Monday, December 22, 2014

CR Event Report: Division of Labor Opening & Co-Occupations Zine Release

This has been a busy season for Cultural ReProducers in Chicago - In November we came out en masse to celebrate the opening of the exhibition Division of Labor: Chicago Artist Parents at Glass Curtain Gallery, curated by and including a whole lot of remarkable Cultural ReProducers alumni (for the full list and curatorial essay, you can download the exhibition catalogue). The show had not one but two openings: an evening reception on November 19th, and an experimental family-friendly Saturday-morning party on the 22nd, which drew an
all-ages dance party with Tiny Cover Band
incredible crowd of artists and their families. While adults mingled over the snack table, Columbia College's Art Education Department kept the kids busy with a collage project based on included artist Anne Toebbe's layered domestic collage-paintings. Tiny Cover Band played an energetic set of tweaked indie classics on child-sized instruments, and at one point handed out small percussion instruments (maracas, bells and clappers) so everyone could join in. The result was a transformative all-ages dance party that brought everybody together on the dance floor.

One of a handful of recent exhibitions in which parenthood is a point of discussion, Division of Labor has already drawn some positive attention, including a Critic's Pick on Artforum.com and and a notable mention in the Chicago Tribune's Best Visual Art of the Year. Cultural ReProducers is excited to present the final installment of our childcare-supported event series there on January 31st. More on all that very soon.

Candida Alvarez on the relationship between family & abstraction
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On Wednesday, December 10th Cultural ReProducers launched its new zine, Propositions, Manifestos & Experiments, at Sector 2337 with the event Co-Occupations, a multimedia extravaganza organized with Caroline Picard that featured presentations by artists connected with both the zine and the Division of Labor show.

After introductions, Christa Donner kicked things off with the Cultural ReProducers

Manifesto and later shared an excerpt from Palle Nielsen's "Model for a Qualitative Society." Thea Liberty Nichols read from Ellen Lanyard's short essay in the influential M/E/A/N/I/N/G #12, Lise Haller Baggesen performed her new "Yo Mama" essay, Candida Alvarez shared a slideshow considering the influence of both motherhood and daughterhood in her work, Fred Sasaki's how-to videos created with his father and young son were screened, Claire Ashley delivered her own manifesto alongside images of relevant work, and Keiler Roberts brought her deadpan humor to the floor with a live comics reading. Husband-and-wife duo The Speers rounded out the evening with a thrumming electronic sound performance while their two-month-old baby dozed in the back room. All in all, it was a lively, jam-packed evening.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Lost in Living: Review and Online Streaming

We're pleased to present part one of a two-part series featuring filmmaker Mary Trunk's documentary “Lost in Living,” which can be streamed online free of charge through December 25th, 2014 at http://vimeo.com/67761940. Trunk does a remarkable job capturing the joy, exhaustion, and the many conflicts that arise as a result of being both mother and artist.  Don’t miss this opportunity to view an important film that accurately portrays many of the issues mother/artists deal with on a daily basis.

 by Christina LaMaster

Mary Trunk’s feature length documentary, Lost in Living, deals with the emotional and practical tensions which arise when artists become mothers. Trunk films and interviews four artists over the course of seven years. Two of them are young artists: Caren McCaleb, a painter and video editor, and Kristina Robbins, a filmmaker. These two women are close friends and experience pregnancy and the birth of their first children at about the same time. We are allowed to see first hand the impact rearing babies and toddlers has on their lives as mother/artists. The other two women featured are writer Merrill Joan Gerber and visual artist Marjorie Schlossman, both of whom have adult children and who reflect upon the impact of their young and growing families on their careers as artists. These reflections are more dramatic when some of their grown children speak of their childhoods, and recall some of the difficulties of being the child of a mother/artist.

What is so impactful in this film are the ambiguities expressed by these mother/artists—the need to be creative contrasted with the often mundane activities of child-rearing and house work; the feelings sometimes amounting to desperation when they speak about the interruption of their artistic careers and the difficulty of getting back on track; the cavalier dismissal by many in the art world of the value of motherhood; and the regret expressed especially by the older artists at the feeling that they neglected their children for the sake of their art.

Trunk’s own struggle with both motherhood and filmmaking inspired her to make the film, and her objective/observational role as a documentarian allows each woman’s journey to be understood. Lost in Living, does not make a case for choosing between motherhood and art.  Trunk does, however, with both hard-eyed realism and immense sympathy, show us how difficult it is to manage both. In this film mother/artists will see themselves and their struggles laid out before them and perhaps feel a little less alone, a little more recognized for their efforts. This documentary is a must-see for all artists, women, and mothers who may consider themselves “lost” in living.

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Christina LaMaster is a photographer, installation and video artist.  A fifth-generation Nebraskan, she has spent most of her life in the Midwest, teaching and holding various program and administrative positions at museums and community arts centers.  She now calls Central Illinois home, and recently earned her MA in Studio Art from Bradley University.  She is particularly interested in women’s issues, motherhood and the idea of the “maternal gaze.”  Chrissy is the mother of two college-aged children, and has spent the last 20 years attempting to find a balance between motherhood and art.   

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Cultural ReProducers: Propositions, Manifestos, and Experiments

At long last, our first zine project, Cultural ReProducers: Propositions, Manifestos &
Experiments is finally in print. This risographed think-tank explores the intersection of contemporary artmaking and family life through text and images from 28 international artists published by and with the collective Temporary Services in glorious duotone with a centerfoldout poster of the Cultural ReProducers manifesto. Due to the multilayered nature of the zine (44 pages in 3 colors with a centerfoldout manifesto poster) it was painstakingly collated, folded and stapled by hand and there are just 400-ish copies in existence.

Orders within the United States are just $7 US plus shipping ($8.50 postpaid). You can support the work of Cultural ReProducers by ordering your copies directly from us here:

Thanks to Temporary Services the zine will also soon be available as a lovely e-book and archival PDFs at $2 each through their imprint Half Letter Press.

