Wendy Babcox / 6+
6+ is a collective which invites women artists from different cultural backgrounds to work together. We seek to develop a supportive, creative network of women artists through a practice of direct engagement - including exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations. We explore different possibilities for artistic cooperation across great distances, both geographic and cultural. Our work is about finding connections between apparently distant locations and experiences, while at the same time creating a space for difference. We believe it is possible to work together to create relationships outside the logic of the market, of commerce, of the media and of the march of armies. 6+ include multi-media artist Sama Alshaibi, interdisciplinary artist Wendy Babcox, installation and performance artist Rozalinda Borcila, media artist Mary Rachel Fanning, painter Yana Payusova and sculptor Sherry Wiggins. www.6plus.org
[image by Sama Alshaibi, from the 6+ project Secrets]
Emily Roysdon / LTTR
LTTR is a feminist genderqueer artist collective with a flexible project oriented practice. LTTR produces an annual independent art journal, performance series, events, screenings and collaborations. The group was founded in 2001 with an inaugural issue titled "Lesbians to the Rescue," followed by "Listen Translate Translate Record," "Practice More Failure," and most recently "Do You Wish to Direct me?" LTTR is dedicated to highlighting the work of radical communities whose goals are sustainable change, queer pleasure, and critical feminist productivity. It seeks to create and build a context for a culture of critical thinkers whose work not only speaks in dialogue with one another, but consistently challenges its own form by shifting shape and design to best respond to contemporary concerns. LTTR was founded in 2001 by Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy and Emily Roysdon. Ulrike Müller joined LTTR in 2005 and Lanka Tattersal was an editor and collaborator for issue 4. www.lttr.org
[image: cover of LTTR Issue #4]
Uzma Rizvi / SAWCC
SAWCC (South Asian Women's Creative Collective) is an organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility and development of emerging and established South Asian women artists. SAWCC provides a forum for South Asian women artists to profile their creative and intellectual work, and network with other South Asian women artists, educators, community workers and professionals. Uzma Rizvi is a SAWCC Board Member, independent curator and critic, co-chair and Faculty Fellow of the Pratt Institute Initiative on Art, Community, and Social Change (IACSC), and a PhD from Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. In addition to SAWCC, she has and continues to serve on the board of various organizations, such as on the board of Friends of Fulbright India (FFI) and as a member of the Visible Collective. Her work also includes performance/theater, documentary, and radio. Uzma is currently teaching at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in the Departments of Social Science and Cultural Studies, and Critical and Visual Studies. www.sawcc.org
Two Girls Working
Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki met in Brooklyn, New York in February 2000 and have never lived in the same city; this long-term project has also been a long-distance collaboration. They initiated the long-term project Trappings to explore individualized approaches to power through interview-based community dialogue. Instead of creating a project that articulates their own perspectives, they developed a project that openly explores the relationship of women to power within the construction of personal identity. The resulting book, Trappings: Stories of Women, Power and Clothing was published by Rutgers University Press in the fall of 2007, and Trappings has also been circulating as an exhibition for several years; it will be presented at the Bronx River Arts Center in 2008. Two Girls Working has also exhibited their other photographs and artworks in museums, galleries, and public settings across the country. www.twogirlsworking.com
[image: Trappings installed at the Nashville International Airport in 2005]
Faith Wilding / SubRosa
Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator with a BA (Comparative Literature), University of Iowa, and an MFA (Performance/Installation/Feminist Art), California Institute of the Arts, 1973. Wilding is Chair and Professor of Performance, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (2002-present). Wilding was a co-founder of the feminist art movement in Southern California, chronicled in her book By Our Own Hands (Los Angeles,1976). Her work addresses the recombinant and distributed bio-tech body in various media. Wilding has exhibited widely around the world for the past 30 years, including at: Bronx Museum of Art, NY; MOCA in Los Angeles; The Whitney Museum of Art; the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Drawing Center, New York; Ars Electronica, Linz; Documenta X, Kassel; the Singapore Art Museum, and others. Wilding co-founded and collaborates with subRosa, a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers using BioArt and tactical performance in the public sphere to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives, and work. subRosa produces artworks, performances, workshops, contestational campaigns, publications, media interventions, and public forums. Recent Wilding/subRosa performances/exhibitions include: “The Interventionists”, MASSMoCA; “BioDifference” Biennial of Electronic Arts, Perth, Australia; Performance International, Mexico City, and Merida, Yucatan; “Cloning Cultures,” National University, Singapore; Welcome to the Revolution, Zurich; Art of Maintenance, Kunstakademie, Vienna. www.cyberfeminism.net
[Image from the SubRosa poster project Refugia/BAZ]
Moderator: Amy Mackie
Amy Mackie is currently a curatorial assistant at the New Museum. She also works as an independent curator and writer focused on feminist and genderqueer art practices. While completing her MA at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, she worked with LTTR and Ridykeulous for her thesis exhibition "Hot Topic," and with Rhea Anastas on the research for the book Witness to Her Art. She was formerly the director of Taxter & Spengemann Gallery in New York City, and recently served as the exhibition coordinator for Art in General’s anniversary exhibition "25 Years Later: Welcome to Art in General."
[image: Ginger Brooks Takahashi poster for Hot Topic exhibition]
Respondent: Carey Lovelace
Carey Lovelace has written for publications including Art in America, The New York Times, Newsday, Harper's, Artforum, Ms., International Herald Tribune, artnet.com, and many others . She just completed a term, 2003-2006, as co-president of the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA/USA)--with 435 members, the nation's leading association of art writers. With AICA/USA, she organized the historic and acclaimed May 2005 National Critics Conference, for the first time bringing together theatre, dance, music and art writers. She also co-organized, at the Guggenheim Museum, an acclaimed all-day symposium on the Christo Gates project, and the panel "Doublethink and Doublespeak: The Art and Politics of Language" at the New York Public Library. She co-hosted "The Yay/Nay Show," an arts-and-culture program on WPS1, whose archives can be accessed on www.wps1.org; she and co-host Linda Yablonsky won a 2006 AICA Award for Best Presentation of Art in a Broadcast Medium. She has appeared on or moderated panels at the Cairo Biennale, Columbia University, the College Art Association, the Women's Caucus for Art, the National Critics Conference, the American University Museum, and has been a featured guest on BBC3's Nightwaves, among many other venues. She has translated books from French for Harry N. Abrams and is also an award-winning playwright, with productions at the New York-based Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Samuel French One-Act Festival, and REDCAT Theatre in Los Angeles, among other locales. Her essay "Dancing at the Revolution: the 1970s" will be featured in the upcoming anthology, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail: A Passionate History of the Women's Movement in Art, 1968-2006, vol. 1. She guest-curated the Bronx Museum’s exhibition Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community, a survey of feminist activist art in the 70s and early 80s; this panel is presented in conjunction with the exhibition’s opening. www.careylovelace.com