Conversation with Iwona Biedermann

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk to Iwona Biedermann, photographer and owner of DreamBox Foto Studio and DreamBox Gallery in Bucktown. We met in her gallery amidst her current show of Irena Siwek’s incredible ink drawings and paintings. When I got to the gallery, she had taken out several of her photographs from her various series. I was astonished by the depth of her photos from the inner lives of nuns to an old Jewish cemetery in Monologue of the Lens. She also had amazing portraits of children and  piano playing veteran with one arm. Her work gives me chills.

My first question to her was what drew her to photography. Her response blew me away: “Photography communicates, connects, and reveals. It is a universal language. I was drawn to it from the beginning when I got my first camera… Photography became my melody. I follow the sound of each frame and the rhythm for me is like the language of poetry  Photography  is very close to reality. It collects memories. Memory gives a sense of place where we are and where we belong. Photography is an extension of my understanding and connector of the world around me.”

Her work has concentrated on religious communities in the US and Poland. We talked about her incredible series Beyond the Veil about nuns living in a convent. She talked about how she was in Krakow and saw a nun standing by the old cathedral holding large keys. She took two photos and was “intrigued by it.” During that time, she was asked to photograph at one convent.  Iwona Biedermann felt that she had begun the project before she really knew it. She became fascinated by the story and asked the Polish Museum of America for an exhibition. The Museum facilitated connections with different orders since it was necessary to gain access to these worlds. She also began collaborating with Laura Husar on the project.The best way she got to know them was to live in the convents for several days. She described, “It’s a vanishing world. The number of nuns is growing smaller and they are growing older.” She also explained, "I saw them as women who made a choice to serve God by serving others through contemplation and action.” It’s truly a magnificent series. She manages to convey the beauty and fragility of the world. She focuses on a rosary here, a group of nuns playing cards there.

Iwona Biedermann talked about another incredible series Coptics in Chicago, which is a series of photographs about Coptic baptisms in Lake Michigan. The series started when she happened to come across upon a baptism when she was walking along the lake.  Coptics from all over the midwest meet early in the morning before sunrise for the ritual every year. One challenge with the project was gaining the trust of the community since she was not approaching it from documentary standpoint. Now, she says that if she doesn’t make it, they miss her. She believes, “It’s a beautiful ancient ritual… We are all born of water. The symbol of water is something I’m really interested in. Water is a subject that I come back to.”

In addition to her own work, she runs DreamBox Gallery and DreamBox Foto Studio. She told me that the idea came to her in dream. It was a place where she lived and worked. She registered the name at City Hall in that very week. DreamBox Gallery and Foto Studio opened up in 2003. The Gallery shares the space with the coffee  house Cup & Spoon  since 2014 and collaborate under the name WOW Frequency. They have poetry events, open mics, and much more.  The mission “to provide alternative exhibition space for emerging and established artists in Chicago. The mission is to create, inspire, and be inspired by cultural links between artists and their creative currency. Word. Image. Idea.” It’s a wonderful asset to the neighborhood and the city.

You’ll have to check out her work at the website: http://www.iwonabiedermannphotography.com/

The current exhibition by Irena Siwek has been extended to June 30th so you should definitely check it out! http://2014.dreamboxgallery.com/

Interview with Rebecca Wolfram

This past week, I met Rebecca Wolfram, a prolific painter and curator of the “The Museum of Objects Left on the Sidewalk.” Several of her paintings depict a variety of violence perpetrated by humans against one another and even against animals. I asked her about this choice to depict these activities. She told me this absolutely incredible story about the origin of her series “We Are Capable People,” that depicts the dark side of human activity. She told me: “ “One night, I was walking along and there were these two guys. One was down on the sidewalk and the other one was over him ready to smash him. They were fighting... And so, I kinda froze and I said something like: ‘Is everything okay?’ trying to intervene a little bit. The one who was ready to pop the other one, he turned to me, very savage, he looked very bestial and savage, almost drooling, and he says, ‘We are capable people here! We don’t need your help. We are capable people here.’ Okay...So I backed off. But I loved what he said. That’s what it means to me. We are capable people. Yeah, what are we capable of?” What an incredible story.