For those of you in Chicago, join us for the event Co-Occupations, a reading, curated bookshelf and zine launch co-organized with Caroline Picard for Sector 2337 on Wednesday, December 10th at 7:30pm (doors open 7pm) including a live performance by musicians/parents The Speers. The event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Division of Labor: Chicago Artist Parents, curated by Christa Donner and Thea Liberty Nichols and on view through February 14th at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery. Please join us if you can! Sector 2337 is located at 2337 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL.

Propositions, Manifestos & Experiments features contributions by: Christa Donner, Candida Alvarez, Laura Berman, Andrew Yang, Lise Haller Baggesen, Keiler Roberts (Powdered Milk), Lenka Clayton, Jennie Temple (Project!! Wakaka!), Stephanie Diamond, Selina Trepp, Chiara Galimberti, Lauren Weinstein, Alberto Aguilar, Fred & August Sasaki, Orla Whelan (AtHomeStudios, the Mothership Project), Crystal Ann Brown & Eliot Hown (The Hown's Den), Libby Clarke, Rebecca Niederlander & Iris Anna Regn (Broodwork), Jane Marsching & Andi Sutton (Plotform), Kyle Schlie (S.A.C.K.), Melissa Potter, Claire Ashley, Andre Francke & Kim Dhillon (Invisible Spaces of Parenthood).

Friday, November 28, 2014

Collaborations: Melissa Scherrer + Maeve

Collaborations is an ongoing series of creative projects undertaken by artists with their children. Milwaukee-based artist Melissa Scherrer makes collages, paintings and photographs with her daughter Maeve as part of her larger body of work, included prominently on her website under Professional Collaborations. Melissa is also the producer and host of Mother Friday, a weekly internet radio talk show exploring the many complexities of mothering, fathering, and creativity. Find more at www.mscherrer.com



Tuesday, October 14, 2014

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Walter Peter and Anna Yema Ditzel


photo © Nils_Klinger
The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at
dOCUMENTA (13), the summer 2012 installment of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany: The “60 wrd/min art critic” is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).

Lori Waxman is an art critic and historian who lives in Chicago. For d13 she decamped to Kassel for three-and-a-half months, together with her husband Michael Rakowitz, an artist also included in the exhibition, and their daughter Renée, who at the time was two-and-a-half years old. Lori wrote a total of 241 reviews during the course of the project. A few of them were for artists whose work revealed their existence as parents; some were even for children.   

A book of the entire project was published by Onestar Press, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It can be purchased in print or downloaded as a free PDF.  Over the next few weeks Cultural ReProducers will share a series of reviews excerpted from the project, which recognizes children and parents as relevant participants in cultural dialogue.

Walter Peter
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // KASSEL // 186

Walter Peter
Children live in another, parallel universe that sometimes overlaps but mostly conflicts with the adult world. In a series of large colorful paintings and high contrast pencil drawings made using digitally altered photographs of his two young daughters, Walter Peter envisions this realm of endless curiosity, rampant play and unmetered time. On this planet, when balls are dropped and roll, cause and effect is learned. When swings go higher and higher, excitement and risk are tested. How does this work? What does that do? How does it feel, taste, smell? The world is fascinating to children, and children are fascinating to adults. That’s partly why we have them. But children are also mischievous and careless. Any honest parent knows this, though few admit it. Peter does, in drawings whose unforgivingly dark pencils and blown-out details sketch the edge between children having fun and children being impish trolls.

—Lori Waxman 8/15/12 2:47 PM

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC  //  KASSEL  //  237

Anna Yema Ditzel

I love rainbows. Who doesn’t? But most of us, myself included, would be too unsentimental, or too afraid of appearing sentimental, or naïve, or guileless, to actually paint a picture of
Anna Yema Ditzel
one. For this, as for many other images and acts of the simplest joy and beauty, we need a child. And here we have one: Anna Yema Ditzel, age five, who loves to paint not just the large canvas she presents here but also playthings, tables and walls. Apart from the general loveliness of rainbows, which Ditzel certainly captures, and the accompanying pleasantness of a big green field and a bright blue sky dappled with plump white clouds, what distinguishes her painting from other similar representations is three-fold. Ditzel gives the rainbow in question more than the usual number of colors and arranges them in a novel order. She portrays the sun with not just yellow rays but also green ones. Finally, she signs her name without any restraint, using half the hues on her palette to write the letters A-N-N-A out twice, tall and energetic, as if they were horses running free across the grassy field of her imagination.

—Lori Waxman 9/15/12 3:15 PM

Also in this series: 
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Yi-Ping Hou, Sylvia Krüger, and Charlotte Lohr
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Julie Bernattz and Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

Monday, September 29, 2014

CR Event Series Report: Kids in the Studio

On September 13th, Cultural ReProducers teamed up with the DePaul Art Museum to present Kids in the Studio: Art, Labor, and Everyday Life, led by Copenhagen-based artists Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom.

The event took place in conjunction with Fires Will Burn and Ink, Paper, Politics, two exhibitions of political printmedia that provided the perfect context for a conversation about the work that both artists and parents do. Brett and Bonnie kicked things off by sharing their own approach to combining politics, creative practice and family, and discussed other projects that run counter to an art world that increasingly cuts artists off from their everyday lives. Manifestos and models presented included Palle Nielsen’s kid-centered installation “The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society” at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Andrea Francke’s “Invisible Spaces of Parenthood” working daycare center as art installation, and Nils Norman’s adventure playground research and sculptural projects. After several people started taking cell phone pictures of the screen, Brett and Bonnie generously offered to share their slideshow and resources with everyone (if you’d like a copy, let us know). They opened the event into a lively group discussion that nobody wanted to leave, which spilled over into the all-ages reception afterwards.

In a sunny lecture room upstairs, kids were invited to express their own agendas with colored paper, rubber stamps, and markers. By the time the adults headed up for the all-ages reception, the room was festooned with exquisite corpse drawings, a plastic cup tower, and an amazing paper rocket designed with the help of our brilliant childcare workers Ash, Macon and Craig.

