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And Blogposts can be found at:
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Saturday, June 25, 2016
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Art Rock
I'm excited to be participating in Portland Community College's Visual Arts Fair: Art Rock.
This Monday, May 16, 10 am-2 pm, Mike McGovern and I will be leading a collaborative printmaking demo and workshop. Come get your hands dirty and make some prints with us!
Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
17705 NW Springville Rd, Portland, OR 97229
Free and open to the public!
This Monday, May 16, 10 am-2 pm, Mike McGovern and I will be leading a collaborative printmaking demo and workshop. Come get your hands dirty and make some prints with us!
Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus
17705 NW Springville Rd, Portland, OR 97229
Free and open to the public!
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Print Print Print!
Southern Graphics Council International is having their annual conference in Portland this year: Flux Portland, and the city is full of amazing prints and shows and happenings!
I've got a couple of pieces on view around town.
I'm thrilled to be a part of the fantastic Print Portfolio:
My Rules, curated by Mike McGovern
The piece below is on view at PCC Sylvania
I've got a couple of pieces on view around town.
I have this brand new piece up at the Trayle Studio Print Show
There will be a little opening this Friday if you'd like to pop by.
In this Metaphor, I am the Tree of Singing Birds
Polyester Plate Lithograph with Watercolor
My Rules, curated by Mike McGovern
The piece below is on view at PCC Sylvania
The Ghost Ship
Polyester Plate Lithograph with Watercolor
. . . . .
Check out all of SGC International's Flux PDX events here: http://sgciportland.com/
#sgci #sgci2016 #fluxpdx
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
This is what happened in the studio today. I wasn't expecting it. I went to the studio to put some finishing touches on a piece I'm making for an upcoming print show, but I was feeling unsettled: rattled, sad... I just couldn't finish the piece I had in my head. My heart had other plans.
The news gets inside us, permeates everything. Feeling the shock and horror with Brussels today.
The news gets inside us, permeates everything. Feeling the shock and horror with Brussels today.
Three Days of Mourning
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
On Artmaking, Feminism, and Intimacy
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about feminism, art, and intimacy, how their roles and influences tangle and intertwine—partially through conversations with a dear friend with whom I share a deep kinship in these realms. She is a fellow philosopher-poet of the arts (and she happens to be a brilliant art historian**)
There is, we concluded, a crisis of intimacy. Not just an intimacy breech, she said, but a crisis of intimacy. This is as relevant in the personal as it is in the political.
This is how it is.
I had a conversation with an intimate recently wherein they were baffled how our personal conflict became became a conflict of politics... but how could it be otherwise? The intimate is political. The political is intimate. There is no deep feminism that does not embody both. Culturally, we seem to have not yet learned this; we have not yet figured out how to inhabit it, how to breathe within it.
Those of us trying to span the gap are suffering its loneliness.
This statement is equal parts personal and political.
When did we extricate the two from each other? When did the abstraction, the academizing make us lose sight of the fact that these are the stories of one or a million female bodies, their rights to themselves, their lives... ourselves, our lives? My face, my fat, my muscle and bone, my wrinkles, my biceps, my knees, my thighs and [the countless articles and online discussions about] the gap that does or does not belong between them, the cubic feet of space that my body inhabits, this belongs to me. Embracing ownership of it is a political act, and the politicizing of that body, my body, can be nothing but deeply personal.
Tina Fey said, in Bossypants, that the definition of crazy as it applies to show business, is "a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore."
We make ourselves smaller. We contain and hedge in our depths; we do not fully inhabit all of our space. We are the bridges slung low and heavy across the canyon. We hold tight to both sides, stretch ourselves taut. We remind ourselves and each other to be narrower and narrower; we should recede into the distance when viewed from either side. We string ourselves between worlds, between realities, for the aesthetics, for the poetics. Our ribs are the planks and we make ourselves ever smaller.
This is our crisis of intimacy.
Reproductive rights, women's suffrage, domestic violence, fair pay, rights to own land... these battlefields are only expansions of the struggles of individuals, the singular and particular life of any one woman, her body, her work, her marriage, her home, her grief, her joy.
The stories we tell in word and image, of power dynamics, of relationship, of microaggressions and transgressions, of grief and loss and joy, the stories and mythologies, the symbologies and metaphors that we build and weave together, these stories are political.
How and if we choose to share our stories is a political act. That fact is inescapable. Silence bellows as loud as what is spoken... or cried... or shouted.
