nanomajority

Art 364B

Art 364B — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:21:20 +0000

Art 364B - Maria Yoon

Maria Yoon — Mon, 09 May 2011 12:53:34 +0000

Maria Yoon

Art 364B - Melissa Potter

Melissa Potter — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:18:37 +0000

Project Statement Ammunition for the Virgin

By tradition in some the remote and inaccessible Southeastern parts of the Balkans, a girl born to a family without boys is forced or sometimes chooses to live her life as a man. She dresses like a man and usually takes on the role of inheritor of the family property, becoming a brother to her sisters. In most cases, she never marries and never engages in a sexual relationship, hence the referral to these women as “sworn virgins”.

The reported “last virgin” of Montenegro, Stana Cerovic, is the subject of this film. I took a team of ethnographers to Stana’s village of Tusina to interview her at her rural home. I asked Stana questions about the advantages of life as a man, and even whether it was possible to be happy without children.

Through further interviews with women under the age of 40 (I turned 40 during filming), the film investigates the challenges women face when dealing with cultural expectations, sexual identity, and economic choices. The film follows these diverse voices through my well-worn paths in the city of Belgrade, where I have spent ten years working and developing as an artist, and as an individual.

This project for Nanomajority features a clip of the film in progress and a photo gallery with some of the film's characters. Special thanks to Rene Gremaux, Jelena Jovcic, Stephanie Lupu, and Sasa Sreckovic.

Ammunition for the Virgin--Nano from Melissa Potter on Vimeo.

Melissa Potter

Art 364B - Jennifer Musawwir

Jennifer Musawwir — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:16:10 +0000

Over the next seven months nanomajority will feature the women of ART364B in seven separate monthly installments.

As her contribution to the project, Jennifer Musawwir provides a curatorial statement for the project. (See "Project Posts" on the right.)

To participate in the conversation, click "Add new comment" at the bottom of Project Post page, or click "Reply" under a comment to reply to that specific comment.

About ART364B:

In the spring of 2005 seven women–six artists and one curator/art historian–were invited by Melissa Potter to form a women’s critique group in response to the continuing underrepresentation of contemporary women artists in New York galleries and museums. Kate Clark, Marietta Davis, Tiffany Ludwig, Jennifer S. Musawwir, Miriam Schaer and Maria Yoon unanimously responded. What quickly evolved was an intellectual and egalitarian arena for stimulating and focused discussion among peers, with an awareness of the limited exposure for female artists in the New York area–a problem rarely acknowledged by the contemporary art press. The diversity of media, ideas and backgrounds among these seven women lends this group its multifaceted character. This group continues and renews an almost lost tradition of the female/feminist collective as a means of generating dialogues for women in the arts.

This critique group has entered a phase of maturity where it is presenting itself through means of exhibition or publication with the concept of the group as the point of interest and driving force. ART364B, the course number of art historian Linda Nochlin’s first class devoted to the subject of women artists, has been chosen as the name to represent this group of women working to ensure critical spaces of feminist dialogue in the realm of contemporary art.

Jennifer Musawwir

Visually emphasizing dominant concepts

Adriana Corona — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:11:34 +0000

In this project I explore a method of displaying the underlying word distribution of a text using the text itself. In essence, I will try to develop a system to visually emphasize repeating concepts without divorcing the visual representation from the original content.

Although useful, other methods of summarizing text—such as basic extraction of key terms or even scaled representations like word clouds—tend to separate the summary from the original, leaving the reader a reference instead of a direct link to the source of the summary. I will attempt to eliminate this back-and-forth, allowing the reader to organically perceive those summarizing elements immediately while reading the original.

To create text that displays its own distribution, I will extract word frequencies and use them to emphasize recurring substrings by simply altering their relative brightness.

Adriana Corona

Art 364B - Miriam Schaer

Miriam Schaer — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:59:44 +0000

Note: Over a period of seven months nanomajority will feature the women of ART364B in seven separate monthly installments.

To participate in the conversation, click "Add new comment" at the bottom of the page.

Artist's Statement: Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice?, An Introduction

“Selfish... Neurotic... Irresponsible... Immature... Unfeminine... Unfulfilling... Materialistic... Uptight... Deviant” — all words I have heard to characterize my decision to not have children, a decision transforming me into a target of one of society’s remaining and widely held prejudices.

Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice?, addresses the question of why the existence of women who choose maternal independence over child-rearing angers or offends so many people and institutions. The work presented here is part of a continuing exploration of our culture’s pejorative views about women without kids. For Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice?, I hand-embroidered representative negative comments on baby dresses using red thread to create scarlet letters. Gathered from interviews with childless women, online research, and personal experience, the statements taunt and accuse, and are typical of an endless flow of critical statements that seem to be growing bolder even as non-traditional families are gaining greater acceptance.

In the course of my research I have spoken with many women, both in formal interviews and casual conversations. Often I chatted with women while working on the embroidery pieces, which are very portable, as I commuted to and from my teaching position at Columbia College Chicago. The responses I got were very strong. Many women, often those with children, shared with me their own stories about having felt trapped or seduced by the myth of “having it all.” Others told me about the pressures they experienced to have children before they had children, from family members and others in their communities.

My interlocutors raised so many questions about the nature of the prejudice against women (rarely men) who have chosen not to (or who cannot for one reason or another) follow society’s traditional childbearing path that they also, in effect, presented the case for a better, broader understanding of this cultural bias. Lately, more gay and lesbian friends have spoken with me about the recent pressure they have felt to have children.

The Reproduction Imperative

“The key reason marriage existed at all, in any society, at any time, was because sexual relationships between men and women produced children,” Charles Cooper argued in defense of California’s notorious Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, in California’s 9th Circuit court. Cooper, who is lead counsel for Prop. 8-sponsor Protect Marriage, continued with, ”When a relationship between a man and a women becomes a sexual one, society immediately has an vital interest in it for two reasons. One, society needs the creation of new life for the next generation; but, secondly, society’s vital interests are actually threatened by the possibility that an unintentional and unwanted pregnancy will mean the child born out of wedlock is raised by its mother alone, and this directly implicates society’s vital interests.”

Does he mean having children is the only reason to have a relationship?

For myself, I am clear I couldn’t have the life I live, which I love, had I children. Of course, many women manage to juggle kids, careers and other activities all at once, but many have told me about the difficulties they endured doing or trying to do so, and the importance of resources like family to help out, and income sufficient to hire help.

I welcome readers’ views, from all perspectives, about this prejudice as I continue my work. (Click "Add new comment" at the bottom of the page.)

Note: Click on an image below to start the slideshow.

Miriam Schaer

ART364B - Marietta Davis

Marietta Davis — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:32:18 +0000

Note: Nanomajority is featuring the women of ART364B in seven separate monthly installments. To participate in the conversation, click "Add new comment" at the bottom of the page. In addition to "The Beauty Files" you can view other videos by Marietta in the "View Project Posts" section on the right.

Artist's Statement

"The Beauty Files” is a video conversation from 2010, featuring my long-term collaboration with artist Heather Marie Vernon. We employed a DIY style using different types of video cameras to reference high as well as low art. Our objective is to play with pop culture by creating an abstract mash-up of beauty techniques, music lyrics, and philosophical concepts. We discovered that low-tech methodology was not only aesthetically important but also culturally relevant. We wanted to emphasize feminist ideology and contextualize the piece, like Hannah Wilke, Joan Jonas, and Yoko Ono, continuing the history of female artists exploring issues of the body, female identity, and representation through vanguard performance and video.

Marietta Davis

Art 364B - Melissa Potter

Melissa Potter — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:56:16 +0000

Project Statement: Ammunition for the Virgin

The reported “last virgin” of Montenegro, Stana Cerovic, is the subject of this film. I took a team of ethnographers to Stana’s village of Tusina to interview her at her rural home. She asked Stana questions about the advantages of life as a man, and even whether it was possible to be happy without children.

Ammunition for the Virgin--Nano from Melissa Potter on Vimeo

ART364B - Tiffany Ludwig

Tiffany Ludwig — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:41:32 +0000

“Telling stories in the public realm: what has been removed”
By Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki

Two Girls Working is the collaboration of Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki. Since 2001 they have created the project, Trappings, http://www.twogirlsworking.com.

Over the course of the past ten years while working on Trappings, we have encountered a few different kinds of censorship. We’ve had pieces removed from exhibitions before they were installed. We’ve had participants directly ask us to remove portions of their interviews. We’ve had participants ask to be removed from our project immediately, after being interviewed (before we edited the interview), and after being presented in our project for years. We had a momentary cause for alarm when our publisher mentioned that some of her colleagues thought we should remove the word “power” from the title to make it more approachable. We’d still love to believe we misunderstood them. And we’ve had artworks curated into exhibitions, while others were left out. Maybe not censorship, but an act of editing, yes.

