Author Archives: Lauren

This week’s upcoming events

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Coming up this week are a few events of interest to us here at For The Birds.

The first is a discussion at Bluestockings on Wednesday entitled Women’s Radical Research, hosted by Kate Angell and Jenna Freedman. The event starts at 7pm, with a $5 suggested donation. According to the Bluestockings calendar:

Join librarians Kate Angell and Jenna Freedman for a look a 10 important resources for fostering your own critical pedagogy, including: zine libraries, open access scholarly journals, and carefully selected websites. Please bring notes about your favorite resources too! Angell is a reference librarian at Sarah Lawrence College and a zine librarian at ABC No Rio. Freedman is a research librarian at Barnard College and the creator of the Lower East Side Librarian zine.

The second is a Support NY benefit show on Thursday at Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn where we will also be tabling! Hope to see some of you there.

featuring:
Aye Nako
The Butts
The Facts We Hate
Hey Baby
Hot Mess
Titfit
Very Okay
and more!
8pm // $6-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
Thursday, October 21 @ Hank’s Saloon, 46 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY

And the grand finale of the week is the SPARK Summit at Hunter College.  This all-day event is designed to push back against the sexualization of girls in the media and will work with girls age 14-22, along with other leaders and activists, to start a grassroots movement. The day will include panels, workshops and other speakers highlighting media literacy, social justice issues, and concrete ways to take action against harmful representations of girls and women in the media. Their roster of panelists is impressive, including members of Feministing.com, Women’s Media Center, Holla Back, Girls for Gender Equity and the American Psychological Association, among others. And if that’s not enough, Geena Davis will also be speaking! You can find out more and register at their website and even participate remotely, for those outside the NYC metropolitan area.

Sparkle Feathers now available to order online!

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In conjunction with this year’s Big She Bang, we’ve put together yet another compilation entitled Sparkle Feathers! If you weren’t able to attend the event and pick up a copy, it is now available for sale through our web store.  Available on CD or cassette!

FTB-004 – Compilation featuring: The Cathy Santonies, Arctic Flowers, Scantron, The Two Funerals, Circuits, Little Lungs, VOG, Teen Wolves, Shellshag, Noun, Surrender, Street Legal, The Missionaries, Black Wine, Caves, Rad Pony, The Last Internationale and Bell’s Roar.

Being a Woman in Music Discussion on NPR

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Recently, NPR asked hundreds of women who work as musicians to fill out a questionnaire about aspects of being women in the music business today.  They’ve published their complete answers online and will be airing a series of pieces on women in music in the coming months.  You can check out everyone’s answers here.

They are currently still accepting answers to the questionnaire, which can be found here.  There are other ways to participate in the conversation, so visit their site for more information!

Feminist Voices in Visual Resistance #2: Feminist Politics in Art Institutions

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Presented in conjunction with their publication Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) hosted a symposium last Friday on Art Institutions and Feminist Politics Now. Through multiple presentations and panel discussions, artists and curators of various specialties started to examine what effect feminist politics and gender specifically have in their work and curatorial practice.  They discussed the political impact of their curatorial choices as feminists, along with the extent to which certain feminist and queer images are silenced within larger art institutions (museums, biennales, art fairs, etc.).

Notable participants included curators Camille Morineau (Musee national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris) Ivet Curlin (What, How & for Whom Collective, Croatia) Catherine Lord (author of the forthcoming Art and Queer Culture, 1885-2005), and Connie Butler (Chief Curator of Drawings at MoMA) along with artist Sonia Khurana, and author Michelle Wallace, among others. Continue reading →

Feminists in Current Visual Resistance

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Kristine Virsis - Alice

Last week I went to an event at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore in lower Manhattan, for the book Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today, based on a traveling exhibition of amazing protest art.  A group of artists included in the book gathered to share their thoughts on making art to promote social justice and global equity.  Despite being a broad survey of issues and voices (the book is incredible), the topics of sexism, reproductive rights, sexual assault, patriarchy, and other similar issues were not very prominent among these images.

While certainly contemporary printmaking addressing these issues does exist, even a recent exhibition of feminist work from The Center for the Study of Political Graphics lacks a significant recent feminist voice, as most of the work is from prior to 1990.  Their collection, Reclaiming the F-word, contains posters addressing so many feminist issues that are still pertinent today, yet most of them weren’t created in the past two decades.

While certain issues may not be as prominent in activist printmaking as they previously were, there are a host of female-identified artists who are using their work, in anywhere from traditional printmaking to flyers and other illustrations, to continue confronting feminist issues in an accessible way.

Just Seeds Collective members such as Kristine Virsis, Favianna Rodriguez, Meredith Stern and Melanie Cervantes, use their prints to address the role of women within resistance movements. Others like For the Birds friends and collaborators Cristy Road and Caroline Paquita are using their art and illustration to tackle gender, sex, and queerness, among other topics. These are just a few of the women I know of who are currently creating accessible feminist art. It would also seem that with a current strengthening of DIY feminist zine culture, there would be a surge in similar image making as well.  I’m looking forward to exploring these topics and posting more often about current feminist visual resistance.

In other For the Birds friend-art news, Tamara Waite-SaintIbanez, who designed last year’s Big She Bang poster, has a solo printed sculpture show coming up in March!  Check out the flyer for details.