Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She currently lives and works in Thunder Bay, Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Her new book The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future is available from Pluto Press.
Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link mid century formalism, architectural theory and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island (New York, NY), the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences (Charleston, WV), the PalaentologicalMuseum (Cortina, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Zuckerman Museum (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene diRosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She is currently a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program.
Experimental animation reinterprets, reorganizes and challenges the material, technical, narrative and affective conventions of animation established by mainstream studios. While the participation of women in this field has become more and more visible, their work has not been sufficiently exhibited or discussed, nor have their varied and singular perspectives. To recognize the important contributions that women have made to the field of Experimental Animation in Latin America as directors, animators, artists, art directors, and sound engineers, Moebius Animación has curatedWomen in Latin American Experimental Animation, an exhibition of short films by Latin American women and women of Latin American descent. Join us for this screening of films, presented by co-curator Lina X. Aguirre.
The program features women animators from Latin America exploring multiple techniques like drawing, stop-motion, time-lapse, found footage and paint on glass to produce an exceptional program of experimental animation.
LIna X. Aguirre is a member of Moebius animación, a curatorial and critical project dedicated to Latin American experimental animation. Moebius has curated a selection of 16 short films from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, produced between 2007 and 2014 by independent filmmakers and artists. This compilation is the result of their effort to map out the artistic field of experimental animation and its intense dynamic during the last decade. They have defined trends in the technical, narrative, material, and sensorial/affective dimensions of the works. Screening (85 min.)
Rosa Clemente is an Afro-Puerto Rican journalist and scholar-activist researching national liberation struggles inside the United States, Afro-Latinx identity+politics, sexism within Hip-Hop culture, media justice, Hip-Hop activism, and African American and Latinx unity. More information about her can be found here: http://rosaclemente.net/biography-of-rosa-clemente/
Rosa’s schedule while she is on campus:
Wednesday, 2/27, 11:30-1pm Lecture Hall 1
Thursday, 2/28, 3-5pm Longhouse
Many thanks to the sponsors and programs contributing to Rosa’s days with us!
Sponsors include: Media Island International, the Women of Color in Leadership Movement, the Willi Unsoeld Seminar Series, the CCBLA, the Art Lecture Series, and the the Dean’s Match.
Programs include: “Who Gets What?: Political Economy of Income, Wealth, and Economic Justice,” – “Political Economy and Environmental and Social Movements: Race, Class, and Gender,” – “Mediaworks,” – “The Spanish-Speaking World,” – “Teaching ELLs: Culture, Theory, and Methods,” and “Unruly Bodies: Health, Media, Biology, and Power.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, multi-disciplinary artist, scholar, activist and this year’s Evan’s Chair at The Evergreen State College. As an educator, Alexis Pauline Gumbs walks in the legacy of black lady school teachers in post-slavery communities who offered sacred educational space to the intergenerational newly free in exchange for the random necessities of life. She honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. She believes that in the time we live in access to the intersectional, holistic brilliance of the black feminist tradition is as crucial as learning how to read. She brings that approach to her work as the provost of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a transmedia- enabled community school (aka tiny black feminist university) and lending library based in Durham, North Carolina.
A queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. She was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University during her dissertation research.
Cassie Thornton is also known as the Feminist Economics Department (The FED). The FED works with imaginary financial limitations. On earth, we have amassed excessive public, private and personal debt, justifying an inability to provide shelter or food, education, or healthcare for many, and much less, go to space. Collective fear of debt is so strong that when we look at the sky we see the debt ceiling where the ozone used to be, rather than an expansive universe with infinite possibility. Thus, The FED’s materials are in themselves financial forms– debt and its accomplice, security.
On earth, The FED constructs situations where members of the public observe and confront financialization– in order to see it as an idea that can be manipulated rather than the absolute way of living and being. Through producing experimental moments in public spaces, participants test and extend what can be considered ‘real’. This work involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things— dancers touching the surfaces inside financial institutions, actors selling their nervous breakdowns to pay off debt, security guards protecting public vulnerability by reciting poetry written on the job, and people screaming their debt to space over the radio.
Sister Spit began in San Francisco in the 1990s as a weekly, girls-only open mic that was an alternative to the misogyny-soaked poetry open mics popular around the city (and the nation) at that time. Inspired by two-bit punk bands who managed to go on the road without hardly knowing how to play their instruments, Sister Spit became the first all-girl poetry roadshow at the end of the 90s, and toured regularly with such folks as Eileen Myles, Marci Blackman, Beth Lisick, and Nomy Lamm. The tour was revived as Sister Spit: The Next Generation in 2007, and has toured the United States annually since, with authors and performers such as Chinaka Hodge, Dorothy Allison, Lenelle Moise, Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. In this next incarnation, out of respect to the changing gender landscape of our queer and literary communities, Sister Spit welcomes artists of all genders, so long as they mesh with the tour’s historic vibe of feminism, queerness, humor, and provocation.
In addition to the authors of Sister Spit Book’s two most recent publications, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, and Rad American Women A-Z, the tour incorporates artists and activists with wide-ranging audiences, styles and voices. Furthermore, the Sister Spit Tour invites local guest writers to add to the lineup.
Female heroism is undersung, but Ellen Lesperance is determined to sing it—not only so it’s not forgotten, but with the hope that it might be catching. Go to her web site, and you immediately hear the chants of the Women’s Peace Camp at the nuclear testing site Greenham Common.
Look at her paintings, outside the elevators at Seattle Art Museum, and you see they’re dot patterns in a grid on brownish paper: patterns for sweaters that, when worn—and however soft—might transform the individual wearer. Lesperance, originally from a hippieish family in Seattle’s U District and now living in the latter-day utopic city of Portland, is both wedded to and critical of collective idealism. She knows how it can hollow out over time, and how dogma or compromise can take over. But she plainly still believes in the sheer power of individual action. How to make it happen? That’s the spur of her work.
The tone of inspiration has become pretty rare in art. It’s fairly rare in the culture at large. Radical acts may remain, but the rousing spirit of radicalism is hard to find. Lesperance’s art actually includes everything from the archival photos she starts with to the titles she writes to the pattern paintings that hang on the wall to thesweaters she wants to be worn. One of her own inspirations was visiting the Asylum for Radical Feminism in Santa Fe, which she found harrowing: The feminists were very few in number, and essentially impoverished. But they had stories to tell; that’s where she learned of Greenham Common.-Jen Graves, The Stranger
“I like the idea that, for example, through the recreation of a Greenham sweater, a new ‘wearer’ might be beckoned. I also have a particular interest in assigning valor to young women from the Pacific Northwest like Rachel Corrie and Beth Horehound O’Brien, women who have sacrificed their lives fighting the good fight.”