We also talked about her series of drawings and paintings of dead rats. She told me that “People really respond to them. Some people hate them.” The inspiration behind the series originated when she came across a dead rat in the snow, “almost iridescent cause it was rotting.” It struck her that this was a living creature so she drew a picture of it. “People treat this rat like it’s garbage. They don’t treat all animals like garbage. It’s certain rats, especially rats, are just treated like garbage. People hate rats. ‘Just kill them. Get rid of them.’ Disrespect them completely. Yet, it’s common knowledge that rats are very intelligent…” The distinction between rats and other reviled creatures and beloved creatures seems so arbitrary. When she sees a dead rat, she feels compelled doing a drawing of in her sketchbook. This remarkable series of painting and drawings is giving dignity to the animal and its death.

Inside her home, Rebecca Wolfram also showed me some incredible wooden sculptures that she built from found wood. One was human sized person that originated when she found a discarded accordion folder. Now it serves as the guts of this beautifully painted sculpture. The outside is painted like skin, while the inside shows the internal organs.  She showed me a painted wooden dog on a skateboard that had began when she found a piece of wood that looked like a dog’s head. Very neat!

I asked about “The Museum of Objects Left on the Sidewalk.” The museum started in 2005 when she found some items to display. She found it irritating to see garbage just thrown on the street. She had the inspiration to put exhibits of the things found on the streets. She aptly said, “When you make something an exhibit, suddenly it takes on a quality of specialness.” She found some a headboard from a bed from the alley and put it on the fence and put exhibits up. She told me, “It was a big hit.” People in the neighborhood would contribute things; she made labels with her next door neighbor's’ kids. Over time, things began to decay. A few years ago, she and a neighbor built some solid shelves that are still there today.

Wolfram explained that the museum has become sort of a landmark in the neighborhood. She was surprised that everyone knew about the museum. Initially, she didn’t think of it as art project. She thought of it as “a museum, a community museum of stuff on the sidewalk.” Some of the more unusual things left included a dead lizard, a beautiful wooden box of sea shells and polished glass, and a shark made from hanger wire. Wolfram also talked about how proud people are about the things they contribute to the museum.A wooden plaque of a beautiful bird was one day left in the museum. Later, she got a visit from two ladies who wanted her to know that they had left it for the museum. People take a special pride in it.

At the end of my visit, I got a lovely guided tour of the Museum. She showed me a man’s grey/brown shoe that had been in the museum for awhile. Then it disappeared one day and then reappeared. There was a small drawing that she had done of the shoe above it. Two boots had dirt and plants growing out of them. The two Frida Kahlo paintings that had been placed there a week ago had disappeared since the morning. Alas. That’s how the museum goes. I decided that I had to contribute something to the Museum. I had a John Hancock Swizzle stick in my bag that I offered up as tribute to this wonderful museum.

Check out  her work at her website: http://benigngirl.org/

Conversation with Lyra Hill with Bonus Workshop!

This past week, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Lyra Hill and to participate in a workshop by her and her MCA students at the Zine Fest. Lyra Hill wears many hats; she’s a cartoonist, filmmaker, and performer. She was the founder and curator of Brain Frame, a performance comic series that ran for three years. While I did not have the pleasure of attending Brain Frame, it was a wonderful artistic experiment. Lyra Hill served as curator, performer, promoter, bookkeeper and so much more for the show.