We seemed to hit just the right mix of timing and people for this one, and the scene a looked a lot like the early proposal drawings we used to apply for funding for this event series: exuberant kids mobbed the refreshment and activity tables while adults connected over ideas raised in the lecture and scribbled down each other’s contact information for future conversations. Bonus: everyone went home with an experimental risograph zine designed by 3-year old Ada, created while Brett was working on Temporary Services' latest project.

On Saturday, December 6th we look forward to expanding this dialogue through the final installment in our series:  Making It What We Need,  a workshop and conversation generating concrete ideas about how institutions can support the work of cultural producers who are working it out as parents. Among other things, this event will help shape the future of what Cultural ReProducers is and does. We’d love to include your voice. This event will be presented by Cultural ReProducers organizers Christa Donner and Selina Trepp  in conjunction with the exhibition Division of Labor: Chicago Artist Parents, on view at the Glass Curtain Gallery from November 20th, 2014 - February 14th, 2015. Mark your calendars, and stay tuned for more information!

The Cultural ReProducers Event Series is a roaming series of lectures, performances, and other events designed to allow parents with small children participate more actively in the art community. These curated weekend morning events include free on-site childcare and intergenerational receptions.

Our goal is twofold: to give parents and their kids the chance to participate as critical members of the arts community, and to inspire cultural institutions to better serve artists and audiences, providing positive models for future programming. This project is made possible through support from the Propeller Fund.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC  // Julie Bernattz and Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

photo © Nils_Klinger
The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at dOCUMENTA (13), the summer 2012 installment of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany: The “60 wrd/min art critic” is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).

Lori Waxman is an art critic and historian who lives in Chicago. For d13 she decamped to Kassel for three-and-a-half months, together with her husband Michael Rakowitz, an artist also included in the exhibition, and their daughter Renée, who at the time was two-and-a-half years old. Lori wrote a total of 241 reviews during the course of the project. A few of them were for artists whose work revealed their existence as parents; some were even for children.
 

A book of the entire project was published by Onestar Press, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It can be purchased in print or downloaded as a free PDFOver the next few weeks Cultural ReProducers will share a series of reviews excerpted from the project, which recognizes children and parents as relevant participants in cultural dialogue.


Julie Bernattz
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC  //  KASSEL  //  029

Julie Bernattz
Give a child a gift and watch what happens. Most prefer the packaging to the toy wrapped inside. It isn’t that dolls and blocks aren’t fun, but that boxes and wrapping are there to be torn, open and closed, balled up and thrown. No one is going to tell you not to destroy a piece of die-cut cardboard. Julie Bernattz, an artist who trained as a printmaker, works with the materials she has at hand. As the mother of a young girl, she has an endless supply of My Little Pony and Lalaloopsy containers that have been ripped open by eager hands. Arranged against a hot pink ground, some of these scraps reveal totally unexpected interest. Simple cardboard shapes prove most compelling. The printed sides are faerie lands empty of their inhabitants, like when Cory Arcangel removed Mario from the Super Mario Bros. video game. The backsides are raw abstractions, recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard reliefs. It’s trash but it also isn’t. In a land increasingly filled with garbage that we can just barely manage to recycle, Bernattz’s approach may become a necessary one, practically and ethically, as well as aesthetically. If you can’t toss it, look at it again, rethink it, and see if you can’t find something worthwhile there.

—Lori Waxman 6/16/12 2:37 PM

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC  //  KASSEL  //  040
Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira


Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

The art of children has long been prized among the avant-garde for its supposedly radical freedom and beautiful naiveté, because children are believed to be unfettered by the tradition of representational accuracy, by the fact that an apple must be round and red, that a face must have two eyes, two ears, one mouth and one nose, and all in the right space. This is hogwash. Consider the artwork of Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira, the four-year-old daughter of a conceptual performance artist. In one vibrant crayon sketch, palm trees sway in the breeze, an orange hut in their shade, a lush hilly landscape in the background. In another, a bright yellow fish swims in the wet blue sea. An odd composition of horizontal black lines and a little red house turns out to be a reproduction of a taxi receipt. A stunning pencil sketch gathers together a mass of dark scribbles that change direction and intensity to form a bird and cloud. One of Sofia’s most abstract pictures, of wavy red and blue stripes, is the result of a firm task given to her mother, to fill in the lines with precise coloring. None of these pieces are the product of wild imagination unbound by the reality of the world. They are the result of a young person continuously figuring out the world as she encounters it, tries it on and tests it out. With, admittedly, great color sense, sweet composition and a very willing maternal collaborator.

—Lori Waxman 6/18/12 5:40 PM

Also in this series: 
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Yi-Ping Hou, Sylvia Krüger, and Charlotte Lohr
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Walter Peter and Anna Yema Ditzel

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Kids in the Studio: Art, Labour, and Everyday Life - Cultural ReProducers + DPAM

How can artists feed their creative work while balancing the messy realities of life? On Saturday, September 13th at 10:30 am, Cultural ReProducers is pleased to join forces with The DePaul Art Museum to present Kids in the Studio: Art, Labour, and Everyday Life led by Copenhagen-based artists Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune. Challenging a cultural economy that expects artists to be a mobile, accessible micro-industry, Fortune and Bloom lead a workshop at the intersection of artistic practice and family life, offering alternative models for creative work and inviting participants to share and develop their own. The workshop focuses on cultural labor, but has relevance to workers, parents and non-parents alike.


Kids in the Studio is presented at the DePaul Art Museum, located at 935 Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL directly next to the Fullerton Red Line stop. The event is presented amidst the exhibition Ink, Paper, Politics: WPA-era Printmaking from the Belverd and Marian Needles Collection, a powerful context from which to explore the relationships between art, politics, life and labor.  

During the event, kids in our on-site childcare area will express their own creative agendas using foam stamps, washable ink and poster-sized paper. Cultural ReProducers events are free, but childcare is available through pre-registration only.

Space is limited. Sign up here to secure your spot:


Eventbrite - Kids in the Studio: Art, Labour, and Everyday Life

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The Cultural ReProducers Event Series is a roaming series of lectures, performances, and other events curated by artists Christa Donner and Selina Trepp, designed to allow parents with small children participate more actively in the art community. Events take place on weekend mornings and feature free on-site childcare and all-ages receptions. Our goal is twofold: to give parents and their kids the chance to participate as critical members of the arts community, and to inspire cultural institutions to better serve artists and audiences, providing positive models for future programming.

