NOVEMBER 2022
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7
GIRLS MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, NOVEMBER 2022
GIRLS MAGAZINE NOVEMBER Letter from the Editor - Page 3 Whitney Bradshaw - Page 4 Angie Chandler - Page 13 Alicia Escott - Page 18 Anisa Tavangar - Page 24
GIRLS MISSION STATEMENT GIRLS is a revised portfolio of interviews from a nationwide community of real, strong womxn. It's a magazine that is 100% all womxn, which is beautiful in its rarity - the magazine is a safe space FOR womxn ABOUT womxn. Created by Adrianne Ramsey, it serves as a content destination for multigenerational womxn. Read on for an engagement of feminist voices and a collaborative community for independent girls to discover, share, and connect. The usage of the terms "girls" and "womxn" refers to genderexpansive people (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary, non-conforming, gender queer, and any girl-identified person). Front and Back Cover Image: Laxmi, 2018 from the series OUTCRY. Courtesy of Whitney Bradshaw
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: APPROACHING THE HORIZON BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY The controversy surrounding elections has only become more polarized in the two years since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Midterm elections are an opportunity for the country to reflect on where we are and what direction we would like to go in. My hopes for the upcoming elections are voter participation – I would love for people to actually show up and vote, although I know it’s not that simple. For the past two years, we have seen alarming trends in red states passing laws that make it much more difficult for people to vote freely and easily. I’m fortunate in that I have always lived in places that have good voter protection laws and actually want people to vote, but seeing videos of people waiting seven hours in line to vote in Georgia or reading about Florida’s state government misleading parolees about voting and later arresting them has me flabbergasted. There’s a lack of trust that is happening right now with regards to voting systems on both the right and the left, which is pretty disheartening because all the data says that our voting machines are secure and that elections have been counted fairly. Stacey Abrams is a great example of someone who has done an incredible job in mobilizing people to vote and making sure that people are registered. That being said, the themes of GIRLS 15: November are social justice and creative activism. It is very important for me to highlight femme-identifying artists and organizers who are tirelessly working to uphold our democracy through their works and advocacy for the rights of several communities, particularly BIPOC and womxn. The overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24th left a foul taste in my mouth but also lit a fire under me, as I realized that the fight is truly never over and now is not the time to be complacent. I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Alicia, Angie, Anisa, and Whitney for participating in this issue and speaking to me at length about their practices, which lie at the intersections of civic democracy, politics, and active engagement. It is also such a treat to highlight the activities of two incredible artist-run platforms, For Freedoms and 100 Days Action. Their discourse and activities surrounding civic democracy and artist engagement has been a huge inspiration for GIRLS.
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW
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Photograph by Jamie Kelter Davis for Seriously Badass Women
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Whitney Bradshaw is an artist, activist, educator, curator, and former social worker who lives and works in Chicago. Bradshaw is an Artist-in-Residence with Chicago Public Schools' juniors and seniors, piloting a new arts program called RE:ALIZE. Bradshaw was previously the chair of the visual art conservatory at the Chicago High School for the Arts for 10 years. Prior to that she was the curator for the renowned LaSalle Bank Photography Collection and later the Bank of America Collection. In addition, Bradshaw was an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago. Her photographs have been widely exhibited across the United States and in Zurich. She has had solo shows at the DePaul Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Wave Pool Contemporary Art Fulfillment Center, McCormick Gallery, the Tarble Arts Center at EIU, Adler University, Villanova University and more. Her work has been included in several group shows including Director’s Choice PhotoSchweiz 2021, Female in Focus 2020, Dock6 Design + Art 13 2020, Well Behaved Women 2020, and In a Time of Change, 2021. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern School of Law, and the Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell collection, and has been published in The New York Times, The LA Times, Time Out New York, and Vogue. To learn more about Whitney's work, check out her website: www.whitneybradshaw.com, or follow her on Instagram: @thewhitneybradshaw
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in September 2022. GM: What was your path to becoming an artist? WB: I was always really interested in power dynamics and social strata. While growing up in a mostly white suburb of Chicago, white flight began. Diverse families would move in and I would hear my parent’s friends, our neighbors, coming over and talking about moving out. Consequently, as a very young person, I recognized the horrendous impact of segregation and the dark history of racism and white supremacy in both the United States and my own community. At the age of 10, I started babysitting for the families that had moved into my neighborhood. It was an incredible opportunity to learn from people who were not like me and my family. I really wanted to understand more about systemic racism, classism, and sexism. I went to college and eventually got my degree in Sociology, with a minor in Women’s Studies, an interdisciplinary program I co-founded and was the first