As artists and collaborators we have had continuous discussions about this kind of content removal or a curator’s preference. Despite the fact that we have release forms from all of the women and girls who have participated in our project, we have always and without question followed the wishes of our participants to remove their names, certain content, or their entire interview. It is our position that the stories are theirs, and they choose to share them with us as artists and the public that views Trappings. When specific works of art have been removed by a curator, we have also chosen not to argue. Well, not too much. We ask them to consider if they are being too cautious about their audience, and at times that argument has enabled a work to stay in a show. But not always.

Our most recent exhibition, Trappings: Portraits, had its launch in rather public gallery settings: airports. First at the Miami International Airport’s MIA Gallery (October 2010) and this month it will open at the Portland International Airport gallery (April 2011). In both locations we have been asked to remove, change, or alter the content of the exhibition.

Our intention with Trappings is to share as many stories as possible with as wide an audience as possible. To do this, we created a project that was multi-faceted. Trappings began with an interview session where groups of women were asked to respond to the question: what do you wear that makes you feel powerful?. The sessions were held within private or public spaces and were art, performance, and dialogue experiences. The project could have ended there, artistically speaking, but we chose to bring these conversations from the private realm to a broader audience: first galleries and museums, then public venues such as city buses, streetscapes, and health clinics.

In creating these exhibitions we’ve decided that having a piece removed from an installation will not spell the end of the exhibition. Yes, it’s censorship, yes it’s limiting what an audience sees in that installation, but the entire body of work continues to exist and is fully and publicly presented on our website and in other installations. Maybe our reluctant acceptance of being asked to remove content from a few of our exhibitions is because we feel like we are actually getting away with something; securing the influence of the project question and igniting dialogue about feminism, power, personal identity, and presentation in anyone’s daily life is the goal of the project.

Public or private, space is political. Private galleries, public exhibition spaces, and the spaces influenced by artists through public art installations are all awash in their own politics and climates of control. In exchange for our flexibility and being aware of the politics and being able to work with them, we get to talk shop (feminism, power, and women’ s voices) within them.

Recently removed artworks:

From our national traveling exhibition: Trappings: Stories of Women, Power and Clothing

One of the women in this piece had a discussion about rape too sensitive for a corporate gallery:

From our recent exhibition: Trappings: Portraits

The slogan on this T-shirt was too sexual for a public gallery:

The ankh in this photo was seen as too religious for a public gallery:

This Women in Black gathering was seen as too political for a public gallery:

Removed from the project

This woman asked us to remove her interview because she feared conservative relatives would not like her being seen on the Internet:

Reply All: ART364B, A Feminist Art Collective of the 21st Century

Jennifer Musawwir — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:54:52 +0000

Over the next seven months www.nanomajority.com will feature the women of ART364B in seven separate monthly installments and it is with much enthusiasm that I kick-start this collaboration with an introduction to our feminist art collective. I am an independent curator and art historian and five years ago began meeting with the artists Kate Clark, Marietta Davis, Tiffany Ludwig, Melissa Potter, Miriam Schaer and Maria Yoon on a monthly basis. At that time we were all based in New York City and Melissa Potter approached a handful of women she had known professionally and personally to form a crit group. The six of us responded positively to her invitation and ever since the spring of 2005 have been faithful participants to the monthly meeting designed to allow each member equal time to discuss their work and receive constructive feedback from the other members. In the early days we convened after hours in the meeting room of a downtown non-profit where one of the members worked and where this professional environment helped us maintain focused discussions.

The natural overlap between personal and professional that is evident in our work and affects our career decisions contributed to the bond and trust that exists amongst us today even though we did not all know each other prior to the creation of this crit group. Eventually, we lost our meeting space because that member had moved on professionally and from that point our meetings became a moving target taking place in our homes, studios, cafes, school and anywhere else that can accommodate our group. Many transitions have occurred over the past five years with Melissa Potter relocating to Chicago, Miriam Schaer shuttling between Chicago and New York as well as Marietta Davis splitting her time between Washington D.C. and New York. These geographic restraints in addition to long-term artist residencies have been overcome through the use of online video conferencing programs such as Skype allowing us to proceed with our monthly meetings. Since the beginning, our group discussions often continued via email where we remain in contact between meetings sharing opportunities, offering advice, and sometimes working out disagreements. A stimulating conversation between seven women was started five years ago and continues to develop in person and online. About a year or so in, it became evident that something more than a critique group was brewing among us seven and the consensus was to redefine ourselves as a feminist art collective with the initiative to engage with the public.

Feminism, its history and its imprint on contemporary art, is a topic that has always been current and comprehensive to our group. We were keenly aware of similar consciousness-raising, critique, reading and writing groups that cropped up in the 1970s among women in the arts that in some cases continue today. These groups have been credited for shaping the careers of many women from that generation as well as fostering supportive and non-competitive spaces and serving as launching pads or thinking cells for women to break down professional and personal barriers. Art collectives of all types continue to exist among contemporary artists but it was our decision to clearly acknowledge the legacy of the 1970s feminist art movement when we choose to call ourselves ART364B. This name is homage to the course Linda Nochlin first taught at Vassar College in the spring of 1970 and which was devoted to the examination of 19th and 20th century representations of women. As a feminist art collective, we began to seek out opportunities to exhibit as a group and share with the public our work as individuals but also relay the depth and strength of our ongoing discussions. Our first experience to show as a collective was for the New York University Kimmel Art Galleries in late 2007 where each artist showed pieces representative of their work and I took the role of curator providing the text for this show underscoring the sincerity of our group dynamic.

We recently began to develop an exhibition based around motherhood that was triggered by half of the women in this group recently becoming mothers. We began to analyze the decisions we all have made regarding motherhood, which are just as poignant for the women in this group who do not have children, but as this exhibition develops, a concentration on the outdated and oversimplified have/have not binary will not serve as the basis for this exhibition. The working title for this exhibition is (PRO)CREATE: An Exhibition Considering Motherhood and it will encompasses individual reactions to the personal and social consequences of becoming a mother, not physically able to be mother and happily accepting this reality, clearly choosing to not have children or simply putting that decision on hold. An emphasis on lack or the decision to lack children is not central to the development of this theme and as the title implies, we are thinking about creation in relation to our professional lives. Historically, male artists, unable to physically make babies, imbued themselves with the power to procreate when they gave birth to their masterpieces. Women artists of the 1970s demanded to be acknowledged as valid artists with the power to also create masterpieces and not just as sex objects or baby machines. I would like to expand the (PRO)CREATE exhibition to eventually include other artists and seek those who address the theme of motherhood in consideration of the rapidly changing interpretations attached to this term. For instance, its counterpart, fatherhood, cannot be forgotten and the expanded notions of parenthood in general with gay couples increasingly having children, the growth and celebrity attention to the adoption route, and the many advances in medicine that assist in starting families. Marketing, merchandise, pop culture, reality television and politics are factors among others that play a prominent role in the socio-cultural perceptions and practice of motherhood.

With each installment on www.nanomajority.com we hope to present ourselves as a group and individually, develop our ideas for the (PRO)CREATE exhibition and share with the public snapshots from our ongoing conversation that we plan to continue each month in response to the featured member. Conducting our discussions within a public forum and inviting outside comments will be a first but one that is welcomed because it will undoubtedly inject new ideas and perspectives. We are a diverse group with regard to age, race, ethnicity and professional background and look forward to receiving outsider feedback to our collective and individual projects. The six artists of ART364B work in a variety of media and with a range of themes but I will leave it to these artists to introduce their work in the coming months. On a final note, a recurring debate amongst the group has been whether we should open our group to new members and guests or remain as the original seven. This discussion brings up issues of exclusivity and diversity as they affect our public image and internal development. My resistance to the inclusion of new members is based on my belief that it will shake up the dynamic and turn it into something other than what we been building over the past five years. I do invite guest appearances and collaborations such as this one with nanomajority.com but question whether it is necessary to expand the group on a permanent basis. I hesitate to share this opinion because it implies a sense of exclusivity that I am certainly aware of but reject it because I firmly believe that the foundation and development of this feminist art collective stems from the meetings of the original seven members. This opportunity for ART364B to appear on nanomajority.com presents a perfect forum to pursue this discussion as a group and for the first time, with others.