Laurie says: I was delighted to be invited to participate in the Huffington Post’s 30 LGBT Artists You Should Know. Now that the piece is up, I’m honored to be in the company they chose. The works include Frida Kahlo, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Hannah Höch, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and 25 other artists. It’s really worth [...]

Laurie says: I posted about this article by Junko Fukazawa when she first wrote to me about it: I just got an email from Junko Fukazawa, who (among other things) writes, curates and gives workshops on feminism and art. She is one of the core of people that I work with on my Women of [...]

Lynne Murray says: I remember the first time I heard someone discuss weight as an external burden on a woman’s body. I was 16 and talking to two acquaintances my own age, one was tall and thin. The other was shorter, quite round and very miserable about a crush she had on a most undeserving [...]

Debbie says: I’ve been back a little more than a week from a ten-day trip to Paris, much of which was spent in art museums. Of course, artistic representations of bodies are everywhere: bodies in painting, bodies in statuary, bodies in sketches. I can’t find any photographs on the web of a piece that particularly [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Whatever you may think of beauty contests, they matter deeply to the people involved in them. They are also a useful way to look at what’s going on in the world, especially the world of conventionally beautiful young women and those who fetishize them. Miss Universe Canada is a separate beauty [...]

Lynne Murray says: When I was discovering poetry in high school, I ran into Amy Lowell’s poetry and fell in love with it. It’s very sensual and my favorite poem of hers Patterns, is almost like a small romantic novel as evokes the interplay between external restrictions on the body imposed by the heroine’s brocade [...]

Laurie says: Zina Saro-Wiwa has made a remarkable  documentary about black women who are “transitioning” — cutting off their chemically straightened hair and embracing their natural kinky afro texture.  Among her previous documentaries is This is My Africa, which was broadcast on HBO This is the link to the terrific and thoughtful video on the [...]

Laurie says: This past Wednesday was the 166th anniversary of the birth of famous Russian jeweler Carl Fabergé, best known for his famous Fabergé eggs, on May 30, 1846. I was lucky enough to see the amazing eggs, carvings and jewelry in the Forbes Museum when I was young and living in New York City. [...]