Cindy Rehm and Performance Workshop #1

As part of our Womynhouse exhibit, we will be doing a night of performance art on November 2nd.  Our friend and mentor Cindy Rehm from Craftswomanhouse came to LMU on 10.22.11 to do a performance art workshop with the ladies of Womynhouse.

In the workshop we discussed performance, performance artists, and practiced performance ourselves.  We learned that performance art does not necessarily have to be based on theatrical displays but that what you do on a daily basis, such as rituals and processes, can be transformed into performance art.  It is a type of art that can shed light onto our customs as well as serve as a social experiment or an interactive art. Because humans have body knowledge, performance art can be a powerful tool to integrate a visceral feeling into a gallery space. Performance art has the ability to bridge the gap between the audience and the space as well as the audience and the performer. It can also create gaps and/or intense reactions. Because it's happening in real time, there's no manipulation or finessing of the act. It is created using a specific moment in time that cannot be captured or held onto, and during performance the artist cannot start over. As a result, performance art has a certain authenticity that makes it special.

In order to get us started as performance artists, Cindy gave us a sheet of paper with fluxus ideas. For example, one quote said "Scream, scream, scream, scream!" We were left to interpret each quote ourselves, choose a quote and perform it to our liking. To help us get into our performances, we chose from an array of props. It was a great exercise, and next week we will be performing in a second workshop by interacting unexpectedly with a prop that is generally "gender-specific".

Below are photos of our workshop. Thank you Cindy. And thank you Amanda C for providing me with some notes of the experience.

Choosing our Props

Reading Through our Prompt Fluxus Terms

Arielle's Fluxus Exercise

Arielle's Performance Continued

A Discussion of Gender Roles

A Weekend of Arting Out

With the show quickly approaching, we are all pulling together our hard work and organization. Here are some photographs of the "before" pictures of our pieces. You will have to come to the gallery to see the hard work! There are less than two weeks until the opening reception!

Amanda C's Bedroom Floor

Jess Embarking Upon Empty Canvas

Youngblood Opening & Reception

One of our talented womyn, Amanda D'Egidio, had the opening of her show, Youngblood, which she curated with Sydney Banta, also a Loyola Marymount student. Their show will be up through the first two weeks of October. The Youngblood show features photographs and installations. Please go see it at the student gallery while you can and support a fellow womyn! Here are some photographs of the opening:

Amanda & Sydney, Curators of Youngblood

Group Recordings

The women of our show have been meeting in small groups conducted by Kenzie and Erin for the purpose of recording: personal stories, moments, thoughts, ideas, and feelings that we've experienced as females. Selected recordings from these group discussions will be shared in an interactive installation for you to hear.

The discussions were interesting for us as a group, because we learned things about one another that we otherwise would never have known. As the show draws nearer, we become closer to one another, and the excitement is building up. We can't wait to share our views with you and with the world.

Original Screenprint, Womynhouse Stamp

Original Design by Amanda Courtney

Cindy Rehm & Craftswoman House

Last week, we met with Cindy Rehm, creator of Craftswoman House. Her organization creates projects and exhibitions which aim to inspire a dialogue about feminist issues today. She gave us creative insight about working as a large group as well as mentorship about embarking upon a female-based art show. We are lucky to have her support and she has agreed to do two performance art workshops with us, once the show gets rolling. It was refreshing to hear her say that we shouldn't worry about reshaping the feminist movement, but rather take pride and excitement in the fact that we have even organized a group of women working together to make art.

Below is the link to the blog which she co-created with Launa Bacon. I have also borrowed some images from the site and would like to thank her and Craftswoman House for the interesting photographs and inspiration.
http://craftswomanhouse.blogspot.com/

And for more:
http://www.artslant.com/la/venues/show/21871-craftswoman-house

In addition, please see the paragraphs below, which I have posted from the Craftswoman House blog. There is a call for submissions for all feminist artists from Craftswomans House:

"Throughout history, creative works by women have been devalued, dismissed, and even buried. In an attempt to keep women’s work visible, Craftswoman House seeks artworks that make a direct reference to, or were inspired by, second-wave feminist art for inclusion in a November-December 2011 group exhibition. We are also seeking video and performance works for an event in early December. Please send images or links of up to five works, or a link to video or performance, a short statement on the relationship between your work and second-wave feminist art, and a CV to craftswomanhouse@gmail.com withStemma as the subject. For further information about Craftswoman House, go to craftswomanhouse.com or craftswomanhouse.blogspot.com. Deadline September 7, 2011"

Womynhouse Begins

“A wish for otherness.  A space in which you are surrounded by an entirely different world aura, transcending the established plane”.[i] (Judy, Catalogue)

From October 16 to November 11, 2011, thirteen female Loyola Marymount University painters, photographers, performers, writers, and historians will gather forty years later to present our very own Womynhouse.  The Thomas P. Kelly student art gallery will become the site for our own explorations of all things art: installations, spoken word, performances, films, mixed media, poetry, prose, and the uncategorized.  The space will become our sanctuary to practice, interact, debate, philosophize, and engage with ourself, each other, and the viewer.  Using the Southern California Feminist movement that swept across the 1970s as our guide, Womynhouse will not only become the first all-female show at LMU, but it will also cross boundaries by giving voices to a group of passionate and talented students who are interested in spreading this language to the rest of the LMU community with frank vulnerability on pressing female issues today.  

In 1972, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro started the Feminist Art Program where they went on to create the Womanhouse project with their students.[i] The purpose of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts was to "help women 
restructure their personalities to be more consistent with their desires to be 
artists and to help them build their art making out of their experiences as
women”.[ii]  Using this as our main inspiration, we will be channeling and pumping this inherent female energy into our own projects with a focus on the contemporary gender issues we see in 2011. Some of these themes and ideas will criss-cross and overlap with those of the 1970 Cal Art students yet we hope to bring our own stories, struggles, and celebrations to our peers here at LMU. Although our own project will be taking place in an institutional setting, the ideas and concepts are still genuine, honest interpretations that are happening to females in a Southern California university in 2011. The original 1972 Womanhouse project stems from deep academic roots; it simply could not have existed without the support of the educational system.  Similar to our Feminist foremothers, we cannot exist without the support of our own university.  

Womanhouse at Cal Arts shows the “pivotal role of the institution in nurturing the artistic legacy of Los Angeles” by providing an experiment “in considering institutional boundaries, social context, and critique”.[i]  In conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration taking place in over 60 institutions across Southern California, the Womynhouse project will allow our own LMU community to participate in the celebration and honoring of the "birth of the L.A. art scene." http://pacificstandardtime.org/ 

Womynhouse will become the opportunity to expose both our campus and our talented art students to the rest of the LA community.  Through collaborative forces, our hopes are to generate a campus-wide discussion that invites both men and women to understand the teachings of what it means to be a Feminist through all things art. If you are interested in supporting us! Please email Acourtne@lion.lmu.edu. 

Thank you,

Amanda Courtney 

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[i] McFadden, Jane, “Los Angeles: Then and Now, Here and There”, LA Artland (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), 46. 

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[i] Joselit, David.American Art Since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 180. 

[ii] Schapiro, Miriam. Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 10.

   

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[i] Chicago, Judy and Miriam Schapiro. "Womanhouse" (Valencia, CA: California Institute
of the Arts, 1971.)