to graduate with a degree in. After that, I worked on the South Side of Chicago with adults with physical and mental disabilities, and later began working all over the city with families whose kids had special needs. […] As a child, I experienced sexual abuse, both within and outside of my family. As part of my own healing and desire to support others in similar circumstances, I enrolled in an intensive training to work with rape survivors in emergency rooms through this organization called Rape Victim Advocates, which is now called Resilience. This was the first time that I had ever been in a community of people who I felt I could tell my stories to. Together, we created a brave space in which we could be vulnerable and share our trauma while being witnessed, truly heard, believed, and supported. The discussions we had in that space had been silenced or dismissed within our culture and families. After that, I worked with rape survivors in emergency rooms in Chicago. I was on call for fourteen hospitals in the city, and anytime someone was raped, I would go to the emergency room and support them in dealing with hospital personnel and police. I stayed with them in the emergency room and provided unconditional support through rape kits, interviews with police, sometimes returning to the scene of the crime with investigators, and often accompanying them to lineups at the police station. Additionally, I helped them find a safe place to stay and get the locks changed on their home if the perpetrator had taken their keys, wallet, etc. I did that work for three years before returning to social work with an early intervention program. GM: That’s a tough job. It’s interesting that you have such a strong background in both community and social work. How did this translate into an art practice? WB: After working in social services for several years, I felt the need to do something different that would feed and nurture myself. After witnessing so much trauma, I needed to recharge and care for myself. I decided to go to graduate school for photography; I had been making pictures since I was a kid and always wanted to be an artist. (Continued)
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW While doing social work, I rented darkroom space through the Chicago Park District and took a photography class. Every Friday night, I would stay in and process film that I shot during the week, and began showing my work in local restaurants and coffeehouses. I had never really taken myself seriously as an artist, but I really wanted to give it a shot, so I put a portfolio together and picked a three-year MFA program to apply to. I wanted to get as much studio time as possible and ultimately be able to teach. To my surprise, I was accepted into the Columbia College Chicago graduate program. While working towards my degree, I was an adjunct professor and an assistant registrar and curatorial assistant at The Museum of Contemporary Photography. My visual thesis, “Scars”, was a beautiful melding of both my social work and my photography practices. Over the course of three years, I worked with a group of 9 people who had survived trauma that left physical marks. The project was intimate, empowering, and transformative for us all. It was the first project in which I truly found my voice as an artist, thus laying the groundwork for subsequent projects, including OUTCRY. GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism? Why is it important to you? WB: I have always felt that it’s important to empower communities by creating space for people to be able to share their experiences. I love art and its potential to communicate and connect in unusual and sometimes meaningful ways. Art can be incredibly powerful, but oftentimes it is only seen by artists who go to art spaces. The white cubes, you know? (Laughs) Another thing about art is that it’s often attached to access, which is an equity issue in and of itself. I want to create art and spaces that are accessible to all people, and the only way that our very segregated society is going to be able to really come together is to create spaces that are truly and intentionally intersectional. Having an art practice that allows for that and creates space for all of those things is a continuation of my interest in supporting and empowering communities of all kinds.
Installation view of OUTCRY at McCormick Gallery (Chicago, IL), July - October 2021. Courtesy of the artist
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW GM: Speaking of accessibility, your project OUTCRY is currently being shown at BAMPFA via the large public screen outside of the main galleries. This means that anyone can see it, whether they’re walking/biking/driving by, and they also don’t have to pay an entrance fee. WB: Exactly! I am thrilled about the exhibition at BAMPFA, especially because it’s so massive and so public. I am also extremely excited to have it up through the midterm elections. During the pandemic, three of the OUTCRY portraits were included in an exhibition titled “In a Time of Change”, a collaboration between SaveArtSpace and the Colorado Photographic Art Center. That was the first time the work was shown outside of a museum or gallery, and it was game changing. The images were very large and displayed on billboards, making them accessible by all. The exhibition at BAMPFA is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to present such a large portion of the project (100 of the 400 portraits) at such a monumental scale (70 x 100 ft) on a public screen. It is incredibly impactful, and I intend to continue seeking out ways to share the series in this way so that it can reach more people. GM: Could you discuss the conception and evolution of OUTCRY? WB: I conceived of the project when Trump was elected. I was absolutely irate that this racist, xenophobic predator had just become the leader of the “free world." I put the project off for a couple of years because I had a full-time job and was raising my daughter, but I felt an urgent need to create a space for womxn to build intersectional community, practice speaking up and out for ourselves, and release our emotions related to the political climate or our experiences as womxn in a white supremacist patriarchal society. The project is open to all womxn, including non-binary and trans folks. Additionally, I hoped to help propel the revolutionary #MeToo Movement forward, as it was gaining a lot of steam and real change was beginning to happen. (Continued) Installation view of OUTCRY at BAMPFA (Berkeley, CA), July - November 2022. Courtesy of the artist
