On June 15, 1984 the WAVE (Women Artists Visibility Event) also known as Let MoMA Know took place in New York City in front of the Museum of Modern Art. The event was organized by artists Sabra Moore and Betsy Damon, and art historian Annie Shaver-Crandell through the New York City chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art. I shot photos of the protest and now, 30 years later, I am compiling a list of names of the women pictured in my photographs.
I try to keep my work and my life separate. I don’t consider working in my garden part of my artwork but more and more it is becoming a bigger part of my life and in turn inspiring me. I have yet to figure out how to incorporate it into my art. I’m learning the ways a garden has a life of its own—the squirrels dig up the seeds, the soil requires conditioning with compost, there are certain times when beetles arrive en masse, nine-inch worms now reside in the soil and the birds that consider it a paradise are constantly staking out their territories.
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.
The Transforming Hate project evolved from a project created at the invitation by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana.
It had not been my intent to make a “grand” project, but to simply create an artist’s book that explored the struggle to make an artwork that might transform the white supremacist books that had been provided to me to work from.
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.
I’m so excited that I can now move into and organize my newly renovated studio space. We’ve been working on that space since we moved into the house in January 2011. At that time, frigid air just blew right through the old windows and doors. So I taped sheets of clear plastic over them. However, the strong winds blew the plastic sheets off the windows so I re-taped the plastic onto the cinder block walls every few days.
During most of 2013, I wrote letters and emails asking people to help me complete my Transforming Hate Project installation and The Proposal artist book publication with tax-deductible donations of money through Artspire.
I have had to shift my focus from fundraising for the Transforming Hate Project to compiling sets of images for my new website-in-progress. This process has required that I go through my external drives and CDs over and over again. Why did I ever believe that my images were organized? And of course some pictures have never been digitized.
I know that when The Proposal is finally published it will be different from the book that I originally made. I have seen that happen with the work of other book artists. I can live with that because for me to be able to make something that is really meaningful to me is an incredible gift. Here’s hoping that the published book will convey the spirit of that experience.
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.