Musings

I recently subscribed to Maria Popova's Brainpickings newsletter. I highly recommend checking it out. Every Sunday, a thoughtful newsletter comes out that is well worth a read.

This week, Maria Popova came out with an essay "Rebecca Solnit on Breaking Silence as Our Mightiest Weapon Against Oppression." In the meditation about silence and society, this quotation really spoke to me: "The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It’s how we make the world." It reminded me a lot of what this project and other oral histories are about. It's about reclaiming a silenced history, bringing it out into the open, celebrating and shouting to everyone about it. I guess I need to go read some more Rebecca Solnit.

Other news this week: I had the privilege of hearing the incredible Shirin Neshat speak at the MCA. She gave a short lecture, showed a recent video piece she made, and then did a QA.

A few choice quotations (a little bit of paraphrasing): 

When talking about her choice of myriad mediums including photography, video, film, and even more recently opera, she explained: "I like being a beginner. I like the struggle. I like learning new languages...My strength is to constantly experiment." This was like music to my ears. I constantly like to learn new things myself and I feel she encapsulated how I feel about it. Not that everything is smooth going, there's a lot of bumps when learning something new, but the joy in discovery is a constant.

She also noted: "Poetry is subversive, yet a universal language for Iran." I like this idea of poetry, not just in the context of Iran. There's a lot that can be said in poetry that may not be easily said elsewhere. But there's a universality to poetry that we sometimes forget. We had the storytellers who were poets that were the public entertainment going back 1000s of years. Now, poetry sometimes is seen as very distant from the ordinary experience but that's not true. Music is a manifestation of poetry, words accompanied by melody and harmonies. 

Anyway, just some early April musings. 

Also, a reminder that my Kickstarter for the literary journal The Antelope Magazine is still running. It's a journal of oral history and mayhem! Help support it today! 

That's all for now.

Backstory

It keeps going... Yesterday, I completed 61 interviews. I had the absolute pleasure of meeting Edra Soto, conceptual artist and co-founder of the amazing gallery The Franklin. She was so incredibly generous with her time, showing me the gallery and walking me through her work. I am so lucky. I have only a few more interviews before it's time to get busy editing the book and working on getting it published. Almost done interviewing...

It's been a while since I've last posted. It's been a very busy few weeks for me. For the fourth year, I've been interviewing people for the Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire at Schurz High School. For those of you unfamiliar with a maker faire, think DIY with technology in a festival format. People come and talk about the amazing things they do and teach it to you.  Think 3D printers, robots, drones, electronics, crafts, and so much more. Back in 2013, my best friend, Christina Pei, asked me to help interview makers for the faire. I've been so lucky to interview people at makerspaces across Chicago, the STEM Teen Program at the Adler Planetarium, Tinkering Lab at the Chicago Children's Museum, teachers at the Schurz High School, Chicago Public Library YOUMedia and so much more.

It was tricky at first since I hadn't interviewed people before. I had to learn about what people were doing and talk to them either in person or more often on the phone. And I loved it. I realized it was so much fun talking about the amazing things they do. It gave me the confidence to do something like this project. Without this project of Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire, I really don't know if I would have been able to do all of this. So I want to tip my hat to Christina and the Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire. 

You can read more about the Faire here (along with many of my interviews): makerfairechicagonorthside.com

Interview 58

It's been an exciting week! I completed the 58th interview last Tuesday with Petra Bachmaier of Luftwerk. Have you had a chance to check out solarise at the Garfield Conservatory? I highly recommend seeing it. They have several incredible installations inside and outside the facility. Portal is probably one of the most sublime pieces I've ever seen. solarise is up until the end of September 2016.

I know I've mentioned this before but one of my favorite writers and participants for this project, Lucy Knisley, is releasing a book in May. The trailer that she created is here: http://lucyknisley.tumblr.com/post/141902628439/the-new-animated-book-trailer-for-something-new

I also checked out Nora Moore Lloyd's work at the Thompson Center. The week long exhibition on Native American art was really lovely. Congratulations to Nora!

Joyce Owens, painter and sculptor, will be showing some of her constructions at Gallery Guichard in Bronzeville and the Cultivator Gallery in Ravenswood this month.

That's all for now!

Conversation with Krista Franklin

I met with the incredible Krista Franklin back in July. I asked Krista Franklin to describe her work. She described it as  “pretty diverse. Visual artist, poet, sometimes performer (mostly around the poetry or poetics, papermaker...visual art includes papermaking, collage, letterpress, [and] sometimes bookmaking every blue moon.” She is also the writer of the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books), and most recently Killing Floor (Amparan). She also held a position of artist-in-residence with Arts and Public Life/Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator.

I asked her what drew her to collage in particular. She explained: “I can draw but I’m not the best drawer. So it was a natural response for me to use magazines to get the most realistic image that I wanted to have. So that’s what led me to it; the idea [of having] things look as realistic as possible, [but] not being able to render them myself. So [it was about] figuring out ways to snatch the ideas I needed in a direct kind of way.”

I asked about her use of media, including photos. She told me, “That’s evolved over time. My initial impulse was to have a realistic image…I have before used a lot of antique photographs in my work especially in the early phases…I was using a great deal of antique photographs of people of color... As well as popular culture figures who have passed away that I had [a] deep appreciation and admiration of… I was using their iconic faces or iconic histories to pull at things and to herald them… Much of my early work especially dealt with pulling from the ideas and theories of the Black Arts Movement in particular, and how people of color (specifically black people in this country and across the globe) have been represented in very insidious ways. What I sought to do with my art, particularly visual art in this case, was to create images that would resist those ideas, that were antagonistic [to] those ideas, that showed us the way I saw us: as full, human, beautiful, complex, and worthy [of being] loved…

“We Wear the Mask is a recent series for me, particularly about women...There’s a lot of things happening... I became very interested in Afro-Surrealism in the past three years...I wanted to push the envelope of my collage [practice] into the surreal realm, to play with the idea of disruption and [the] idea of the full imagined space from the weird way my brain works. I was thinking [about] a lot of ways in which women are seen as dangerous, gold diggers, dangerous creatures. I wanted to pull and play with some of those concepts, blending the female body with animal, plant, other organic spaces in the world, fusing those all together. The ideas that I was getting at had to do with negative perceptions placed on women by history, which ultimately lead to misogyny and violence against us, seeing us as somehow tricky or slick. I wanted to push the envelope about that around the [woman] body.

"So the title, of course, is taken from [the] Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem, [a] very famous poet. He’s from the same city I was born (Dayton, OH). His house is there, it’s a historical monument. So also [I’m] tipping my hat to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s [idea] of wearing masks to survive in the world as a person of color... and [how it] plays out as a woman of color, as a woman in the world in my experience.”

That’s just a small section of a wonderful interview. To check out Krista Franklin’s work, go to her website: http://www.kristafranklin.com/