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW […] I intentionally brought several groups of womxn together for the project who did not know each other and were of different ages, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and abilities, in order to create a truly intersectional space that would build empathy, understanding, and foster intimate connections. Nobody’s experience is the same, and even though as womxn we have some shared experiences, the systems of inequality in place involving race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, and other forms of discrimination intersect within our unique identities, thus resulting in a myriad of experiences and varying degrees of privilege and trauma. My hope is that OUTCRY encourages more connections across identities and that everyone can see themselves or someone they know represented in this work. Unlike the current exhibition at BAMPFA, OUTCRY has usually been shown in a museum/gallery as a floor to ceiling installation of as many of the 400 photographs as possible. A short documentary video made by one of the participants, Anamarie Edwards, accompanies it. This video presents an Outcry Scream Session, which provides the audience with a glimpse into the myriad of reasons why womxn take part in the project. (Continued)
Adia, 2018 from the series OUTCRY. Courtesy of the artist
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW At BAMPFA, I sequenced 100 of the 400 portraits into a video loop that includes a bit of text every 25 portraits in order to provide the viewer with some context. The text briefly explains the project and includes a quote from Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.” When seen en masse, the OUTCRY portraits constitute a monumental act of collective resistance by an intersectional community of extremely powerful womxn, whose representations alone challenge the patriarchy. Since Roe v. Wade was reversed, I have felt an urgency around getting the project out more publicly and to states that have banished and/or criminalized abortion. My hope is that the work will implore people to support womxn’s rights, vote in ways that uphold a womxn’s right to choose, and stop the extreme right from continuing to chip away at all of our civil rights. I have an upcoming show at Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m trying to get shows in Florida and Texas. Jin, 2018 from the series OUTCRY. Courtesy of the artist GM: Is OUTCRY an ongoing project? WB: Yes! Everywhere the project travels, I engage the community in what I call Outcry Scream Sessions. I started the project on the day of the 2018 Women’s March. Before going to the march, I reached out to three of my neighbors to see if they’d be willing to try out this scream session idea. They all agreed to do it and were excited about it. One of them is a Black womxn teacher, another is white and works for The Chicago Tribune, and the third is a Latinx womxn who is an academic dean. My partner was getting a haircut that day; his stylist was upset because she couldn’t go to march due to work, so he told her about my project and suggested she join us for the session. She said, “Hell yeah!” and brought a friend. The experience was powerful – we chatted over some drinks and snacks, I talked about why I wanted to start the project, and shared intimate stories about how my voice has saved me, as did others. We then practiced screaming together, and finally took turns getting in front of the camera. (Continued)
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW Each participant got to choose whether to scream alone or with the support of the group. No one ever has to scream alone if they don’t want to. That first night set the course for the rest of the sessions, as each session has its own chemistry. Before the pandemic, I held scream sessions at my house pretty regularly, and it was all word of mouth. Womxn who came to the sessions would tell other womxn, or people would reach out to me, and then I would organize intersectional scream sessions. The project changes with whatever’s going on with the participants personally, politically, and socially. I held a number of scream sessions during the pandemic, and those were very different. Those portraits aren’t in the BAMPFA exhibition because they weren’t made in a studio setting. Instead, they were made outside, with everyone wearing masks and social distancing. During the pandemic, people were really struggling for a multitude of reasons and the resulting sessions were intense, powerful, healing, and even fun! Much of the sentiment that came up during the pandemic resurfaces in different ways in other sessions; everyone comes to OUTCRY for different reasons and shares whatever they wish to.
Leslie, 2018 from the series OUTCRY. Courtesy of the artist
GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections? WB: It’s horrendous that Roe was reversed, but I hope that this is going to make a shift in Republican lead states. We’ve already seen changes in Kansas and Alaska, which is promising. I’m feeling hopeful that the majority in this country are enraged over womxn’s rights being taken away, and understand that this is just the beginning of the Republican assault on all of our civil rights. I’d really like to see some changes made to the Supreme Court; to start with, no more lifetime appointments - that’s a major issue. I hope that everyone who believes in a womxn’s right to control their bodies and have the right to choose will get out and vote for decidedly pro-choice candidates. I also hope that OUTCRY will continue to provide support to womxn during these horrendous times and encourage people to speak out whenever and wherever they need to, including at the ballot box.