Bonnie Fortune and  Brett Bloom are multimedia artists working across writing, curatorial projects, and social practice. Fortune’s work explores issues of social and environmental ecology, appearing in publications such as AREA magazine and venues like the Roskilde Museum for Contemporary Art, Frist Center for the Arts, and the Center for Book Arts. Bloom focuses on the use of urban space, and is a founding member of the long-running artist collective Temporary Services, who as part of their work run the publishing imprint Half Letter Press. As parents they have actively taken up issues around parenthood and creative collaboration. You can find more of their work at Let’s ReMake and The Mythological Quarter.

FAQs:
I’m not a parent. Can I come? Absolutely, and bring your friends. We hope these events will be of interest to anyone engaged in the arts - not just families. One of our goals is to include parents in the context of the broader art community, which means it’s vital to have non-parents there as part of the conversation too. Be sure to pre-register if you'd like a voucher for free museum admission.

I am a parent. Does my kid have to be in child care, or can I keep them with me? Parents who'd rather keep their children with them during the lecture are welcome to do so. We're just offering the option to participate without the distraction of wrangling small children.

Why do I need to pre-register for child care? For safety and legal reasons, space is limited to 18 children per event, and we expect it to fill quickly. Registration is first-come, first-served.

What time should I arrive if I have children? Sign-in starts at 9:30am. The event itself starts at 10:30 and will last a little over an hour. Of course, timing with children is often a bit unpredictable. You’re welcome to sign in and quietly join us at any time during the event.

Who will be watching my kids? We’ve hand-picked a great selection of experienced babysitters and playgroup facilitators who will lead hands-on activities linked to the events that parents will be attending. These are people we know and trust with our own kids regularly. Keep in mind that this is a grassroots, artist-run childcare project, not a licensed daycare facility. You will be asked to read and sign a waiver before registering your child. 


What about parking and public transportation? The DePaul Art Museum is conveniently located adjacent to the “Fullerton” CTA Brown/Red line stations. The Fullerton Bus (#74) and the Lincoln Avenue Bus (#11) both stop in front of the museum.

Street parking is available in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Validated parking rates are also available for the Sheffield garage located around the corner from the museum at 2331 N Sheffield, a half block south on Sheffield Avenue. Validated rates are $8 before 4pm and $6 after 4pm.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Leaving the Kids at Home

Residency Report is an ongoing series of posts from artists who've undertaken creative residencies with their families. As important as it is to have options that include young children, sometimes it just makes more sense to go without them. On her website, writer Debbie Urbanski describes her process for pursuing a residency while leaving her young children home with family.  She graciously allowed us to share this excerpt:

Heading off to my first writing residency at Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in Ithaca, NY a few months ago, I was terrified. I was leaving my kids for the first time ever, having never spent even a night away from them. I felt guilty and wondered what had I gotten my family and myself into. It helped to read some firsthand accounts of other writing residencies online, but I couldn’t really find anything written by a parent of relatively young children (mine are 4 and 7 years old).  In brief, despite the nervousness, anxiety, and guilt, my first writer’s residency was one of the best milestones in my writing life so far. My family survived and so did I.


There are a few rare residencies that allow your family to stay with you. Part of me thinks 'awesome!' But part of me thinks 'no!' That would slip the writer back into the role of caregiver and make it difficult, yet again, to focus on one’s work.

Why leave the family behind to pursue a residency program?
* To have uninterrupted time to focus on one’s writing / creative work.
* To meet other artists and have sustained adult conversations about art.
* To remember what it’s like to be a writer first (versus being a parent first).
* To take the next step in one’s career.

In my case at least, being a mother is a constant buzzing distraction, one that bangs its fists against my writing room door begging for attention. I always think that being a mom makes me a better writer, but being a writer makes me a worse mom. A lot of times in the day, I’ll be honest, I want to be writing (or reading). My weekday schedule means I wake up ridiculously early to walk and then make breakfast for the family, and get the kids up, and get my husband up, and coordinate making lunches, and make sure the kids are stable enough for the day. I’m lucky enough to have time to write in the morning, but that time ends when the alarm on my phone goes off, which means I have exactly 11 minutes to get to school to pick them up. It’s a jarring transition. Fragments of my stories are always hovering around me, fighting for my attention. I haven’t been able to write on the weekends for about 7 years.

Choosing the right program
There are some great resources out there to find the right residency for you. In my case I figured I could escape for 2 weeks maximum. My ideal criteria was that residents would be fed, since cooking occupies way too much time in my ordinary life, and ideally I wouldn’t have to pay to go. If this is your first residency, I’d also recommend trying to find one close to home. It was a great comfort to me that I might be only an hour away in case my kids needed me. Or I wimped out.

I wish more residencies offered two weeks. I wish more residencies offered stipends to help with childcare costs. A mentorship program would be nice, where they pair you up with another artist mother so you can ask questions (like, am I insane?) before you go. Saltonstall allowed visitors on Sundays which was great, so the kids got to see where I worked (though these visits were not uncomplicated). Not all places allow that.

Preparing the kids
My kids were 4-½ and 7 years old when I went. I don’t think I could have left them any
 Dad Camp
sooner. Even at 4 ½ years, Stella’s conception of time is fuzzy, and she would ask heartbreaking questions like, “Will you be home for my birthday?” (which was 3 months away), but it’s probably different for every family. I just felt like I couldn’t wait any longer. That said, it’s true, when Saltonstall called to offer me the residency part of me wanted to say,”actually I’m not ready for this.”

We called my residency “Mom’s writing camp” -- and my husband added that Mom had won an award to go there. So my kids were excited. We were also talking about summer camps for them, and they found the idea that I had my own camp to be kind of wacky. Our school generously allowed Stella (age 4) to move to full day pre-school with after care for 2 weeks, so the kids were taken care of weekdays until 5:30. Friends generously offered to help out with rides if we needed it or invited Harold and the kids over to dinner. And we have a great babysitter who was able to help Harold out a few nights too when he needed to work late or take a break. Grandparents who lived locally would have come in helpful, but no such luck for us.

