Tag Archives: Women’s Caucus of the Arts

My Photos in Transforming Community – Disability Exhibition

Laurie says:

I am very happy to have 2 photos in the Transforming Community: Disability, Diversity and Access exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery in New York City.

It takes place during the 2015 Women’s Caucus of the Arts National Conference, which explores access and difference in its many forms. It runs from February 7th to the 22nd.

Quote is from the WCA exhibition information:

Disability challenges all facets of art and its accessibility: experiencing art, art education, interacting with art(ists), and art making. What are new ways of seeing, hearing, experiencing, and witnessing artwork? In the past, disability has functioned as a metaphor to signify tragedy, injury, oppression, and lack. Disabled people in representation held the space of the plucky survivor, the trickster figure, and the liminal shadow. In more recent decades, different perspectives with different cultural frameworks are emerging in the broader community.
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Kim Manri
Kim Manri was photographed in her studio. She is the director of Taihen, a famous Japanese disability dance and performance company. I photographed her a part of my Women of Japan Project.

How do artists find space, time and audiences for expressing artful differences, whether these differences be physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory? How do forms of difference encourage new connections, new conceptions of what it means to be alive, to be in community, to be alone, to be part of the wider world? How do different experiences of the world re-shape what art can mean? How do conceptions of race, gender, class, settler/native status, and sexuality become more powerfully expressed when combined with disability or vice versa? We welcome engagement on this topic under the widest possible umbrella.”
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Edison_Sue H
Sue H was an activist on issues of Fat Liberation and disability when I photographed her for my book Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes.

The juror was Petra Kupers, a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan, who has written illuminatingly on these issues.

This broad and nuanced conversation about disability is very important to me and to my work (the photographs span from 1994 to 2005), and exhibitions like this happen all too rarely. So I am especially glad that my work is part of it.

My Work in US/Chinese Feminist Exhibition

Laurie Says:

I wrote a few days ago about the US/Chinese feminist exhibition Half The Sky: Intersections of Social Practice Art in Shenyang, China at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts. It runs from April 15th to the 30th.

As I said, I’m delighted to be in the exhibition. The catlogue is beautiful and the reproduction of my photograph of Fumiko Nakmura is excellent. And my photo is also one of the art works featured on the back cover.

The post last week focused on the work of three of the Chinese women. See these two previous posts for far more about the story of the exhibition.

Today I want to focus on work by three US women, including my own. There are a number of installation works, so you may want to check the Women’s Caucus of the Arts gallery page and explore it.

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Nahamura Fumiko

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I met Fumiko Nakamura through Okinawa Women Act Against [US} Military Violence, who sponsored me there when I was working on my Women of Japan project. In my Women of Japan work, I combine my artistic sensibility with my commitment to capture the person in the photograph: cultural, personal, environmental, and physical cues, what is and is not said or communicated. Centrally, I collaborate with the person in the photograph, who makes many aesthetic choices. Combined with extensive community work, this approach encourages communication across cultural boundaries.

Fumiko Nakamura, filmmaker and peace activist, retired after 40 years as a school teacher to found non-profit Ichi Feet to document the horrors of the battle of Okinawa and the subsequent suffering.

Brenda Oelbaum

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BrendaO_orig..

How can we women hold up our half the sky if we are busy worrying about the numbers on a scale? “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.” – Naomi Wolff. There is so much hysteria about fat that women today in the United States obsess about their bodies and what they eat to the tune of 66 billion dollars a year. Dieting is not only counterproductive, making a dieter’s body better at storing fat, but it also dulls the mind so that we have little energy to do more than count calories. How can we hold up our half of the sky when we are busy worrying about the numbers on a scale? Scales are for fish!”

Suzanne Beutler

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hts1_orig

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In my India series of paintings, I used information from pictures I took in Pune and Bangalore, India.  I have scenes of homeless people in makeshift shelters by the side of the road, along with Rotarian supported schools where I took pictures of enthusiastic students.  I believe education is the hope for the many poor in India.  I plan to show this hope with the school children in juxtaposition to the street scenes.

The conjunction of the US and the Chinese work should be fascinating. I wish I could be there.