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WHITNEY BRADSHAW GM: Besides OUTCRY, what are some projects you’re currently working on? WB: I attended The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for many years. The festival began in 1976 as a radical feminist space and existed for 40 years; like OUTCRY, cis-men were not allowed. For me, this space was absolutely transformative. I’m really interested in how many of us create utopian communities to support ourselves. A couple of months ago, I had the incredible opportunity to visit the festival’s physical archive and conduct research. I also found the photographs that I took at the festival when I began attending in the late 80’s and printed those out. I’m still in the research phase and am not sure where this will wind up, but I am interested in sharing my experience while investigating utopian, empowering, and healing affinity spaces. I’ve been working on another project that deals with my own family and the trauma and secrets within it; this project incorporates writing and archival photographs that my dad left for me when he died. I’m moving a little more slowly on that project because it’s a difficult one to do. I started it in 2008, but wanted to wait until my daughter, Ruby, was old enough for me to tell her a little bit about my past. I have another project, titled “Slow Release”, that I just finished when Ruby went to college. I raised her largely as a single parent, and we had this really strong community of women and girls that she’s grown up with and I’ve learned to be a parent with. We started the project when Ruby turned 13 and collaborated on it for the entirety of her high school years; I thought it was an interesting moment to capture, as it was a time when she was separating from me and doing her own thing. This project permitted us to spend time together and share something, which allowed us to remain connected and be able to communicate well when things got tough. We would go to friends’ homes and I would photograph Ruby alone. She’s the constant in the project, as you witness her growing up and individuating over time. Then there are photos of her with the other teens, and then the teens with their mom(s). Again, it’s about community and connecting with a diverse and intersectional group. Currently, I am an Artist-in-Residence piloting a new Chicago Public Schools art program called RE:ALIZE, so I have my own studio there and work with juniors and seniors who are aspiring artists. I’m working on the utopian project with them because I want the students to
Gerri, 2018 from the series OUTCRY. Courtesy of the artist
think about how they can design their own community and empower them to use their own experiences, artistic abilities, and voices to improve their environments and work towards social justice.
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ANGIE CHANDLER
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Image courtesy of Stacey Keck
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Angie Chandler is a cultural arts strategist and programming curator from Brooklyn, New York. In Brooklyn, she received both her love of the arts and her B.A. in Education and History from Brooklyn College. As a 1st generation American, her Caribbean and Afro-Latinx heritage inspires a focus on global perspectives. Angie’s time as an educator continues to fuel her passion for art education, advocacy, and arts equity. As an arts administrator, she’s worked in a variety of small and large-sized spaces increasing community engagement, curating innovative programming, and introducing new voices to institutions. Angie is the creator of Culture Mapping: San Diego, a data-driven initiative to give historically excluded artists and arts orgs increased visibility and access to resources. Angie takes great joy in creating opportunities for artists and communities to engage in impactful experiences. Currently, Angie spends her time as a consultant and facilitator based in Southern California.
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ANGIE CHANDLER This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2022. GM: What was your path to your current career as a cultural arts strategist? AC: [I transitioned from a] classroom teacher, to a teaching/theatre artist, museum worker, and am now a cultural arts strategist/consultant. My work life has never really been linear, but I see a thread when I reflect on the various positions that have led me to now work as a cultural arts strategist. After nearly a decade of working full-time in the arts, my experience and skills as a problem solver and innovative public program curator has led to more freelance and consultant opportunities. I kept thinking about the “why” behind the success of the work I crafted, and I realized it was in seeing and implementing sound community-based intersectional strategies. I’ve been working consistently as a strategist on various teams and as a consultant for about five years now. GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism? Why is it important to you? AC: The idea of merging my artistic practice with activism began really early on in my work as a theatre artist. Working with both Black playwrights and directors to tell our stories was inherently political in terms of portraying the Black experience and advocating for funding and inclusion in place-based arts conversations and media placements. Once I shifted to [working in] museums, I was immediately drawn to social practice artists via an artist residency I worked at. While there, I helped artists create work and experiences that commented on and advocated for issues around homelessness. My next position took me to an African-American museum and cultural center; again, the bulk of my work and programming centered around social practice artists who focused on redlining, gentrification, voting, social justice movements, Black joy, and so Photo by Jonathan Cooper
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much more. (Continued)