We called the kids hanging out with Dad during those two weeks “Dad Camp” — and the talk of ice cream trips, mac & cheese, and lots of PB&J got the kids pretty excited.

Re-Entry
Re-entry was challenging on a lot of levels. The kids missed Dad Camp in a lot of ways (no chores! no making lunches! ice cream!) My husband had enjoyed being a single parent in a
catching up post-residency
lot of ways too (no negotiation! less clean up in the kitchen! more eating out!). I missed having adult conversation every night for dinner (it’s true, I cried the first family dinner I had, where the conversation was mainly about why Stella was kicking me under the table about every minute). I missed having entire days for writing and I felt dragged down by the amount of housework that my life requires.

Because the residency ended on Mother’s Day weekend, we decided to stay for a few more days down in Ithaca and hike. Perhaps we were too ambitious -- there were some spectacularly unhappy scenes. But there were some nice moments too, like getting to read with my kids again. I think it would have been equally as shocking for me to suddenly appear and be thrust back into the everyday schedule of chores and tending to the kids. It took maybe three weeks for us to work out the kinks, maybe longer.

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 Debbie Urbanski is a writer living in Syracuse, New York. Her work focuses on aliens, marriage, cults, belief, and family, or some combination of those themes. Her fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tin House’s Open Bar, and the UK science fiction magazines Interzone and Arc. You can find more of her work at http://debbieurbanski.com

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Interview: Candida Alvarez

black cherry pit, 2009, 7 x 6 feet, acrylic on canvas
photo by Tom Van Eynde
Cándida Alvarez is a painter known for vibrantly layered abstractions that dismantle and remix an array of influences that cut across pop culture, modern art, world news and personal memory. Her work is shown in museums and galleries around the world and is represented in numerous public and private collections, including The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio. Cándida is a tenured Professor in the Painting and Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1998. She has been parenting nearly as long as she’s been making a career for herself as an artist, and her passion for both is clear.

CR: To start, tell us a little bit about you and your son.

Candida: Ramon Alvarez Smikle was born 23 years ago in New York City. He was the perfect baby, slept through the night, and loved to pick flowers to give to his mama. He spent his first seven months in Brooklyn, and then we all moved to Connecticut so his dad could pursue an MFA at Yale in Photography.  Two years later, since we were still in New Haven, I also applied and was accepted into the MFA program in Painting.  It was the 90’s and the stock market had crashed, and as a new mom, I saw [grad school] as an invaluable opportunity for some time out to work and engage in critical thinking and discourse about the work. I studied with Mel Bochner, Catherine Murphy, Frances Barth, David Reed, David Pease, Howardena Pindell, Rochelle Fienstein, Dick Lytle, and Sylvia Mangold.

We all moved to Chicago in Fall of 1998, after I accepted a full time teaching position at SAIC in the Painting department. Ramon started second grade at the Lab school, so we moved to Hyde Park. In 2006, his dad and I divorced, and I moved to the south loop so Ramon could be close to his new high school. Four years later, Ramon decided to apply to Columbia College, where his dad taught, and Ramon graduated with a BA degree in Music Business Management. He excelled in his passion, and today he lives in Santa Monica, working full time for Shazam as their Music Partnerships Coordinator!

CR:  What was it like for you to become an artist-mother? What kinds of support or lack of support did you encounter?

Candida with Ramon, 1991
photo by Dawoud Bey
Candida: I remember never giving it much thought until the day I found myself pregnant. It was a conversation I really was not that invested in. I was married for 10 years and was 36 years old.  I was living the life of the artist, working in a home studio, making ends meet. When I realized I was carrying a child I felt like I was ready… but to be honest I had no idea what to expect. Most of my friends had already grown children, or they were just beginning new partnerships.

It was not very popular for artists to have children, but I was steadfast in my decision. I remember thinking I may not be taken seriously as an artist after this. It was odd to see my belly stretch out in front of me, and to feel the pulsations of life growing inside of me.

Ramon was born during the winter. A few weeks later, I remember fretting about going to an art opening, as it seemed odd to bring a baby with me. I was trying to get used to this new part, which was like walking with a new limb, so to speak.  As fate would have it, the phone rang. My dear friend, poet / mother Hettie Jones was calling  to check up on the recent mom and new baby.  I told her about the opening, and she convinced me that I had to go. I went, despite my fears that I’d lost my identity as the artist to this new reality called mother. In fact it was powerful: I became both things simultaneously. Baby Ramon was bundled up in his shower gifts and he and I together walked in. As I held him in my arms he sooo became the object of desire, not the art on the walls. He intoxicated everyone around him. It was lovely.

Learning to juggle the “we-ness” of those years, when your child is totally dependent on you is daunting and doubt invariably clings like a nasty cold. Fortunately, I did know and was friendly with artists who had children, so that helped tremendously. These women were also successful: Elizabeth Murray, Allison Saar, Laura Letinsky, Hettie Jones. They all seemed so comfortable around their kids, and they made it seem easy, although they had to become better at multi-tasking. They were my role models and gave me confidence and joy in sharing a well of knowing that you just cant really explain, but need to live through. 


Candida's studio, Fine Arts Building, Chicago
CR:  Do you feel that parenthood had an impact on your creative practice?

Candida: Yes, parenting had an impact on my creative practice. I learned to multi-task, as time and exhaustion competed for prominent roles. At the end of the day, there was not a lot of time to catch up or socialize. Unfortunately, friends who were childless we saw less and less. Bright color appeared everywhere and slowly it became important to the paintings. We left New York, so my son’s dad could get his MFA from Yale in Photography. It was as traumatic as it was exciting.

At first the hardest thing was dropping him off at the baby sitter. You worry about the care no matter what. We both cried. But soon I rented a studio and got to work. My days were not as long, but the time was precious. It was a constant juggling act. I remember having to leave him after the first 6 months of nursing. It was painful but also liberating. I was in Ecuador, showing my paintings, talking about art. I walked around like a zombie, missing this bundle of life that was so close to me. It was difficult, not sure yet how this experience had affected me.

All in all, I would say motherhood was the best thing that happened to the artist that lives inside of me. It pushed all doubt to the background as love, confidence, intuition, patience, moved to the foreground. Ramon is a constant reminder that we are still always becoming ourselves.
Ramon and Candida, 2014 (selfie by Ramon)

CR:  You have raised your son through the newborn stage into adulthood. How have you negotiated the demands of your creative work, day job, and parenthood? What advice would you share with artists struggling to make it work?

Candida:
As a tenured professor and a former interim graduate dean I’ve had the chance to put my multi-tasking skills to work, and they paid off! I am grateful for that relationship. It has given me the space for criticality and engagement close to home, especially when travel or networking was challenged by my commitment to my son. I wanted to be a good mother, attentive when it mattered. 


I would say: Hang in there, it’s worth it. Aim to be present, not perfect. Be kind, considerate and respectful.

Monday, July 21, 2014

CR Event Series Report: An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum

walking-as-art for all ages
On July 19th Cultural ReProducers joined forces with the Art Institute of Chicago to present "An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum" led by art historian and critic Lori Waxman in the form of a slideshow through history, from Surrealist novels to Fluxus walking performances to Janet Cardiff's contemporary audiovisual adventures. Meanwhile, our kids laid down their own art walks of inky stamps and colored tape in a sunny room across the hall. At the close of the lecture, Waxman distributed a handout packed with Fluxus walking scores for participants to enact around the museum and out into the city, providing potential outlines for endlessly sensory self-guided tours.

One of our goals has been to make the Cultural ReProducers Event Series free of charge in addition to organizing free on-site childcare. Artists are the most underpaid / unpaid workers in the arts economy, and for artist-parents the equation "time = money" is especially literal, since work time often translates directly to childcare costs. This could have made things tricky at a museum that charges $23 adult admission, but the museum's education department was amazing to work with and together we made it happen. The event was held in the Ryan Education Center, a great family-friendly space in the new Modern Wing that is always free, and joined the Art Institute's annual Kaleidoscope Festival, which provided free museum admission as well as great activities throughout the day with organizations like the Poetry Foundation and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Wendy Donahue at the Chicago Tribune did a really nice event writeup for the newspaper's website, which also brought some new visitors our way.

 The Cultural ReProducers Event Series is a roaming series of lectures, performances, and other events designed to allow parents with small children participate more actively in the art community. These curated weekend morning events include free on-site childcare and intergenerational receptions.

Our goal is twofold: to give parents and their kids the chance to participate as critical members of the arts community, and to inspire cultural institutions to better serve artists and audiences, providing positive models for future programming. This project is made possible through support from the Propeller Fund.

We're busy planning our next event for Saturday, September 13th at the DePaul Museum of Art:  Kids in the Studio: Art, Labour, and Everyday Life with artists Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom. Drop us an email at culturalreproducers (at) gmail dot com if you'd like information about this and other upcoming events.


Friday, July 4, 2014

Interview: Chiaki Kamikawa

Chiaki Kamikawa is an artist and gallerist based in Paphos, Cyprus. We met as artists-in-residence at BankArt NYK in Yokohama, Japan before either of us were mothers, where I was lucky to see the wild energy of her drawings, sculptures and small-press zines develop firsthand. Chiaki's work is exhibited widely throughout Europe and Japan. She also runs Chiaki Kamikawa Contemporary Art, a gallery showcasing local and international work as well as art workshops, cultural events, and her own working studio. You can catch some of her latest work in the exhibition The Intuitionists, opening at The Drawing Center in New York on July 11th, 2014.

CR: First, briefly describe your daughter in your own words.



Chiaki: My daughter Savvena Sayuri is 11 months old. She is very active and social.  She loves nature and wildlife.

CR: What’s the art community like in Paphos? How did you get started running a gallery and building an audience there?

Chiaki: The art community in Paphos is quite big and international for the size of the town. I think the relationship between artists is much closer than in a larger city: we get to know each other’s families, where we live, each others' interests, etc.  What I really like about our art community is that there is a family-like atmosphere and interaction between different age groups.



In 2011 when I was looking for a place for my studio, I came across with a space that, I thought, would be a perfect place for a gallery. I wasn't thinking of starting one, but as I thought it over it seemed more logical to open a studio/gallery myself in Paphos. At that time there wasn't any contemporary gallery that organized its own exhibitions. At the beginning I gathered local artists, and gradually I met more artists whose work I wanted to show. To build up a diverse audience, I try to organize exhibitions with local Cypriot artists as well as international artists. Especially in a place like Paphos, I think it is important to introduce artists’ work from abroad so that the local audience can see work beyond what is already familiar.

CR:  What is it like to be a working artist-mother in Cyprus versus in your native Japan?



Chiaki: Women are encouraged to work after having a child in Cyprus, therefore there are a lot of working mothers. Traditionally grandparents look after their grandchildren while parents are working, and this tradition continues until today.  
In my case, my mother-in-law takes care of my daughter while I am working and other family members are also supporting me a lot. The family bond is very strong in Cyprus, and for working mothers this bond
means a huge help. 

In Japan, especially in the big city where I was raised, working mothers have to find another way to raise their children. Many people don't live near grandparents and children usually go to public/private childcare while mothers are working.  Good childcare is not always available and some mothers have to stop working and wait before they can start it again.

To be honest, I don’t know if it would have been possible for me to be an artist and run a gallery with my daughter in such a relaxed way if we were living in Japan!

CR: How do you find a balance between artmaking and parenting, running the gallery and earning an income? 

Chiaki: It is a real challenge to find a balance between everything I want to do. At the moment I consider myself as a full-time mother and part-time everything else.  My first priority is my family, and the second priority changes according to the situation.

