Unknown Speaker 00:00 Caribbean small house basically, he can't possibly see what's inside all they can see is what's outside some American tourists This is a piece I did it's Caspar Weinberger with fortunately and women in a protest against Pinochet. Again, it's about selective vision, about sort of what's perceived and, and what's not. Unknown Speaker 00:40 Again, it's about it's about the other about women, class, race. And the lack of ability to really acknowledge those things that deal with them, the difference between knowing them and really experiencing them. And I don't think that women can be by themselves can kind of achieve a new status, without plurality in general, and in terms of class, and race also be acknowledged. And that's it. Unknown Speaker 01:24 You have any questions you want to ask, as we saw, if you want to tell us anything about your experience? Unknown Speaker 01:34 I think it's kind of interesting how your work you address gender law. But for me, it's kind of confusing. I'm not really sure. What what it is about genuinely addressing, because I guess it's a mixture of a lot with race. And I mean, I can see that there's something there. And I just I haven't seen, but I mean, Unknown Speaker 01:57 why not? I think that I very much address all those issues together increasingly. At first, it was an interest in feminism in general, only. Increasingly, I realized that the same kinds of words and structures are applied to Latin America, say as to women, like Latin America is identified with nature, women are identified with nature, blacks are identified with sexuality, women are identified with sexuality, the same kind of dualities that are set up. And that whole kind of thinking in general, has to be challenged, I don't think you can just like get women how to you have to get rid of that thinking as a whole. Also, Unknown Speaker 02:43 you're saying before that you've always been uncomfortable, not having an image of reality? I think it's funny how both of your works are political, and use images, I mean, real images rather than? I mean, I didn't see any really abstract work. And did you do abstract work when you were here? And you said, you never really feel comfortable? Unknown Speaker 03:09 No, I did some, but I never I always felt like it was sort of an exercise. It's not satisfying to me it's Unknown Speaker 03:21 called Peace. What would you say that's connected to any always having had a kind of politicized heart? Because images are because images are images, they're almost Unknown Speaker 03:32 pulled, but actually, the truth of it is that I don't think you can, you can make a piece of art it's not because even choosing not not saying these things. And even even completely non objective art, or art about vases of flowers or something like that is making a political statement. Because if you look at it, historically, the first first people that painted vase of flowers in the 16th century to paint something like a vase of flowers was something really liberating and political in that sense, because before that, that was done people came forward with so they can religious things, but nobody just painted these blocks and the first people who did that were doing something revolution. It's gotten to the point where now to paint wagons as information is known as kind of steroid situations that are all around you choose to use. So that's a political statement. So I don't really you know, some people have you reacting to other people's Unknown Speaker 04:44 abstract work Unknown Speaker 04:51 well, I'm really used to seeing abstract work I've been seeing since I was a little kid. And I think a lot of it is very beautiful and I've learned a lot from, it's just, for me personally, it's not enough for my to express myself. It's not enough. And like I say, I'm not comfortable with it, I feel that, you know, if I do something that looks abstract, it's, to me it's an exercise learning a technique or something. But it's not, it's not a full expression. But I want to say because I need to express myself through form and content and no content are just strictly formal, this content isn't something that I need to say or to now I've ever been more interested in, in in somebody else. But that doesn't mean that has been influenced by or, or I don't love looking Unknown Speaker 05:43 at you know, 10 years. Unknown Speaker 05:46 Now, it doesn't interesting. Unknown Speaker 05:48 Have you? Yeah, I Unknown Speaker 05:49 think I did abstract paintings kind of like Elizabeth Murray when I was a student here at Barnard, and stop doing. When I got into school, a little actually went to graduate school. And my first year in graduate school, I continued to do those paintings, literally when I went to Columbia. And then, during that summer, the paintings just like kind of everyone loved them, the teachers loved it, everyone thought they were great, they were really light and bright and funny. And that during that summer, I was working for living rooms and furniture, and I was driving around a lot in New Jersey, and then the wastelands and also having this incredible experiences of using the service door, and, you know, just a different kind of perception of class, you know, had I mean, going into the, the kinds of buildings like I had grown up in except not being able to go with the front and that kind of stuff, and also driving around New Jersey, in the kind of industrial wasteland that's out there. And I started trying to paint that stuff, because I thought that was a lot more interesting than my paintings. And from there, I started doing these paintings about technology, there were paintings and more than two drawings, about how things worked, and what they were. And then I went into doing the things that were like classes of objects, like the male and female ones that show the first slide that I showed, which was about, you know, making kind of subtle differences with classic objects. Yeah. Do you Unknown Speaker 07:29 graduated recently? Unknown Speaker 07:30 A three. So the first maybe the first three slides of artwork of mine, were done at Columbia. Do you take any critique in graduate school know? I know you're not moved? Unknown Speaker 07:51 Yeah, you probably you can wait, you might dismiss the section that you should have slides with the mural that we've recently completed Lesson One in East Village, and we've gotten a grant to do another one. So have you Unknown Speaker 08:09 tried to say, yes, we have a site that's on Fourth Street between C and D, and come visit us. We'll be there in July and August can't miss this. It's the exact address is 353. East Fourth Street, church and you've got it. That's exactly where it is. It's really, really beautiful. Unknown Speaker 08:36 The building with the full table, what's around the corner of the foot, actually, if you need to invest to the stage with all those flattened buildings, and look across, it's just you know, blocks are just flat map. And Unknown Speaker 08:55 we'll look again, there's this priest, there's this priest that has done this incredible thing of making that part because you know, you've seen it right. It's these two rows of willow trees in this totally devastated area, with this like Playhouse that he's built for kids in a swing with a pitched roof. And these like brick walkways. I Unknown Speaker 09:12 mean, it's a phenomenon altering the back of virgin hair. Unknown Speaker 09:15 Yeah, I mean, it's really a phenomenon. So we appropriated this spot. And he said, Great. I think we're going to do something about kind of the children in the neighborhood, Unknown Speaker 09:29 their their Latin roots compared to the this to nearly look now. Unknown Speaker 09:36 At the time, the rules include will there be any children left? That's a good question. Well, we're going to go in there the gentrification, right. It just made the kind of static Unknown Speaker 09:48 piece Well, at least it Unknown Speaker 09:50 will be a document. I've heard Unknown Speaker 09:51 rumors that the city might sell those projects, but along Avenue D. There are a lot of projects and those people aren't going anywhere. I mean, I've heard these rumors, but I don't kind of believe the city will get away with that. Yeah. But they might, you know, they've gotten away with all kinds of other Spanish. Right? Oh, it's phenomenal. And you know, the drug dealing continues. I mean, if you hang out on the street, you can figure out who they all are. You know, I don't know why the cops don't know, you know? Yeah, I'm sure they know. I mean, it's just never seen, I used to live on Second Street. I know. I mean, it's, it's wild. It's really wild. Unknown Speaker 10:30 And there, you know, we have had a, working on the last mural, we found that there was a lot of hostility towards the first one to two white girls coming down to make a painting. And they sort of grew to know us and appreciate us and consider us as friends through through the summer, we went to the new site, and we were trying to figure out like, who the buildings belong to, and get the name donor, so we could get permission to put on a grant proposal. And we went to the building, there are two black men coming out of the building. And we asked him if they knew who owned the building. And if they could, you know, tell us because I don't even know before we even got a chance to explain why we wanted to know, they said, What do you want to know for you want to buy it or something you want to kick us out? Unknown Speaker 11:16 So we have a big PR job to do? It's not Unknown Speaker 11:20 going to be easy. What was their reaction, once you explain to them? Well, they didn't give us a chance to explain it. Unknown Speaker 11:29 We got one from Manhattan Community Arts Fund, and we got another from a group called art matters. And we're also applying to Niska Chase Manhattan Bank, the Barbara Deming Fund for Women. Unknown Speaker 11:47 We want this next project, maybe we'll go to the last project, we donated our time. And we had to work during the day during the week freelance jobs to be able to support a kind of an expensive habit. And this year, we're trying to do it a different way. I'm trying to get paid for our time. So we don't have to, you know, be doing other unrelated things. In the meantime, you can be more dedicated. So Unknown Speaker 12:11 yeah, exactly. Unknown Speaker 12:12 You know, we spent two months in the last one, the last stroke was on the wall, we had to feel it, like we had to leave behind all these people that we spending all this time with. And Unknown Speaker 12:24 yeah, the experience of doing it was, was a very, very kind of exciting experience. Because