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ANGIE CHANDLER My approach will always bring me to communities and organizations working on the issues highlighted in their work. That community and place rooted approach, alongside my B.A. in History and advocacy practice, helps me to add context to conversations [that take place] in art spaces and bring artists’ works into the offices of elected officials and the government. This experience of moving through these seemingly different worlds has really come together in my project, Culture Mapping: San Diego. GM: What has been your experience working on that specific project? AC: Before I began this project, I was actually on a rest from activist-based work in the arts. I came to San Diego to catch my breath, heal from institutional trauma and burnout, explore other parts of the arts, and enjoy the weather. However, when your work is so deeply rooted in policy change, advocacy, and telling underrepresented stories, sometimes that rest is short-lived. I called out San Diego’s biggest newspaper for erasing Black voices in the arts, and then wrote a full-page op-ed, which blew up. Since I’m not originally from San Diego, I thought about how I could use that energy to support the artists that I was advocating for. I decided to create a survey that would use data to show who was here, what they added to San Diego, and what they needed support-wise. That survey turned into a 30+ page report, accompanying press, and opportunities to help connect folks to resources and consulting work for me. This upcoming January will mark two years since I launched the project. I’ve seen the goals manifest into increased visibility and access for historically excluded artists and arts organizations, helping both the city and county of San Diego think deeply about the arts [in relation to] equity and racial justice. I’ve been able to build deep connections with the project participants, regional art institutions, and media outlets, and provide some of them with artist development support. That’s a lot, and as a self-funded initiative with a staff of one, I've felt overwhelmed many times. I was and still am using my own funds to pay vendors and for materials, and lose income on the value of the time I put into the project. (Continued)
Photo by Alvin C. Jacobs
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ANGIE CHANDLER
Photo by Stacey Edelstein
My experience is one of joy, validation, erasure, frustration, and satisfaction – all at once. Certain segments of the San Diego arts ecosystem have been very receptive and about that action, [but others] have used the report and the work without crediting me or offering me compensated opportunities to impact policy. [But] many are extremely grateful, and some want me to do more with the initiative than I have the capacity for. [This experience] sounds like almost every Black woman-run business, platform, or initiative, and that’s wild. This is action-based, art-driven DEI work, but done MY WAY, and I refuse to let the work kill my spirit in the same way white supremacy tries to. I take breaks, I choose who I want to work with, and say things how I want and need to say them GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections? AC: Gosh, I hope for action and elections that lead to policy changes that benefit Black, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian folks. In 2016, I curated a show as part of the For Freedoms initiative called “Portraits @ the Polls”, where I asked people about the freedoms they were voting to protect. I’m so focused on freedom and autonomy for women’s bodies, trans rights, voting right rights, and equitable housing. I want to see voters come out and vote out the loud ass majority of folks who want to see us return to the 1900’s – hell, even to the 1800’s. GM: What are some new projects that you’re working on in your practice? AC: [I’m working on] more writing and curating projects, as well as more place-based social practice influenced programming. My next chapter will deepen my work of providing support and space for artists to connect with themselves and the community. I’m focused on consulting and institutional work that will prepare me for that yet-to-be-named initiative.
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ALICIA ESCOTT
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Image courtesy of Kija Lucas
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Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist based in the land currently called San Francisco. She/they practices in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott’s practice is informed by how we each negotiate our day-to-day realities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate-chaos, mass-extinction, and the social unrest such rapid change and the subsequent unprocessed grief produces. Her/their work makes space for the unspoken individual and collective experiences of loss, heartbreak and grief, and cultivates spaces of regeneration. She/they approaches these issues with an interstitial practice encompassing writing, drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, socialpractice, seed-planting, composting, and activism. Escott has been making work exclusively about environmental and social justice for over 15 years. Her/their recent work directly incorporates habitat restoration into its creation and exhibition and is increasingly interested in creating art spaces for other-thanhuman audiences, as well as their human neighbors. Escott’s work has been shown in over 100 art institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces, including exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara. She/they have been an Artist in Residence at Recology, The Growlery, Djerassi Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Irving Street Projects, The JB Blunk Artist Residency and Dream Farm Commons. Escott is a founding member of the collective 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The New Yorker, KQED, MOMUS, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. She/they holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Richard K. Prince Scholarship, and a BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago.
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ALICIA ESCOTT This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in September 2022. GM: What was your path to becoming an artist? AE: I always understood myself as an artist. Art felt like a way to process the contradictions and inherent insanity of the world around me. I went to art school for undergrad; while my classes may have been liberal and philosophic in addressing social, political, and especially environmental issues in artmaking was at that time routinely dismissed and usually labeled as “didactic.” In many ways, I graduated making work that was less pertinent than what I came in making, but I did learn how to think critically, expansively, and creatively. After undergrad, I took some time away from my practice; when I returned to art making, I did so with a firm commitment to myself that from then on, I would make work that directly addressed the issues that were important to me. I felt of paramount importance to the world around us. This has shaped my practice in the nearly two decades since. Because of this, I feel that my career as an artist has followed the rise of social practice. It’s exciting to me that more artists feel compelled to talk about these issues in complex, nuanced, and entangled ways. Sadly, the issues my work addresses have only become more relevant as the years have passed into decades, and more recently this relevancy has increased not linearly, but exponentially.
GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism? Why is it important to you? AE: I have been making work about environmental and social justice issues exclusively for 18 years. Currently, the carbon that was released from car mufflers and smokestacks at the time of my birth is just now having an effect on our “climate.” We understood then the science of climate change about as well as we do now, but 40 years of science has not created the cultural, embodied, or structural shifts needed to address it. I had to spend a lot of time in my earlier career answering the question if I wanted to “save the planet”, then why was I in the arts? My direct experience with activists, policy makers, and those on the front line Alicia Escott, The Archive to Come: Letter to
is that they deeply want artists in the game.
COVID-19 in a Seed (Video Still), 2020/2021. Courtesy of the artist
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ALICIA ESCOTT
Alicia Escott, Like Grafting a Live Branch to a Dead Beam II, 2019. Courtesy of the artist
GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections? AE: I hope that we will see free and fair elections be accepted as such. The rise of extremism in this country is extremely scary. Even in a society that was functioning at its highest level – without war, unnecessary conflict, or extreme inequality – the physical challenges facing us as climate chaos accelerates would still feel insurmountable. Sadly, the way that political discourse has broadly devolved, as well as the acceleration of misinformation, makes me worried that we will see the byproducts of a climate crisis that many have feared to be its worst initial consequence: societal breakdown and increased violence. While it’s important that the Democratic party hold onto its slim majority, as it would be my greatest hope that that majority were strengthened so we are not at the whim of 1-2 senators, I hope the most that there is a condemnation of anti-democratic extremism. I hope that as time goes on, those voices become more alienated. It’s very concerning that Democrats prefer to be up against opponents with extreme positions, instead of nuanced, moderate Republicans. It’s a big gamble in an increasingly unstable playing field. GM: You co-founded the arts collective 100 Days Action. What compelled you to do this, and what has been your experience working with this group? AE: 100 Days Action coalesced directly after the 2016 Presidential Election. What began as an emergency invitation initiated by artist Jerimiah Barber and writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, where anyone interested could show up, eventually settled into 12 core members who together formed 100 Days Action. 100 Days Action creates spaces for us and others to initiate acts of both defiance and solidarity. Initially, we were focused on those first 100 Days of the new administration, but kept working beyond that initial time frame. (Continued)
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ALICIA ESCOTT Like many of my social practice collaborations, especially The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, this work has not just been about our artistic expression but creating a space for other’s political and artistic expressions. During the Trump administration’s “First 100 Days”, we hosted some 150 acts of artistic and political expression. One of my favorite projects of ours took place during the 2018 midterm elections, when we created a faux oval office out of cardboard called The People’s Oval Office. This project used spectacle to work in partnership with the organization Mi Familia Vota in order to register voters in a local, flip-able district. The desk invited folks, regardless of age, sex, immigration status, skin color, or sexual orientation, to sit down at The People’s Oval Office and become the president. This platform was a place to generate images of individuals whom the Trump administration increasingly alienated holding this office. As President, participants were invited to draft an Executive Order on the spot. Our administration was thus successful in: ending rape culture, allocating reparations, LANDBACK, universal housing and healthcare, rights to nature, an end to car culture, and many other formerly “impossible” achievements. The documents that came out of The People’s Oval Office were a growing testimony of the hopes, dreams, and demands of the individuals and communities we worked with. Early on in our process together, we as a group realized that just coming together in that difficult time, holding conversation together, and making work together was already a success, regardless of the outcome of that work. In this way, 100 Days Action changed my life and how I think about art making and success. This recently came up on a panel, when curator Thea Quiray Tagle talked about how we, and the work of other collectives, were actually practicing skills for the collective decision making that we will increasingly need in order to create a habitable future. This sentiment really resonated with me.
