Swoon works in a combination of wheat-paste and paper cutout to create life-sized, figurative and graphic street art with strength and femininity. While a great deal of her work has been done outside the confines of a gallery, she was classically trained as a painter before adopting street art techniques.
The artist formerly known as Caledonia Curry studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999 at age 19. She's also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, a grass-roots, decentralized group of artists who believe in art as both personal expression and collective action. This group contributes graphics to struggles for justice, both in the studio and on the streets, collaboratively and individually, all over North America.
Tomorrow night in Portland (Thursday, February 17 at 7:00 PM), renowned artist Carolee Schneemann will give a free performance lecture at PCC's Performing Arts Center on the Sylvania Campus. A product of the 1960s-70's New York art scene, her work challenged, shocked, and forced her audience to think about their reaction to women's bodies and feelings about physicality, often with her own body as part of the composition.
If you've ever thought the rainbow patch could use a 21st century makeover, you weren't alone. Revel & Riot is a new company whose aim is to "promote LGBTQ rights, awareness and equality through new media, graphics, writing, and products on the internet." Their tees, posters, and buttons with sharp designs and reappropriated statements ("God Hates Bags", "Gay is Good", "Ask. Tell.") are awesome and a great way to show your politics while looking good. by Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home author Alison Bechdel has even given a shout-out to them!
Anthologies are tricky projects to undertake. They are by their nature exclusive, as their purpose is either to further a canon's creation without challenging it, or to shatter boundaries and call for re-definitions and new critical perspectives. Either way, the vast majority of contributors to the anthologized media will be left out. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art is self-consciously trying to create both kinds of compilations at the same time. The book being about modern art specifically further complicates the viewing of these artists and their work—the editors are attempting to define and redefine a genre created to define and redefine. So it goes without saying that Modern Women is a pretty metaphysical literary and artistic experience.
Wif-pdx (Women in Film-Portland, natch) is part activist organization, part information network, and part event sponsor. This very week, for example, they are joining up with NW Documentaries, another kick-ass grassroots film center in Portland, to screen an as-yet-unfinished documentary called Austin Unbound. And if you're in town, I think you should go see it.
No, not that kind of craftivism (although my fingers are crossed for that vulva necklace this Hanukkah). This week I'm all about Etsy's growing community of world-saving vendors; whether they're sustainable in their work practices, donate money from each sale to charitable organizations, or print their politics right on their products, these crafters make activism an art.
"Buzz" is a current art show curated by Hungry Eyeball installed inside Tender Loving Empire, an impressively multi-tasking collective. "Buzz" contains works by five Portland, Oregon based artists: Chelsea Fletcher, Amy Ruppel, Rebecca Artemisa, Kinoko and Wesley Younie. Although it is too late to see Y La Bamba play an intimate show for the opening night (darn it!), it is fortunately not too late to see the art. "Buzz" will be in the Tender Loving Empire gallery until November 2nd. More after the jump!
Via Muslimah Media Watch, Anida Yoeu Ali's "Mistaken for Muslim" is a powerful video that juxtaposes diverse images of Muslims, and the artist herself, with a poem relentlessly detailing xenophobic and Islamaphobic hate crimes in post 9/11 America:
It's festival season here in Portland, and MFNW was just the beginning. Running now thru September 19th, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art is putting on its 8th annual Time-Based Art (TBA) festival. Here's your Bitch guide to women-centric performances and exhibitions over the next few days.
How, exactly, does one become an artist-in-residence at a sanitation department? If you want to do it the way Mierle Ukeles did it, first you get expelled from Pratt for making "pornographic" abstract art. Then you have a baby. Then you write a rad manifesto that redefines everyday maintenance work as fine art. Then you make landfills into beautiful public parks! Easy peasy.
"Buzz" is a current art show curated by 
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