After three years of social networking with MySpace, For the Birds has called it quits — no big loss, we were crumbling under the weight of spam and ads.  Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook instead!

This month, we re-launched our newsletter, which is now distributed on a monthly basis, and includes For the Birds events, member updates, an ‘Upcoming Events’ section of fun feminist happenings in New York, and even a curated list of ‘Staff Picks’ (this month’s included Kathleen Hanna’s speech at the Planned Parenthood rally and online women’s history publication RE/VISIONIST‘s one year anniversary issue).

If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter, e-mail us at forthebirdscollective@gmail.com!

Big thanks to our friend Amy Leigh of the twelveohtwo zine distro for talking about For the Birds and our efforts on These Things That People Make radio show. Leigh discusses the need for DIY information sharing, community building, and especially, this work in a feminist context.

Twelveohtwo, which has been around for seven years, operates similarly to For the Birds distro, in that Leigh focuses on tabling and does not do mailorder. Leigh says this choice was motivated by the community-building act of physically bringing zines to a space, sharing, and connecting with people; as well as in her own interest not to burn out.

Leigh mentions other really exciting things that occurred from the ’90s onward, girl zine projects, networks, and even zine-making parties. These Things That People Make, a Canadian interview-based radio program, also seems really great judging by its past and upcoming shows. Check it out here! And follow twelveohtwo on Facebook and Twitter.

image courtesy of Huffington Post

Feminist artist & art critic Mira Schor just blogged at the Huffington Post about A Feminist Tea Party‘s “Ask Me, I Will Tell,” a panel that featured Lauren Denitzio of For the Birds, among other feminist creatives. It is a great and hopeful article about feminists artists and art practices now:

This event had personal meaning for me: I’ve been involved with feminism since, as a graduate student, I was a participant in the CalArts Feminist Art Program and its legendary Womanhouse project. But I’ve often felt quite lonely in the intervening years, particularly since the 1990s. Women artists of my own generation remained steadfast in its politics, but young women artists would frequently tell me that feminism wasn’t necessary anymore because everything was fine, there were no more problems, they had every opportunity. Phrases such as “I’m a feminist but,” or “I’m not a feminist artist,” or “I don’t want to be considered as a woman artist” were so frequent as to become a kind of running joke, although it seemed pretty clear that if being considered a feminist or a woman artist was so dangerous that you would avoid it at any cost, then clearly there was still a problem.

But in recent years something has changed. Crocuses are blooming through the snow cover in the winter garden. Younger women again seem to be interested in feminism. They have entered an art world and art education influenced by conceptual art and others 1960s and 70s movements and by more recent movements such as Relational Aesthetics that encourage the construction of sociality and community as art and where more fluid art identifications pertain: artists feel free to draw on performance art, data presentation, political analysis, and traditional crafts, and to shift from showing in high art spaces to working in situations located outside the artworld.

Be sure to check out the full article, with a nod to our Bird Lauren, here!

Gene Beery, “Untitled (We still have wild birds here),” 1994 at White Columns’ 5th Annual: ‘LOOKING BACK.’