people don't usually look at painting got pretty interested in what we were doing. A lot of it was because we were there for a long time, and they got to know us and they got to watch it go up and they got to see like, their photograph, and then their picture done. And they got to, you know, see the grid, you know, it was like a slow process. And they got to observe the whole thing. And they were involved about Unknown Speaker 12:50 that was that the Sierra? So I was friends of mine said, you know, people have to live with some people a long time before they can save your life. And I always felt that young people should have some control over their environment. And that's just the position that they have to be I look at CRPS. But I know it's more about whether you should impose something on people and how they go against them until they really give it a chance. So that's working with people? Unknown Speaker 13:31 Well, they don't don't always understand perhaps what we're getting at politically in the work that we imposed. Our politics are late to Yeah. But they become interested in asking us what's going on and having a dialogue about what they think about what we think. And one day I came riding up on my bike, and there were two black women that live in the neighborhood. They're looking at younger black women. And I wrote up, she said, Oh, there's one of them. There's one of them. And she said, Yeah, my friend was telling me that two white girls made this and I couldn't believe it. Unknown Speaker 14:07 Right, did you spend time looking at the other murals that were put on me early 1900s, like the post office? Unknown Speaker 14:15 Yeah, that was one of the things that we wanted to to avoid. The mural movement is has become sort of a WPA offspinner murals. mural painting is very derivative a lot of times you got a gig that's been repeated over and over and over again, and you wanted to do a mural that didn't do that. But it didn't have that kind of style. And content to it. We wanted to do a mural that was more like, what our real work is. When we work in studio. There's a lot of people do one kind of work in the studio and then they came into something else it looks like the WPA or wall is if that's the only control you can make. Wanted to kind of avoid that but Unknown Speaker 14:59 I just also want to say that I specifically went to Mexico to see the Rivera murals. And then I'm very, very interested in all of the Mexican muralist in terms of the integration of art politics. And that was a very important source. And if I'd done a different sort of sequence of my work, I might have talked about that, to show to show me that, that it is possible that it can be done and that and also the thing about Rivera, I mean, a lot of people like Roscoe Moreover, the thing about to me about various it's showing very, very dignified people, and it's images of, of like the try to call back the Aztec history. And it's trying to, you know, showing images of kind of labor and their documentation of how the X ethics actually did certain things. And I suppose, yeah, Unknown Speaker 15:51 I can read here. And there are the government buildings that have all of these wonderful bureaus, but they have been co opted with this corrupt PRI party, you don't have to take it on. Like we're for labor, they took all the propaganda of the revolution, as there's you have all these dimensions that are so vino in themselves, and they have the images of a muralist serving their party. And it would, it was something so disturbing that once you go into the courthouse, and there this goes around the staircase, I mean, there was really environmental law, they had this preset. Model is already early days of the 19th century, and the limiter, and all the slogans that are part of you know, you have the text in with the pictures. If the growth speaks artistically, it's so strong and effective. And it's being co opted in you it's like, you know, when people said they want to make art that would be hung on bank walls are fond of, Unknown Speaker 16:58 you know, I want to live it's unacceptable to say, Unknown Speaker 17:01 here's a political law, and it has been co opted, and it's very strong, and it's very powerful. And it is used to perpetuate. Unknown Speaker 17:09 But that's true here to Unknown Speaker 17:09 party uses and to show, right. Unknown Speaker 17:13 Because that's here, too. I mean, you have you know, Chase Manhattan Bank buying, you know, John Ahern pieces and Barbara Kruger pieces and, you know, they're for investment and a Unknown Speaker 17:24 major payment. Yeah. You're talking about Unknown Speaker 17:27 right? They did? They did they do think about they did the Diego Rivera show, right? Yes, they did talk about content. Before financed. Yeah, but then they didn't really put zero. You want to let's afford Unknown Speaker 17:49 damage some painting, really, that was during the time, it was a big hullabaloo paper. And I wrote a letter to this call. Unknown Speaker 18:02 The side of the angel, like I had a fairly sophisticated art teacher in high school. One of the things that does interest me about how art history reads at the moment versus how it reads, you know, 3040 50 years later is that I mean, Diego Rivera had a big show at the modern. He's got all this work in the Museum of Modern Art. And