes like this. According to Greek mythology, one day, Demeter’s daughter, Persephone (also known as Kore), was out picking flowers when she was raped and abducted by Hades, god of the underworld. The furious Demeter gave chase, forgetting her responsibilities in the world above ground. As a result, grain didn’t grow—the land laid fallow—and many died of starvation due to famine. Disguised as an old woman dressed in black, Demeter came to the city of Eleusis, where she rested by a well, mourning the loss of her daughter. There, she was found by Baubo, a nurse or servant in the Eleusinian ruler’s household. Baubo offered the goddess a cup of wine but Demeter refused it. Baubo offered sympathy but was rebuffed again. Then Baubo did a thing that even today would get you noticed—she lifted up her skirt and showed off her private parts. The gesture made Demeter laugh, and then the goddess ate and drank. In some retellings, Baubo is accompanied by another servant, Iambe, who tells dirty jokes in an effort to make Demeter laugh, but it’s almost always Baubo’s flashing that gets the job done. (Sometimes, Baubo and Iambe are the same person. Sometimes she goes by the name of Hecate or Isis. As I said, it’s confusing.) 

Like an actor whose tiny role on stage or screen makes such a deep connection with the audience that she is catapulted to fame, Baubo’s cameo in the story of Demeter and Persephone is small but transformative. In an agrarian culture like ancient Greece, a ruined harvest could lead to starvation, disease, and death. By making Demeter laugh, and giving her renewed strength to find Persephone, Baubo essentially helped end a famine in the human world, saving countless lives. Art historian Winifred Milius Lubell, whose The Metamorphosis of Baubo: Myths of Women’s Sexual Energy is the definitive work on the subject, traced the iconography of the vulva across vistas of time, geography, and culture. She thinks Baubo was another aspect of “extremely ancient…agricultural rituals of fecundity,” in which chosen women “squatted over the newly plowed fields” and allowed their menstrual blood to drip into the earth to increase its fertility. You might say that Baubo spoke truth to power, the servant’s pussy flash reminding the grain goddess of her responsibility over the harvest and thus as a life-giving force to humanity. Without Baubo’s timely reminder of the vulva’s regenerative power, human civilization would have ended.  

Votive offerings from the sanctuary of Demeter in Priene, c. 5th century BCE. Photo: Evelyn Aschenbrenner

Demeter is eventually reunited with her daughter after Zeus intervenes with Hades to set Persephone free. But before Hades does so, he tricks Persephone into eating some pomegranate seeds. Eating food in the underworld means she has to return below ground for at least part of the year. Demeter’s grief during Persephone’s annual travels below the earth thus became an allegory for the changing seasons and cycle of human life, from spring/birth to winter/death, and back again. 

Baubo’s singular act was powerful enough that it was reenacted by initiates and pilgrims at a pair of important religious festivals that honored the journey of Demeter and Persephone during the autumn planting season. Thousands of men and women participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, an annual event that lasted for eight days in late September, the last three of which were open to initiates only. These rituals were held in strictest secrecy, so much so that scholars still argue about what actually went on. However, they mostly agree that initiates “imitated what Demeter had done while searching for her daughter,” and that included Baubo’s skirt lifting gesture. 

Only married women were allowed to attend the fall festival known as Thesmorphoria, which took place in October. At night, they slept in tents. During the day, attendees portrayed events from the story of Demeter and Persephone in rituals thought to increase both human and agricultural fertility. They ate pomegranates and perhaps let the red juice drip into the earth, just as the proto Baubo offered up her menstrual blood. As part of one rite, they “manipulated bread-dough models of male and female genitals.” No written explanation exists as to why they did this, but scholars think it may have been to awaken desire and stimulate fecundity. Piglets, alive or dead, were thrown into ritual caverns or pits, and their decomposed remains were later retrieved and spread on altars, mixed with seed corn for the coming year. This mimicked the moment when the Earth opened as Hades nabbed Persephone, and some hogs were pulled beneath the ground along with the girl. According to a 2013 article by Sarah Iles Johnston in the journal History of Religions, on the second day of Thesmorphoria, women broke a day of fasting with “ritual obscenity,” recalling the jokes Baubo/Iambe told to Demeter. And at least one historian—Ewa Osek, writing in the 2018 essay collection The Many Faces of Mimesis—believes they also reenacted Baubo’s pussy flashing. As A.C. Smythe of the site Goddess Gift summarizes it, this was a festival “where women were taught the profound lessons of living joyfully, dying without fear, and being an integral part of the great cycles of nature.”

The story of Demeter and Persephone resonated deeply with the women of ancient Greece, because it reflected traditions in their strongly patriarchal society. Women were kept sequestered inside their father or husband’s house. Marriages could be arranged by fathers without input from their wives or daughters, who might not even be aware that such life-altering discussions were taking place. Thus, in classicist Mary E. Naples’ words, a girl of 16 or so, “was often torn from her natal home and forced to marry an unknown man who was—on average—twice or three times her senior.” Depending on distance and circumstance, a young woman might see her parents and siblings only rarely after marriage, if at all. Persephone’s abduction and Demeter’s sorrow must have felt very familiar. 

Baubo riding a sow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Photo: EdenPictures / Flickr

On the other hand, according to Naples, Demeter’s success in having her daughter returned to her for at least part of the year was a rare instance in which a goddess defied the rapacious Zeus without punishment—a power play that would have been impossible without Baubo’s skirt toss to bring the goddess out of her grief. The annual gathering at Thesmophoria likewise provided an uncommon taste of power for mortal women, a time when they could throw off the shackles of patriarchy as they gathered in a wholly female society, sleeping outside and performing secret rituals.

“What happened to this fun-loving, bawdy, jesting, sexually liberated—yet very wise—goddess?“

Despite Baubo’s role in the Eleusinian Mysteries and Thesmophoria, few, if any, images of her exist from ancient Greece (the statuettes from Priene may have been a rare exception). This is due at least in part to the ephemeral nature of the art created for women’s rituals. Lubell noted that men created images in marble, precious metals, and clay fired in a kiln—media made to last for centuries. Meanwhile women of the time used what was at hand in a household—bread dough, for example, which quickly disintegrated.

While Baubo was clearly revered in ancient Greece, her origins may reach back even further. Many Baubo-like entities have names that begin with a similar root syllable, a “bau” or “ba” sound. Over a thousand years before the ancient Greeks, the goddess Bau ruled over “the dark waters of the deep or the void” in religion practiced at Sumer in what is now modern-day Iraq. Bau was also worshipped in ancient Phoenicia, where one of her guises was Baev, the “guardian of the source,” an entrance to a cave or hole. 

Baubo may also be related to a little-known Egyptian goddess named Bebt. The ancient historian Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC), described rites for the Egyptian cat goddess Bast at her main temple at Bubastis. During these ceremonies, men and women rode a barge down the river, yelling “mocking jokes and jests” at women on the riverbanks. Women on the barge performed dances, “then, standing up, they hitch up their skirts.” (According to Herodotus, more wine was drunk during this festival than at any other time of the year.)

The image of a vulva-flashing goddess was so popular in Egypt that artwork of her in one or another of her guises, but always unashamedly displaying her bits, appears to have been mass produced. In the late 19th century, antiquities hunters in the markets of Cairo or Alexandria in Egypt could buy bronze or terracotta figurines of this sort that had been dug up in farmers’ fields, writes Lubell. These showed women in flowing gowns and headdresses, lifting their skirts above their naked pudenda. Is it possible these figures were actually of the much older Egyptian goddess Isis? Again, scholars disagree. 

So, what happened to this “fun-loving, bawdy, jesting, sexually liberated—yet very wise—goddess,” as Smythe describers her, with such far-reaching and ancient roots? One clue comes to us via the writings of Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writer who penned an essay called the “Exhortation to the Greeks” (aka “Exhortation Against the Pagans” and “Exhortation Against the Heathens”) around 200 AD. The purpose of this essay was to mock and demonize the Greek’s pagan belief systems, in order to convert people to Christianity. In his rants he describes a number of Greek rituals in detail, and, as a result, his writing has also been relied on as a source of information about ancient pagan cults and Greek mythology. While his telling of the story of Baubo is invaluable, Clement is clearly disgusted by it, and he believes his readers should be, too. “Baubo, having received Demeter as a guest, offers her a draught of wine and meal. She declines to take it, being unwilling to drink on account of her mourning. Baubo is deeply hurt, thinking she has been slighted, and thereupon uncovers her secret parts and exhibits them to the goddess,” he explains. And how is Baubo received by the goddess? “Demeter is pleased at the sight, and now at least receives the draught—delighted by the spectacle! These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians!” Clement writes with great disdain. Later, he asks how anyone can respect the Athenians, when they, “and the rest of Greece—I blush even to speak of it—possess that shameful tale about Demeter?” You can almost hear Clement’s pearl-clutching from across the centuries. 

Saint Clement of Alexandria. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Could the rise of patriarchal religions, such as Christianity, be at the root of Baubo’s downfall?  Were men appalled, and maybe even threatened, by Baubo’s raunchiness? It’s quite possible. And the main weapon they could use to kill her off was to bury her under layers of shame. Michael Psellus, for example, was an 11th-century Christian historian who described what he thought took place during the Eleusinian Mysteries, including Baubo’s big moment. “She pulled up her gown revealing her thighs and pudenda,” he wrote. “Thus they gave her a name which covered her with shame. In this disgraceful manner the initiation ceremonies [at Eleusis] came to an end.” 

It was around this same time that Baubo-like figures, called Sheela na gigs, began appearing all over Europe. They showed up as architectural carvings, posed over doors and entryways. They were meant to be ugly—as ugly as the gargoyles and other so-called grotesques that hung alongside them on churches, castles, and other places—and indeed they were. A round-headed creature holding her vulva wide open, with her hands clutching her labia, the Sheela na gig’s true meaning is a mystery. But one of the most popular theories is that put forth by researchers Anthony Weir and James Jerman. They argue, in their 1986 book Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches, that the Sheela na gigs’ location on churches, and their grotesque features, by medieval standards, suggest that they represent female lust as hideous and sinfully corrupting. 

 “With the rise of the patriarchy, the vulva went from being a place of reverence to a puritanical, unmentionable, and ‘dirty’ part of a woman,” writes Jean Shinoda Bolen in her book, Goddesses In Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty. “It went from a symbol of the goddess to one of the most demeaning and hostile words (‘cunt’) a women can be called.” This negative view of female genitalia and sexuality, and by extension, Baubo, pretty much held steady in Christianity and European cultures for the next 800 years or so. Even Jane Ellen Harrison, a pioneering classics scholar and suffragist, relegated almost all discussion of Baubo to a footnote in her 1908 masterwork, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Baubo’s gesture, she wrote, was a “stumbling block” and “not in harmony with modern conventions.”

A Sheela na gig carving on one of the 85 corbels around the Kilpeck Church in England, built circa 1140

“She is a goddess who speaks directly from her genitals, and your approval is neither sought nor required.?

Nevertheless, Baubo does make some appearances in a few modern works. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early 19th-century play Faust, she shows up as an occult figure. “Old Baubo comes alone,” a chorus of witches chants, “she rides upon a farrow [a sow]. Then honor to whom honor is due. Mother Baubo to the front, and lead the way!” In his 1882 work, The Gay Science, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche muses that, “Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubo?” And Sigmund Freud, who was likely familiar with the findings at Priene, referred to Baubo in his 1916 article, “A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession.” 

For those men, Baubo was a historical myth, not a figure worthy of contemporary worship. And to some women, that is to our detriment. “Baubo has been degraded into over-sexualized images of women and girls,” writes Dr. Kaalii Cargill, a scholar of women’s traditions in ancient Greece, on the site LivingNow. “The obscenities that were once shouted in sacred play are now directed at women as aggression, hostility, and violence. We have lost Baubo and so many of the myths and rituals that can connect us to ourselves, each other, and the world.”

But not everyone has relinquished their connection to Baubo. And some believe that her story has relevance for women today. Referring to her as the “Greek Goddess of Humor,” A.C. Smythe of Goddess Gift explains that Baubo should be “celebrated as a positive force of female sexuality and the healing power of laughter. [She] teaches us a lesson in how to turn enmity into friendship. Perhaps her bawdy behavior was a reminder that we should remember that all things will pass and change. To not take things too seriously, for nothing lasts forever.” 

Similarly, Jen Miller, on her blog Quill of the Goddess, describes Baubo as “The queen of deep belly laughs, dirty jokes, and unbridled sexuality. I would compare her to Mae West or Amy Schumer. She is a goddess who speaks directly from her genitals, and your approval is neither sought nor required.” Maria Wulf, on her blog Full Moon Fiber Art, even makes Baubo relatable by explaining that she “is the part of us that’s ‘too loud’ and cackles at dirty jokes. The one who is having ‘too much fun.’”

The public display of the female body—at least as dictated by women—still has the power to shock in the 21st century. A society that can lose a good portion of its collective mind at the sight of a mother breast-feeding her baby at a restaurant is probably not ready for Baubo. Yet, as Lubbell points out, Baubo’s power stemmed not from “gleaming armor or beauty bestowed on her” by male gods, but from her own body. She was irreverent and sacred, a symbol of women’s “nurturing and transformative energies” combined with their “resourcefulness and laughter.” In an era when women’s rights and bodily autonomy are under siege on what seems like a daily basis, maybe we ought to reclaim Baubo as a life-affirming reminder of female power.  

By Lynn Peril
Top photo credit: BPK Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen / Johannes Laurentius / Art Resource, NY
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2020 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Mother Jones Was A Hell-Raising Trailblazer In The Fight For Workers’ Rights

19th Century Journalist Nellie Bly Broke Barriers And Became A Legend In Her Field

On The Anniversary Of The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Here’s The History Of The Shirtwaist

Desire, self-betrayal, displacement, freedom of choice versus fate, sexual violence and power, coping with trauma, the mysticism of religion: God in Three Persons is a zenith in The Residents’ career-long exploration of these themes. As the infamous San Francisco-based rock band and art collective march into their sixth decade of existence, The Residents bring to the stage for the very first time what many fans consider among the best of their vast 60-album discography. 

With every legend surrounding The Residents, there’s a little bit of mystery, a little bit of tragedy, and a little bit of failure woven throughout. The story behind God in Three Persons is no exception. Its lyrics are written entirely in trochaic octameter, a rare poetic meter most famously used by Poe in “The Raven.” God in Three Persons is the first of The Residents’ series of storytelling releases, in which a long-form story unfolds on the record. 

In 1987, before he was able to record his parts for the record, iconic guitar god and quintessential Residents collaborator Snakefinger died suddenly of a heart attack while on a solo tour. The Residents were gutted and had to completely reapproach their aesthetic, as Snakefinger had been around since the beginning. They called on composer Richard Marriott to arrange woodwinds and brass to complete what would have been guitar parts.

It was the last album they recorded to tape before switching to digital and the first album to be released on an exciting new format at the time of its release in 1988: CD. Without the limitations of vinyl, they didn’t feel bound to compose and craft the album around a record flip right in the middle so they wrote something to be listened to from beginning to end without stopping.

Once the record was completed, they had ambitions for its release — an instrumental version of the record, two singles — but the record company wasn’t in sync. Though they performed live and later staged other works, the Residents have never performed God in Three Persons live… until now. They will perform a brand new multimedia staging in collaboration with media artist John Sanborn this weekend at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This is going to be a treat and a must-see for both fans and newcomers. 

To find performance times, check out MoMA’s website.

Top photo: Roger Jones

More from BUST

Sharkmuffin’s First Video For Their Sci-Fi Rock Opera Is An Amino Acid Trip: BUST Premiere

Let Them Sit On Cake: Professional Cake Sitter Lindsay Dye On Art, Camming, And The Decriminalization of Sex Work

Old New York Downtown Vibes Live On With “The Living Installation”

A Russian artist is facing six years in jail for posting LGBTQ+ rights and feminist posts on social media. Yulia Tsvetkova was recently put on house arrest and has been fined 50,000 rubels (or about 800 US dollars) under the charges of distributing “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” (despite the fact that her accounts were clearly labled at 18+ due to Russian law) as well as for the “production and dissemination of pornographic materials.”

The 26-year-old theater maker’s accounts featured posts that championed female empowerment, sex positivity, LGBTQ+ inclusivity and body positivity. These charges come just after Tsvetkova had another encounter with the Russian government for creating an anti-discrimination play that challanged traditional gender norms with a youth theater group.

While none of her actions seem like they should pose any problem, artists, especially those who speak up about LGBTQ+ and women’s issues, are becoming increasingly persecuted by the Russian government as of late. As stated by Amnesty International Russia’s director, Natalia Zviagina, “Yulia is the latest target of a long-running discriminatory and intensely homophobic campaign. She has suffered one blow after another, having been arbitrarily detained, interrogated and intimidated on multiple occasions.”

While the homophobic campaign to which Zviagina is referring is long-standing, many of the cases similar to Tsvetkova’s come after a federal law that was signed in 2013 by Prime Minister Valdimir Putin banning what the Russian government describes as “gay propaganda.”As Julie Trébault of the Artist’s At Risk Connection (ARC) explained in PEN’s call for the immediate release of Tsvetkova, “The Russian authorities are making the stakes clear: if artists speak out in support of normalizing different body types or sexual orientations, their work will be quashed and their actions criminalized.”

Violence against members of LGBTQ+ community and their allies has also increased in the country in recent years. Just last year, an LGBTQ+ activist, Yelena Grigoryeva, was killed after her name was listed on a “gay-hunting” website. In 2018, the Human Rights Campaign also made headlines after reporting on unspeakable crimes being committed upon LGBTQ+ individuals in the neighboring Russian Republic of Chechnya.

The basic human rights of creatives, feminists and members of the LGBTQ+ in Russia are under attack. As Tsvetkova stated in an interview by Current Time posted on RadioFreeEurope, “This sets a serious precedent for everyone involved in LGBT activism in any way. Particularly if one is lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to have any connection with children.”

Tsvetkova is currently facing a series of trials. If convicted, she could be sentenced to the six year term in prison. However, thanks to organizations like Amnesty International, PEN and the ARC there are people fighting to help artists and activists like Tsvetkova, protecting the fundamental human right to exercise freedom of artistic expression.

Header Screenshot Courtesy of Current Time via RadioFreeEurope

More from BUST

LGBTQ Creators Are Suing YouTube For Homophobic Censorship

At Least 12 Trans People Have Been Murdered This Year—And All Of Them Were Black Women

Why Are Airlines Censoring The Queer Storyline In “Booksmart”?

The New York City art scene has dramatically changed since the 1980s, and people are obsessed with that time period for a reason. Creativity existed for its own sake and was an integral part of artists’ lifestyles. Artist dynamic duo Jadda Cat and Michael Alan of The Living Installation still live that kind of life. Their project maintains a raw punky format with similar energy to that of the downtown New York underground art scene.

Jadda Cat studied art in Savannah, Georgia before moving to New York to establish herself as an artist. Alan was born and raised in New York in the late ’70s. He had a hand in the nightlife club scene in the early ’90s and organized art shows, parties, punk and rap shows, and raves from a young age. Everything changed when he met Jadda Cat, and they fused to create the Living Installation, a wild, loose, all-encompassing piece of genre-defying, living art. Alan and Cat become living sculptures, constantly changing form, interacting inside an intricately and sometimes upside-down, inside-out, designed art installation. The installation is a three-dimensional collage, comprised of paintings, sculptures, projected imagery, theatrical lights, and materials. They are intricately woven into an eye-catching setting, which becomes animated by the duo.

I recently arrived at their cozy art studio in Bushwick to see their latest performance. I was greeted by Cat, fully engulfed as a work of art. She showed me into the space and hopped back into her stage. It was a two-person-operated circus of joyous clown smiles hidden under all the paint and dirt. I was amazed that they take no breaks — they don’t even go to the bathroom. The performance lasts up to eight hours, full of mesmerizing special effects made out of nothing, a visual feast for the eyes and senses. The combination of hypnotic visuals and rapid transformations makes each performance a spectacle not to be missed. I even rewatched the performance at home and was sucked into my TV. (And I hate TV.)

Cat is living art at its rawest form, girl power beyond, ruling the stage with rages of energy. She creates a dazzling array of characters, changing her body’s shape and size using a crazy amount of paint, prosthetics, tape, costume elements, toys, puppets, and assemblage materials to morph her appearance into creatures, ghosts and crazy critters, becoming in turn comic, beautiful, and even terrifying. She is questioning ideals placed on what a woman should behave and look like. Cat is a vibrant celebration of what it means to be a woman, a playful genius. She is cheerfully bizarre. She goes in and in and in, and makes me question what am I looking at. The Living Installation is something people need now: Jadda Cat shows us that we can be anything or everything. The ability to engage in these transformations with no script speaks to a natural talent that has no ulterior motivation other than engaging the world.

At the same time, Alan is changing his form into mutated insanity while they manage to photograph each other, buzz people up, create live music, and even run a live feed. They spend weeks designing the sets, backdrops, sculptures, costumes, ideas, and practices. It is apparent that the art duo pours their hearts into their work with out any hesitation, compulsively creating together for hours on end. 

If that’s not enough and over the top they go out into the city splattered in paint and costume, showing up at random in museums, trains, and the streets with no purpose other than to strike a smile on the faces of the people around them. These kindred souls truly live the work, spending hours of time in preparation, creating art together in harmony. I have always believed that they must have played the same way as children, creating their own worlds and words and gibberish. Now they do the same thing as adults. The difference is that they are bringing the transformative power of pure play to their viewers, sharing their happiness and flow with a wider audience. The goal is to take people away from the stress of the day to day and immerse them in the world they have created for fun.

This unfunded, beyond vast, die-hard project has gained worldwide recognition and offers audiences an intense, long-lasting, surreal and serene experience that shouldn’t be missed. It’s different than anything I’ve seen going on now. I was truly excited to get a chance to find out more about the driving force behind their work, and what new creations they are brewing.

Jadda Cat, what goes through your mind while you perform? What is it that keeps you motivated to act for hours on stage?

Performing is a meditative experience where I get lost in the materials and colors and forget about daily life. I get to play!

Is this project what you do day in and day out?

Michael and I both work full time on our individual careers and work double time on the Living Installation. I am the manager and lead artist at a custom cake studio in Chelsea, where I design, sculpt and paint highly detailed cakes, and run the team. Michael creates his drawings and paintings at his Bushwick studio for at least twelve hours a day. He is constantly creating new work, which is shown in galleries and museums. He does custom portraits, donates work to various charities and helps his mom. Sometimes she joins us in the shows! We somehow always manage to find time to keep the Living Installation going. It is all consuming! We love to create smaller public art appearances in between the performances we plan out.

Do you have any performances coming up?

Our latest project is called “Messyme Street.” We’re taking inspiration from Sesame Street. It is somewhat of a parody but a highly artistic interpretation. We have made a whole new soundtrack, sampling the sounds from Sesame Street and messing with them until they are absurd and hilarious. This performance premieres this Saturday, January 18, to be viewed online. We’re also putting out an EP for everyone who signs up. I hope we can find some free time to go on the train and messyme around!

There is a musical element to your project. Can you tell me more?

Some is made live. Some is prerecorded. Some is made in collaboration with some legendary artists, including with the late Tommy Ramose, Meredith Monk, The Residents, Geneva Jacuzzi, Jeff and Jane Hudson, Adron, Jello Biafra, Aaron Dilloway, 3 Teens Kill 4, and even our cat Pirate.

Is it just performance the night of?

We also make photos from the shows which we plan on exhibiting. 

There aren’t many projects of this nature in NYC. I would say you are unique. Why do you do it?

I’d like to quote Mike on this. “What’s happened to New York City? Why so serious?”

This is a collaborative project between the two of you. What special strengths do you each bring to the project and to the performances?

I bring a strong female energy and lighthearted touch to the stage. Mike punks it out and breaks all our gear and falls all over. He’s a stage diver! Last week we were performing in a freight elevator and within the first minute he dropped his cane all the way to the basement — maintenance had to retrieve it. We compliment each other well.

What part does being in New York and from New York play in your creative flow?

It is everything.

What sparks your creative energy and provides you with what fuels your creativity?

We just don’t stop creating and we run on momentum.

What role does transformation play in your performances?

It opens us up to unlimited possibilities. It also is a risk. You never know what you’re going to get. You’re working blind. You’re possibly about to become electrocuted by Christmas lights and paint bad mix. You’re vulnerable, ongoing. Art with no risk is repetitive and you never grow or learn.

What changes would you like to see take place in the art world and the world in general?

We’d like to see people become more present, kinder to each other, communal, less ego, more forgiving, more caring, more open-hearted.

You can view the next Living Installation online or live on January 18. Find more information here.

More from BUST

Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer Is Fighting Jewish Stereotypes With Art

“For Neither Love Nor Money”: Artist Sawyer Rose Shines A Light On Women’s Invisible Labor

“The Plastic Age We’re Living In”: Artist Portia Munson on Her Environmentalist Art & the Power of the Color Pink

You heard us right, a brand new art exhibition about reproductive justice is coming to New York City. Organized last year in the wake of the Southern state abortion bans by Project for Empty Space’s Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol, “Abortion is Normal” opened at the Eva Presenhuber gallery late last week and is set to go up in a second location at Arsenal Contemporary on January 21st.

Labeled as an “EMERGENCY” exhibition, “Abortion is Normal” seeks to explore accessibility, abortion as a form of healthcare and reproductive justice and the notion of bodily autonomy as a whole. “This show is about reproductive rights, and more expansively about our right to own our own bodies,” Wahi stated in the official “Abortion is Normal” press release. Jampol added in an interview with ArtNews, “It’s really making you think about [abortion] as something that’s part of our healthcare that’s supposed to be normalized, and that we’re supposed to have this access. It shouldn’t be a fight for it.”

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to everyone for an amazing opening last night of Part 1 of #AbortionisNormal @galerieevapresenhuber. Part 2 opens @arsenalcontemporary on January 21. Artwork is available now exclusively on @artsy at the link in bio.

A post shared by Downtown for Democracy (@downtownfordemocracy) on Jan 10, 2020 at 2:50pm PST

50 artists are participating in the show, contributing a wide variety of pieces from sculptures, to multimedia creations, to photography, crochet and paintings. A series of watercolor painting by feminist artist Nadine Faraj depict portraits of nude women with empowering slogans painted on their bodies such as “Mi Cuerpo Mi Decisión” and “Yo Aborté” while another piece by artist Ektra KB titled “Anti-Facist Vending Machine” showcases beautiful beadwork with the word “COURAGE” in bold across the top. Other works include a portrait of the notorious RBG with reproductive rights warriors behind her and a painted letter to the infamous Brett Kavanaugh.

The various works of art on display at “Abortion is Normal” encapsulate the many facets of abortion, womxn’s rights and reproductive health, making in the perfect place for feminists and art lovers to witness art as a form of protest at its finest. What’s more is that Downtown for Democracy, the political action committee that aided in producing the exhibition, has vowed to donate a portion of the funds made towards educating voters on reproductive rights and combating the oppressive efforts of the Trump administration.

“Abortion is Normal” will be at Eva Prensenhuber from now until January 18th and at The Arsenal Contemporary from January 21st to the first day of next month. 

Header photo courtesy of Charles Edward Miller via Flickr

More from BUST

This Artist And Activist’s Portland, OR, Shop Delivers Color And Hope

Frida Kahlo’s Clothing, Jewelry, And Makeup Will Be Shown In The US For The First Time

Massachusetts Could Be Eliminating This Massive Barrier To Abortion Access

I attended a reading of The School for Wives at Molière in the Park (MIP) in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park back in November. Molière in the Park aims to bring free, excellent, and inclusive theater to Brooklyn. At this particular performance, Handmaid’s Tale (and former BUST cover girl) Samira Wiley shone alongside Dominic Fumusa, Christopher Henry Coffey, Carter Redwood, and Tamara Sevunts. I interviewed the program’s founding artistic director, Lucie Tiberghien, about the series, the reading, and her craft. Tiberghien is a French-American Brooklynite who directs.

What is Molière in the Park? What prompted you to start/found the series?

Molière in the Park (MIP) was founded in the fall of 2018, and is the first non-profit in Brooklyn solely dedicated to bringing free, inclusive theater to Prospect Park, on a yearly basis. I believe that high caliber theater performed in public spaces and available to all is vital to the well-being of communities. I created MIP to fulfill that belief and give back to the borough I have called my home for over 15 years.

Every year we will produce a contemporary production of one of Molière’s masterpieces translated into English offering an opportunity to all of Brooklyn to experience subversive and timeless theater under the stars.

This was a reading for The School for Wives; do you think that this will go on to be a play in the spring of 2020 for Molière in the Park?

We are considering The School for Wives for our 2021 season. If we go ahead with a production, we will continue to look for ways to use the play as a way to further today’s conversations around gender and feminism by playing with non-traditional gender casting. For example, I would love to cast a woman in the lead male role.

Where would you say that there’s feminism to be found in The School for Wives?

The character of Agnes, who was held captive and stripped of her rights from a very young age and into adulthood, in the end is freed and able to choose a path for herself. That alone feels empowering, especially since the forces that allow her to regain her freedom seem to all be guided by chance alone, as if to say that the natural order of the world and nature tends towards women’s equality and the respect of women’s bodies.

As a director, what do you find in your line of work that’s inspiring?

Working on new plays with writers who are trying to raise awareness, and who believe, as I do, in the power of theater to impact the world we live in. And putting productions of classical plays like Molière’s into the world for free: inviting people to discover what theater can do on an individual, emotional, political, and communal level.

Are there plays by Molière, other than The School for Wives, that you might like to direct, particularly those with empowering themes?

The Misanthrope interests me from a feminist perspective as well. Celimene is a fiercely independent woman who choses against all odds, to remain single and free, rather than follow the man she loves and risk having to give up her freedom. I find it particularly interesting to also think about these issues through the lens of a French 17th century male playwright.

What would you say is the hardest part of directing?

Letting go of the work once the audience is allowed in. As directors, we shape, build and try to control as best we can, every aspect of the performance and the storytelling but in the end, once the show begins, the performers are in charge, and the show takes on a life of its own. I can hope that I created an ecosystem in which the show will grow and thrive but once the performances start, it’s out of my control. It’s like raising a child.

Finally, how do you find the act of sharing and supporting others along with being supported in regards to feminism?

It’s important to me to collaborate with women, listen to women’s stories, tell women’s stories, include a strong female perspective in everything I do. I often create all female design teams. I’ve worked with many women playwrights. The world is a better place when women are heard and given a platform.

Top photo of Lucie Tiberghien photographed by Jennifer Mudge

More from BUST

Not One Woman Director Was Nominated For A Golden Globe (Again)

Liv Hewson On “Let It Snow,” Representation, And Feminism: BUST Interview

The Academy Snubs Yet Another Black Female Filmmaker

Drawing its title from the Yiddish saying “a Jew is 28 percent fear, 2 percent sugar, and 70 percent chutzpah,” Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer’s 70 Percent Chutzpah offers a guide on conversion to the curious would-be Jew. In the large-scale ink drawing installation, the section “Becoming a Jew: How to,” raises the specter of every Jewish stereotype in the book and shreds them in glorious, graphic fashion. For the discerning convert, it’s important to “carry Clorox with you at all times, so as not to contaminate public spaces. (Gentiles are sensitive to semitic bacteria),” and to remember that studying Torah “is critical to your identity as a Jew,” because “this is how you will win a Nobel Peace Prize and learn how to control the weather.” “Becoming a Jew: How to” aptly conveys the mingled fascination, envy, and revulsion anti-Semites seem to have for the people of the book.

Kurth-Sofer envisions two types of viewers as the ideal audience for these darkly humorous images. She sees “a Jew who gets it” — a fellow Yid who can appreciate her Jewish jokes, who understands the context and significance and playfulness of the experiences depicted in each meticulously-rendered panel. But she hopes her work also affects, as she puts it, a “non-Jew next to them” — a gentile who might be confused by the specificity of the content, who maybe doesn’t personally know many Jewish people, but who can still appreciate the aesthetics, the intricate detail of line and form Kurth-Sofer puts in every work. Either way, she says, “I want them to think it’s funny.” 

Citing R. Crumb, Raymond Pettibon, and David Shrigley as artistic inspirations, Kurth-Sofer weaves text into her intricately-rendered, often monochromatic drawings. The body of work Not Kosher, created and exhibited during Kurth-Sofer’s sojourn to Vienna, Austria in 2018-2019, comprises grimly funny step-by-step illustrations detailing the process of cooking various Jewish dishes. Step one of “How to: Make Latkes:” “slice off foreskin of eight-day-old baby cousin;” meanwhile, baking Kurth-Sofer’s hamantaschen involves “milk and honey and secret ingredient (the tears of our ancestors)” and “(last but not least) sprinkle a little bit of Black Death on top.” 

Recently, Kurth-Sofer expanded her work beyond the two-dimensional format and into something resembling social practice art. Following her undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kurth-Sofer received a Fulbright grant to study at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, research anti-Semitic imagery at the Jewish Museum in preparation for what would become Not Kosher and 70 Percent Chutzpah, and teach English at two Viennese high schools. Growing up in a conservative Jewish community in Los Angeles with a non-Jewish father, Kurth-Sofer admits that she “felt like I was the least Jewish person in my school […] I just felt like I was too different to be Jewish.”

But in Vienna, Austria, outside of the second district, Jews are hard to find, and she discovered that she was, for many of her students, the first and only Jewish person they had ever met. “Some [students] would gasp,” Kurth-Sofer remarks, while “others would ask somewhat off-putting questions.” But she found that her work with Viennese students and at the Jewish Museum could connect in mutually beneficial ways: she taught the students about Jewish culture and ritual, shared her experiences as a Jewish person, and showed them some of the archival images she was studying. She “showed them pictures of the Jew as pigs, the Jew hoarding money,” and other anti-Semitic political caricatures, and would ask them, “can you see that this has been constructed by people who hate Jews?” 

And when she began mounting her work in shows around the city, she went a step further, and invited her students, the teachers at her school, friends from her Viennese synagogue Or Chadash, and fellow artists from the Academy of Fine Arts—as well as anyone passing by outside—to join her in Havdalah ceremonies. Kurth-Sofer passed around booklets with translations and transliterations of the brachot, and encouraged them to participate however they felt appropriate. She admits, “it […] felt really uncomfortable for me having to lead and facilitate this thing that felt really out of my comfort zone, but ultimately it felt really great to share with the community, the secular community, that Jews are still here. Jewish traditions still exist, and [they’re] beautiful, too.” Kurth-Sofer plans to further incorporate Jewish ritual in future exhibitions, particularly if she continues to work with “concepts of Judaism or biblical tales or religious iconography.”

Living in Vienna, navigating that combination of hyper-visibility and invisibility, marked a sea change in Kurth-Sofer’s self-identification as a Jew, and for her artistic practice going forward. Her Fulbright proposal, titled “The Mythologized Jew,” was spurred by “an interest in rediscovering what it means to be a Jewish woman—a Jewish person—today.” At the Jewish Museum, she worked with the Schlaff Collection, a collection of some five thousand objects bearing anti-Semitic imagery or themes. Kurth-Sofer wanted to analyze these objects, which include figurines, postcards, and texts, for their myth-making, fictional qualities, and mine these popular, violent caricatures for use in an eventual body (or bodies) of work. She admits that it “took me a really long time to realize that they could be considered art at all,” but she found that this work helped her “celebrate my Jewish identity and learn more about what it means for me personally […] to be Jewish.” 

Now Kurth-Sofer is interested in Jewish mythology and folklore, and wants to highlight the stories of “Jewish women and femme figures.” She approaches each body of work with the focused rigor of a Talmud scholar. When I ask her about her current projects, she references not sheets upon sheets of doodles on drawing paper and dried-out ink pens, but a stack of texts she’s using for research. There’s Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, Howard Schwartz’s Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural, and Robert Alter’s translation (with commentary) of the Bible. For individual drawings included in 70 Percent Chutzpah, Kurth-Sofer describes her love of the “curated compositions you find in Renaissance depictions of divine subjects.” Kurth-Sofer studied works at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum for inspiration, paying particular attention to “the fantastical, mystical nuances of scenes that have been depicted countless times throughout history.” In 70 Percent Chutzpah’s “Judith,” a tight composition stuffed with bulky, Sendak-esque figures features the dying Holofernes with the Mourner’s Kaddish patterned across his skin. A drawing depicting King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, “God Full of Compassion,” sees Kurth-Sofer writing the Kel Maleh Rachamim prayer across the monarchs’ faces, in both cases indicating a degree of condemnation intermingled with sorrow. The stylized figures of Ferdinand and Isabella clasp their hands stiffly and look out at the viewer, a testament to Kurth-Sofer’s interest in the use of eye contact in Renaissance portraiture. 

For the foreseeable future (with the exception of several upcoming shows in Austria), Kurth-Sofer’s practice is based in the United States, where, she observes, “people […] don’t really understand the urgency of my project.” Of her time and work in Vienna, she says, “now that I finished this project and I feel connected again to my Jewish identity, I’m finding that what’s prompting me to make my current body of work and future ideas.” Applications for MFA programs also take up much of her time and focus. But when she feels she’s satisfied her need for study, expect Kurth-Sofer to have her chosen subject and particular point of view ready to be deployed: “Once I start going, I work pretty fast.”

All photos courtesy of Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer

More from BUST

How “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Represents Jewish Women

8 Laura Berger Artworks Exploring Human Connection

“The Plastic Age We’re Living In”: Artist Portia Munson On Her Environmentalist Art & The Power Of The Color Pink

While women in the U.S. workforce are struggling to break the glass ceiling, they’re also fighting to stop “scrubbing the glass floor” at home. American women are doing almost twice as much cooking, cleaning, caring, and volunteer work as men, even if they are working full-time jobs. Over years, these thousands of unpaid labor hours that women work fuel a cycle of slower career growth, lower pay, and personal stress. In her exhibition, For Neither Love Nor Money: Women’s Invisible Labor, artist Sawyer Rose shines a light on these systemic inequities and their repercussions.

“In addition to the economic pressures that working women face, they also experience physical and emotional fallout from these disproportionate labor loads,” says Rose, who herself is a working mother. “Being constantly ‘on’ at work and at home takes a toll, causing some women to develop health problems including heart disease and diabetes, as well as anxiety and depression as a result of the strain they’re under.”

To spread the word about the true costs of gendered work inequity in the U.S., Rose builds large-scale installation sculptures using personal stories and work data collected from a diverse group of female-identifying workers from all walks of life. Participants record their work hours, paid and unpaid. Then, Rose translates each woman’s hours into a data visualization sculpture that helps viewers understand the vast number of hours each woman clocks at her paid job and at her unpaid home and/or volunteer job.

Renée Stout (African American) is herself a sculptor and contemporary artist. Even with success in her field, she still struggles with keeping up with her paid work plus all the unpaid tasks required to run her business and her life. On the average, women visual artists earn $0.74 for every dollar made by male artists, and black women working in all fields earn on average $0.65 for every dollar made by white men. The + sign is an hour that Renee did paid labor. Rose adapted the motif from a cross sign that Stout uses often in her own art work. Each wooden box with a + on it equals one paid labor hour that Stout reported to Rose. Stout’s unpaid labor hours (as can be seen in her portrait) are wire frame boxes – less visible and less weighty, as women’s unpaid labor is accorded less status and importance (and money) in society.

Once a woman’s data sculpture is complete, Rose takes the storytelling a step further by taking a photographic portrait of each woman lifting and carrying her sculpture, bearing the burden of her hours in a real, physical way.

Rose asks those viewing her art to broaden their understanding of women’s work inequity and also to take into account how factors such as race, age, and socio-economic class compound the effects of the problem.

“Despite large gains for women in the labor market, stereotypical gender norms and expectations still affect women at both work and home,” says Lucie Schmidt, PhD, professor of economics at Williams College. Schmidt is a labor economist who works on the economics of the family.

Loeta Robles, who is Peruvian American, drove back and forth from Chico, CA to San Francisco for years while earning her dental degree. While she was away during the week she would keep up with everything at home via FaceTime, even “attending” family dinner night with her Peruvian American parents and brother and helping her kids with their homework. Saturday morning, she’d leave the city at 3:30 am, returning home in time to make it to the kids’ soccer games and 4-H events.

The value of this unpaid work is quite high. In 2016, Benjamin Bridgman at the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that if this value was included in national accounts, it would increase U.S. GDP by almost 4 trillion dollars, or 23%.

“Men today take on more unpaid labor compared to the generation of men before them. But women still do more,” Schmidt says. “Rose’s art is important because it helps us to clearly see the magnitude of this previously invisible labor.” 

For Neither Love Nor Money, curated for Dominican University in San Rafael, CA by Sharon Bliss, runs through Jan. 17, 2020. It is presented by The Carrying Stones Project, a fiscally-sponsored nonprofit that educates the public about women’s labor issues through an ongoing series of sculpture, data visualization, and social practice works.

Dawline-Jane Oni-Eseleh is an art teacher in the Oakland, CA schools, at nonprofits, to adults with disabilities, and wherever she can get a gig to help make ends meet. At one point she was juggling six jobs and volunteering with a nonprofit that pairs kid authors with grown-up illustrators to publish their first books.

For more information, visit carrying-stones.com.

Top photo: Sawyer Rose

More from BUST

Artist Ghada Amer Makes A Feminist Statement With Ceramics And Embroidery

This Textile Artist Is Giving New Life To Traditional Lacemaking

Feminist Art Pioneer Carolee Schneemann Looks Back On 50 Years Of Work: BUST Interview

Lindsay Dye is a multimedia artist, performer, and cam girl who studied photography at the Pratt Institute. It was there, Dye says, that she first discovered a budding interest in camming and cam culture. Dye then began her career as a cam girl where she first learned of Wet and Messy Play (WAM) and Squashing (crushing) fetishes from viewers which ultimately lead her to what many know and love her for: cake sitting. Dye’s live cake sitting performances have garnered her critical acclaim and media interest as she’s been featured in the Huffington Post, Dazed, Office Magazine, and so many more. I had the pleasure of catching one of Dye’s performances on September 25 at Bluestockings Bookstore.

In a way, the effect and experience of watching cake-sitting begins in the anticipation, excitement, and confusion. Why did I express such titillation as a spectator of an act that is not sexually gratifying for me? The confusion does not dissipate when Dye begins performing. Even as she crouches down into a raised child’s pose, dressed in a metallic blue bodysuit, platform heels, and a long black ponytail, things are not all that they seem. Dye tops off her performances with live singing—most often sad love songs—while she crushes her handmade cakes styled in bright pink and blues. On one hand, watching a cake sitting performance is exactly what you’d think. However, what I did not anticipate was the nostalgia: the smell of sweet frosting brought me back to memories of childhood birthdays where my face was ultimately smashed into cake after blowing out my candles. Dye’s performances are not ones to miss, and I’d encourage anyone to satisfy their sweet tooth whenever she’s in town. After watching Dye’s performance, I was able to ask some questions that arose. Dye spoke on her performances as a cake sitter, her career as cam girl, and her experience in the current sex work climate.

In your Dazed profile,you mentioned that you have always wanted to be a stripper. What was the stripping community like in Miami, where you grew up?

I describe Miami as a lawless swamp. You can get away with anything: you can change your name and start your life over on a beach. As a Florida woman, I began going to strip clubs as a pre-teen with a fake ID. I do not remember a time where I was not objectified. Ending up at Scarlett’s seemed natural; seeing naked women on a stage earn money from men made sense. It felt organic and circular. In high school, I advanced to clubs like Tootsie’s (the biggest stripclub in the world — I think I started the rumor that it’s in a defunct Costco). I admired the sport, the gymnastic qualities, that it took innate talent combined with body strength and learned skills. I wanted to be brave like strippers are, I wanted to be a performer like strippers are, I wanted to have the self-awareness strippers have. I needed to seduce people with my body as much as I needed to seduce people with my art, and I planned to make a living doing both. I knew I had to turn what made me feel weak into my power (and my profit).

In regards to your cake sitting performances, do you find that your performance art is valued similarly to traditional artwork?

I run my own business. I make my own schedule and book my own shows, I’m in documentaries and films, and my next exhibition is at a museum. I made this happen without the help of a manager or an agent, a gallery, or being considered a “traditional artist” — even though that’s what my formal education and training is in. In my experience, once you’ve claimed your identity as a sex worker, people, media, and society denounce that you have any credibility. Not just in relation to art, but any attachment to intellect.

I’ve learned that the “artist” label doesn’t really matter. I don’t measure my success if people refer to me as such or by how much money I make. I measure it by how much I produce and how active I am, my work ethic. I measure it by who I’m helping and the community I advocate for and uplift. I measure it by reminding myself that when I was 10 years old, I said to myself, “I’m going to move to New York City and be an artist.” I couldn’t have planned or imagined how it’d go down.

What has been your experience profiting from your performances?

I’ve never had the endgame of making art I’d profit from: that would mean I’d be pandering to an audience or corporate entity I don’t necessarily have a connection to or care about. I don’t necessarily profit from my performances. I can’t think of a fair price to charge someone [and they’d be willing to pay] for a 5-minute performance that has taken my lifetime up to this point to prepare for. My performances are always sliding scale dependent on the audience they’re for. My art and my life expenses are supplemented by something I can quantify, my services as a sex worker, merch I sell, stipends for panels, interviews and published articles.

What I’m “popular” for doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much money I make, although it is informed and influenced by how I make a living. I think it’s hard for people to grasp why I’d keep performing an act that isn’t economically viable — but this is exactly what art making isn’t about. If I was making a lot of money from my performances I’d become morally conflicted about why I do it. Its meaning would be compromised.

I understand that you’ve been camming since you were in college. I’m curious about how camming has changed for you in the wake of the internet’s changing climate and regulation of sex work?

I’ve been camming for seven years. The irony of camming during this length of time is that the interface hasn’t changed at all; in fact, it looks like AOL in the early 2000s. But the laws and regulations around online sex work have undergone extreme upheaval. With the implementation of SESTA/FOSTA, basic freedoms of the Internet have been dismantled by conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking. Anyone who uses the internet has been affected, whether they realize it or not, though it’s the vulnerable laborers whose livelihoods are being threatened: women, people of color, migrants, and LGBTQ-GNC folk. The policing of sexual content ushers sex workers offline and onto the street.

The wildest part about the bills is that they hide what they are trying to find. Sex trafficking gets pushed further underground. It doesn’t erase it, it just makes it harder to find. These bills were meant to moralize, not protect.

Webcam performers can no longer offer date raffles and promote “in person” services. Skype has banned sexually explicit calls. Bots monitor the language and terminology in chatrooms that both performers and our clients use, prompting warnings of deletion if a term as simple as ‘meet-ups’ is typed in the chat — even in fantasy or jest. Craigslist and Backpage were seized by the government, along with a laundry list of other sites that allowed sex workers to protect themselves and properly screen clientele.

On the same note of sex workers operating online, have you ever had your social media taken down or been reported for your posts?

I recently posted a list of “HOT TIPS” meant to help the survival of sex workers’ Instagram accounts. I shared what I learned through trial and error use of my own Instagram account as I’ve been reported and deleted. I eventually got my account back and made some changes I suspected would keep me off IG’s radar. The tip that has helped the most and I’ve received the most feedback about: changing your gender to male on your profile. When I edited my gender, my shadowban was immediately lifted, I gained thousands of followers overnight, post engagement and impressions increased — revealing the very literal embedded sexism present on this app that is owned by Facebook.

Banks, payment processors, and crowdfunding sites have cut off business with anyone tied to the adult industry. Social media and online advertising tools have manipulated their TOS and implemented discriminatory coding to delete, shadowban, and censor sex workers, whether they’re posting sexually explicit content or not.

I’ve noticed many sex workers online advocating for the decriminalization of sex work rather than legalization. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

This is a human rights issue. Legalization would mean regulation of where, when, and how sex work takes place — sex workers could still suffer criminal consequences and exploitation by police. It would disproportionately exclude marginalized people who may not have privileged access to the bureaucratic red tape: work permits, licenses, tolerance zones. Sex workers are already targeted and at risk; their human rights need to be protected. Decriminalization eliminates criminal penalities and prohibits law enforcement from intervening in any sex work activities, maximizing legal protection and their ability to access justice and healthcare. The goal is to make a safer environment for consensual sex workers where they are not penalized or regulated by unfair standards which would further the destigmatization of Sex Work.

Where to find Lindsay Dye next:

Dye has been working with The Museum of Sex to curate a camming exhibition. The show will be featuring some of Dye’s artwork and will run December 19, 2019 – May 31, 2020. 

More from BUST

Shadow Banning: Why Women Are Pretending To Be Men On Instagram

How 19th Century Sex Workers Were Blamed For Ruining Lives By Trying To Survive

These Women Fought For Sex Workers’ And Women’s Rights In The 19th Century

When It Happens To You is a new play that’s just come out this week and is out for only the next six weeks, now through November 10. It’s an off-Broadway play at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York.

Adapted from a memoir written by the New York Times best-selling author, Tawni O’Dell, and directed and co-conceived by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, this play is based on O’Dell’s true story of how she “struggled to help restore a sense of safety and wholeness to her family after her daughter was the victim of a brutal attack.” It encompasses a structure in which O’Dell brilliantly narrates multiple stories, telling the audience how she had to learn to survive while intertwining performances by actors.

O’Dell stars in the play as herself, and the show begins as she introduces the story and sets the stage for what’s to come. Throughout the play, she engages in breaking the fourth wall, and in more than one aside, O’Dell uses this time to talk about her thoughts and why she had to do what she did to bring peace to her family (portrayed by Kelly Swint and Connor Lawrence). With this cast, O’Dell turns the tragedy of recovering from the pain into a powerful performance.

In an interview with CBS New York, O’Dell says that she was inspired by the “ripple effect” that tragedy has on a family. Throughout the play, O’Dell talks about the statistics of rape and how the numbers shouldn’t be so high — that a victim could be anyone you know, and that’s scary. In her CBS interview, she says that her daughter sought justice by going to court and putting her rapist to jail, that her daughter still has terrible days, but O’Dell thought to herself that she at least might have prevented someone else from being attacked — and now, with the play, the two hope that they can help other victims.

When It Happens To You is a powerful performance about how the repercussions of violence outlive an incident. O’Dell makes clear in her asides that she’s looking to get to the heart of these repercussions, and how she, as a parent, deals with them. And how, even where there’s tragedy, there is still space for love and humor.

Top photo via Jeremy Daniel

More from BUST

Pippa Bianco’s “Share” Starts A Conversation About Redefining Redemption For Survivors Of Sexual Assault

Rape Survivor From El Salvador Faces Retrial For Murder After Having A Miscarriage

Rape Kits Aren’t Getting Tested, But Kamala Harris Has A Plan To Fix That

Walking up and down the con-floor of C2E2, there is a lot of fan art and artwork to take in. Amid the isles of Superman posters, typical images of big busty comic characters, and dark and brooding images of Batman is a colorful and sweet-smelling booth that stands out from the crowd. It’s the booth of artist and author Camilla d’Errico. 

d’Errico has had art galleries of her work, done liscenced fan art and worked in comics, among other media genres. Her soft lines, pastel colors, and (iconic) big eyes are her mark: it’s very hard to walk by her booth and not get lost in the euphoria her work brings out. “I feel like I’m a candy store in the middle of a metal show,” d’Errico tells BUST. “My stuff is like cotton candy, and I think it stands out, and I think people really appreciate that.”

d’Errico has been working in Con shows for 20 years, and says a lot has changed over that time, especially when it comes to inclusivity and representation. 

“I think it’s really cool. I’ve always just thought of myself as just an artist and not a female artist, but the more I think about it, the luckier I feel – because 100 years ago, women weren’t allowed to do art. I realize now I’m so lucky. I feel like if I can inspire other women to say yeah, I want to do art too, they can make a serious career out of it,” d’Errico tells BUST.

A lot of her exposure is thanks to her relentless work at Comic Cons around the country. Now, d’Errico has coloring books, comic books, and art books printed with large comic houses such as Dark Horse, in addition to her gallery shows. d’Errico explains how, although Comic Cons are more inclusive now, in her earlier years of working, the Cons felt more like a boys’ club. 

She recalls how she really stood out at her first Con back in 1998: at San Diego Comic-Con, “Guys would literally peer their heads out of the booth an be like ‘is that a girl?’ But now,” she recalls, “20 years later, there are so many women here.” 

If you look at comic art and fan art from the ’90s and earlier, much of it was geared towards men. How many of us didn’t love Rogue, but felt some sort of dysmorphic body shame? Those images are changing. “Women are now part of [comic and fan art], and I think it’s great because there is so much more for girls. It’s not a boys club anymore,” d’Errico says.

Over the years, the work of female and nonbinary comic artists and colorists such as Jen Bartel, Joelle Jones, Tamra Bonvillain, d’Errico, and many more have really changed the game, especially at Cons. These artists and colorists are being commissioned to create comic cover varients and original work. They all have different aesthetics which are celebrated.

For d’Errico, working as an artist within this community has allowed her to create her own aesthetic and tap into two genres she loves, anime and Italian Rococo. “My love of both styles make me feel my art has a classic portraiture feel to it, but it also has a fun whimsical anime feel to it,” d’Errico tells BUST. 

However, growing up, d’Errico faced some pushback on what art is and criticism that her work wasn’t art because she drew anime-inspired characters. d’Errico didn’t listen, though, and continued making her art and developing her aesthetic, which is all self-taught. d’Errico says with her artwork she wants to help people reconnect with their inner child. 

“I think it sparks a piece of our childhood which, nowadays, more adults are getting into. They recognize that this is fun and it is creative and it is something they want to put in their homes because being an adult is so hard!” she says. “It’s something that makes them smile and brings them happiness.

“I think women have a lot to say in comics and in art,” d’Errico says. She goes on to explain that, by having artwork like hers showcased at Cons, it not only attracts people who are drawn to softer colors, but also it creates a safe space for girls and for people in general to enjoy more softer, emotional or expressive work at cons. 

Follow d’Errico on her website.

Art by Camilla d’Errico

More from BUST

Pam Grossman On “Waking The Witch”: BUST Interview

Misogyny and Manacles: The Real Story Behind “Wonder Woman”

This Comic Series Brings #MeToo Into The DC Universe

A bubblegum pink Barbie hairbrush. Gummy rubber bracelets inscribed with breast cancer ribbons and the word “hope.” A cake topper proclaiming, “It’s a Girl!” A bouquet of fake roses. These are just some of the objects that make up artist Portia Munson’s sculptures and installations, which amass thousands of found everyday plastic items, often arranged by color. Munson’s work draws attention to humanity’s insatiable hunger for more and more stuff, and the massive amounts of waste we continue to accrue because of it.

When I look at Munson’s beautiful, colorful works and the many objects used to create them, I’m instantly transported to my own girlhood—a time when pink toys, dolls, books and knick-knacks filled my bedroom and my life. Munson’s reframing of this everyday ephemera of girlhood and womanhood as art makes a powerful statement about the value of femininity and “girly”-ness, which are not often taken seriously in mainstream patriarchal culture. But beyond just giving artistic value to the objects that are marketed towards and associated with girls and women, Munson’s work also insists on these objects as waste, polluting our air, land, and water, and causing an environmental emergency. In this way, Munson forces us to look at our own complicity in our current climate crisis, dead-on. 

Portia Munson is a visual artist working in photography, painting, sculpture and installation. Her work has been shown internationally in major public and private exhibitions since the early 1990s. Munson’s most recent solo exhibitions include The Garden, at PPOW Gallery in NYC, and Earth Rites, at NYU Langone Medical Center Art Gallery in NYC, both in 2017. Munson’s Pink Project installation is currently on view through July 21st at New York’s Rockefeller Center, where she is a 2019 artist-in-residence. In Munson’s words, this installation collects “the refuse of consumer culture that usually ends up in landfills, what you might call ‘the backside of the mall.'”

In the press release for your 2017 show The Garden, you said that your work is interested in how the man-made invades nature. Can you say more about this idea? Do you see this as related to gender and/or feminism?  

Nature is female: “mother nature,” and “mother earth.” There is almost no place on earth that humans cannot be seen or heard. Our presence is everywhere, from the sound of airplanes to plastic bottles. Feminism and environmentalism are interconnected ideas for me—feminism is a reaction against the exploitation of women, and environmentalism is a reaction to the exploitation of the environment. My collecting began with pink plastic objects [which I was thinking about] in relation to feminism, and over time my focus has shifted toward the overarching idea of environmentalism. The two are fundamentally linked.

I was so struck by your piece “Her Coffin,” a large glass box filled with pink plastic items from hair brushes and My Little Ponies to breast cancer awareness wristbands. Can you share some of your thoughts on the color pink, and how it’s operating within Pink Projects?

The idea for “Her Coffin” started as a response to all the pink breast cancer awareness products, most of which are plastic or packaged in plastic. Since plastic is carcinogenic and [often contains] endocrine disruptors, there seemed to be something very ironic going on.

“Her Coffin” is containing the pink plastic stuff of our time, the toxicity of the plastic, sealing it, encapsulating it in the form of a coffin. With this piece, I’m thinking about the dangerous impact plastic is having on our health and the health of our environment. Like all of my pink pieces, this one is commenting on the marketing of femininity with pink plastic objects.

Ever since I was a young girl, I was attracted to the color pink. As I got older, into my late teens and twenties, I began to question this connection, and I responded by collecting all the cast-off pink things I found. [I was] looking for the inherent meaning in the accumulation of pink objects.  I think that the color pink is cultural code for femininity, which in turn is shorthand for weakness or submissiveness. But when pink plastic objects are shown in mass, they have an empowering effect, and the collective color is much stronger. I layered the pink in Her Coffin like sediment, thinking about the many layers of meaning and wanting to get at how much pink plastic there is. I see it as a time capsule of the plastic age we’re living in.

What’s your process like? How do you gather the materials for your sculptures and installations, and how do they go from raw objects to the final works?

Almost all of my work is ongoing—one piece leads to the next. My work involves collecting and organizing stuff from the world around me. I organize and sort found plastic into categories commenting on and making sense of the world. I started as a painter, observing the world through still-life painting, collecting pink plastic objects as my painting subjects. In the early 1990s I spent a few summers living in a dune shack In Provincetown, Cape Cod. Walking the beach every day, I looked for and collected the plastic that was washed ashore, looking for pink plastic. I saw that the main color washing up was green, which was very striking to me, so I began the green project and started to think very clearly about the color and its relationship to the environment. 

The image of green plastic washing ashore juxtaposed with the color green’s environmental connotations is so powerful. Can you say more about your Green Project?

It just seemed very ironic and kind of sinister that so many environmentally toxic objects are mass-produced in the color green. Not only is the plastic bad for the environment, but the products themselves—herbicides and things like that—are actually destructive. The color green is also used to market stuff like lawn chairs. Another common use of green plastic is fake plants and trees. It’s supposed to mean “environmentally friendly” and indicate that something deals with the natural world in some way, but it’s made in this material that, when it eventually breaks down, is really toxic. Working with these ideas, I’ve made several green pieces. One was called “Lawn”—I loosely arranged the plastic detritus I’d collected in shades of green, mimicking an actual lawn. I was thinking about how a “lawn” is a modern invention, how so much care is given to lawns but they offer virtually no benefit, and the huge amount of chemicals introduced into our environment and water because of the maintenance of lawns. Then I made another green piece called “Sarcophagus,” in which I also gathered lots of green plastic objects and encased them in a glass tomb. The container functions as a time capsule, and the objects within it are arranged from dark to light, as I was also thinking about the strata of the earth. I’m always trying to imagine the end of plastic; I’m very aware that this age we’re living in is finite, so a sarcophagus seems appropriate. In terms of the earth’s life cycle, we’re living in the plastic layer.

I first learned about your work through No Wave Performance Task Force’s  2015 event, Period Piece, where Christen Clifford discussed your work as part of a lineage of menstrual blood art. Can you describe your menstrual prints project? 

I started making menstrual prints when I was in my mid-20s. For quite a few years, when the blood was flowing, I would take sheets of paper and make prints off of my body, and I would do that through the course of each cycle. I would number the prints and hang them up, filling the wall to look like a calendar. When I first started making these prints, I didn’t know about other contemporary artists using menstrual blood. Only later, when I was in an exhibition at Exit Art (titled “1920”) that included some menstrual work by Carolee Schneemann, did I realize that others were also working in that vein. I knew that, in some cultures, menstruating women would be separated from the rest of the group, that menstrual blood was considered powerful, and that there were power objects in various cultures that had menstrual blood on them. When I was making my menstrual prints, I felt I was connected to something ancient and powerful. It was empowering to use my menstrual blood to make images.

How do you see your work using menstrual blood as connected to your work using mass-produced man-made objects?

I’ve always made art that’s connected to what I’m observing in my immediate surroundings. When making work that involves collecting everyday plastic castoffs, I’m simply seeing what’s around me and figuring out what I want to say about that. Menstrual blood was a substance that was right there; it was like an ink that had an amazing color, and as an artist who really responds to color, I was compelled to do something with this material. I was fascinated by the images that emerged, how they resembled Rorschach images, often looking like winged creatures—birds, bats, angels, or butterflies. The process of making images and displaying them was a rebellion against the idea of menstrual blood and menstruation as something that should be hidden. I like to make work that’s beautiful with materials or subjects that may have an unsettling aspect to them.

All photos by Dan Bradica, courtesy of Art Production Fund

More from BUST

See Parker Day’s Possession at Superchief Gallery NY

Cutting-Edge Looks Modeled By New Orleans’ New Creative Class

“Into My Life” Filmmakers Showcase A Mother And Daughter’s Memories Living In Brooklyn’s Largest Affordable Housing Co-Op

Celebrate Possession, Parker Day’s latest photography series, this Friday, July 12th at the Superchief Gallery NY from 7-11pm. With a party to kickoff the solo exhibitition’s opening night, Superchief, one of Brooklyn’s premiere art galleries, will be featuring Juxtapoz Magazine’s summer issue release and local musicians all night long.

But the real draw of night is Parker Day, longtime BUST friend. The Los Angeles based photographer whose newest work asks, “What does it mean to possess a body? Do you identify with ‘your’ body? Regardless of what body we possess, do we share common human experiences, as well as feelings of potentiality and limitation?” The artist grapples with these questions through a series of colorful images that focuses intensely on the diversity, beauty, and shock value of the human body.

Day’s exhibit is definitely worth checking out, with her last solo series, ICONS, presented at Superchief Gallery L.A., selling out before it opened in 2017. While you’re there, make sure to take home the Possession series as a book, to bask even longer at the shared bodily spectacle that Parker Day brilliantly highlights in her work. Even if you can’t make it on Friday, be sure to go see Possession’s solo premiere, which will be running at Superchief Gallery NY through Sunday, July 21st.

Top photo via Parker Day

More from BUST

7 Cult Films Reimagined By Parker Day

6 Women Visual Artists To Get Obsessed With

The Boulet Brothers Are The Masterminds Behind “Dragula: Search For The World’s Next Drag Supermonster”

Andrea Bowers’ recent Art Basel exhibition, Open Secrets, is a massive installation designed in response to the #MeToo movement. In an Instagram statement, Andrew Kreps (the gallery who represents Bowers) provided this statement about the piece: “The work contains approximately 200 photographic prints, each of which lists the name and occupation of an accused person, as well as their response to the allegations, printed in the typeface in which they were originally published.” Open Secrets will be featured at Art Basel in Switzerland.

Ironically, though, Bowers did not obtain consent from the survivors to use the images in her piece. On Twitter, writer Helen Donahue expressed her disgust at her story being told and her likeness being shown without any prior approval on her behalf. According to The Cut, “Donahue had posted the images on her own Twitter in October of 2017, saying that she’d suffered the injuries at the hands of an unidentified man in media whom she and three women later identified to Jezebel as Michael Hafford, a former freelance columnist at Vice’s now-defunct Broadly vertical.”

cool that my fucking photos and trauma are heading art basel thx for exploiting us for “art” ANDREA BOWERS @unavailabl DO YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING INSANE IT IS TO FIND OUT MY BEAT UP FACE AND BODY ARE ON DISPLAY AS ART RN FOR RICH PPL TO GAWK AT THRU A STRANGER’S INSTAGRAM STORY pic.twitter.com/5X9vF5hZE5

— helen (@helen) June 11, 2019

Open Secrets is valued at $300,000. Bowers should not profit from people’s sexual trauma without obtaining their explicit consent to use their images in her art, especially when she included a tweet with the person’s Twitter handle included: she knew exactly where she could have reached out.

Bowers has apologized in a statement to The Cut, saying: “I should have asked for her consent…I have reached out privately and am very much looking forward to listening.”

Photo credit: Andrew Kreps gallery (Instagram)

More from BUST

Put Your Money Where Your Art Is: Women And People Of Color Take On Big Pharma And Racism

What Makes Art Feminist? Janet Mock And The Brooklyn Museum Weigh In

Women’s Careers Will Stall Because Men Are Afraid Of #MeToo

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two prominent LGBTQ activists, will be memorialized with a permanent monument in Greenwich Village near the Stonewall Inn. Both women were leaders in the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, along with Stormé DeLarvarie and others, an event many consider to be the spark that ignited the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s and ’80s. 

The monument will be the first in New York City to specifically commemorate members of the transgender community. (Christopher Park, across from the Stonewall Inn, already has two statues honoring queerness and gay rights, one of two men and one of two women close to one another). All figures are painted white and do not have distinct features. Critics, as the New York Times noted, have said that the current statues do not recognize the trans individuals and people of color so integral to the Gay Liberation Movement.

After Stonewall, Rivera and Johnson were the backbone of the LGBTQ rights movement in New York City, focusing much of their attention to homeless LGBTQ youth and transgender rights. Together, they founded the first transgender rights organization in the world, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), in 1970. Both advocated for those afflicted by AIDS and continued with their activism until their last days, with Johnson being hailed as the “Rosa Parks” of the movement. Johnson died under suspicious circumstances at the age of 46 in 1992. Friends of Johnson and others believe she was murdered. Rivera died of liver cancer at the age of 50 in 2002.

The monument aims to bring recognition to these women’s accomplishments, which have largely gone overlooked in LGBTQ activism and history. New York City’s first lady Chirlane McCray stated in an interview with the Timesthat it was important for a monument representing the accomplishments of the movement to have a “name and a face. […] The LGBTQ movement was portrayed very much as a white, gay male movement […] This monument counters that trend of whitewashing the history.”

City officials will begin their search for an artist shortly, hoping to have the monument (estimated to cost $750,000) completed by the end of 2021.

In an age where conservatism seems to be on the rise, this promised monument of two powerful, revolutionary trans women of color is a sign of hope. McCray went on to state that “the city Marsha and Sylvia called home will not erase them. […] Our new monument will proudly remind the world that hate has no place in New York City.” The monument will ensure that Johnson and Rivera will not be erased from LGBTQ history and cement their legacy of radical activism and hope.

Header Image via Flickr

More From BUST

Tennessee Becomes First Southern State With Hate Crime Statute Protecting Transgender People

New York State Passes Non-Discrimination Act To Protect Transgender And Gender Non-Conforming Folks 

The Boulet Brothers Are The Masterminds Behind “Dragula: Search For The World’s Next Drag Supermonster”

Art, politics, and activism are certainly no strangers to one another, but the past few months have been particularly active with protests in New York City.

This past February, artist Nan Goldin led a die-in at the Guggenheim Museum to protest the Sackler family’s involvement with the museum. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactures OxyContin, the controversial drug that has caused many fatal overdoses. Purdue Pharma has been accused of profiting from the opioid crisis by dishonestly marketing the drug and encouraging doctors to prescribe it with a heavy-hand. The Sacklers are globally some of the biggest donors to the art world, with Sackler wings of museums such as the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their fortune is estimated to be $13 billion. 

Masha Gessen of the New Yorker describes the protest: “[Goldin] stood in the middle of the lobby, visible from almost any point of the great round building. Then the noise level rose and did not subside. Small flyers started falling, as though from the glass dome, swirling like snow as they descended the six stories. Within minutes the floor was coated in white. The sheets of paper were prescriptions, made out by a “Robert Sackler, MD,” to a Solomon R. Guggenheim, for eighty-milligram pills of OxyContin, to be taken twenty-four times a day. Each script contained a quotation: ‘If OxyContin is uncontrolled, it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused. . . . How substantially would it improve our sales?’” This quote was taken from a filing by the Massachusetts State Attorney General. Undoubtedly, the protests have worked. The Guggenheim, the Met, and the Tate Museum in London have said they will no longer accept donations from the family. 

As prominent as the Sackler family is in the art world, they aren’t the only patrons who have earned their wealth through corrupt business practices. This May, the Whitney Biennial will take place. The Biennial is an important showcase of contemporary art. This year, 75 artists will be featured, and the lineup is the most diverse ever: according to The New York Times, “people of color are a majority, and it’s one of the youngest groups in the biennial’s history, with three-quarters of the participants under the age of 40.” However, it is not without some controversy. One of the participants, Michael Rakowitz, withdrew from the event due to the fact that Warren B. Kanders is the museum’s vice chairman. Kanders is the chief executive of Safariland, a company that manufactures tear-gas that has been used on migrants crossing the U.S-Mexico border. 

The efforts of a group called Decolonize This Place have been crucial in drumming up public awareness and support of the legacies of these well-known institutes. The group describes themselves as “an action-oriented movement centering around Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification.” The group protested the Whitney last December due to Kanders involvement, and in solidarity with a letter calling for Kanders’ resignation, signed by more than 100 of the Whitney’s staff. It is likely that they have plans for the upcoming Whitney Biennial.

In a Vice interview with members of the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous feminist art collective who have been highlighting gender inequalities in the art world since the 1980s, they discuss how little the art world has changed since they first started protesting. “The [wealthy] art world pretends that it’s liberal and progressive. They’re kind of hypocritical when they complain about Donald Trump the politician and don’t look at the system that they participate in,” one Guerrilla Girl said. According to the interview, “a recent study published on February 11 by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) revealed that the artists whose work is selected to be part of major U.S. museums’ permanent collections are still overwhelmingly white (87%) and male (85%).”

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the art that these museums provide. However, we must go beyond our uncritical acceptance of any billionaire who just so happens to have their name on a building — not just for the art world, but for the whole notion of capitalist philanthropy in general. Art should be exciting, thought-provoking and reflect a diverse society. We should demand the same of the institutions that propagate it.  

Photo credit: YouTube/Sandi Bachom  

More from BUST

What Makes Art Feminist? Janet Mock And The Brooklyn Museum Weigh In

This Swedish Woman Created Some Of The World’s First Abstract Paintings—And Then Hid Them Away For Decades

8 Subversive Women Artists To Know

What’s not to love about artist Lisa Congdon? Her bright, exuberant aesthetic is infused with a clear commitment to feminism and inclusion. “People need hope,” says Congdon, who relocated from San Francisco to Portland, OR, a few years back to be closer to family, and for a slower pace of life with her wife, Clay Walsh. Congdon’s body of work—including books like Art, Inc.: The Essential Guide to Building Your Career as an Artist, REI’s “Force of Nature” gender-equality campaign, and her celebrated “Protect the Vulnerable” image that became emblematic of the Women’s March—is ubiquitous. And it’s considerable enough to fill a whole retail store, which she opened in North Portland’s Industrial Row in October. From the cheerful pink assemblage above her counter to the glass display of one-of-a-kind art pieces to the cavalcade of beautifully arranged shiny objects, it’s a warm, inviting space. “People say it makes them happy,” Congdon says of her eponymous shop that doubles as her studio. Lately, Congdon’s been using her platform to support women running for political office, trans women of color, and an LGBT youth leadership camp called Brave Trails. Whether it’s through art or activism—or both—Congdon is continually putting more beauty into the world. Below are her personally curated picks from her shop (most of which are also available at lisacongdon.etsy.com). ?

“Begin Anyhow” Journal ($9)

“Who doesn’t love a journal that reminds you each time you open it that you get to start again?”

“A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives” by Lisa Congdon ($19.95)

“This book is a celebration of women who hit their stride at a later age and are doing amazing things.”

“Protect the Vulnerable” Art Print ($42)

“This 11×14-inch print is a reminder to defend the rights and freedoms of the most vulnerable in our society right now.”

Hand-Painted Wooden Houses ($60 to $150, available only in-stores)

“I love painting simple, minimalist wooden houses. Each one is unique with different combinations of graphic color and symbols.”

 

“I Can’t Even” Cat Sticker Set ($5)

“Sassy cats. That is all.”

 

By Korina Devincenzi
Photographed by Chris Dibble
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2019 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Corita Kent Was A Pop-Art Pioneer—And A Catholic Nun

This Instagram Account Compares Fran’s Outfits In “The Nanny” To Contemporary Works Of Art And It’s A Visual Delight

This Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy TreasureThis Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy Treasure

Many of us know Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (7 March 1802 – 1 October 1873) as the sculptor of the four magnificent bronze lions that guard Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. During the mid-19th century, however, Landseer’s fame derived from his unrivalled talent as an animal painter.

 A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society, 1838. by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (Tate Collection, London)

From the upper echelons of Victorian society to the working middle-class, there were few who were not familiar with Landseer’s work. He owed much of his success with the general public to the efforts of his two brothers. Talented draughtsman in their own right, they made engravings and etchings of Landseer’s paintings which sold at a fraction of the cost of the originals. As a result, it was not uncommon to find a reproduction of one of Landseer’s paintings gracing the walls of a modest family dwelling in much the same way an original might be displayed in an upper-class drawing room.

Favourites, the Property of H.R.H. Prince George of Cambridge, 1834-1835. by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT) 

For the majority of his career, Landseer had royal patronage. He painted many portraits of Queen Victoria’s pets over the years and, upon her marriage to Prince Albert, Landseer painted a picture of the queen herself. He would go on to paint the royal children, often depicting them with the royal pets.

Queen Victoria and her Family at Windsor Castle, 1842. by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (Royal Trust Collection)

The critics of Landseer’s day accused him of cheap sentimentality and of “pandering to vulgar tastes.” Even today, a current entry at Britannica.com states, rather severely, that Landseer’s “later works were marred…by anthropomorphism that lapsed into sentimentality.” The chief criticism seems to be that Landseer has given the animals in his paintings human traits such as courage, loyalty, devotion, sorrow, and grief.

Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner, 1837. by Edwin Henry Landseer (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

These criticisms did nothing to diminish Landseer’s popularity. When he died on October 1, 1873, all of London marked his death. Flags flew at half mast, people lined the streets, and the lions in Trafalgar square were hung with wreathes. Landseer was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Punch eulogized him with a poem that read, in part: 

His art has been sound teacher to his age; Whether of sympathy ‘twixt man and brute,Or lessons drawn from Nature’s wholesome page,And pleasure that in truth has deepest root.

Today Landseer’s paintings hang in some of the finest museums in the world. I present to you below a collection of some of his most famous and controversial work.

A Highland Breakfast, 1834. by Edwin Henry Landseer (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

This painting is an example of one of Landseer’s very popular storytelling pictures. The setting is a Highland shepherd’s hut. A group of dogs are gathered round their breakfast – a tub of hot milk. It appears that the three dogs behind are bickering over who gets to eat first. While they argue, the two smaller dogs in front (one of whom is a nursing mother with a few pups) are drinking their fill. Completely oblivious to any canine turmoil, the shepherd’s wife sits nearby, nursing her baby.

Attachment, 1829. by Edwin Henry Landseer (Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO)

According to the Saint Louis Art Museum, this picture is based on the true story of an 1805 mountain climber who fell to his death while hiking in England’s Lake district. “His body was not discovered for three months and all that time, his faithful terrier stayed by his side.” 

The Shrew Tamed, 1861. by Edwin Henry Landseer 

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, the catalogue described this painting as a portrait of noted equestrienne Ann Gilbert demonstrating the taming techniques of the famous American horse whisperer John Solomon Rarey. The critics were not convinced. The Times wrote: “The lady reclines against his glossy side, smiling in the consciousness of female supremacy, and playfully patting the jaw that could tear her into tatters, with the back of her small hand. For horses read husbands, and the picture is a provocation to rebellion addressed to the whole sex…”

Even more controversial, there were those who believed that Landseer was paying homage to the famous courtesan Catherine Walters. She was known as a “pretty horse-breaker” and when she went riding in Rotten Row, crowds gathered to watch her. In their review of “The Shrew Tamed,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine wrote: “We hope it will now be felt by Sir Edwin Landseer and his friends that the intrusion of ‘pretty-horse-breakers’ on the walls of the Academy is not less to be regretted than their presence in Rotten Row.”

A Jack in Office, 1830. by Edwin Henry Landseer Victoria and (Albert Museum, London)

This is one of Landseer’s best-known works and the first of what the Masters of Art series calls his “canine burlesques of human life.” A dealer in horse meat has left his wheelbarrow in an alley under the guardianship of an overweight cur – the titular ‘Jack in Office” (slang for a self-important, minor official). The thin, clearly starving, neighborhood dogs are drawn by the tempting smell and cautiously approach, but none dare to touch the meat that Jack is watching over. 

The Arab Tent, 1866. by Edwin Henry Landseer (The Wallace Collection, London)

According to The Wallace Collection, this painting is Landseer’s response to “fashionable Orientalist themes.” It depicts an Arabian mare and foal, two greyhounds, and two monkeys, all snuggly settled in and around an Arab tent. The Wallace Collection points out that the “higher up the picture, the more intelligent the animals depicted become.”

Saved, 1856. by Edwin Henry Landseer

In this painting, Landseer depicts a famous Newfoundland-St. Bernard named Milo who lived with the keeper of the Egg Rock Lighthouse in Maine. Milo was credited with rescuing several children from drowning. Newfoundland’s were featured in many of Landseer’s paintings and he popularized the black and white variety of the breed – a variety which now bears his name. 

Header photo Edwin Henry Landseer Self-Portrait, 1840.

More from BUST

Pug Yeah: Pugs In History And Literature

Lassie Wasn’t The First: The Collie In Literature And History

Rod Spankings Ordered To Victorian Boys For Joyriding Stolen Horses

Directed by female filmmaking trio Ivana Hucikova, Sarah Keeling, and Grace Remington, Into My Life celebrates the lives of two African-American women, Cassandra Bromfield and her late mother, M. Elaine – a school teacher and creatively gifted filmmaking enthusiast who captured their lives and their community living in Brooklyn’s largest affordable housing cooperative, Lindsay Park.  

Centering around Bromfield’s life, the tender award-winning short documentary dives into her fond memories of growing up in the co-op, weaving in beautiful Super-8 footage that her mother had shot throughout the 60’s and 70’s.   

As a way of preserving the analog memories, Bromfield digitized the footage that was left by her mother and shares the edited video clips on YouTube. She believes her mother’s intention of creating these films was to show that the lives of these people mattered and by sharing it with the world would be a way to pay tribute to her mother and the community that existed there before.  

We connected with the directors to learn more on Cassandra, her treasured recordings, and their thoughts on how photography and video plays a significant role in documenting our personal histories. 

Tell us a bit about yourself, how the three of you met, and what inspired you all to make this film.  

We met as participants in a collaborative filmmaking residency program run by UnionDocs in Williamsburg in 2017. Ivana originally had an idea to make a film about cooperative housing in the neighborhood, which led us to Cassandra’s door. Once we heard Cassandra’s stories, however, particularly the ones about her relationship with her mother and their shared Super-8 archive, we shifted directions and asked Cassandra if it would be okay to make our film with and about her exclusively.

Is this the first project you’ve directed together as a trio?  What was that like, versus having one person direct, one person produce, etc.?

Into My Life is the first project we worked on together. We co-directed the film and the three of us worked pretty seamlessly as a team. Maybe it’s the benefit of our being three women, but we were able to divide and conquer different tasks as they arose on creative and logistical fronts without much fuss. Our way of working didn’t really follow traditional roles, but it worked for us and became an equally shared effort. Cassandra is an amazing artist and was so generous sharing her stories and archive with us. We felt very fortunate to collaborate with her throughout the process.

Photo of the directors with Cassandra at the premiere of Into My Life at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018.

Let’s talk about the Bromfields! How did you meet Cassandra, and what drew you into her life and story? 

We met Cassandra while researching Lindsay Park, the cooperative where she lives. She was one of the few residents who responded to our requests for interviews and, as it turned out, the first and only person with whom we ended up meeting. At the end of our conversation about her childhood in Lindsay Park, Cassandra casually mentioned that she had a trove of Super-8 footage that she had shot with her mother of Lindsay Park. Thus, the project was born.

Cassandra lent us a hard drive with digitized Super-8 materials, all of which we screened in order to tease out possible storylines for our film. What followed was an ongoing conversation among the three of us and Cassandra while we met regularly to conduct interviews with her and film her in her home, working on her dresses or editing her own videos. Early on, we decided that the structure would be based on asynchronous audio and therefore mostly only recorded audio when we interviewed Cassandra.

While editing the final piece, we shared our cuts with her to make sure we were honoring her story and her legacy in a way that felt right to her. Cassandra’s voice was and is central to this project; she speaks in very evocative ways, both about herself and about her mother. Figuring out how to present the audiovisual archive they created together, their relationship as mother and daughter, and the different stories that each of them told across time in the same space that Cassandra lives today became a challenging yet rewarding puzzle we pursued until the very end.

At what point did you learn about Cassandra’s mother and her filmmaking talents?

Cassandra told us about her filmmaking background during our first meeting with her; in fact, we used a lot of the audio from our first interview in the final cut of the film, even though that conversation had started out as one about cooperative housing in Williamsburg. As part of that discussion, Cassandra mentioned her mother’s penchant for filming her daughter and other residents of her housing complex and said she was making some short films on YouTube featuring said archive. We watched her clips and fell in love with her perspective on the importance of her mother’s work and of safeguarding her own legacy. When we screened the rest of the footage Cassandra gave us, we decided we had to make a film with and about Cassandra herself. The footage she and her mother shot was so joyous and beautiful; you could see and feel the love with which they filmed each other and the people around them. Throughout the course of the project, we never ceased to be amazed by the beautiful eye and vision that Cassandra’s mother had, and that her daughter still has to this day.

A pillow of M. Elaine designed by her daughter, Cassandra. Photo by Lanna Apisukh.

The Super-8 footage her mother shot is a beautiful portrait of the community they grew up in. What was it like discovering this footage for the first time?  Did it shape or change the original direction of the story?

Seeing the footage for the first time was magical. Super-8 footage is always beautiful to watch, but seeing this Super-8 footage, shot by two black women in Brooklyn in the ’60s/’70s of themselves and other black people around them, was absolutely breathtaking. As a result of that first experience, we decided to focus on the archival material almost exclusively as a way of telling Cassandra’s story.

Some of M. Elaine’s original audio and 8mm film recordings. Photo by Lanna Apisukh.

Do you think home recordings (photography and video) will continue to play a critical role in documenting our personal lives in the distant future?

Why make home videos in the first place? To document moments of time that we deem important or special and to share those experiences with our loved ones. With the passage of time, these materials become even more precious as we grow older, change, move, and even pass away. Our ability to turn to these home recordings to be reminded of who we were and what life was like at the time we hit record, took that photo, or recorded that audio is invaluable to each of us as people. When other people have the opportunity to share in that audiovisual legacy, they inevitably think of their own, respective stories and archives, but also can relate to the homemade, direct, and honest nature of the format in a way that is immediate, emotional, and pretty universal. They see themselves in others in what to us seems like a pretty radical and gut-level act of empathy. 

Do you think you’ll continue to expand on this story of Cassandra and her mother?    

We’re open to it. There are possibilities for expanding or sharing Cassandra and her mother’s story, so we’ll see where those lead and where Cassandra would like to take it. We’ve been thrilled and also very humbled by the continuing life of the film and have been, for the time being, focusing our energies there.

What’s next?  

Grace is currently directing another short documentary about a 50-year-old black, lesbian surgical tech becoming a competitive boxer while also developing a few other short documentaries (and working actively as an associate producer on two feature documentaries).

As a producer, Ivana is developing a feature documentary film about political art in the historical context of Eastern Europe, and as a director, she’s working on a short documentary TV series about 100 years of women’s rights in Slovakia.

Following the thread of daughters and family relationships, Sarah is currently working on a feature documentary which brings together the stories of daughters who have taken over their families’ businesses, all operating in fields where women are the minority of the workforce. She is also directing/producing a short for BRIC and is working on a feature doc as an associate producer.

Cassandra also recently began a YouTube cooking show called “Cooking and Talking” with guests. Friends come in and make a dish and talk of family, work, life and about the food they are cooking. She also continues her passion of designing clothes. 

Analog portrait of Cassandra Bromfield at home in Lindsay Park. Photograph by Lanna Apisukh.

To learn more about Into My Life, visit Union Docs’ website, and follow the filmmakers on Instagram for updates on screenings. Watch Into My Life here.

Top photo: Cassandra Bromfield at a handball court where Into My Life once screened for the community at Lindsay Park. Photographed by Lanna Apisukh.

More from BUST

8 Short Kids’ Films Every Mini-Feminist Should See

Elise Hooper’s New Novel Tells The Story Of Photographer Dorothea Lange: Interview

These Activists Are Fighting To End Female Genital Mutilation

Imagine a crowd of young women wearing vividly-colored clothing with flowers in their hair, converging under a sea of signs and banners with bright, colorful images and slogans inspired by supermarket products— “Fresh Eggs,” “God Likes Canned Peaches”—waving under a bright blue sky. Acoustic guitars strum folk songs while people sing and dance along. Now, imagine that this celebration is also full of Catholic nuns in traditional habits, wearing flower garlands over their black-and-white wimples. The year is 1964, the occasion is “Mary’s Day,” the Catholic holiday of the Assumption of Mary, and the celebration was organized by a nun known as Sister Corita Kent, who also made the banners.

The Mary’s Day signs are just one example of the way that Kent used the language of advertising to create pop art with a religious, spiritual, or moral message. A nun and artist based in Los Angeles, Kent rose to fame in the 1950s and ’60s and continued to create art until her death in 1986. Though she isn’t as well-known today, she was covered widely in the 1960s and 1970s—she even appeared on the cover of Newsweek. The media latched onto the fact that these playful reimaginings of advertisements came from an unlikely source: a devout Catholic nun.

Corita Kent, “Tiger,” 1965, Serigraph, reprinted with permission of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Corita Kent, “That They May Have Life,” 1964, Serigraph, 35 3/4 X 30 IN, Corita Art Center, Photograph by Arthur Evans

Born in 1918, Frances Elizabeth Kent was the fifth of six children. She was born in Iowa, but her family soon moved to Hollywood, California, where they settled during the glory days of silent film. Kent was interested in art from a young age. “I can remember always making things, like designing things, paper dolls and their clothes, and then drawing,” she said in a 1977 interview for a UCLA oral history project. Catholicism also played a large role in her life and her family very early on. Kent’s older sister Ruth and brother Mark both entered the religious life. Ruth joined an order called Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), the largest religious community in Los Angeles. IHM had been focused on providing education soon after its 1848 founding; the nuns taught both at IHM’s own college and in local Catholic schools, including the middle and high schools that Kent attended. By the time Kent graduated high school, she was sure she was going to become a nun herself. As she recalled in the UCLA interview, when a friend asked her, “When did you make up your mind?” she answered, “I don’t know. I think I just always have wanted to be.”

Corita Kent C. 1965 Image Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Kent joined the convent in 1936, shortly after graduating high school, and took the name of Sister Mary Corita (“Little Heart”). For the next 30 years, she lived and taught in the IHM community. At first, she taught elementary school during the day—often incorporating artistic activities in her lessons—and studied at night. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1941, and in 1944 was sent to teach at a school for indigenous children in Canada. Three years later, she was called back to L.A. The Immaculate Heart College was going through the process of accreditation, and it was recommended that the art department hire a second teacher. With her obvious talent (not to mention a few art credits), Kent was the natural choice.

Taking the position meant that Kent had the opportunity for further education, and she embarked on the slow process of earning her master’s degree in art history while continuing to teach. At one point, she picked up a DIY screen-printing kit to teach her students. One saw her struggling with it, and introduced her to a woman he knew: Maria de Sodi Romero, the widow of Mexican muralist Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Romero had learned screen printing so that she could reproduce her late husband’s work. Under her tutelage, Kent picked up the basics of the form, and then taught herself everything from that point forward. She brought her enthusiasm into the classroom, and shared her knowledge with her students so they could create their own screen prints, too. Kent took a class in screen printing to earn credits towards her master’s, but “I don’t think I really learned anything new,” she said in the oral history. “It was just a time to be able to make prints.”

Corita Kent, “The Lord Is With Thee,” 1952, Serigraph, reprinted with permission of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Corita Kent, “The Juiciest Tomato Of All,” 1964, Serigraph, reprinted with permission of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

Kent completed two prints during that class. The following summer, in 1952, she looked at one of the prints with fresh eyes and new ideas. “It was really so bad that I started adding colors on top of it, making a completely new print,” she recalled in the UCLA interview. “It turned into a completely different picture because underneath it was a picture of the Assumption, with a very, as I remember it, kind of fashion-modelish lady in the center. It was a very unwholesome picture.”

Titled “the lord is with thee,” Kent’s image showed Jesus and the Apostles layered in shades of blue, green, yellow, tan, and brown, vibrating with the solemn intensity of a German Expressionist painting—very different from the sedate religious art of the time. Kent entered the piece in a competition sponsored by a museum in Los Angeles, and it won first place there, as well as in many later contests. But Kent discovered that her image was either loved or reviled. “It would either win a first prize or not be accepted in the show,” she explained in the oral history.

Corita Kent (center right) at Immaculate Heart of College Mary’s Day Celebration, 1964. Image Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

With “the lord is with thee,” Kent began to gain notice in the art community. She spent her summer school breaks creating art, and went on speaking tours during Christmas breaks. These tours allowed Kent to visit art museums around the country, but it was in her own Los Angeles that she encountered the artist who would change the direction of her work. In 1962, Kent attended an exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans by the then-unknown Andy Warhol. After seeing the paintings, she began incorporating the language of advertising and pop lyrics into her work. One month after seeing the Warhol exhibit, she began creating pieces that combined the familiar Wonderbread packaging with images of the Host, the circular wafers used during the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. “By taking bread out of its ordinary form, and presenting it as his body, He [Jesus] originated pop art,” she explained in a 1966 lecture, as quoted in Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, edited by Susan Dackerman.

Kent saw the hand of God in the vernacular language of everyday life. She took the Exxon catchphrase, “Put a tiger in your tank,” and used it as a channel to the higher sprit. “‘Put a tiger in your tank,’ I really think of as saying [that] the spirit , whatever the spirit means to us, is inside of us,” Kent said in the oral history. In 1964, Kent created a response to the soup-can paintings after harvesting a few words from a Del Monte advertisement and declaring, “Mary mother is the juiciest tomato of all.” “I was aware of how ‘tomato’ was used colloquially”—an even-then outdated slang term for an attractive woman—“but I felt [that] language was taking a turn, you could hardly use a word without it having some other meaning,” she explained in the oral history. Determined to discover just what it all meant, Kent researched the word and found a connection between the tomato and the “mystical rose,” a symbol for Mary.

Corita Kent in her apartment c. 1970. Image Courtesy of Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

In the mid- ’60s, the tenets of Vatican II—the 1962-1965 council that made many changes to modernize the Catholic Church—inspired the IHM sisters to “ally their religious order and its work with the outside world,” according to Corita Kent and the Language of Pop. In so doing, the nuns embraced “contemporary themes, such as world hunger, and utilized forms and practices common to avant-garde artists and progressive educational theorists.” Under Kent’s direction, the college became a renowned center of the avant-garde, hosting events with some of the most groundbreaking artists of the times including Alfred Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames.

The art she created in this period often had an activist message. In 1967, she urged America to “stop the bombing” of Vietnam in a piece that read just that. In 1969, she incorporated the title of Pete Seeger’s anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” into a piece. That same year, she made the piece “love your brother,” featuring images of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1971, she created the largest copyrighted image in history: the Boston Gas Company’s storage tank, known as “The Rainbow Swash,” which still stands in the Dorchester neighborhood. Though some saw a hidden portrait of Ho Chi Minh, Kent denied it, insisting that the rainbow was a symbol of hope.

Corita Kent, “Manflowers,” 1969, Serigraph, 23 X 12 IN., Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles  

But not everyone was happy with Kent’s growing fame and the IHM sisters’ progressive approach. In particular, it infuriated Cardinal McIntyre, a conservative and powerful leader in the Catholic church. McIntyre saw Kent’s art as sacrilegious—especially the tomato screen print—and went on the attack, refusing to accept the order’s plans to modernize. “Do you want to look like a floozy on Hollywood Boulevard?” he asked in response to the nuns’ decision to update their habits. The Vatican backed McIntyre up, and by 1970, 350 of the 400 sisters had chosen to take leave of their vows rather than conform to McIntyre’s demands and formed their own community outside the Catholic Church. The Immaculate Heart Community still continues today, describing themselves as “formed by insights from eco-feminist and justice spiritualities.”

Kent did not join the new community; she had left the Church two years earlier. She was angry at McIntyre’s hostility towards IHM; she was overworked; she was suffering from insomnia and depression; and she was experiencing a loss of faith. “I’m really frightened to say this but everything appears different to me, even God, and I’m so afraid that I am losing the foundation of my belief,” she wrote to her friend and sometime collaborator, priest and poet Father Joseph Pintauro, as quoted by Sister Rose Pacatte in Corita Kent: Gentle Revolutionary of the Heart. Celia Hubbard, an artist friend of Kent’s, wrote to the president of IHM college, “I think Corita may have an exhaustive breakdown if she doesn’t take some time off.” Kent was granted a sabbatical, but she never returned. She was dispensed from her vows in November 1968.

Corita Kent, “Love Is Hard Work,” 1985, Serigraph, 24 X 18 IN., Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

She moved to Boston, where she embarked on a new phase of her work. Instead of directly religious, her art became more abstractly spiritual. In a 1980s interview quoted by Pacatte, she explained, “I came to feel that there is no distinction between religious art and secular art. Religious means to bind together. Religion is defined as a deep sense of connection to the whole cosmos so that we know we are related to everything and everyone.” In 1983, she created a series of billboards titled, “we can create life without war,” commissioned for the Physicians for Social Responsibilities. According to the Corita Art Center, she considered the piece the most religious work she’d ever done.

Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1974, at the age of 56. After her diagnosis, she began spending more time working with watercolors; though they never received the reception her screen prints did, “she found comfort in the softness,” notes Pacatte. In 1986, the cancer spread to Kent’s liver and was diagnosed as terminal. Kent continued creating art for as long as she could, noting both her work and her pain levels on her calendar: “March 26: Pain. March 27: Washed out. March 28: Painting.” She died on September 18, 1986 at the age of 67. One of the last pieces she created is also her best-known: the Postal Service’s rainbow-striped “Love” stamp. With 700 million in sales, her message continues to be spread across the nation. 

By Miss Rosen

This piece originally appeared in the March/April 2019 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

Top Photo: Immaculate Heart College Art Department C. 1955; Corita Kent Pictured on the opposite page, in the center, pointing. Photograph by Fred Swartz. Image courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

More from BUST

Mother Jones Was A Hell-Raising Trailblazer In The Fight For Workers’ Rights
These Kung Fu-Trained Buddhist Nuns Teach Nepalese Girls Self-Defense
This Artist Turns Weird State Laws Into Mind-Boggling Photos

Are you going to SXSW this year? On March 15, from 7-10pm, Pussy Power House and Satellite Art Show are hosting Double Take, a BUST-sponsored interactive performance art dance party that you will not want to miss. The event will be in Austin, TX at the Museum of Human Achievement. There will be live music and dance performances by local artists from Austin and New Orleans, plus NOLA based DJ @rustylazer. The event is inclusive, and people of all gender identities are welcome.

From neon fishnets to leather harnesses and exposed nipples, Pussy Power House consistently manages to blow us away with their inspiring events and just how beautiful, cool, and unique all their looks are. The L.A.-based feminist interactive arts group was formed with the purpose of creating an artistic space centered around women. By creating bold, wearable art with repurposed materials, Pussy Power House pushes the boundaries of fashion and social norms surrounding women’s bodies. They are known for hosting incredibly fun events that range from DIY body positive strip clubs to parties completely dedicated to periods. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one of their events yet, now is your chance!

It’s $10 cash at the door, and the first 50 people to arrive will receive a free drink. Plus, there are free mezcal tastings by Gem & Bolt and free copies of BUST. What more could you want! 

Grab your shortest shorts and your boldest accessories and make sure you check out this cool event! 

(Also, they ask that you bring your own cup or reusable water bottle if you want to drink as part of their no-waste philosophy. We agree that there is truly nothing better than an eco-friendly dance party.)

Check out the event details on Facebook, and check out Pussy Power House at pussypowerhouse.org.

Address:
Museum of Human Achievement
Austin, TX 78702

Some of the performers and artists that will be featured are:

Fashion + Costumes:
@corinneloperfido
@ssauvageriess
@luna.raae
@matthewxohh
@humble.haberdasher

Live Performances:
@jasondereknorth
@brebitz
@owlfactory
@15smiles
@dmzl_in_delight
@rabycreative
@matthewxohh

@rustylazer

And there are still more being added! Email pussypowerhouse@protonmail.com to get involved.

More from BUST

Pussy Power House Models Zero Waste Wearables In Our Fashion Editorial

Pussy Power House Is The Interactive Feminist Arts Group Making Waves In L.A.

Genieve Figgis Turns Art History On Its Head In Subversive Paintings

The tradition of tattooing dates back thousands of years all across the globe, from Ötzi the 12,000 year old ice mummy found in the Alps whose skin shows the oldest tattoos on a specimen, to Ancient Egyptians using tattooing to heal various ailments. Tattooing is steeped in tradition and has an incredibly rich and diverse history. And there is just way too much of it to fit into one article, so today we’re going to focus on the women who transformed the art form at the start of the 20th century. 

1. Maud Wagner – The First Female Tattoo Artist

Maud was born on February 12, 1877, in Lyon County, Kansas. From a dirt poor family, there were little opportunities for her future. So when Maud was a teen, she ran away to join the circus.

Gus, Maud and their baby, Lovetta.

By the time Maud met her future husband, Gus Wagner, in 1904, she was a famed contortionist and aerialist. He was a sailor who was covered in tattoos he’d picked up during his travels, and Maud was utterly entranced by his artwork. Gus also had a reputation as quite the tattoo artist.

Smitten, Gus asked Maud out and of course, she said yes… on the condition he teach her how to tattoo!

Instead of dates, they had lessons. Maud learned a traditional hand poked tattoo method. This is where a single needle is dipped in ink then pushed under the skin by hand over and over to create a pattern. It quickly became her preferred method (in fact, Maud would never use a tattoo machine!).

Maud quickly grew one of hell of a collection of tattoos on herself, thanks to Gus and his lessons, so she became a tattooed lady attraction. 

But after Maud and Gus tied the knot, they left the circus to tattoo full time, travelling around around with Vaudeville shows, county fairs, circuses and curiosity exhibits.

Not long after they were married, Maud and Gus had a daughter, Sarah, born in 1908. Sadly, just one month after her birth, Sarah died. It crushed Maud, so understandably when the couple had another daughter, Lovetta (born two years later in 1910),Maud was a very overprotective mum. 

Maud actually banned Gus from ever tattooing their daughter. And though Lovetta grew up to become a tattoo artist just like her parents, she never had any tattoos. When Gus passed away in 1941 Lovetta said she’d never get tattooed, because if it wasn’t her Dad’s, then what was the point? (And also, because there was still no way in hell that her mum, Maud, would tattoo her baby girl!)

Lovetta holding a famous pic of her Mum, Maud

As time went on, Maud found fame as America’s first known female tattoo artist. This kept her in demand all over the country, and she worked right up until her death in 1983. 

Her last tattoo was a traditional rose she tattooed on fellow artist Don Ed Hardy.

The Wagner family helped bring tattooing inland, popularizing it not just in the coastal and Naval towns in America. 

Maud is still celebrated as the first known female tattooist in the USA and she influenced so many other artists who came after her. Including…

2. Millie Hull – The Mother of Modern Tattoo

Mildred Hull, known to her friends as Millie, was a marvel of the tattoo world. In the 1930s, she was the only woman tattooing as part of the legendary Bowery tattoo group, which would become known as the originators of modern tattooing.

Born in 1947, she lived in the rougher (putting it mildly) areas of New York City. A school dropout aged 13, Millie soon joined the circus (you can see a pattern emerging here) and started working as an exotic dancer.

Millie with her tattoo gun

A sideshow spotter told Millie she’d make way more money as a tattooed lady, earning up to $80 a week. 

So she met with famed tattooist Charles Wagner and began the very painful process of covering her body in tattoos in just a matter of WEEKS! (If you’ve ever had a sleeve done, then you can imagine the pain of covering your whole body in a few weeks!)

Millie talked through the process in an interview in the late ’30s, and she clearly comments on how she felt forced into getting tattooed so she could make more money, but she also had a wicked sense of humour about it: “I had a few weak spells as a result of the tattooing, but mainly I suffered anemia of the bankroll.”

So, Millie ditched the sideshow, learned the tattoo trade and opened her own tattoo parlor, The Tattoo Emporium, in Bowery at the back of a barber shop. (Most of the tattoo shops down Bowery were in tiny spaces at the back of other businesses.)

Millie tattooing a customer at her Bowery shop

The fact that Millie had her own business was an unbelievable achievement. At the time, tattooing was totally dominated by men. And with Bowery being a really rough area to live and work in – EVERYTHING was against her. But Millie didn’t care. She held her own and grew The Tattoo Emporium into a successful business. 

She sat at the heart of an ongoing tattoo revolution, creating the traditional bright and bold styles that are still used today. More than this, Millie gained a kind of mainstream fame. Just to give you a flavour of her success, in 1936, Millie appeared on the cover of Family Circle, a famed women’s home and life magazine that gave tips on interior design and the best recipes for meatloaf. Stars on the cover tended to be wholesome Hollywood stars, and there was Millie front and center – tattoos on show!

Sadly, Millie had a tragic ending. She suffered with depression throughout her life and in 1947, she committed suicide, consuming poison while sitting in a restaurant in Bowery. She left behind a huge legacy, firmly cemented as the founding mother of modern tattooing.

3. Jessie Knight

Jessie is a slightly more well-documented figure in tattooing. She was famed for being the first documented British female tattoo artist! Born in 1904 in Croydon, London, Jessie was part of a large family, with seven other siblings. Her dad was a Captain in the Navy, a tattoo artist and sharpshooter, while her mum was a poet and Illustrator.

Jessie tattooing a servicewoman in 1952

Jessie was another circus gal! Her whole family was in the game. She worked as a human target and a sharp shooter. In 1933, she appeared on the BBC with her sister and brother in a knife throwing act, one of the first circus acts ever televised! Her career in the big striped tents came to a premature end, though, when she was shot in the shoulder during a terrible accident.

She then decided to follow in her tattooist father’s footsteps and took up a tattoo gun of her own, swapping it out for her rifle. She started tattooing with her dad in 1921 in Barry, South Wales. By the time Jessie was 18, she already had quite a large client base at her Dad’s tattoo shop, and was well-liked in her local community in Wales.

Jessie’s style of tattooing was bold and colorful. She worked freehand, meaning she drew her designs straight onto her client’s skin, and she didn’t use stencils (a method of pre-drawing and outlining a tattoo design). This made her even more of a novelty in the tattoo world.

Her tattoos were getting a stellar reputation, and in 1955, Jessie won second place in the Champion Tattoo Artist of All England for her tattoo of a highland fling. This was a monumental achievement for Jessie. Female tattoo artists were totally unheard of, so this award generated huge buzz around Jessie’s work.

Jessie’s award-winning Highland Fling

After this success, Jessie went on to open her own tattoo shops, first in harbor town Portsmouth and then later one in Aldershot. Again, her achievements with this are utterly incredible: she had the means and the popularity to own her own business and tattoo her way. Tattooing still wasn’t in the mainstream, so not many artists could do this.

It wasn’t easy, though. Other tattoo artists would spread rumours about her being unsanitary, called her a whore, and vandalized her shops. She was robbed and had her designs stolen, so much so that at one point she had a bodyguard help her take her shop money to the bank to deposit it.

In another dark chapter, Jessie was married when she turned 27, but her husband was an abusive nightmare. After 8 years things came to a head and Jessie shot and injured her husband with a gun she’d exchanged with a client for one of her tattoos. Her husband had kicked her dog down the stairs… I would have shot him, too.

This didn’t stop Jessie, though. She loved tattooing and in 1968 Jessie moved back to her beloved Barry, Wales (Apparently with her 300-something year old lover!) and though she’d officially retired from tattooing in 1963, she kept on doing what she loved. Most of her clients were now women! Attitudes were changing and shifting. Jessie was at the forefront of that and is remembered fondly by everyone who knew her.

Top photo: Maud Stevens

This post originally appeared on F Yeah History and is reprinted here with permission.

More from BUST

11 Feminist Tattoo Ideas

Meet Amanda Rodriguez, The Tattoo Artist Behind Those Iconic English Roses

This Female Tattoo Artist Just Broke Major Gender Barriers

I was so thrilled to catch Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990 at the Museum of Sex here in NYC, as she is one of my favorite painters. Leonor was way ahead of her time, and was the OG feminist spitfire. Born in 1907 of Italian and Argentinian parents, she was mostly raised by her mother in Italy and was said to have loved visiting the morgue as a youth. Her work explores female sexuality, and she often painted androgynous men in the nude, where women were ALWAYS the dominant figures. By the 30s and 40s she was hanging out with guys like Dali and Max Ernst but refused membership in the Surrealist club. Leonor refused many things, one being the traditional role of wife and mother. She voluntarily had a hysterectomy, and lived and open lifestyle, for many years she lived with two men at the same time. Which at the time was considered quite revolutionary if not scandalous.

“I always imagined that I would have a life very different than the one imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt in order to make that life.” – Leonor Fini

The show is fantasitc, it includes many paintings, and a few video clips of her in the 60s dressing in her elaborate costumes, she loved to play! Make sure to catch this show, it’s only up until March 4th. Pro Tip: the museum is open until 11 pm Sun.-Thurs., and midnight on Friday-Saturday. We went on a Tuesday night around 9pm and it was marvelously empty!

MUSEUM OF SEX
233 Fifth Avenue @ 27th Street
(212) 689-6337 https://www.museumofsex.com/events-and-tours/

Leonor Fini, Portrait de femme aux feuilles d’acanthe (Portrait of Woman with acanthus leaves), 1946, oil on canvas.

Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.

Leonor Fini, L’Alcove (The Alcove)/Self-portrait with Nico Papatakis, 1941, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.

Leonor Fini, Paris, c. 1938. Unknown Photographer, Courtesy of the Estate of Leonor Fini.

Top Image:  Leonor Fini, Femme costumée/ Femme en armure (Woman in Costume/ Woman in Armor), 1938, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Weinstein Gallery.

From the minute you walk into the theater, you realize this play is not just a show. This is a Gloria Steinem experience. The biographical play Gloria: A Life is currently playing in New York at the Daryl Roth Theatre, where the round staging seems to have been chosen specifically to reflect the talking circle that Gloria suggests as a way to equalize everyone. Every inch of the stage’s floor is covered in persian rugs, and each individual seat is designated by a paisley velvet pillow. Make no mistake: You are in Gloria’s home, and everyone is welcome.

It feels like every few months a new actress is in the news for portraying Gloria Steinem: Sarah Jessica Parker, Marisa Tomei, Julianne Moore, and Alicia Vikander, among others—and Gloria lovers hold their breaths. Before the play, I admit I had my doubts about how then-star Christine Lahti would portray Steinem: not doubts about Lahti’s acting ability, but about how the play would believably show 50+ years of Gloria’s activism. (Now, Patricia Kalember is in the starring role.)

The cast of GLORIA: A Life by Emily Mann, directed by Diane Paulus, at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Photo © Joan Marcus.

From the minute the lead actress walks on as Women’s March Gloria, the willing suspension of disbelief is ignited, and you know you are in good hands as the play leads you through the timeline of Gloria’s life. Gloria’s look has been captured so perfeclty that I was left wondering if Gloria loaned her actual wardrobe to the production. The play goes through a non-linear timeline of Gloria’s life effortlessly, and the diverse ensemble cast of women does a fantastic job of helping to tell the story. Throughout the play, the ensemble effectively transform into various feminists, allies, and activists in the blink of an eye. A particularly powerful moment arises when cast member Fedna Jacquet steps up on a platform to recreate the iconic photo of Gloria and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, which is then projected on the walls surrounding the audience. Applauds ensues.

Christine Lahti and Fedna Jacquet in GLORIA: A Life by Emily Mann, directed by Diane Paulus, at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Photo © Joan Marcus.

Gloria Steinem’s most-quoted lines are peppered into the play, and her sense of humor is not left out, either. In fact, it is often used to cut the tension. There are a few scenes showing Gloria and the other activists dealing with various forms of chauvinism, a hard task for the writer Emily Mann to portray without making the play a downer. Mann dodges this traps by resting on Gloria’s sense of humor to smooth over moments that would otherwise turn preachy. The play ends with a nod to Steinem’s platform of inclusivity as the floor opens to the audience to speak their stories about what the 50-plus years of feminism has meant to them.

Joanna Glushak, Fedna Jacquet, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Christine Lahti, Patrena Murray, DeLanna Studi, and Liz Wisan in GLORIA: A Life by Emily Mann, directed by Diane Paulus, at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Photo © Joan Marcus.

Top photo: Christine Lahti as Gloria Steinem in GLORIA: A Life by Emily Mann, directed by Diane Paulus, at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Photo © Joan Marcus.

More from BUST

Gloria Steinem On The Road, Hillary Clinton And ‘The F Word’: BUST Interview

Gloria Steinem And Kathleen Hanna On Feminism, Riot Grrrl, And The Sexual Revolution: From The BUST Archives

Gloria Steinem And Chelsea Handler Said The One Thing Most White Feminists Are Reluctant To Hear 

Fashionable 19th century Parisian painter Auguste Toulmouche is best known for his depictions of richly clad women set against the backdrop of luxurious interiors. His paintings have been called “elegant trifles” and the ladies who feature in them have been referred to as “Toulmouche’s delicious dolls.” One critic even compared the interiors of a Toulmouche painting to daintily decorated jewel boxes. Unsurprisingly, the 19th century public had a great appetite for these visual treats. Toulmouche’s paintings were popular, both with the upper and middle classes, and even with post-Civil War Americans.

Le Robe Bleu by Auguste Toulmouche, 1870.

Auguste Toulmouche was born in France, in the city of Nantes, on September 21, 1829. He studied design with a local sculptor and painting with a local portraitist. In 1846, he moved to Paris. There he entered the studio of Swiss artist Charles Gleyre and, by 1848, was ready to make his Salon debut. He was only nineteen years old.

Toulmouche’s work was generally well-received, both by critics and the public. He won a third class medal in 1852 and a second class medal in 1861. In 1870, he was awarded the Legion of Honour.

In the Library by August Toulmouche, 1872.

In 1862, Toulmouche married a cousin of Claude Monet. This alliance led to his being asked to mentor the young Monet. Toulmouche advised Monet to join the art studio run by his own teacher, Charles Gleyre. It was there that Claude Monet would meet other up and coming Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Some critics note the influence of Impressionism on Toulmouche’s own later work.

In describing the paintings of Auguste Toulmouche, art aficionados of the day inevitably focused on the beautiful female subjects. Describing them, a critic in the 1874 issue of The Repository writes:

“Only a sweet doing-nothing engages this fair creature, and she lives to wear her beautiful dresses, and be painted by such artists as Toulmouche, Stevens, De Jonghe, and others of the same school. These pictures are only to be studied in a certain way. Examine each fold of the dress, and each figure of the lace pattern. Admire the cabinetmaker’s skill in working out such charming designs, and the decorator’s in painting the walls. Mark the exquisiteness of taste that gives one the very richest upholstery, and costumes of satin and velvet, instead of dull, plebian surroundings. Become absorbed in the consummate execution of details, but do not look for expression, for the rendering of soul-beauty, for that is not truly Parisian in art.”

Young Woman in An Interior by Auguste Toulmouche, 1870. 

Coupled with the sumptuous gowns and rich interiors, the seemingly idle natures of the fashionable women in the paintings opened them up for harsh criticism from those who felt the depictions to be symbolic of a deeper societal ill. In Philip Hamerton’s 1895 essay “Painting in France after the Decline of Neoclassicism,” he writes:

“The women in these pictures have no brains: they are sometimes pretty; they always have expensive tastes; but you never see them doing anything better than lounging, or looking in the glass, or receiving visits from other women as idle and expensive as themselves. It is precisely the women of this kind, whether they live in marriage or in concubinage, who have given that lamentable direction to the public opinion of their own class by which it has come to be held a disgrace to them to do anything of any use. They will not work with their hands; they are too ignorant and incapable for mental labor, and therefore, in the majority of cases, there is some male slave at work for them, who for his reward may see this luxury (which irritates him), and enjoy such conversation as may be carried on with a lady who neither reads nor thinks, nor has ever even acquired that homely wisdom which our equally illiterate grandmothers gathered in the kitchen and the farm.”

The Love Letter by Auguste Toulmouche, 1863.

The criticism of the women depicted had little impact on the popularity of the paintings themselves. In 1888, the Detroit Art Loan Record reported that “among all the versatile and genial painters in France” none were more sought after and admired by American society that those of Auguste Toulmouche. The same article goes on to declare that:

“Women of the world are fortunate to have found in three representatives of Parisian art men qualified to interpret them with unparalleled success. [Alexandre] Cabanel enjoys the title of painter-in-chief to women, and Alfred Stevens and Auguste Toulmouche share a similar distinction.”

The Reluctant Bride by Auguste Toulmouche, 1865.

Auguste Toulmouche died in Paris on October 16, 1890. Those paintings of his that are not now in private collections can be found hanging in some of the finest museums in the world.

This article originally appeared on MimiMatthews.com and is reprinted here with permission.

Top Photo: Dolce far Niente by Auguste Toulmouche, 1876.

More from BUST

A Look At Ladies’ Shawls In Classic 19th Century Literature

The History Of The “Confidence Man”

Victorian Advice For Dry January

The recent internet frenzy of ’90s nostalgia have brought Fran Drescher’s titular character from The Nanny to our current pop-culture lexicon. One could argue that Fran’s sartorial choices were their own character in the show, thanks to the talent of costume designer Brenda Cooper. Visually centric social media apps such as Instagram and Pinterest provide the perfect home for Fran Fine’s show-stopping ensembles thus making her a viral sensation.

One particular Instagram @thenannyart is exemplifying notions of fashion as wearable art by comparing Fran Fine’s looks with fine art.

Fran as a Piet Mondrian

Brussels-based independent curator and founder of drawingroomplay.com, Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte recalls watching the show as a teen and being inspired by the “beauty in the artifice of this over-the-top-sitcom.” After seeing a still shot of Drescher’s character looking over her shoulder in a red and white patterned jacket, he was struck by how much the image resembled Gerard Richter’s 1988 painting, Betty. Using his keen eye for making visual connections, Van Eeckhoutte has curated an impressive gallery of images that combine Fran’s outfits with contemporary art.

The one that started it all: Fran as a Gerhard Richter. 

Additionally, Van Eeckhoutte’s juxtaposition between the “high culture” of the art world and the ’90s camp of the sitcom addresses the show’s narrative, in which the class difference between Fran and the Sheffields was a defining theme. The lady in red from Queens and her over-the-top, tell-it-like-it-is persona contrasted with the Sheffields’ refined, jaded existence on the privileged Upper East Side.

Fran as a Picasso

Fran as a Josh Smith

Images courtesy of Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte of @thenanny art via Instagram

More from BUST

This Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy Treasure This Artist’s “Plastic Bag Store” Is A Trashy Treasure 

This 90-Year-Old Photographer Is An Avante-Garde Instagram Queen

This Street Artist Uses Yarn To Create Unforgettable Images

In a world that suggests nothing lasts, plastic is forever. That’s why Brooklyn-based artist Robin Frohardt, 37, is exploring the discrepancy between how briefly we interact with plastic versus how long it stays around in her installation and performance piece, “The Plastic Bag Store.” Originally staged in the Carolina Performing Arts’ CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio in Chapel Hill, NC, the piece resembles a grocery store, but the aisles are all lined with plastic bottles, boxes, and containers filled with products made by Frohardt out of plastic bags. “I was at the grocery store watching someone double and triple bag all this food that was already in a bag inside of a box inside of another bag,” she says of the inspiration behind the project. “I was just struck by the absurdity of how much disposable packaging there is in our lives.”

A work of art as well as a performance space, “The Plastic Bag Store” also hosts puppetry performances in the evenings that offer a tragicomic glimpse into the ways our trash could be interpreted by future generations. “We only use most plastic for a split second,” explains Frohardt, “so I thought it would be funny if in the future people assumed that these things were of great value. Like, why else would we make so much of it and make it so enduring?”

Frohardt’s aim is to create a funny and engaging experience that individuals want to explore. “Because you can walk through the installation like a grocery store, and you can go through the aisles and look at the products,” she says, “you’ll take that with you the next time you’re in [a real] grocery store.” 

While the installation premiered in Chapel Hill, versions will soon be cropping up in New York and San Francisco. Find out when the piece will be heading your way at PlasticBagStore.org.

By Katie Shepherd

Photos by Johnny Andrews / UNC-Chapel Hill

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2019 print issue of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

“Danger Of Nostalgia”: This Artist Bridges Past And Present To Send A Message About Abortion Rights

This 90-Year-Old Photographer Is An Avant Garde Instagram Queen

This Street Artist Uses Yarn To Create Unforgettable Images

“Males, signaling their social dominance, do handstands on their front paws so they can spray urine as high as possible into trees.” This is how photographer Ami Vitale explains the messy practice that inspired the pee-splashed bear suit she wore while taking pictures for her 2018 book Panda Love: The Secret Lives of Pandas. “Pandas comprehend their home by smell as much as by sight,” she continues. “Bears rub scent on their dish-like ears to pick up faint breezes off the forest floor and send their smells to other bears.” So basically, if you want a panda to trust you, you have to meet them on their turf—and that turf involves pee. 

It’s a far cry from the popular image we have of pandas as gentle, dopey giants, but Vitale says this is one reason she wanted to publish Panda Love. “The panda may be the most recognized and the most photographed animal on the planet,” she says. “I wanted to take a story we think we already know and turn it on its head.” To do this, Vitale spent three years in China working with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, whose researchers have been working on breeding the notoriously uninterested-in-sex bears and releasing them back into the wild. “The pandas sent to the wild will have no lines of school children waiting to meet them and no fan pages on Facebook,” says Vitale. “And as these bears trundle off into the forest, they take with them hope for their entire species.”

Now 47, Vitale has been a full-time photographer for almost 20 years. Her work has taken her to more than 100 countries; in just the few weeks that we were in contact about this story, she visited 21. She studied international relations in college at the University of North Carolina and received her masters at the University of Miami, then worked for the Associated Press before turning her attention toward photography. “As a young woman, I was painfully shy, gawky, and introverted,” Vitale says. “When I picked up a camera, it gave me a reason to interact with people and take the attention away from myself. It empowered me.” At first, she trained her lens on human subjects in conflict zones, but she began shifting toward wildlife photography as she realized she’d really been photographing nature all along. “The more I document people and their issues, the more I realize I’m also documenting nature, and the more I document nature, the more I realize I’m also photographing people’s lives,” she explains.

Vitale says she found her creative voice by listening to other people, then using her power to amplify the stories of those who wouldn’t normally be able to have their photos published in magazines like National Geographic, where Vitale is a frequent contributor.

Though she has spent time in poverty-stricken areas and war-torn countries, Vitale says Panda Love was one of the hardest projects she’s ever worked on. There was the challenge of finding a new angle for such a beloved creature, yes, but there was also the difficulty inherent in working with huge—and extremely protected—wild animals. “The Chinese treat the bear as a national symbol, and each panda is closely guarded and watched,” Vitale explains. “They are multimillion-dollar bears that everyone treats with kid gloves, and they are highly vulnerable. Getting close, without interfering with their conservation and in a way that is acceptable to their very protective minders, was challenging.”

“They are multimillion-dollar bears that everyone treats with kid gloves, and they are highly vulnerable.”

Pandas raised in captivity often learn not to fear humans. But when you’re working with pandas that will eventually be released back into the wild, as Vitale was, you want them to keep their healthy fear of people. In order to do that, she had to trick them into thinking she’s not a human, and apparently, the best way to do that is by wearing a panda suit that smells like a bear—hence, the pee-stained suit. She also had to gain the trust of the scientists responsible for the bears. In general, Vitale says the pandas, despite having those teeth and claws, are not scary. But she also notes that she had to be “very respectful of their biology.”

It’s difficult to get an exact count of how many pandas are left in the wild, but researchers generally believe there are only around 2,000. Though the number has risen in recent years thanks to various conservation efforts, especially in China, pandas remain a threatened species for a couple of reasons: their natural habitat keeps shrinking due to deforestation, and they’re hard to breed in captivity. Vitale believes that the recent incline in the panda population is a sign of hope for all of us, though, even as we’re bombarded daily with alarming headlines about climate change. “The story of the panda is a perfect metaphor for what we can do to turn things around,” she says. “We are at a turning point and the world is fragile and vulnerable. The choice is ours now. I want to tell people not to feel helpless and remind them that the power of individuals to make a difference is real.”

Vitale began working with pandas in 2013, as a member of a film crew documenting the first release of a captive-born panda back into the wild. That panda, Zhang Xiang, is still alive and thriving, and in 2017, she actually crossed into a different reserve than the one where she was released—a first for any panda introduced back into the wild. Vitale quickly fell in love with the lumbering beasts and spent the next three years photographing them from sunrise to sunset, accompanied only by a translator. Another photographer might have buckled from the isolation, but Vitale says the bears kept her company. “Each animal has a different personality,” she explains, “and just like people, you grow attached to certain characters.”

Having wrapped up her Panda Love project, Vitale has no plans to stop photographing the wonders of nature, especially those that are in danger of disappearing; her next projects will take her to Kenya, Mozambique, and South Africa. In fact, she is rarely home—Vitale spent just six days there in 2018—but when she is taking time off, she hangs her camera in Montana. “It captured my heart and just won’t let go!” she says. Her constant travels don’t allow her to keep pets of her own, but her neighbor’s cat and dog come to stay with her during her brief visits. It’s certainly not a life for everyone, but it’s just the way Vitale likes it. “While I have this platform, I’ll work nonstop,” she says, “because I want to inspire others to be good to this planet.” 

By Eliza Thompson 

All photos reprinted with permission from Panda Love: The Secret Lives of Pandas by Ami Vitale, copyright 2018, Hardie Grant Books.

This piece originally appeared in the January/February 2019 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Artist Vivek Shraya Transcends Time To Honor Her Mother In This Poignant Photo Series

Photographer Aline Smithson Makes The Familiar Look Beautiful And Bizarre

Meet The Woman Behind Your Favorite Music Photographs

Multi-media artist and political activist Kendalle Aubra has created the most glamorous, badass calendar for the New Year. The 2019 Angry Feminist Pin-Up Calendar is full of empowering, fun images that, according to the calendar’s website, take “traditional pin-up tropes and spin them on their heads, recontextualizing pop iconography specifically to empower femme-identified people of all shapes, colors, sizes, and backgrounds.” Those featured include Lenora Claire and Molly McIsaac. 

Aubra writes that creating this calendar was not only a passion project for her, but also part of her healing process. Aubra is a survivor of abuse and sexual assault, and when the justice system failed her, she turned to her art. All of the profits from this calendar go to organizations that support survivors of abuse and/or fight for legislation that will justly incarcerate violent individuals. Some of the organizations benefiting from the sales of the Angry Feminist Pin-Up Calendar include Planned Parenthood, Safe Horizon, National Organization for Women, Battered Women’s Justice Project, National Center for Transgender Equality, and many more.

This $25 calendar is a perfect New Year’s gift for yourself or a friend, and it can be found at angryfeministpinup.com. If you would like to keep up to date with Kendalle Aubra’s work, follow her on Instagram @freudian.slit.

Images from angryfeministpinup.com and @freudian.slit

More from BUST

Everyone, Particularly Offset, Needs To Leave Cardi B Alone

Today Is The International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers

Cyntoia Brown’s Case Shows Just How Broken The US Justice System Is

“Sareytales: The Art of Online Dating” is a project I started two years ago after I received a particularly cruel text message from a guy I met on the dating app Jswipe. His hurtful words inspired me to start creating artwork showing the creepy, cruel and misogynistic messages I had been receiving on various dating apps for many years. What began as a fun little project of crafting clever designs from cruel words has turned into something much larger. Sareytales has evolved into a platform that empowers other women to stand up to the online bullying, anti-Semitism, and cyber-sexual harassment culture of online dating. Join me as I turn ugly into art, one text at a time. My artwork (prints/greeting cards/gift wrap) can be purchased on my etsy shop (esty.com/shop/sareytales). Follow @Sareytales on Instagram for more feminist art, and be sure to visit sareytales.com to view upcoming events, exhibits and artist collaborations.

More from BUST

This Artist Bridges Past And Present To Send A Message About Abortion Rights

Frida Kahlo’s Clothing, Jewelry, And Makeup Will Be Shown In The US For The First Time

Juliana Huxtable On Her Genre-Crossing Art, Her “Hibernation” Creative Process, And Instagram Vs. Tumblr

Walking through the door, one is immediately drawn to the cyan wall opposite the entrance of the gallery, saturated with color as deep and rich as peacock’s feathers. An initial glance reads the wall as a delicate patterned wallpaper reminiscent of a time that has passed. Walking up to the wall offers a slow reveal and recognition that those elegant patterns are in fact in the shape of the female reproductive system. A step further, and it settles in that these forms are fashioned from gold-colored coat hangers. In that moment of awareness, the artist marks her territory,demands a reframing of initial perceptions and provides an invitation to dig deeper.

“Danger of Nostalgia in Wallpaper Form (in utero)” is the largest of sculptural pieces from conceptual artist Holly Ballard Martz’s recent solo exhibition, Pattern Recognition at ZINC Contemporary in Seattle. According to Martz, this wall has been a long time in the making. She began meticulously and painstakingly forming and soldering the 120 wire hangers in 2016.

Martz tells BUST, “I began working on ‘Danger of Nostalgia’ not long after Trump’s inauguration. I was concerned about the escalation in the attacks on women’s reproductive rights. At the same time, I was disturbed by the ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan and its implication that at some unspecified time in the past, our country was considered great.” Mainstream America’s historical proclivity to romanticize the past provided the catalyst for Martz to connect the present and past to the festering abortion rights crisis as an increasingly right-leaning Supreme Court once again puts reproductive rights at risk. 

Detail: “Danger of Nostalgia in Wallpaper Form (in utero)”; image courtesy of the artist

Every detail of this wall is meant to heighten this conversation, while raising the ghosts of backroom abortions alongside a long-ago controversy from the mid-19th century. As Martz’s vision emerged, she realized that the repetitive pattern of the organic shapes had a Victorian feel and reminded her of the textile designs by founder of the British Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris. Martz says, “I could visualize a full wall of these curlicue forms looking like an ornate wallpaper and that visual prompted me to think of William Morris. I was reminded of an article that I had read about the addition of arsenic from the family arsenic mine to some of the pigments in order to create the rich colors, especially the blues and greens. The result was that the laborers were poisoned as well as the Victorian families who were wealthy enough to hang the wallpaper. The wallpaper was prone to off gassing when damp. It felt to me that this tied in with my initial thoughts on the danger of romanticizing the past and this was the impetus for the choice of a blue-green background.”

Morris, a socialist, aligned with the Pre-Raphaelites; he returned to a medieval aesthetic as a means of protesting the dehumanization which accompanied the rise of the industrial revolution in England. Ironically, Morris continued to produce these toxic wallpapers for ten years, dismissing the concerns of private and public medical experts. For Martz, the juxtiposition of poison in wallpaper or danger in coat hangers raised the ghosts of past tragedies and injustices with a warning that “the good old days” were not so good after all.

Wallpaper Sample Book 1, page 86: Seaweed, pattern #377, via Brooklyn Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Staying within the same time period, Martz circles back to the influence of patriarchy lurking beneath the surface of this longing for nostalgia. Four sculptural pieces fashioned from vintage, Victorian-era starched detachable men’s shirt collars serve as an emblem of the perpetuating male-dominated status quo. “Tower of Power” consists of an arrangement of the collars, hung in equal distance and space, casting a shadow resembling vertebrae of a spine, a nod perhaps to the foundational power structure of every western society throughout time. The other three pieces lie flat against the wall, clearly titled to reveal the artist’s perceptions.

“Tower of Power,” vintage men’s detachable shirt collars and studs; 33” x 6” x 6”; 2018. Image courtesy of Mark Woods

“Stacked” collars laid one on top of each other contain the faintest of text, reading. “Only Straight White Straight Men Need Apply.” “Power Grid” is reminiscent of a tic-tac-toe game, serving as a reminder that the game is often fixed. “Double Crossed at Birth” is formed by layering two collars together forming an X, representing the double X chromosome and the inherent historical limitations against women set by society. 

“Stacked,” vintage men’s shirt collars, 22.5” x 16.25”; 2018; Image courtesy of Mark Woods

“Power Grid,” vintage men’s detachable shirt collars; 16” x 16”; 2018; Image courtesy of Mark Woods

“Double Crossed Since Birth,” vintage men’s detachable shirt collars; 14” x 14.25”; 2018′ Image courtesy of Mark Woods

Ultimately, Martz created “Danger of Nostalgia” as a means of engagement. In that spirit, she invited people attending the exhibition to utilize the wall as a selfie backdrop. They were then invited to post the image to their social media, and Martz donated $5 to Planned Parenthood for every post. Beyond this invitation, Martz discovered that the piece served as a means of giving voice to other women on a much more personal level as they shared their own experience of abortion with her. She saw that abortion is still a source of shame for many women, begging the question, “How far have we come?” or more importantly, “How far have we yet to go?”