Left to Right: Installation views of The People's Oval Office, 2018 in Modesto, CA and CCA Hubbell Street Galleries. Photos taken by Ben Leon and Courtesy of 100 Days Action
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ALICIA ESCOTT GM: What are you currently working on in your practice? AE: I’m working seasonally. At this stage in my practice, I have learned to juggle collaborative and collective work with a solo practice, and also balance work inside and outside of the studio in the form of habitat regeneration and community building. This past summer, I had a show that included a video installation alongside my Metabolic Rifts and Domestic Interiors sculptures that felt very meaningful. These are living sculptures made in collaboration with local wildflower seeds. I’m increasingly interested in these works as sculptures for nonhuman audiences, as they are the host plants for several pollinators. The video works were an extension of this work and feature both my hand and the hand of an assistant, artist Sommer Taylor, as caretakers for them. The paired down minimal videos show our hands reaching out and caressing the plants; reversely, the plants themselves reach out to our hands. This work spoke to interspecies longing, connectivity, and reciprocity in the way that the living sculptures and our hands engage one another. This work will likely resume again during the rainy season, when it’s time to scatter seeds. This fall, I am in residence at Dream Farm Commons in Oakland, continuing my work with oak ecologies, and more broadly, ecologies that have historically co-evolved with fire through the work of the Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone people. This residency is intentionally unfolding during the fall, our “fire season” and the time when acorns can be planted. We are hoping oak saplings can be transported at the end of the residency to empty, treeless holes in the pavement on the surrounding streets of downtown Oakland, where Dream Farm Commons is located. This planting will hopefully be undertaken with the help of students at a next-door high school. This work is unfolding, but it practically and metaphorically uses the community building nature of oak trees as a model. Oak trees link their roots underground to hold each other up via mutual aid, and the generosity of their acorns help support an entire complex “ecosystem” – or as I like to think, community. Much of my work grapples with the separation of ourselves from “nature” – something that is so deeply problematic. Everything is nature, but then it isn’t. Plastic is a product of nature, but it’s been molecularly altered and is thus incompatible with so much of what we term the “natural” world. I’ve come to understand “nature” here as a series of co-evolved relationships, what you might call ecosystems, or more simply, communities.
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Photo by Kija Lucas
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ANISA TAVANGAR
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Image courtesy of Rashad Rastam
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Anisa Tavangar is a PhD student in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, where she studies the enduring legacies of colonial approaches, primitivism, and ethnography. She aims to uncover new strategies for ideological and physical presentation of African art with a priority on object stewardship and institutional adaptability. Anisa works as a writer and curator at For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that seeks to bring the voices of artists into public discourse. Through For Freedoms, she has led and curated exhibitions, programs, and initiatives with partners across the country highlighting mass incarceration, the Indigenous Land Back Movement, the values of prison abolition, supporting emerging artists, and more. She is a cofounder of the Guggenheim Greenhaus, a futurist thinking initiative out of the Guggenheim Museum and has presented on the capacity of beauty as a conduit for justice through the Slow Factory Foundation, Bend Design, and the Association for Baha’i Studies.
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ANISA TAVANGAR This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in September 2022. GM: What was your path to your current career, as well as your job at For Freedoms? AT: In college, I studied art history and Africana studies. But even getting there was a process. When I was little, I always felt drawn towards art and beauty, but was also really curious about how race and injustice exist in our world, and wondered what I could do about it. It wasn’t until college that I saw how these worlds collided. I learned about artists, institutions, curators, and figures who were working at the center of justice movements within the art world, which was so exciting and animating. In terms of my work at For Freedoms, I ran into Hank Willis Thomas at an art fair in New York. I talked to him about some of the work that I had done and shared my appreciation for his work. He asked me if I wanted to work at For Freedoms, and I thought, “Yeah! You know what, I should!” At the time, I was freelance writing and running digital media for artist’s studios, galleries, and various organizations, and that’s what I began doing at For Freedoms. From there, the role grew into curatorial and writing projects, which was very special. GM: Could you discuss some recent projects you’ve worked on through For Freedoms? AT: In 2022, I would say that my most significant project was the special exhibition I curated at Expo Chicago, which was a really fun and special project to do. This was during our exploration of “Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary”, so investigating what it means to produce another justice -- what does it mean to envision alternatives to how justice is commonly understood or practiced and how can artists be a part of that process? In conjunction with that, we had a booth at the Expo that was titled “Another Justice.” The idea was to visualize the values of abolition through the work of four Chicagobased artists – Anwulika Anigbo, Maria Gaspar, Jazmine Harris, and SHENEQUA. We presented these artworks at the fair, which was also exciting because art fairs are really commercial. They’re meant for galleries to present works that they want to sell; they’re not really curatorial spaces. Maybe there’s a process of discovery as you’re walking through, but that’s not the intention of a fair. So, this was also our way of thinking about how For Freedoms participates in this type of space. How do we approach this model of an art fair that still feels distinct and like us? We had a curatorial statement on the wall and an exhibition text, which is also very rare in an art fair. It was just such a fun opportunity to not only connect with these artists and build relationships with them, but also have these really critical conversations within the fair space. [The usual] art fair audience is people who can more or less afford art. Not everyone is there to buy of course, but many are, and who can afford to do that? (Continued)
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ANISA TAVANGAR There’s a specific subset of people [who attend art fairs], whether we’re looking at race or class, so it was also an exciting and intentional way to introduce prison abolition to perhaps a new audience of people. [It exemplified] the spirit of bringing people together and having a compassionate environment through the works of these really wonderful artists. [Another recent project is] the Google Image Equity Fellowship, which For Freedoms did in conjunction with Google and alongside Free The Work and Aperture as co-partners. I was one of our For Freedoms team members who went through the portfolios of many wonderful, talented artists. For that project, it’s really about recognizing that we have so much to give and offer, and thinking about how we can, along with other institutions, pool our resources and encourage young artists of color to make beautiful work.
GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism, and why is it important to you? AT: I don’t know if I would call myself an ‘activist’; my aspiration is that I am an organizer. Many of the methods of activism are a piece of that, but the way I try to model creative activism is by being authentic in who I am and how I’m approaching the work that I do. I love art and art history, but I approach these through the lens of abolition. The values of abolition require creating communities that will flourish in ways that we haven’t imagined before. From my perspective, that means [creating] access to both beauty and art. Not that art in itself is going to change everything or is the [sole] answer, but [recognizing] that art might be the way of channeling the values that we hope to realize. As a writer, curator, and graduate student, [I want to] think about the power of images in conjunction with the magnitude of what justice might look like. [This] helps me align the work Left to Right: Maria Gaspar, SHENEQUA, Anisa Tavangar,
that I do and centers how I hope to participate in
Jazmine Harris, and Anwuilka Anigbo. Photo by Jim Brodie
the world.
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ANISA TAVANGAR GM: You recently became a PhD student in Art History at Princeton University. What do you plan on focusing on through your graduate studies? AT: I wanted to do this program as an extension of some of the research [I completed] as an undergrad. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the presentation of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Essentially, looking at that collection and wondering how it got to be a collection, its relationship to African art history as a discipline, and the impact of the specific physical environment on the work of contemporary art that’s in the space. The short conclusion is that it’s not good. (Laughs) It’s based on primitivism and ethnography, which are really obsolete modes and methods that we wouldn’t accept these days, but are so ingrained in the ways that institutions function. Being in grad school, my hope is to continue the work of mining and uncovering the impact of primitivism, ethnography, and colonialist approaches on the presentation of African art in western institutions. But with that, [I want to] think about the ways that these works are being presented today, if current foundations are obsolete, and if so, what can they be replaced with? What are the values of the future that we can center in thinking about the future of museums? […] I think that one of the challenges of this work is how overwhelming it is. In my undergraduate thesis, I was looking at one room, in one museum, in one city – it was so specific, and yet it felt like an endless project. I think that’s one of the daunting challenges of talking about decolonizing or restructuring art museums. The scale is so massive and the problem is so complicated, often manifesting itself in ways that are subtle or elusive. It’s going to take a lot of us doing this work to realize new museum systems.
Photo by Edwina Hay
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ANISA TAVANGAR GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections? AT: My hope for the midterm elections is voter turnout. When I think about my relationship to politics, it’s a complicated one. I personally am not registered for a political party. I don’t think that politics or politicians will save us, but I definitely think that whoever we elect can possibly mitigate harm for a short amount of time. I see politics as an opportunity to practice collective voices and actions; voting is a way of expressing your right as a citizen and participating in something that is so much bigger than us. It’s not the final or only step, but is one piece of a really large web of collective and social action. I hope that as things feel like they are not only on fire, but also so strained, tense, painful, cracking, splitting, and all of these horrible things, that people will still want to participate and not disengage.
Photo by Jim Brodie
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ANISA TAVANGAR
Photo by Leila Yavari
GM: You are also a co-founder of a climate and environmental justice initiative, Guggenheim Greenhaus. Could you talk about your involvement with this project? AT: Guggenheim Greenhaus is a project that I got involved in through Tony Patrick, who is a member of the For Freedoms family and a wonderful, intelligent thinker and creator. Through Tony’s vision, we created this opportunity to bring the values of futurist thinking into the museum space. Through the wonderful Education and Public Programs department at the Guggenheim in New York, we’ve hosted a series of workshops and programs for all staff members, from interns at all four Guggenheim museums across the world, to museum board members. [The project is] meant to invite people at varying levels, all of whom are stakeholders in their own ways, to think about the type of museum that we want to build. What would the museum of our dreams look like in twenty years, and how do we get to that point? What do we want to take from the present moment into the future, and what do we want to build to be able to bring into the future? It’s a really wonderful project and initiative [that allows us] to think about museums in a whole new way, where it’s not just about leading with curatorial work and having other departments follow, but thinking about the ecosystem of the museum as a living, growing, organic entity. What does it look like when all of these different pieces work together in harmony?
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NOVEMBER 2022
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7
GIRLS MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER
