Studio Dialogues
Honoring 13 inspiring and bold African American Women Artists/Activists
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My "Studio Dialogues" with these inspiring women was a response to absent African American women in schools, museums, books and articles. When my middle school students were researching African Americans in the Gold Rush era, it was evident there was a gaping hole in the history when it came to females, especially artists!
In the early 2000's middle school art students had the idea to make "women artists pillows" to commemorate a diverse range of historical women artists through history. After making reservations to use the computer lab and school library, they researched historical women artists of color from around the world, drew and transferred portraits onto a variety of fabric pillow shapes. They hand sewed and customized with embroidery, artifacts, images and designs for each woman to represent their artist (Student Women: Kahlo, O'Keefe, Carr, Morisot, Grandma Moses, etc). Years later, this project began while co-writing a “Lesson Study” on African Americans in the Gold Rush era with history teachers for middle school students. Using unclaimed figure-shaped cloth pieces and copper embossings from my former art students, I started exploring the lives of African American women artists connected to that period. Many stories proved difficult to find, but as tech improved, and my search expanded eastward and into the 20th century, I uncovered more African American women artists and activists absent from our texts and articles. Inspired by Henry Louis Gates’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man, I chose to focus on 13 women whose lives spoke to struggle, creativity, hard work and resilience. Uncovering their identities and hardships became more than research—it was a way of stitching together fragments across time: of unfinished gestures of my students, silenced voices of overlooked artistic women, and my own questions of belonging and inheritance. Repurposing those discarded works became an intimate act of honoring what was left behind and giving it renewed presence. Though few of my works are figurative, I have long been drawn to what significance our forms, places, and objects carry—memory, stress, absence, and quiet persistence. In this project, figuration became less about representation and more about embodiment: embodying hidden stories, discarded materials, and my own layered sense of time, place, and identity. |
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