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.

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.   

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.

The zine is also available as a lovely e-book and archival PDFs at $2 each through the Temporary Services 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).

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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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