As a performer, her work evolved as the show went on. For the first Brain Frame, she started to think about adding props, lights, and more to enhance the comics. One of the first stories she performed was about a breakup that she wanted to impart the discomfort of it to the audience. She had an audience member read her ex-boyfriends part, incriminating the entire  audience in her story. That was only the start.  In Brain Frame 2, she debuted her Llama Man character where she dressed up as this “evil child stealing force” from her nightmares in a terrifying costume. She was 10 feet tall on stilts. She spoke in a menacing, sometimes undecipherable voice that went along with her projected comics. This performance really helped up the ante of Brain Frame. Overall, she worked to encourage people to push themselves and try new things by example. She’d push herself even harder and faster as a way to support others’ exploration of their work. Some of her performances were “ramshackle” (her words) but have become more polished over time.

As the curator, the best part was working with the artists. For her, it was important that at least half of the performers be women, which was hard at first. She found that many women were reticent or nervous at first; however, towards the end, more and more women submitted pieces and eventually outnumbered men in performances. Overall, Lyra Hill wanted Brain Frame to “constantly expand… the idea of what could be comics or could be related to comics.” People really responded to it. Collectives, groups and collaboratives, were formed from Brain Frame performances such as Pup House, a shadow puppet group, and more. She had a saying for her performers: “It's better try something crazy and fail, then succeed at something boring." I can certainly tip my hat at that.

In addition to her work at Brain Frame, Lyra Hill is also an experimental filmmaker. She had always loved movies but she hadn’t taken courses in film or comics until college. She just fell in love with experimental film. She learned to work with 16 mm film, which she called “a highly technically, unwieldy, otherworldly spectral experience.” One of her films, Uzi’s Party, shot on 16mm film, is debuting this week. The film is about teenager party where a Ouija game has a supernatural surprise. It’s part teen comedy and horror with an experimental twist. Check it out at 7pm on Friday May 15th.  More details here: http://cuff.org/program/ I’m bummed that I won’t make it but you should go.

In addition to our conversation, I was able to attend a workshop that she ran at Zine Fest at Plumber’s Hall on Washington Avenue, in the same week. She and her students at the MCA ran the workshop called “Horrormones: Performing Coming-of-Age Comics with the Teen Creative Agency.” The idea was to create a comic to perform in an hour as a group. It was tremendous fun. Lyra Hill’s students from the MCA teen program drove the session. We had four possible groups to join, each with their own theme. There groups were: Romance, Changes, Cliques, and Hormones. We chose the group that we wanted to work in so there were about 6-8 people in each, I’m fairly certain I was the oldest in my group by a decade but that was fine. It was neat to work with teenagers. In groups, we each talked about our life and how it related to the theme. We then drew our story on one or more clear plastic slides with a frame, like a comic frame. Then we had to combine the stories into one long story and develop a performance. It was tremendous fun.

The end result was wonderfully messy and inspired. The four groups did their piece very differently. One combined the stories as images in three acts. Another group presented theirs as a series of short stories one right after another. We combined our stories based on age (kindergarten to high school) and ended on a high note about transcending cliques. It was really thrilling! Kudos to Lyra Hill and her amazing teens for running the session.

I look forward to seeing the new films, comics and other performances of Lyra Hill in the future!

Ten Books by Women that Stayed

Several months ago, there was a literature meme making the rounds on the internet. Folks were asked to list 10 books off the bat that impacted their life. It was supposed to be quick and dirty. This wasn’t about showing off. It was just putting books down that stick with you.

I was reading a fantastic post on Melissa Potter’s Gender Assignment blog about the meme. She found that the majority of books mentioned were by men. So she decided to list 10 books all by women in response. Other writers did the same. So I decided that I had to contribute my list of 10 books. It was hard at first but then it became really easy when I thought about books that shaped me as a person. So here’s my list in no particular order:

1.     The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

2.     Relish, Lucy Knisley

3.     God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

4.     A River Sutra, Gita Mehta

5.     House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

6.     The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

7.     Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

8.     Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

9.     Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Marla Semple

10.  Persepolis, Marhane Satrapi

11.  Bonus: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” – This was one of the hardest articles to read but I seem to keep returning to it.

