THE ART ACTIVISM EXPO AT UNCA
My Photo on the cover of Mountain Express ACTIVISM EXPO AT UNCA.
Spoke at UNCA about the relationship of my work to activism. Poet, Alli Marshall, wrote an article about my work. We were surprised when the Asheville weekly, “Mountain Express” featured one of my photos on the cover of the newspaper. I got a chance to meet new people from the community.
I shot photographs at the first Women Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.): The Museum of Modern Art Opens But Not To Women Artists, New York City, June 14, 1984. It was a protest organized by women artists, critics, curators, and historians in the New York City area to demonstrate against the underrepresentation of women artists in the exhibition of “International Survey of Painting and Sculpture,” at the Museum of Modern Art.
A key element in the Transforming Hate Project will be my current artist’s book, The Proposal. It is a new “bookwork-as-art” piece. The image and text narrative gives a sense of what it was like for me, an African American artist, to make art from white supremacist hate material. My reflections are juxtaposed within the historical frame of events I witnessed in America from the 1940s through the 1970s, thus allowing me to explore my process of turning the repulsive material into an inspirational object.
Today’s snow, ice, and cold brought to mind similar weather in January of 1984 – 30 years ago when artists in New York began a series of political actions and protests to call attention to the ways in which the U.S. Government intervened in internal governing affairs and propped up oppressive military dictatorships in Central and South America.