The edges of this is something I have always intuited, as my own work weaves threads of intimacy and personal narrative within broader pictures of cultural place and meaning-making, but this new view, this deepening of my understanding of the mythology, this putting words to it—building narrative in community, it ignites a new spark of understanding, of curiosity, a new desire to parse it out, a new pull to allow myself to reach wider, grow deeper, set loose some of my containment.
It makes the wind of the canyon sound a little more like song.
It makes me feel just ever-so-slightly more brave.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
** I am not the kind of person who uses the term brilliant lightly. Seriously, you should check out her work. I'm pretty excited about this upcoming exhibition she curated for Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University:
For Myself: Nudes by Imogen Cunningham, 1906-1939
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Self-portrait, 1906, silver gelatin print, 18 x 14”, collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Ore. A gift of the Department of Art History at Willamette University in Honor of the Class of 2015, 2015.032.
There is, we concluded, a crisis of intimacy. Not just an intimacy breech, she said, but a crisis of intimacy. This is as relevant in the personal as it is in the political.
This is how it is.
I had a conversation with an intimate recently wherein they were baffled how our personal conflict became became a conflict of politics... but how could it be otherwise? The intimate is political. The political is intimate. There is no deep feminism that does not embody both. Culturally, we seem to have not yet learned this; we have not yet figured out how to inhabit it, how to breathe within it.
Those of us trying to span the gap are suffering its loneliness.
This statement is equal parts personal and political.
When did we extricate the two from each other? When did the abstraction, the academizing make us lose sight of the fact that these are the stories of one or a million female bodies, their rights to themselves, their lives... ourselves, our lives? My face, my fat, my muscle and bone, my wrinkles, my biceps, my knees, my thighs and [the countless articles and online discussions about] the gap that does or does not belong between them, the cubic feet of space that my body inhabits, this belongs to me. Embracing ownership of it is a political act, and the politicizing of that body, my body, can be nothing but deeply personal.
Tina Fey said, in Bossypants, that the definition of crazy as it applies to show business, is "a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore."
We make ourselves smaller. We contain and hedge in our depths; we do not fully inhabit all of our space. We are the bridges slung low and heavy across the canyon. We hold tight to both sides, stretch ourselves taut. We remind ourselves and each other to be narrower and narrower; we should recede into the distance when viewed from either side. We string ourselves between worlds, between realities, for the aesthetics, for the poetics. Our ribs are the planks and we make ourselves ever smaller.
This is our crisis of intimacy.
Reproductive rights, women's suffrage, domestic violence, fair pay, rights to own land... these battlefields are only expansions of the struggles of individuals, the singular and particular life of any one woman, her body, her work, her marriage, her home, her grief, her joy.
The stories we tell in word and image, of power dynamics, of relationship, of microaggressions and transgressions, of grief and loss and joy, the stories and mythologies, the symbologies and metaphors that we build and weave together, these stories are political.
How and if we choose to share our stories is a political act. That fact is inescapable. Silence bellows as loud as what is spoken... or cried... or shouted.
The edges of this is something I have always intuited, as my own work weaves threads of intimacy and personal narrative within broader pictures of cultural place and meaning-making, but this new view, this deepening of my understanding of the mythology, this putting words to it—building narrative in community, it ignites a new spark of understanding, of curiosity, a new desire to parse it out, a new pull to allow myself to reach wider, grow deeper, set loose some of my containment.
It makes the wind of the canyon sound a little more like song.
It makes me feel just ever-so-slightly more brave.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
** I am not the kind of person who uses the term brilliant lightly. Seriously, you should check out her work. I'm pretty excited about this upcoming exhibition she curated for Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University:
For Myself: Nudes by Imogen Cunningham, 1906-1939
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Self-portrait, 1906, silver gelatin print, 18 x 14”, collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Ore. A gift of the Department of Art History at Willamette University in Honor of the Class of 2015, 2015.032.
Friday, January 22, 2016
Big News!
I am thrilled to announce that my dear friend and fellow artist Michelle Daly and I will be having an exhibition together this fall in Massachusetts!
September 29-October 23, 2016
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Details to follow.
For now, follow our postcard project on instagram @toobeautifultokeep
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
On Compensation and Love
Today I opened my email to find this letter from Portland Art Museum inviting artists to paint pianos for an upcoming exhibition.