In the future, what other atrocities will be committed for the sake of an outdated and warped sense of nostalgia? Confronted with these powerful pieces, the viewer is forced to return to the past with an eye towards the present and the future. With her work, Martz calls the bluff of anyone who has ever placed that red MAGA cap on their head.

Top image: Danger of Nostalgia in Wallpaper Form (in utero); steel wire, wire coat hangers, paint; 120” x 120” x .5”; 2018; image courtesy of Mark Woods

Holly Ballard Martz is represented by ZINC Contemporary, Seattle, WA. More images can be found at hollyballardmartz.com.

More from BUST

Frida Kahlo’s Clothing, Jewelry, And Makeup Will Be Shown In The US For The First Time

Juliana Huxtable On Her Genre-Crossing Art, Her “Hibernation” Creative Process, And Instagram Vs. Tumblr

“Silver Lake Drive” Is A Trip Into Photographer Alex Prager’s Eerie, Technicolor World

This week, Refinery29’s 29Rooms heads to the West Coast, premiering the coolest art installations through a funhouse of creativity. From December 5th through December 9th, head to The Reef to expand your reality and wander through the mind of Bri Luna, Owner and Creative Director of The Hoodwitch (@thehoodwitch), who will take you on a mesmerizing and alluring visual quest through the fascinating world of magic with her installation, titled “You Are Magic.”

Through the art of “visual storytelling” (which is The Hoodwitch’s tagline), we can understand the mystical world. The Hoodwitch’s narrative takes you on a transcendent journey filled with affirmations (written by Hoodwitch founder and creative director Bri Luna) as you walk through a crystal cave of wonder.

Photo courtesy the Hoodwitch

Luna, who graces the pages of BUST’s October/November print issue, states, “‘You Are Magic’ was something I have always dreamed of creating, a large, full-scale cave of wonders, love, darkness, and self-reflection. It is a room created to re-affirm that everything we are seeking is already within us. I wanted to create this immersive experience by utilizing sound and light but also incorporating real crystals and energetic grids to fully embody that message. Over hidden speakers, there are affirmations of power being played. I wrote each of these to be used as daily mantras.’”

The Hoodwitch’s beautifully captivating room is more than just aesthetically pleasing, also energetically and spiritually invigorating, Luna further explains,  “My goal with this instillation was that I wanted each person to not only see there’s something beautiful, but to take a moment to stop and breathe. Even if for just 5 minutes. Stop, Re-align, and just be present in that space. Crystals and minerals are the oldest of our earthly Kingdom and they are the skeleton of our planet. I wanted each person to be taken into the depths of the earth, to the core of where it all began. Exploring their personal depths in both lightness and in dark.”

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

?EXPAND YOUR REALITY?Getting VERY excited for Round II of “You Are Magic” my immersive instillation created for @29rooms that’s opening in #LosAngeles ?December 5th-9th! Do you want to attend next week?! I have a special gift just for my followers! The first 100 people to buy tickets right now will get $20 off tickets using the code HOODWITCH20. Hope to see you there! ??#expandyourreality #29rooms #thehoodwitch #refinery29

A post shared by The Hoodwitch® (@thehoodwitch) on Nov 29, 2018 at 1:26pm PST

As you wander through the depths of your subconscious, during your visit to “You Are Magic,” at Refinery 29’s 29Rooms, embrace your inner mystic and surrender to the magic that lives deep inside you through the mindful artistic journey created by Bri Luna. After all, “You Are Magic!”

Purchase tickets here. 

Top photo by Victoria Kovios for BUST

More from BUST

The Hoodwitch’s Bri Luna Is Making Witchcraft More Inclusive

 What’s The Perfect Cocktail For Your Zodiac Sign? “The Mixology Of Astrology” Author Aliza Kelly Faragher Knows

How To Read Tarot Cards: Advice From Tarot Readers

On February 8th, 2019, the Brooklyn Museum will open its doors to the new exhibit showcasing Frida Kahlo’s work and personal items. Frida Kahlo: Looks Can Be Deceiving, a Major Exhibition Exploring the Life and Work of the Iconic Mexican Artist will be the first exhibition in the United States to show Kahlo’s personal belongings from her lifelong home in Mexico City called “Casa Azul” (“Blue House”). The exhibition will include Kahlo’s clothing, cosmetics and other personal items; paintings and drawings by Kahlo; photographs and film; as well as related objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.

Guillermo Kahlo, Frida Kahlo, c.1926. Silver gelatin print, 6 ¾ x 4 ¾ in. (17.2 x 12.2 cm). Collection of Museo Frida Kahlo. © Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives. Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust

Appearances Can Be Deceiving will be the largest show dedicated Kahlo in 10 years in the United States. The show may also be the most intricate US exhibition of Kahlo’s life to date, doing what no Kahlo exhibition has successfully done before: exploring how politics, gender, clothing, national identities, and disability played a part in defining Kahlo’s self-presentation in her work and life.

By emphasizing the importance of Kahlo’s personal life and belongings, Appearances Can Be Deceiving will actually be providing a brand new political and personal context to the art of Frida Kahlo that has yet to be shared with the US on a mainstream level. For example, Kahlo, born to a German-Hungarian father and a half-Spanish, half-indigenous Tehuana mother, adopted the dress of the Tehuana region in Oaxaca, Mexico, which later become her recognized fashion signature. She identified herself as an indigenous Mexican woman and expressed this through her clothing, which she often bought from indigenous vendors at Mexico City markets. The traditional Tehuan dress of long skirts and loose blouses allowed Kahlo to control her appearance, as well conceal some of the devices she needed to wear in order to accomodate her disability. Self-definition through politics, ethnicity, and disability were at the heart of her work and her identity.

Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892-1965). Frida on Bench, 1939. Carbon print, 18 x 14 in. (45.5 x 36 cm). Courtesy of Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

As a Mexican-American woman whose indigenous blood runs strong, I couldn’t be more excited for Appearances Can Be Deceiving. Growing up, I had two different versions of Frida Kahlo: the intimate Frida my father taught to me as part of my cultural heritage, and the elusive Frida that got taught to me by teachers as I, the only Mexican present, was herded around museum halls with 30 other kids. In my opinion, it’s about time that Frida Kahlo’s political and national identity stop falling to the wayside of her legacy in the US. So, take your parents, take your children, take your significant other, take your friends, and take it in.

Standard tickets go on sale December 3rd and the show will run from February 8th-May 12th, 2019. For more information regarding tickets or museum hours, visit the exhibition page at www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/fridakahlo.

View of the exhibition Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the Frida Kahlo Museum, 2012. Photo by Miguel Tovar. © Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives. Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). Self-Portrait with a Necklace, 1933. Oil on metal, 13 ¾ x 11 in. (35 x 29 cm). The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Maya. Necklace, 300-600. Jade beads, silver chain, width of beads: 1/8 to 3/8 in. Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Mrs. Carl L. Selden, 1996.116.4. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). The Love Embrace of the Universe, 1949. Oil on Masonite, 27 ½ x 23 ¾ in. (70 x 60.5 cm). The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ricardo Ayulardo, Family of Matilde Calderón y González, 1890. Silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. (20.2 x 25.2 cm). Collection of Museo Frida Kahlo. © Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives. Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, 1943. Oil on hardboard, 30 x 24 in. (76 x 61 cm). The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lucienne Bloch (1909-1999), Frida Kahlo at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, New York, 1933. Black and white photograph, 21 x 17 in. (53.5 x 43.2 cm). The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of the 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation. © Lucienne Allen dba Old Stage Studios. (Image courtesy of Old Stage Studios)

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). Appearances Can Be Deceiving, n.d. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 11 ¼ x 8 in. (29 x 20.8 cm). Collection of Museo Frida Kahlo. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Top photo: Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892–1965). Frida in New York, 1946; printed 2006. Carbon pigment print, image: 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2010.80. Photo by Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archive. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

More from BUST

How Much Do You Know About Simone De Beauvoir? Take The Quiz

“Worlds Of Ursula K. Le Guin” Shows The Evolution Of A Wizard, Writer, And Feminist

This Brooklyn Based Band Is Breaking Borders And Tearing Down Walls With Their Music

This year at the BUST Craftacular Holiday, taking place at the Brooklyn Expo Center the weekend of December 8th and 9th in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, we are hosting a myriad of workshops and panels at the BUST School For Creative Living. CraftJam will be teaching a class on hand lettering and another on DIY holiday ornaments. Along with the workshops, CraftJam will also be selling goods at the BUST Craftacular. We talked with CraftJam founder Nora Abousteit.

Hi Nora, can you tell our readers about your business?

CraftJam is part of my serial entrepreneurship history in the arts and crafts industry. For the past 15 years, I’ve created companies that help people start making. Whereas I used to build online communities (BurdaStyle.com as well as Kollabora.com), I had the desire a few years ago to focus on a local community that I could see and meet in person (I love hosting and organizing outings anyway) and saw that I was not alone. That’s how CraftJam was born. Some call us a SoulCycle for crafting. Others say we are a 21st-century sewing circle.

What inspired you to start your business?

With each business I started, I followed my gut. Each time, I had a burning desire (similar to butterflies in the stomach) to convert my vision into reality. I just had to do it. It’s a feeling that something needs to exist, and that if I want it in this world, others will want it, too. They might not know yet, but they will.

Even though I grew up in a very crafty household where making was the default and both my parents taught me many skills, the first businesses I started when I was a teenager weren’t in that field. I had a video rental, study tutorial, and hair accessory business before I turned 15. I like building in general, and starting from scratch with the liberty to go anywhere is magic to me and makes me extremely happy.

What is your creative process like?

A lot of ideas I get while not doing anything specific, like walking back from work, folding laundry, or taking a shower. Creative ideas are often a collateral, rather than a planned outcome. And then it’s important to have the excitement or discipline to execute. My best execution work I do in the morning, and I like to start as early as possible.

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in your field?

I think the best advice for people pursuing a career anywhere is to be persistent, flexible, and listen to who you are creating for. I’ve seen quite a few people over the years in the creative fields. And many started out not being the best or visibly talented. But they stuck to it. They learned, got better, adjusted, tried things and didn’t mind the hardships. If you’re passionate about something you can endure a lot for a while and eventually it’ll get better.

Tell us about what you’ll be doing at Craftacular.

We’ll invite visitors to stamp gift tags and give them the chance to win CraftJam tickets. People can also purchase gift cards, giving creativity this holiday. Some of our JamMasters (teachers) will also be doing live craft demos.

What else should our readers know about your business?

At CraftJam you make skills, and friends, hands on. We’re a fun-loving, beginner-welcoming, and BYOB-friendly team of teachers hosting dozens of different hands-on workshops. We organize public as well as corporate and private events. Recently, we openend a pop-up store on 103 Sullivan Street in a historical and charming part of SoHo.

For more information about what CraftJam does, please visit craftjam.co.

Join us at the BUST Craftacular and the School For Creative Living 11a.m.-7p.m. on Saturday, December 8 and Sunday, December 9 at Brooklyn Expo center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Admission is free; learn more and purchase class tickets here.

Photo: Courtesy of Nora Abousteit

More from BUST

Save The DATE! Dec. 8+9 BUST Craftacular Returns!

BUST School For Creative Living Spotlight: Shout Your Abortion, A Panel Celebrating Safe, Legal, And Shameless Abortion

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Spotlight: Heart Grown Wild Founder SantaLena Groves

Aleetha Clanton is a hairstylist, makeup artist, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur based in New York City and Los Angeles, and we are excited that she is teaching a class on hair braiding as part of the BUST School For Creative Living at the BUST Craftacular, December 8-9 at Brooklyn Expo Center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She works with clients such as Solange, MTV, L’Oreal, NBC Universal and Macy’s, as well as many others. She has had work featured in Elle and Bravo TV. She also had her word on a billboard in Paris and on runways during New York Fashion Week.

Hey Aleetha, can you tell our readers about your work?

I do makeup and hair for celebrities, ad campaigns, TV, and photoshoots.

What inspired you to start your career?

I always wanted to be a creative entrepreneur. I was super talented at hair ever since I was young, so I wanted to make it my career.

What is your creative process like?

I get my inspiration by looking at Pinterest, paintings, and magazines. My creative process begins once I get offered an opportunity. I will discuss the client’s inspiration and my ideas via mood boards and drawings.

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in your field?

I would encourage anyone who is trying to get into this field to never stop learning, stay true to yourself, and network as much as possible.

Tell us what you’ll be doing at Craftacular.

At Craftacular I will be demonstrating some cool braids and styles in a workshop, Braiding 101.

What else should our readers know about you and your business?

During my spare time I do motivational speaking at cosmetology schools.

Learn more about Altheea’s work at AltheeaClanton.com.

Join us at the BUST Craftacular and the School For Creative Living 11a.m.-7p.m. on Saturday, December 8 and Sunday, December 9 at Brooklyn Expo center. Admission is free; learn more and purchase class tickets here.

Images courtesy Altheea Clanton

More from BUST

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Spotlight: Jordan Catherine Pagán, Healer And Medicine Maker

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Highlight: Kristen Sollée—Author, Curator, And Educator

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Spotlight: Heart Grown Wild Founder SantaLena Groves

We’re shining the spotlight on our favorite creative folks who will be joining us at this year’s BUST School For Creative Living. The workshops will take place during the BUST Holiday Craftacular, happening December 8 and 9 at the Brooklyn Expo Center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Anna Turner Hart is an artist specializing in embroidery, textiles, and watercolor, and will be teaching a workshop on hand-embroidery as well as selling her original artwork. We’re excited to make something beautiful! 

Hi Anna, could you tell our readers a little bit about your business and work?

I create artwork combining watercolor and hand-embroidery under the name Errant Hart. Hart is my middle name, after my mother’s maiden name Hartman. I thought that “errant” (erring or straying from the proper course or standards) related to my art practice of mixing hand-embroidery with unexpected materials. I make custom portraits of pets and people, and original artwork. I also share my love of embroidery by teaching workshops at CraftJam, my studio, and of course the BUST Craftacular.

What inspired you to start your business/career?

I went to school for fashion design, which is when I fell in love with textiles and embroidery. After working in the fashion industry for a few years, I wanted to get back in touch with my own creative work and some of the ideas that I had been playing around with in college. I thought about the two mediums I enjoyed working with most—watercolor and hand-embroidery, and decided to combine them. When the opportunity arose to have a show at my favorite vintage store, Dusty Rose, I said yes before I had the pieces done. Nothing pushes you like a good deadline! I finished ten pieces for that show, which motivated me to start my Etsy, and I kept building it from there.

What is your creative process like?

I like to work intuitively. Each paintstroke or stitch informs what I will do next.

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in your field?

I would say it’s important to surround yourself with a creative community of people who inspire you. There will be times when you might feel discouraged or unmotivated, and that’s when it’s good to have a support system in place to keep you going!

Tell us about what you’ll be doing at Craftacular.

I will be teaching a beginner-friendly hand-embroidery class, where you can make your own design or pick from a variety of templates. We will go over basic outline stitches and you will make your own embroidery hoop to take home with you. I will also be selling some of my artwork, including new portraits of inspiring women and customizable baby ornaments.

What else should our readers know about you and your business?

ErrantHart is my Etsy shop, where you can place custom orders and see all my available works. Follow me on Instagram @errant_hart for works in progress, tutorials, and cute pictures of my cat, Rodarte.

Join us at the BUST Craftacular and the School For Creative Living 11a.m.-7p.m. on Saturday, December 8 and Sunday, December 9 at Brooklyn Expo center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Admission is free; learn more and purchase class tickets here. 

All photos courtesy of Anna Turner Hart. 

More from BUST

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Spotlight: Jordan Catherine Pagán, Healer And Medicine Maker

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Highlight: Kristen Sollée—Author, Curator, And Educator

BUST School For Creative Living Teacher Spotlight: Trish Burger, Hypnotherapist And Artist

Trish Burger is a creative and spiritual hynotherapist and artist who will be joining us as a teacher at the BUST School For Creative Living, which will take place December 8th and 9th during the BUST Craftacular Holiday at Brooklyn Expo in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Trish will be teaching a workshop on past life regression, and will also have her crystal jewelry available for sale as a vendor.  

In this interview, Trish gives us an idea of her practice and what we can anticipte to experience with her.  

Hi Trish—can you tell our readers a little about your work? 

I am a hypnotherapist that specializes in past life regressions. I also am a Reiki practitioner, spiritual life coach, and oracle card reader, and I create crystal jewelry that I will have on display/for sale at the BUST Craftacular. The method I studied is Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique (or QHHT for short) started by Dolores Cannon. I use hypnosis to relax a client to the same brain wave they are in as they fall asleep and wake up. It is a normal state they are already in twice a day. Then we explore a past life that mirrors the issues they are working on transcending in their current life. You set up your life and challenges before you incarnate. Patterns repeat until you learn the lesson and transcend the issue. Then, I am able to access a client’s higher self. This is that part of you that has all the answers and higher knowledge of who you truly are. While this part of the client is accessed under hypnosis, I ask all of the questions the client has prepared beforehand. It is a form of self-healing in that you, yourself answer all of your questions from a higher perspective. This part of you can answer any question you have ever had. It can also perform self-healing of emotional and physical issues and discomfort you are experiencing. Anything is possible. I end each session with your higher self giving you tons of loving advice on how to live your best life from a place of absolute and pure love.

What inspired you to start your career? 

I was inspired to explore this career to have a deeper understanding of why we are here on earth at this intense time. I wanted to make sense of my life and all the twists and turns. Why are we born to the parents we have? Is there a bigger reason? Is it all just random, or is there order in the madness? I had a very difficult childhood, and I needed some answers to help me heal. Why is there suffering? Why is life sometimes so painful? Is there a reason? Why are some people born to loving and supportive families and others are not? If there is a reason for earth life I needed to know.

What is your creative process like?

My creative process for my hypnotherapy work involves a daily meditation practice. I also love reading books about magic, past lives, and all areas of spirituality. 

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in your field?

Great advice is to read any of Dolores Cannon’s books – Three Waves Of Volunteersis a great one to start with. Also, any books by Dr. Brian Weiss or Journey of Souls by Michael Newton. Search for Candace Craw-Goldman, as she has created a new healing technique modality I practice called Beyond Quantum Healing, or BQH. You can take her class online, and it is a really wonderful way to learn multi-dimensional healing techniques.

Tell us about what you’ll be doing at Craftacular.

I will be hosting my group past-life regression workshop. It is a fun way to explore a past life you have lived in a group setting. It is less intense than a private three-hour appointment, and it’s a way to catch a glimpse into another facet of who you truly are. This current earth life is just a small part of the wonderous and magical creature you are. It is light hypnosis, and the participants sit quietly and listen to my voice as I guide them to a past life they have lived. I recommend meditating as much as you can before the experience. Clients who meditate regularly have deeper and more detailed visions. It’s not mandatory, but it definitely helps. After the experience, we have a discussion of the visions you had. I will also have a booth with my crystal jewelry.

What else should our readers know about you?

I was born a psychic empath. I knew that life was so much more then what we could see with our eyes. I have experienced so much in this lifetime to prepare me now to help others. I am here to hold space for others to now heal. Anything is possible. All healing is self-healing. Give yourself credit for coming this far. Self-care is essential. Have the voice inside your head be one of love and support. Talk to yourself as you would talk to a child. Love is real and here for you. I created my quantum healing business to help others heal and live their best lives. No question or problem is off limits. I am here to help. 

For more information about Trish and her practice, you can visit her website at www.trishburger.com.

Join us at the BUST Craftacular and the School For Creative Living 11a.m.-7p.m. on Saturday, December 8 and Sunday, December 9 at Brooklyn Expo center. Admission is free; learn more and purchase class tickets here.

Photo courtesy of Trish Burger

More from BUST

Save The DATE! Dec. 8+9 BUST Craftacular Returns!

FREE GIVEAWAY: Win A Pair Of Weekend Passes To World Maker Faire NYC

Join Team BUST This Weekend At The BUST Craftacular At Maker Faire NY! 

Juliana Huxtable is wearing blue lipstick, bright pink tights, a plaid miniskirt, and a floral top when she goes onstage at Detroit’s Church of the Messiah—a 130-year-old building that’s home to a social justice-minded congregation—to speak about “Seeing and Being Seen.” She’s part of a panel on the subject as part of Culture Lab Detroit; later, she’ll end the day with a 1 a.m. DJ set at the nightclub Olympus Hall.

This ability to be equally at home speaking on a panel at a church, lecturing in an art museum, and DJing at a nightclub—and to move seamlessly back and forth between creating visual art, performing, writing prose and poetry, DJing, and creating music—is “very natural” for her, Huxtable tells BUST, and not so unusual: “Some people have a day job and a night job and a side gig and a band with their friends. I think the difference with me is that all the things I do are highly visible.” 

Culture Lab Detroit’s “Seeing And Being Seen” panel: moderator Jazmine Hughes; Juliana Huxtable; Ghetto Gastro founder Jon Gray; dream hampton. Photo by Olivia Gilmore for Culture Lab Detroit

Huxtable’s work includes self-portraiture, music, photography, performance art, poetry, a sci-fi novel, the “nightlife gender project” #SHOCKVALUE, and many, many other works. Huxtable is trans, she often uses her own body as her primary subject, exploring gender, race, queerness, and identity in her work, as well as art history, the internet, and science fiction.

I spoke with Huxtable ahead of her appearance on the Culture Lab Detroit panel; she talked about her “hibernation”-style creative process; how travel and place inform her work; and why Instagram can’t rival the micro-communities of Tumblr back in 2010.