 Basically I don’t have enough time to do everything as much as I want.  The amount of time I can spend for creative work dropped dramatically after the birth of my daughter but I am happy to continue what I want to do within my capability. I think it’s unnecessary to worry about finding a good balance between everything because I believe that the time will come back to me in near future.

CR: Thinking as big or small as you like, what kinds of things would make the international art world more accessible to artists with families?

Chiaki:
I think creating more family residency opportunities and funding for artists with families are things that can be done by both public and private institutions.

As for galleries, there are people who are now interested in collecting art for their children, and this may be a new direction for galleries to focus on besides the regular collectors.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Collaborations: Lu Heintz and Asa

Collaborations is an ongoing series of critically-engaged projects undertaken by artists with their children. Kicking off this series is Learning to Letter, a video by artist Lu Heintz with her young son Asa. To see more of Lu's work (both solo and with Asa -- it was hard to choose), visit www.luheintz.com/

Sunday, June 22, 2014

An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum: Cultural ReProducers + The Art Institute of Chicago

Phillipe Petit's illegal tightrope walk between the twin towers, 1974
Cultural ReProducers is pleased to team up with The Art Institute of Chicago to present An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum led by art critic and art historian Lori Waxman on Saturday, July 19th, 11:00 am.

Walking is one of the most primary human actions, yet for the last 100 years artists have experimented with it as an art form. Consider the revolutionary and aesthetic potential of this everyday gesture as Lori Waxman presents a lecture on walking works followed by the chance to enact several pieces for yourself, in and around the museum.

An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum is presented in the Ryan Education Center, located in the Art Institute's Modern Wing. This event is part of the Art Institute's annual Kaleidoscope Festival, allowing families free access to the museum and its events.

Space at this event is limited. Pre-register to secure your spot!

Eventbrite - An Anti-Guided Walking Tour of the Museum

The Cultural ReProducers Event Series is a roaming series of free lectures, performances, and other events designed to allow parents with small children participate more actively in the art community. Events take place on weekend mornings and feature great artist-curated programming, on-site childcare and all-ages receptions.

Our goal is twofold: to give parents and their kids the chance to participate as critical members of the arts community, and to inspire cultural institutions to better serve artists and audiences, providing positive models for future programming. This project is made possible through support from the Propeller Fund.

Christine Hill, Tourguide? 1999
Frequently Asked Questions:

I’m not a parent. Can I come? Absolutely, and bring your friends. We hope these events will be of interest to anyone engaged in the arts - not just families. One of our goals is to include parents in the context of the broader art community, which means it’s vital to have non-parents there as part of the conversation too. Be sure to pre-register if you'd like a voucher for free museum admission.

I am a parent. Does my kid have to be in child care, or can I keep them with me? Parents who'd rather keep their children with them during the lecture are welcome to do so. We're just offering the option to participate without the distraction of wrangling small children.

Where in the museum is the Ryan Education Center? If you enter the Modern Wing of the museum on Monroe, you'll find it on the left-hand side, before the admission gates. Whether you're there with kids or not, entry to the Ryan Education Center (and this event) is free.

Why do I need to pre-register for child care? For safety and legal reasons, space is limited to 18 children per event, and we expect it to fill quickly. Registration is first-come, first-served.

What time should I arrive if I have children? Sign-in starts when the museum opens at 10:30 am. The event itself starts at 11 and will last about 45 minutes. Of course, timing with children is often a bit unpredictable. You’re welcome to sign in and quietly join us at any time during the event.

Who will be watching my kids? We’ve hand-picked a great selection of experienced babysitters and playgroup facilitators who will lead hands-on activities linked to the events that parents will be attending. These are people we know and trust with our own kids regularly. Keep in mind that this is a grassroots, artist-run childcare project, not a licensed daycare facility. You will be asked to read and sign a waiver before registering your child.

What about parking and public transportation?  The Art Institute is easily accessible by CTA train. The Brown, Green, Orange, Pink, and Purple lines all stop above ground at Adams/Wabash, one block west of the museum. The Red and Blue lines stop underground at Monroe, just a few blocks away. Parking downtown can be difficult, but the Art Institute offers reserved parking at several lots within walking distance of the museum if you pay ahead.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Cultural ReProducers Meet-up!

This Sunday, JUNE 29th, 2014
Cultural ReProducers Meet-up
Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.
10am - 12pm


Bring the kids and join us as Cultural ReProducers hosts an informal art/play meet-up this coming Sunday morning at the Comfort Station in Logan Square. Enjoy a casual walk through of the exhibition the Swing and the Wall, connect with other artists, writers, musicians, curators and cultural reproducers, blow some bubbles and make chalk drawings. There’ll also be a weekly farmer’s market going on right
John Preus's The Swing
across the street, and the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest nearby.

There’s metered parking along Milwaukee Ave., the Logan Square Blue Line Stop is a two block walk, and bikes and strollers are welcome! Bathroom on premises. No RSVP necessary.

Any questions?
Please contact Thea at: thealiberty@gmail.com

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Children Are A People

Artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen presented the following talk as part of The ‘M’ Word, a day of panels dedicated to critical discussion about artists and motherhood, organized by The Feminist Art Project for the 2014 College Art Association Conference. It’s a remarkable piece that reconsiders the role of children both in her own practice and in the art world, and we liked it so much that we asked to share it here. Lise is the author of the forthcoming book "Mothernism," published by Green Lantern Press and The Poor Farm Press.

“Children are a People” implies the perspective that children are not only fellow human beings but also members of a group with its own cultural significance, and that collaborating with children would therefore imply navigating a shared (psychological) space with diplomacy and curiosity.

I borrowed the title from an exhibition held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (In Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, where I grew up) in honor of the International year of the child, 1979. Its vision was as simple as it was profound: real art by real artists for real children! Works in the show included a winged contraption on which you could hang from the ceiling and pretend to fly, and a grass-clad Volkswagen Beetle. But what I remember most vividly was a giant MOTHER, (pictured here) - that you could lie inside and pretend you were back in the womb. My visit to this exhibition as a 10 year old was seminal to my own education as an artist, as this was the first time I was addressed at eye level as a museum visitor, not with belittling “kid friendly art”, but instead as an “art friendly kid”.