"This is purely a labor of love." It was almost refreshing in its honesty, in its accidental revelation of what many arts institutions have come to expect of us, the artists they claim to represent. The Portland Art Museum has an annual operating budget in the $15-20 million range. In 2013 (the most recent annual report I could get my hands on), 3% of that budget went to art acquisition, and it's a pretty fair bet that a significantly smaller percentage than that landed directly in the hands of the artists themselves.
I am not trying to single out the Portland Art Museum per se, but I wonder where our priorities lie that this is the accepted norm, the reasonable expectation of artist involvement. I wonder what exactly this proposed labor of love would be in service of. The truth is, I'd love to be involved in this project: it tugs all the right heartstrings: community engagement, arts for underserved populations, art in public spaces. I've seen these pianos around, and I love them. It is also true that I make work for free all of the time. My work is, indeed, a labor of love... but when that labor of love becomes simply free labor in service of a system that exploits artists for profit, when it fuels a capitalistic art market—one that, as an aside, last night brought the highest ticket sale of a work of art to date at a Christie's auction ($160 million for Picasso's Women of Algiers)—it becomes expressly exploitative.
But I'm not sure that even that is what's getting to me the most.
I think it is this, the thing that has kept it nagging and tugging at my mind all day: Why are compensation and love somehow mutually exclusive? Why should we not put our blood sweat and tears into the things we love and also be compensated for those efforts? Have we, when I wasn't looking, all mutually agreed upon this operating procedure? Should there be no support, no exchange, no return for those who are working in service of something that they love? What does this say of the tortured artist trope? The martyr? I try to—and am honored to—give of myself wholly and freely to whom and what I love, but I don't want to give more than I can, get nothing in return. It is not in anyone's best interest when energy flows only in one direction. We need exchange in order to thrive. In short, I think we—all of us—need compensation for our work.
So, no. Thank you for the invitation, but I will not be painting a piano for you this time. Maybe it's time we all stop offering up our services for free and start valuing that labor of love.
I'm familiar with the partnering organization and am a fan of what they do, so I inquired further— namely, I asked about compensation.
Here is the response I got, verbatim, and in its entirety:
I am an artist, and I am accustomed to such requests. I am also intimately familiar with Portland Art Museum's at times less than stellar history when it comes to ethical engagement with local artists and the local arts world. Still, this response landed beyond the bounds of what I have been conditioned to expect. There was no half-hearted apology citing budgetary concerns, or promises of 'exposure' and 'opportunity' (whatever that amounts to). There was simply an assertion that my love should be enough.$0.00This is purely a labor of love.
"This is purely a labor of love." It was almost refreshing in its honesty, in its accidental revelation of what many arts institutions have come to expect of us, the artists they claim to represent. The Portland Art Museum has an annual operating budget in the $15-20 million range. In 2013 (the most recent annual report I could get my hands on), 3% of that budget went to art acquisition, and it's a pretty fair bet that a significantly smaller percentage than that landed directly in the hands of the artists themselves.
I am not trying to single out the Portland Art Museum per se, but I wonder where our priorities lie that this is the accepted norm, the reasonable expectation of artist involvement. I wonder what exactly this proposed labor of love would be in service of. The truth is, I'd love to be involved in this project: it tugs all the right heartstrings: community engagement, arts for underserved populations, art in public spaces. I've seen these pianos around, and I love them. It is also true that I make work for free all of the time. My work is, indeed, a labor of love... but when that labor of love becomes simply free labor in service of a system that exploits artists for profit, when it fuels a capitalistic art market—one that, as an aside, last night brought the highest ticket sale of a work of art to date at a Christie's auction ($160 million for Picasso's Women of Algiers)—it becomes expressly exploitative.
But I'm not sure that even that is what's getting to me the most.
I think it is this, the thing that has kept it nagging and tugging at my mind all day: Why are compensation and love somehow mutually exclusive? Why should we not put our blood sweat and tears into the things we love and also be compensated for those efforts? Have we, when I wasn't looking, all mutually agreed upon this operating procedure? Should there be no support, no exchange, no return for those who are working in service of something that they love? What does this say of the tortured artist trope? The martyr? I try to—and am honored to—give of myself wholly and freely to whom and what I love, but I don't want to give more than I can, get nothing in return. It is not in anyone's best interest when energy flows only in one direction. We need exchange in order to thrive. In short, I think we—all of us—need compensation for our work.
So, no. Thank you for the invitation, but I will not be painting a piano for you this time. Maybe it's time we all stop offering up our services for free and start valuing that labor of love.
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