you owe me there's like one little picture up in the wall of the modern right versus like zillions of these, you know, huge abstract expressionist paintings and these, and it's like, he might have been considered very important at the time, but sort of slowly kind of being written out of exactly it's been written out of sort of importance and dropped out of anthologies and dropped out of the modern even though they own more of his work and Frida Kahlo is now considered a better painter. That's true, which is true, but it shouldn't be one or the other. No, it's not. I mean, I think we could get rid of his wife. Unknown Speaker 18:57 And now she's not. He's her. Unknown Speaker 19:02 One of the reasons I wanted to show these pictures in this coloring book is I find it a little disturbing. And Freda kills work, the pain and the agony of being a woman. And I wanted to have sort of a more sort of joyous, sexual, happy, Freer kind of image but also that wasn't stereotyped. And I think that these cartoons do that very well. Linda Barry, Unknown Speaker 19:31 and the name of the talk Unknown Speaker 19:35 was a Sarah jury Ferren. She works in New York. In Brooklyn, she lives in Brooklyn. Unknown Speaker 19:44 I was my response. I didn't see the recommended up with intuition. So my whole career, like teaching in the All the issues that came up? Where do you teach high school art and design. I'm a social studies teacher. And I teach a course, since a senior option which has been slowly eroded, wiped down in history toward art history, the caves to abstract expressionism in one term. Now, just due to your non history, because they have the history in your face was wiped out, budget crunch. So I have these bullets, commercial art kids, who either don't go to museums, I have no interest in fine arts. And then the question between the fine arts and the whole question of what is more that the women's movement has really focused on, I have this course that deals with the masterpieces by a couple of white men in big countries. So I'm trying our learning name seminar, that study seminar that asked me to do a project of limits on how I would change my course. I'm so cool than that, this workshop on them. So I put together slides and webinars, which I never got a chance to show my class because of the time schedule. But it was so stay when I finished the women who thought it was great, because they really weren't in touch with our 19th and beyond really, you know, so they only knew one or two names, and this was all of the video but it was all women were these that it was very square thing I set out to work on it, and you put in all these issues. Now the issue that interested me the most is the combination you see the school and working used to have people who stressed fine art of their idea was Rembrandt. And then not the kids who were not so commercial, come with them and reify rember, and then reapply the academic 19th century painters really long work was WPA, or over the top palette is the difference in mine, and they put down all the abstract work. So my crusade was to get kids to understand that offers more than painting garbage cans, what do we mean, earnest? So then I went to I tried to pipe that though we had a while taking them to the Museum of Modern Art, and some kids were scared about telling them because No, because they saw that I was trying to push something over on them that like, you know, as if they were Jews in the painful, it was bad. So then I felt limits by doesn't take up all these political fights that I was fighting as a social studies teacher. So teaching the art conflict with that. I last week, when I said listen, you got to read the Georgia O'Keeffe open before that to evaluate his comment and about the country which is coming up. And a lot of kids in the past five plus freshmen and now seniors, right. And I took world history with all political issues, and you have no right to bring that up here. This is August you Why are you bringing that up? And then they turned on, and I put those pictures, particularly with the man reading the paper with the Guatemalan woman. And the last question you asked about gender and class. In the Women's Studies workshop that I took the native thing was in teaching that there are phases go through and that if you start looking for the women, and you get past women as victims and start looking for how did women leave their clients with narrow, you get to everybody, all the old people, all the young people, all the men of color that have been left out of history studies to get to come in when you start exploring life. And then you have a campaign apart from place and the issues apply. And I couldn't get over how every one of these points that I would try to list for the years to this work. Unknown Speaker 24:10 Well, I'm glad if I if I did, and again, I mean, I had Kate Stimson as a teacher and I think she, you know, taught me well, I mean, the tolerance. I mean, women will not kind of move forward unless there's a tolerance of difference in plurality and an acknowledgement of it. And that's not just for women. Unknown Speaker 24:36 I wish he would come down and talk to my classmates Unknown Speaker 24:45 Well, if you can get them to get together in a room, I'll come. Right What time is the next part? Yes. Right Now so thanks very much thank you