Check out her post here: http://genderassignment.tumblr.com/post/97607356625/a-feminist-response-to-list-ten-books-that-stayed

And speaking of Sandra Cisneros, there is an exhibition inspired by her work at the National Museum of Mexican Art. I have yet to go but I will soon. Check it out here: http://www.nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/exhibits/house-mango-street-artists-interpret-community

Conversation with Melissa Potter

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of talking with Melissa Potter, mixed media artist and Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago.  Her work explores gender, feminism, untold personal stories, and so much more. I met Melissa Potter at Out of Site’s “On Occasion Public Performance Think Tank” in February 2015.  In her lecture “Kings, Queens and Hard-core Normcores: Gender as Performance” she talked about her multi-faceted work “Gender Assignment.” In the workshop, participants took Dr. Sandra BEM’s Sex Role Inventory test measuring masculine and feminine characteristics. In the course of this project, she administered about 300-400 tests. You can read the results of the work here:

http://genderassignment.tumblr.com/post/62096800028/all-good-gender-assignments-must-come-to-an-end

The finds have fueled additional work, projects and so much more. She has a blog by the same name that talks about her research in former Yugoslavia, gender performances, and much more. She also interviews feminist artists, and many others and writes about them. It’s pretty fantastic; you can easily spend hours on it. In her work, she makes the important point about how we have to move away from the gender binary and be more inclusive about how we think about gender. We talked about the performative aspects of gender, a topic she explores in various ways in her research and work in countries in the former Yugoslavia.

 As part of Melissa Potter’s work on Gender Assignment, she researched, filmed, and directed What Other Girls Do, focusing on a Montenegro tradition of “sworn virgins” where women live as men in villages. She juxtaposed the Stana Cerović’s story with the lives of five women in Belgrade, Serbia, exploring how they think about themselves with relation to gender and relationships. The juxtaposition really supports this idea as gender as performance. One of the subjects was a street artist known as TKV. Melissa Potter became acquainted with her when she came across a Virginia Wolff quotation in a street art piece signed by TKV, which was serendipitous to her life. She did some research and learned about her, who is starting to get more fame. The documentary is really interesting; I highly recommend it. Find out more here: http://www.melpotter.com/index/#/like-other-girls-do/

Continuing our conversation about gender as performance, we talked about her piece “Boy Brides and Bachelors.” She talked about how she came to film an old pagan ritual in Serbia on a lark. During the course of the filming, she discovered that it was a huge gendered performance.  Men were dressing up as women and engaging in fake sexual acts on the streets. However, she noted that women weren’t included in this ritual.  Check out the short film here: http://www.melpotter.com/index/#/boy-brides-bachelors/ 

We also talked about her work in papermaking. She described it as “socially engaged art form. It’s a handicraft… It’s locational. I’ve been obsessed with working with plants from a particular area.” She’s working on setting up a papermaking studio in Bosnia as she had previously in Serbia. She’s working on Pulp and Pastry project where she’ll be exploring cooking and Bosnian kitchens with papermaking, with a ‘hidden agenda’ of looking at women and alternative history building. I can’t wait to see more on the new project. In the past, she’s worked the project Seeds In Service with Maggie Puckett to explore “the intersections of art of hand papermaking with gardening, social, practice, community engagement, and creative pedagogy in The Papermaker’s Garden at Columbia College.”

 We both talked of our admiration of incredible the Jane Addams! 

This is just a small segment of our conversation. For the rest of our conversation, you’ll have to wait for the book to come out!

For now, check out her blog Gender Assignment. It will rock your world:  http://genderassignment.tumblr.com/

Interview with Isabella Rotman

This week, I had the opportunity to talk to Isabella Rotman, illustrator and comic artist. She’s written several zines including Animal Sex, You’re So Sexy When You Aren’t Transmitting STDs, Fireworks, and many more. We met over raspberry cream Oreo crust pie at First Slice.

