{"id":175,"date":"2021-06-09T12:26:16","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T19:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/?p=175"},"modified":"2021-06-09T12:26:16","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T19:26:16","slug":"ellen-lesperance-wednesday-may-18-2011-1130-100-lecture-hall-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/ellen-lesperance-wednesday-may-18-2011-1130-100-lecture-hall-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Lesperance: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 11:30-1:00, Lecture Hall 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-default\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"300\" height=\"219\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/269\/2021\/06\/Ellen-Lesperance.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-176\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Female heroism is undersung, but\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ellenlesperance.com\/start.swf\" target=\"_blank\">Ellen Lesperance<\/a>\u00a0is determined to sing it\u2014not only so it\u2019s not forgotten, but with the hope that it might be catching. Go to\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ellenlesperance.com\/start.swf\" target=\"_blank\">her web site<\/a>, and you immediately hear the chants of the Women\u2019s Peace Camp at the nuclear testing site Greenham Common.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Look at her paintings, outside the elevators at Seattle Art Museum, and you see they\u2019re dot patterns in a grid on brownish paper: patterns for sweaters that, when worn\u2014and however soft\u2014might transform the individual wearer. Lesperance, originally from a hippieish family in Seattle\u2019s 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\u2019s the spur of her work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tone of inspiration has become pretty rare in art. It\u2019s fairly rare in the culture at large. Radical acts may remain, but the rousing spirit of radicalism is hard to find. Lesperance\u2019s art actually includes everything from the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/local-artists.org\/node\/86177\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">archival photos she starts with<\/a>&nbsp;to the titles she writes to the pattern paintings that hang on the wall to the<strong>sweaters she wants to be worn<\/strong>. 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\u2019s where she learned of Greenham Common.-Jen Graves,&nbsp;<em>The Stranger<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI like the idea that, for example, through the recreation of a Greenham sweater, a new \u2018wearer\u2019 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\u2019Brien, women who have sacrificed their lives fighting the good fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Female heroism is undersung, but\u00a0Ellen Lesperance\u00a0is determined to sing it\u2014not only so it\u2019s not forgotten, but with the hope that it might be catching. Go to\u00a0her web site, and you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[3,29,28,30,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}