You work in a lot of different forms—visuals, music, performance, writing. How do you see them relating to each other?

Most people go to school, and they study painting, or they study sculpture, or they have a specific combination of things that’s a result of a somewhat intentional relationship to education or training. But I came around to my practice sort of coincidentally—I wanted to be an artist since I was young, but I assumed that that wasn’t something that I would be able to pursue. I came to what I was doing through a series of coincidences: a situation presents itself, or I have the impulse to express myself in a certain way. There’s a freedom I feel relating to genre that has resulted in a practice that is multidisciplinary. I don’t really think so much about how they all relate to each other. Sometimes I’m drawn to figurative work, sometime I’m drawn to textual work, sometimes I’m drawn to a video or a text piece. Sometimes something that I plan as a text piece will end up as a video, because it feels inappropriate in that format. 

How about social media? Do you see an Instagram post as being a form of art, or having the possibility to be a form of art?

I think it has the possibility to be, but I don’t see it as that for me. For some artists, the motifs and formal constraints of something like Instagram or Twitter is an interesting way for them to interrogate their practice itself, so there are artists where that is their primary medium, or the stage on which their work plays out. I don’t think that’s necessarily true for me. I think at one point, something like Tumblr was the closest thing I had to a direct relationship between what I wanted to say artistically, and how it existed as a product of social media. But that’s changed for me. I sort of enjoy the fact that, although obviously my work is documented on social media, how I interact with social media—enjoy social media, even thrive—is not in that context.

Tumblr in the time that you were active there seemed like such an interesting, thriving community, and is now not so much that—I don’t know if there are other social media platforms that are like that now, or if it’s just that I’m older and don’t know about them.

I joined Tumblr in, I think, spring of 2010, through maybe 2015 was when I was really active. And then my work started to move in a different direction, and my relationship to social media changed from something that was part of a micro-community to something that felt more generally visible. It doesn’t feel like the place where experimentation is happening for me. Both of my parents were techie people, so I had a Xanga, I had a Geocities, I had an Angelfire, I had a Livejournal, I had a Blogspot, I’ve done MySpace, LastFM. You name it, I’ve done it. So I don’t think for me it is a product of age.

I think the cycles by which social media platforms become outmoded can no longer keep up with demand. At one point, the idea of a social media platform itself was a somewhat novel social phenomenon. So Tumblr was a self-segregating audience with a particular set of interests. But something like Instagram changed what that meant, because it set out to be a really, really wide, net-reach mentality, almost a universal. In the way that gmail is to email, Instagram sought to be to a certain kind of visual social media. I think that platforms that announce themselves as wanting to be the universal standard almost function as some sort of institution. And I think when Tumblr was purchased by Yahoo, that happened—not that it was less corporate before, but I do think that when it was purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo changed the algorithms, it changed the search results, because they wanted to make Tumblr competitive as a wide-reach social media platform. I think the idea of an audience-specific, socially novel form of social media is maybe…I don’t know what that looks like right now, maybe it does exist, maybe I’ll find it.

When people write about to you, they often tie you and your work to New York. Do you think that being in New York is something that’s a big part of your art?

I think my work is informed by New York, just because I’ve lived there—I’ve lived in or directly adjacent to New York since I was 18, which is 12 years of a certain mentality. But I feel like at this point, New York always informs, and I thrive there and I love New York, but—not that I want to move somewhere else—there’s a certain flexibility with my work that I feel by how much time I spend in other places. There was a solid three to five years where I didn’t leave New York at all; the longest I left was maybe three days. And during that period, my work directly reflected my immersion in New York, and also the financial constraints and things like that that New York places on you.

Now, as my work progresses, it’s also in conversation with other things. Even just the fantasy of being somewhere else, or the experience of being in another city for a while, or a different way to relating to a place racially—that changes how I understand what a different aspect of my work represents. Spending six weeks in China will affect how I see different aspects of my work and what they signify culturally. I came to Detroit from New York, but I was only in New York for like four days before coming here; I was in Berlin before that. I won’t be back in New York for 12 days, and then I’ll be back for 4 days, and then I’m going to Brazil, and then Baltimore.

How do you take care of yourself, and how do you keep creating, when you’re traveling so often, moving through time zones, and working so much?

I have to be intentional about carving out space. I also find that generally, the way my year goes is that by the end of fall I’m overworked, and then winter through spring is my hibernation where I get a lot of my [creative] work done. I’m on the wildlife schedule. Also, my schedule is very regimented, so I work really, really hard summer and fall. This year, maybe a little too much. It allows me to take like five months and just work and be around my friends and go out and dance.

Could you share anything about what you’re currently working on?

I am currently working on a new body of work, and I’m working on music. That’s really one of my main focuses, because I’m releasing music next year. A lot of my performances have become more musically oriented, because it’s become a way for me to experiment with what I’m working on.

When you do something like your DJ performance later tonight—how do you prepare for that?

I’m glad you remind me of that, because I lost my USB, so I have to find a USB before I play tonight—I need to find a CVS or something. 

Top photo by Olivia Gilmore for Culture Lab Detroit

More from BUST

“Detroit Is Not A Blank Canvas”: Art And Activism At Culture Lab Detroit 2018

“Silver Lake Drive” Is A Trip Into Photographer Alex Prager’s Eerie, Technicolor World

This Street Artist Uses Yarn To Create Unforgettable Images

If you’re tired of listening to men talk politics—and let’s be real, who isn’t?—Season of the Bitch is the leftist, intersectional podcast you probably need. With a rotation of six hosts (the coven) and guests including author and organizer Jane McAlevey and author and poet Chavisa Woods, Season of the Bitch aims to highlight voices of those who aren’t cis men.

The podcast, which has now been going strong for over a year, is full of witchy feminist goodness, with topics including Mental Health Under Capitalism, Sex Work and Solidarity, Women of Color in Academia, and Feminists of the Animal Kingdom. The hosts chat about current political and societal issues, history, and culture.

“People shouldn’t be scoffed at for not knowing information – they should be given the information, and given support in understanding that information. You’d think this would be more commonplace, especially among leftists,” said Laura Kerrigan, one of the show’s hosts. “Everyone has had a journey to get to whatever level of leftism they’re currently at – it takes work and dedication. So why was it so revolutionary to make leftism not only inclusive, but also accessible?”

Inclusivity is a hallmark of SotB, and though the coven is quick to clarify cis men are welcome and encouraged to listen to, learn from, and enjoy the podcast, the focus on female, nonbinary, and/or trans voices is a unique one—and is much needed and underrepresented, even in socialist, leftist spaces.

Join the coven every Friday for a new episode—including some extra-witchy topics just in time for the spooky season—and keep in touch on SotB’s website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon! 

More from BUST

Podcast Lovers Rejoice! Get Ready For Werk It, A Women’s Podcast Festival Happening This Fall

Phoebe Robinson Is Your Smartest, Funniest Friend With “Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay”

“Throwing Shade” Host Erin Gibson Is “Feminasty” In Her New Book: BUST Interview

Take it from activist, filmmaker, and writer dream hampton: your conception of Detroit’s “rebirth” is probably wrong. “People don’t want to talk about race,” hampton tells me. “There’s this idea that has been given to a whole generation that to talk about race is racism, which is nuts. So they don’t want to talk about the idea that a ‘rejuvenation’ or a ‘Renaissance’ is couched in this idea that white people are finally moving back to Detroit—spoken or unspoken. Black people have always been here, always been creative, always been creating, and it never stopped. It didn’t stop in ’08. It didn’t stop with the collapse of the auto industry.”

hampton tells me this in a small sacistry at Detroit’s Church of the Messiah, minutes before she takes part in a panel discussion on the subject of “Seeing And Being Seen” with artist Juliana Huxtable and Ghetto Gastro founder Jon Gray, moderated by the New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes. The panel is part of three days of events put on by Culture Lab Detroit, a nonprofit organization formed by Jane Schulak in 2012 with the mission of “aid[ing] Detroit in becoming a city that prioritizes the arts as a mean for community investment, sustainable neighborhood development and social change.” This year’s theme: the Crisis of Beauty. Along with holding panels (and a screening of Robocop) open to the public, Culture Lab Detroit took visiting artists and journalists, along with local artists and organizers, on a whirlwind tour of the city’s arts and cultural spaces. We were led by Ingrid LaFleur, an Afrofuturist artist, activist, and former Detroit mayoral candidate who works with cryptocurrency; and Bryce Detroit, an Afrofuturist storyteller, Entertainment Justice activist, and Detroit Recordings Company founder. The experience ran counter to the mainstream narrative that, as hampton puts it, “There’s this idea that Detroit was a blank canvas. And it’s not that.”

The “Seeing And Being Seen” panel, from L to R: Jazmine Hughes, Juliana Huxtable, Jon Gray, dream hampton. Photo by Olivia Gilmore

I grew up in a small town about an hour from Detroit, which meant I’d that seen more of Detroit than most of the other national journalists invited to cover Culture Lab. Growing up, my experience of Detroit was class trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts; family trips to the Motown Museum; concerts at the Fillmore as a college student home for the summer; the Detroit Auto Show. But Michigan is intensely segregated: my hometown, Hartland, is 97% white despite being less than sixty miles from Detroit, which is 80% black. I’m white. I’d been to Detroit before, but I hadn’t seen Detroit like this before. It was a tremendous experience to get a glimpse of the vibrant art community that thrives, and has always thrived, in the city. 

After a visit to Mirage Detroit—a site-specific mirrored house installation by L.A. artist Doug Aitken in the old People’s State Bank—we spent some time at Recycle Here! / Make Art Work, an art space that’s part of Detroit’s Recycle Here! recycling center. The recycling center was formed in 2005 to meet a community need—and it keeps community a focus, both with residents who drop off their recyclables, and with the artists who visit, hang out, and collaborate there, often reusing recycling pieces. A highlight was a giant, plastic elephant that could be wheeled around the space by remote control—playfully joining circles of people chatting and drinking Motor City Brewing Works’ Ghettoblaster and orange Faygo. Colorful murals—including one of Elvira—cover the walls, and a neon sign reading simply “BUTTS” shines red outside.

Recycle Here! / Make Art Work ; photo by Erika W. SmithRecycle Here! / Make Art Work; elephant by Ryan Doyle; photo by Erika W. Smith

The next day began with a visit to Submerge Records‘ techno museum. Many people think that techno began in Berlin—nope, it’s Detroit. International DJ, Underground Resistance member and Manager of Submerge John Collins walked us through us a brief history of techno, describing the genre’s connection to social justice and a push for political change. Afterward the tour, Anishinaabe and African diasporic artists and activists including Efe Bes, Sacramento Knoxx, Onyx Ashanti, and Christy Bieber discussed music and language.

a display on techno history at Submerge Records; photo by Erika W. Smith

We moved from music to visual art with a visit to the remarkable C.A.N. Art Handworks, home to metalsmith Carl Nielbock’s windmills,  architectural and ornamental metalwork, historic reproductions, and stunning collection of African art. Born in Germany to a white German mother and black American G.I. father, Nielbock moved to Detroit in the 1980s and has lived and worked there ever since. As he gave us the tour, Nielbock stressed that you don’t need to be formally trained to create art.

outside C.A.N. Handworks, photo by Erika W. Smith

the windmills at C.A.N. Handworks; photo by Erika W. Smith 

a few pieces in Nielbock’s collection; photo by Erika W. Smith

Held in the Senate Theater, a historic 1920s movie house, the first panel topic was “The Aesthetics Of Tomorrow.” After an performance of “Sweet Grass” by Sacramento Knoxx, Giizhigad, Kaz, and Hadassah GreenSky highlighting the indigenous community in Detroit—and an introduction by RoboCop actor Dr. Peter Weller—who has a PhD in art history—moderator Yesomi Umolu (Artistic Director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial) led artists Anicka Yi, Mark Pauline, and Eyal Weizman in a discussion the role of technology in shaping the future.

Sacramento Knox; photo by Gabriela Baginski

“The Aesthetics Of Tomorrow” panel, from L to R: Yesomi Umolu, Mark Pauline, Anicka Yi, Eyal Weizman

The final day began with a visit to Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum. A must-see if you’re in Detroit, the museum was founded by artist Olayami Dabls—known to most as simply Dabls—and it’s a work of art in every way. The inside of the museum houses an extensive, historic bead gallery; the outside of the building is covered in murals and mirrors; and nearby, there’s an large-scale outdoor art installation, the mural-covered N’kisi House, and the African Language Wall painted in various characters. Dabls walked us through the installation, explaining a metaphor in stone and iron, wood and mirror.

outside Dabls’; photo by Erika W. Smith

inside Dabls’; photo by Erika W. Smith

one of Dabls’ outdoor art installations, with N’kisi House in the background; photo by Erika W. Smith

Dabls’ African Language Wall; photo by Erika W. Smith

Next, a break from visual art: Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, a fast-growing urban farm and nonprofit, community-based organization. Director Jerry Hebron gave us a tour, sharing plans for expansion (the farm has absorbed foreclosed land inthe neighborhood) and hosting a lunch and a discussion with Detroit artists including writer Marsha Music and activist Uri House, who uses mesh technology to bring WiFi to the 40% of Detroiters who need it.

Oakland Avenue Urban Farm plans; photo by Erika W. Smith

lunch at Oakland Avenue Urban Farm; I’m on the far right listening to Ingrid LaFleur. Photo by Gabriela Baginski

Drinks at dream hampton’s beautiful apartment, the aforementioned panel on “Seeing And Being Seen” panel, and we were done—Culture Lab Detroit ended with attendance at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art’s gala, currently displaying Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg retrospective exhibit, a rumination on the 30 years of the Heidelberg Project—a large-scale public art installation that Guyton began on Heidelberg street on Detroit’s East Side in the 1980s. 

the MOCAD gala; photo by Erika W. Smith

I’m immensely grateful that I was welcomed with such generosity by Detroit’s artists and activists—I can’t wait to go back, and I urge you all to do the same. When you do, make sure you go beyond the headlines and seek out the thriving Detroit art scene that’s always been there, and always will be.

Top photo: Church of the Messiah with Culture Lab signage outside; photo by Gabriela Baginski

More from BUST

This Artist Creates Art Meant For Smelling

10 Genderqueer Artists Who Are Smashing The Binary

Learn How To Compost With This Advice From Detroit Dirt Founder Pashon Murray

Legendary funk rock musician—and Joe’s Pub Vanguard Residency and Award recipeint—Nona Hendryx collaborated with photographer Carrie Mae Weems, theater director Niegel Smith, and choreographer Francesca Harper to create an immersive multimedia installation and concert called Refrigerated Dreams, which debuts this Saturday, October 27th at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

Inspired by Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series, Refrigerated Dreams is a work-in-progress directed by Smith and featuring choreography and performances by Harper, Josh Johnson, and The Francesca Harper Project, along with original music by Hendryx.

The set-up: A man invites you to a dinner party, for which he has secured Hendryx and her performance art band Anon to perform. Meant to confront the limitations of duality in gender, race, and social norms, the performance is fragmented into binaries: man or woman, black or white, stay or go? 

Weems’ Kitchen Table Series photographs loom in the background. A disjointed narrative may begin to form. Are the people in these photographs players here? When will they arrive? What is their story? Will they shed the binary narrative?

The intrigugin press release reads, in part, “This will be a night challenging the heteronormative, asking: Shipwrecked. Not yet, but soon / i have to pay the cost to be free / who will care for me?“

Refrigerated Dreams is a work-in-progress and will take over the space at Joe’s Pub October 27. There will be four shows in a single night. If you are looking for a totally radical immersion into the artistic minds of celebrated and renowned artists, you know where to go. Buy your tickets here.

More from BUST

The Play “Mary V” Shows The Power Of Women’s Anger

Mary Lambert Proves The Power Of Vulnerability, Self-Doubt, And Self-Love In Her New Poetry Collection: BUST Interview

After Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Confirmation, The Story Of Kassandra Resonates

As a function-over-fashion type, I walk into clothing stores with the evils of capitalism in mind—“impulse purchase” is not in my lexicon. But one day in the back corner of an L.A. vintage shop, I spotted a pair of black Chelsea boots with fire-truck-red lining. I didn’t even have to check the size. I knew they were mine and I bought them on the spot. Since then, these boots have been a talisman, offering protection from anyone who aims to destroy my confidence. Every time their heels click-clack on the floor, I feel as though I’m charging them like I would crystals in the moonlight. They were my intro to fashion magick. 

“If personal style is a visual representation of your inner world, then fashion magick is adding a bewitching element to this,” explains Gabriela Herstik, author of Inner Witch: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Craft. Clothing has power, whether in the colors, symbols, or historically relevant silhouettes we wear. It’s especially potent when it has lineage to back it up, e.g. an amethyst necklace passed down through generations. Fashion magick—with a “k” to separate it from a magician’s tricks—is putting that power to work, dressing to face the world with intention. “I think that a lot of us are taught that style and fashion are superficial,” says Herstik, “when in reality they can help us navigate this world in a different light as we reclaim sovereignty over our bodies and selves.”

Unlike other en vogue methods of magick—tarot, crystals, zodiac-inspired candles—you don’t have to buy a thing. Chances are good you already wear clothing every day. And fashion magick can be tailored to fit your intention. Herstik recommends that before you dress, you take a deep breath and become present in your body: “Ask yourself what you need.” If you want to feel connected to your heart, wear pink. Donning red embodies sensuality. Black can make you feel protected against the world. To help you speak your truth, recite an incantation over your favorite lip color: “With this lipstick I speak my truth clearly, powerfully, and unapologetically” is an example you can play around with. Adorn your neck with rose quartz to foster self-love. You can even embroider a sigil (a magically charged symbol) onto your clothing, choosing one that corresponds with your specific goal. Or take inspiration from moon phases: If you want to improve your self-esteem, wear an ensemble that makes you feel like a badass during a new moon, the phase that honors new beginnings. Like fashion itself, fashion magick is about doing what you want—and the result is sartorially spellbinding.

By Anna Gragert
This article originally appeared in the October/November 2018  print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!

More from BUST

Join The “Resistance Witches” In Hexing The Trump Administration This Halloween Season (And Beyond)

“Witches, Sluts, Feminists” Is A Must-Read”Witches, Sluts, Feminists” Is A Must-Read

How I Went From Urban Hipster To Real-Deal Witch

Seattle-based artist Natalie Krick’s latest message? Sexuality has no age.

The Nude Grandmothers project, a series of nude portraits of older women, began as a collaboration between Krick and photo editor Amanda Gorence. “The impetus was to create a celebratory and liberating piece that explores female sensuality later in life, and how it evolves,” Gorence says of the series. “Women are often ‘aged out’ of conversations around sexuality at a certain point. We wanted to demystify that idea.”

Krick’s art often challenges perceptions of beauty, femininity, and nudity. The photographer, whose art has been featured everywhere from The New Yorker to Marie Claire South Africa to The Huffington Post, draws a lot of inspiration from fashion media and pin-ups, but she enjoys “playing with these cliches of beauty and sexuality,” she tells BUST. 

“I felt conflicted when I looked at photographs of women in mainstream culture,” Krick says. “I started to think about how these photographs were constructed. How is the body styled and posed to appear female and sexual? How are the photographs retouched to appear beautiful?”

The Nude Grandmothers series highlights three women, posed coquettishly against bright, colorful backgrounds. “I was telling a friend about finding a box of pictures of me at my mom’s that were taken over the span of my adult life, and I was  struck by how beautiful I was in all of my different stages of life—and how I never knew or felt it,” says Alaina, one of the models. “The idea [of the project] appealed to me on so many levels, not just as an opportunity to celebrate myself and work on loving my body, but also make a statement about aging, beauty, and sensuality.”

The other models, though, were a little more hesitant. “At first I thought the project was rather frivolous,” Judith, another subject, tells BUST. “But my 48-year-old daughter said that Americans have a very puritanical and weird attitude toward nudity, and that she felt it was very important that I do the shoot, both for her and for my granddaughter. My husband tried to talk me out of it, which had the effect of talking me into it. His reasons infuriated me, frankly.”

The third model, who wished to remain anonymous, says, “I was definitely hesitant…[but] it felt good to just go for it. It was a lovely experience. I was made very comfortable and felt empowered at the end for doing something I never in a million years thought I would do.” 

Krick says that the project might be a continued series. You can check it all out for yourself here, and find more of the artist’s work, including information on her book Natural Deceptions, on her website.

All photos by Natalie Krick

More from BUST

Writing the Body And Missing The Point: Mara Altman’s “Gross Anatomy”

Feminist Art Parade, Nevertheless We Vote, Comes To New York: BUST Interview

This 90-Year-Old Photographer Is An Avante-Garde Instagram Queen

American filmmaker and photographer Alex Prager has found her place in the contemporary canon. Her images are unmistakable: elaborate tableaux invoking eerie, stylized women, technicolor crowds, and ambiguous emotions. References span from classic Hollywood to modern pop culture to ’60s art-house cinema. Prager’s art is Emmy-award winning, featured in museums such as the MoMA and publications including The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and W. Now, Prager’s distinctive vision can be appreciated in the first career retrospective, Silver Lake Drive.

The upcoming title offers a comprehensive view—more than 120 images—of the self-taught artist’s meticulous constructions. This includes the early works Polyester and Big Valley, explorations of Southern California—in particular, the women of Hollywood’s noir underbelly. A tour through the book finds portraits expanding to grand constructions, such as the epic Face in the Crowd, shot in a Hollywood soundstage and featuring over 150 models, and Prager’s haunting commision for the Paris Opera, La Grande Sortie.

It’s easy to be swept away by the saturated colors and wide-eyed women. But it’s important to remember the darker, ever-present themes: alienation and repressed emotional intensity. Prager writes, “I find my inspiration in the city of Los Angeles. It’s a strange picture of perfection—but there is an eerie monotony that creeps in. It can slowly drive a person crazy, that sense of unease under the surface of all this beauty and promise.”