I was really interested in talking about two of her texts: Animal Sex and You’re So Sexy. Previously, I had done academic work into informative texts, namely Chilean Socialist Comic Books, and Cuban poster propaganda. I’m fascinated at creative ways to inform people about various topics. How do you make it interesting and useful? I’ve collected works from around the world that deal with education such as comic books about voting, water rights, and even a comic book textbook. 

Both of Rotman’s zines are manage that tension of being both funny and informative. Animal Sex is a comprehensive look at sex in the animal kingdom from banana slugs to pandas. It even has a page dedicated to the penises in the animal kingdom (both alluring and terrifying). You’re So Sexy is an inclusive and hilarious discussion of safer sex. It doesn’t just focus on pregnancy prevention. It includes information for LGTBQ people, information about safe use of sex toys, and much more. You should definitely check them out.

She talked about how You’re So Sexy has become a text distributed at various universities including Columbia College, SAIC, and other universities.  She just released a new comic Not On My Watch: The Bystanders Handbook for the Prevention of Sexual Violence; it’s her response to all of the stories and data coming out of universities and colleges about sexual violence. The zine strives to empower bystanders to be alert and get involved to help prevent sexual violence. It tries to give ideas on how to assess and handle situations. I hope she builds an entire empire of books like these two! There's such a need for them!

Isabella Rotman was extremely generous and let me peek at her sketchbooks. I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity. One thing we discussed was how she represents her self. In several works, she depicts herself as a mermaid, a homage to her childhood by the ocean. But she also mentioned that she previously had depicted herself with antlers. However, she doesn't combine them. I wondered if each representation was tied to how she felt about herself at the time. Very fascinating.

 That's just a tiny snippet of our conversation! Check out here work: http://www.isabellarotman.com/

Bechdel Test for Music

A coworker recently told me about an article about applying the Bechdel Test to music.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Bechdel Test, it's a basic test about gender bias in a film. A film passes the test if 1) There are at least two women 2) They have a conversation 3) They talk about something other than a man. Sadly, most films fail this test.

Pitchfork came up with an alternative version of the test. Instead of movies, one applies it to a playlist of music. The rules are below:

1. "Have at least one female-identifying lead performer, performing as themselves or a female-identifying likeness
2. Involve the female self, another woman, other women or otherwise an implied female audience in the song’s lyrics
3. Have a central lyrical topic or theme that’s something or someone besides a man."

It's a low threshold but it's quite hard. I've been trying to put together a playlist of ten songs for the past 45 minutes. I've come up with the following list. It's not a perfect list nor the necessarily best songs by the artists. But I think there is something to this test.

Carolina Chocolate Drops - "Leaving Eden"
Ani De Franco - "Jukebox"
Neko Case - "Margaret v. Pauline"
Heart - "Dreamboat Annie"
My Brightest Diamond - "She Does Not Brave the War."
Nellie McKay - "Mama and Me" 
Ditty Bobs - "Sister Kate"
Anna & Elizabeth - "When I was a Young Girl"
Nina Simone - "Four Women"
Erin McKeown - "The Lions"

Try it yourself and see how you do. Here's the original article: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/699-a-bechdel-test-for-music/

Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore

This past Thursday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore. She defies categorization as artist. She has created performance pieces, zines and comics, written articles, edited publications and much more. She's the author of Unmarketable, Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, and more. She was co-editor and co-founder of the late Punk Planet, and much more.

I was quite keen to talk to her about her body of work in Cambodia. She ended up going there to live and work with the first large group of women to go to college in the country. During her time there, she decided to teach them how to make zines, self-published book or magazine, to show them a basic means of self-expression. She taught 32 women how to make zines while learning about their history and culture. The women took to it whole-heartedly and found a use for it. It started a chain reaction. These women went to their homes all over Cambodia and taught their friends and families. It's incredible. She explained that when she returned two years later, people were still making zines in Cambodia led by woman.