In order to raise “Art Friendly Kids” -- and by this I mean Children who are interested and invested in art, which in my view is what you look for in a collaborator of any age --instead of conforming to ideas of “Child Friendly Art,” we need to accept the premise of a bilateral knowledge transfer, based on trust. The intersection of family life and artistic practice is contested territory rife with cultural anxiety, but can be fertile ground which can serve as starting points for new artistic strategies.

Here I'll examine some of the “rules” of critical play, knowledge, transfer and trust, as it relates my own experience from collaborating with my son Adam when he was about 4 years old:

The first of these collaborations came about in rather a mundane way: One day after dinner my husband was joking around with Adam, pretending to eat him, and I recorded the event with a digital camera, as one does. When Adam felt that his luck was running out, he introduced an inflatable plastic crocodile into the game, to eat his dad - and let him win the game. When I looked at the pictures afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling a slight pang of jealousy: “Damn, if I could only draw something like that,” followed by “…why not?”

In the following months, we acted and recorded a number of short scenarios, resulting in the body of work 'Stories for Boys' from 2004: simple narratives consisting of 7-8 drawings each. Most of the storylines were triggered by everyday experience - Daddy Chainsaw Massacre is a tale of jealousy and woe in which Adam takes revenge on his dad for ignoring him while playing with his nephews, while the purchase of a Halloween skeleton suit inspired the adventures of “Skeleton Boy” -an orphaned skeleton baby who is found by “Mummy Death” one day as she roams the forest; an alter-ego invented to make his fears, inherent to growing up, a subject of conversation and jest.

Young children’s fascination with scary things can be disturbing for parents, but it is nevertheless important to them. Sometimes what one is afraid of has to be wrapped up in something more comfortable in order to cope. Hence the theme in many of these role playing games of ‘playing dead’. Like the classic game “you are the monster mummy and I am the monster baby”, they reinforce the parent/child relationship and serve as affirmation of the recurring question “would you still love me if...”
Mummy Death & the Skeleton Baby, 2004, pencil on paper

Tellingly, there is also a parallel development to the obsession with morbidity in this age group: the development of humor. Not only are we facing the blind wall of our own death, we also find the jib door to get us out of this cul-de sac: the joke! And so, to me at least, these stories are also very funny. As an example, Mommy and the Hoover teaches you how to deal with the sheer feeling of disempowerment that makes you want to hoover up your mummy if she doesn’t behave. Either way, you don’t have to be 4 years old to sympathize. This last story came about as straightforward bargain: One day when I was telling Adam off for something he’d done he turned to me and said, "Mom, when you talk to me like that I just wanna throw you on the floor so you break and then hoover you up in the hoover." And I said, "Ok, you get to do that if I get to photograph it! "

What fascinates me in these stories is the way children conquer the world through play, and how they manipulate the world in order to make sense of it and to get to grips with the sometimes frightening truths you encounter in recognizing the limitations of your own individuality.

from the series House Arrest, 2005
In terms of narrative structures children’s logic and solutions are often surprisingly elegant. An example of this is 'House Arrest,' a story I developed partly in frustration over my at times homebound existence, in which I play the guitar thief which is arrested and driven off by two police officers. It ended on Adam’s suggestion of a lighter, playful note with an air guitar session at the police station, which in turn became the next series, 'Electric Motherland.'

Through our work with these stories I (re)discovered what I already knew, namely that children are deep — sometimes disturbingly so — and they don’t shy away from big existential problems if given the opportunity to delve into them. Their wild and weirdly fantastic narratives are not a threat to their sense of reality, but serve as reaffirmation of, and ongoing commentary on, same reality. And this intersection of fantasy and reality is where play, and art, can happen.

Even so, to many of those in support of art education for kids, the notion of kids as a topic or as participants in the ‘real’ art world remains an uneasy notion. Part of this reserve, I believe, stems from the fact that mothers -- not the mythological creatures, but the real ones and their very real experiences — are still a rarity in the contemporary art museum and in academic discourse.

In ‘The Family Track: Keeping your Faculties while you Mentor, Nurture, Teach and Serve’ Coiner and George offers this explanation: “the fear of children [in academia] specifically extends from adults’ distinct awareness of the capacity of children [...] Children embarrass us because they point ever too cleverly and clearly to our denial of personal, material, and maternal history.” Motherhood, it seems, is still too embarrassingly feminine a topic for the art establishment to embrace.

But outside of that, I am convinced that the latent issue of “exploitation” in relation to children as collaborative art producers arises because we, collectively, do not children seriously as (critical) cultural agents, alongside adults. In other words, even when we invite children to contribute to the production of artwork, we still assume that they do not have a stake or an interest in the art world for which these works are conceived.

The implied knowledge being that children don’t “get” art, and so if they are involved in any
matter of art production, this innocence must have been taken advantage of -and they can therefore only participate in cultural production as “nimble fingers”, their “nimble wits” left unexplored.

Added to this is the fact that the art market values a steady art production, in order to ‘market’ an artist, whereas a (true) collaboration with your child will develop with it –which in
Eskimo Kiss of Death, 2004, oil and acrylic on panel
turn might mean that just as you have “struck gold” with something that resonates with your professional support system (gallery, museum or whatever), your collaborator might already have moved on… at which point you need to make clear to yourself where your loyalties lie and who you are advocating for!

I decided to end my presentation with a picture from last summer’s Great Poor Farm Experiment in Wisconsin, where Adam assisted me in installing my Mothernism tent. Although this was not strictly speaking a collaborative work, I was very happy when he referred to it as our installation. The week we spent building there together, reminded me of one of the cardinal rules of collaboration: Shared investment involves shared decision-making.

In the works with 'Stories for Boys' I used as my example, our respective roles were fairly clear-cut: Adam being the storyteller and I the illustrator, with a clear distinction between the home and the studio. But if I ever wondered about it, Adams investment and authorship in these drawings became apparent, when on the day of the opening, he ran ahead to the gallery space and opened the door to me and my friends with the greeting:
“WELCOME TO MY EXHIBITION!”