We also talked about her work "American Girl Project: Operation Pocket Full of Wishes" in the 2000s. She snuck in some cards in to the store mimicking American Girl produced materials. For this project, she was arrested and escorted out. You can read a full account of it in her zine Safe, Legal Abortion Access. I mentioned that it was extremely tempting to recreate the piece since I worked so close the American Girl. However, I was a bit concerned my employer would look poorly on me if I were to get arrested on my lunch break. Maybe in my spare time.  Maybe not. More likely, I'd come up with my own work to critique corporate imaginings of girlhood in the US.

However, she cautioned in our interview about criticisms of corporate culture that: "I don't want to make a career of hating things." Hating something is easy. She wants to support strictures that she believes in. Going deeper into understanding the structures and possibly changing them is much more powerful and interesting.

Rock on. That's just a small snippet of her work and the conversation. Check out her website for her diverse and provocative work: http://anneelizabethmoore.com/

Female Rockers and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Today I read this chilling fact at NPR: "Of the 726 artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since the ceremony began in 1986, only 65 have been women." That's 0.09% That's atrocious. It's not that there aren't amazing female rockers out there. They just don't get the respect or play that they should.

Once again, this is a reminder of why it's important to promote women in the arts. So artists in all fields get the recognition and respect they deserve. This year, Joan Jett was inducted with other musicians. 

Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/os4amou

So go out and support some women in music today. 

Interview with Sarah Becan

For my sixteenth interview, I met up with Sarah Becan, comics artist, writer, illustrator and more, to talk about her work. She has the amazing webcomic Sauceome (rhymes with Awesome) that talks about body image and food in very meaningful ways. Her treatment of weight and self-perception really resonate with me. I also love how she talks about food and relishes in the diversity of food in Chicago. It’s an important and witty comic.

She's also published The Complete Ouija Interviews, a collection mini-comics based on Ouija conversations in Nantucket and Shuteye, a comic exploring dreams in a compelling and novel way. Both are well worth checking out. We talked about her work as a comic artist and her work as an illustrator, often creating designs for restaurants and other businesses around the city.

Then we had one of those amazing Chicago moments. At one point during the interview, Sarah asked me if I smelled smoke. I had remarked that there had been a strange smell when I walked to our meeting place but I didn’t. Not long after, a fire truck with sirens blaring pulled up in front of the building. I paused the interview so Sarah could investigate.

There was a dumpster fire in a nearby alley! So we resumed the interview as the firemen worked to put it out. At one point, I noticed one of them was standing on top of the fire engine, gazing into the alley. Hilarious. I love this strange and wonderful city. Sarah provided me with this image of the dumpster fire from this morning. Thanks Sarah for the photo!

What a wonderful interview! Looking forward to seeing more great work from Sarah Becan. 

Happy SWAN Day!

Happy 8th Annual International SWAN Day! SWAN Day stands for Support Women Artists Now and gives us a chance to celebrate the great work of women in the arts throughout the world.

To celebrate this amazing and important day, I am publicly launching my website for my oral history project It Will Keep Your Heart Alive: Conversations withe Female Artists in Chicago.  Since July 2014, I've been conducting interviews with women from different fields, backgrounds, and neighborhoods to learn about their work and experiences as female artists in Chicago. So far, I've conducted fourteen interviews with three more scheduled. Several more are in the process of being scheduled. My ultimate aim is compile at least fifty interviews into a book.

This website will change with time. Right now, I want people to have a little bit more background information on the project. Eventually, I'd love to put up some of the content, either audio or excerpts from interviews.

So go on and explore the website. But don't forget to go out and celebrate a woman artists today and everyday. There's so many ways to do it. Go rent/buy/see a movie directed and/or written by a woman, go to a show by a women, buy/borrow/read a book by a female author. The opportunities are endless!

That's all for now!