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A Look at Art and Gender

The Negro Woman Series, Elizabeth Catlett © Howard Museum Collection

In this week’s Village Voice, Jerry Saltz wrote a critique, Women of Babylon, on the lack of women’s representation in New York’s museums and galleries.

When I went to browse the Living Library for Table of Free Voices questions related to gender for this post, I found it interesting that only two out of 100 questions dealt with women’s issues.

Saltz calls the dilemma a “pernicious double bind,” providing a list of the percentages of women participants at recent MOMA and Guggenheim shows.
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Writing on the Table

Willem Dafoe and Antoschka (Photo: Christina Voigt)

For my own selfish reasons, I’ve spent most of my time so far on the dropping knowledge platform browsing the answers from writers. I’ve particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and honest answers from Pico Iyer, the UK-born journalist and author who has spent much of his adult life travelling the world and writing what he has observed and felt.
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The Politics of ‘Water’

Director Deepa Mehta

In February 2000 Deepa Mehta was to direct the film Water in India. It was the third of a trilogy of films for this Indian-born woman who now resides in Canada. The first was Fire, a story of two women drawn together in search of the warmth that their loveless marriages lacked. The onscreen lesbian relationship between the women angered many in India. Extreme protesters went as far as burning the cinema that first screened Fire to the ground, and Deepa Mehta was shunned by her country of birth for showing the world what was considered bad images of India.
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Preserving History with Public Art

Volunteers at the University of Mississippi Museum restored gravestones in rural communities. (Photo: Photocase)

Huge art projects like wrappings or anonymous snarky graffiti, posters and stickers are an integral part of the urban landscape. Limited financing or a new coat of paint gives this kind of public art an ephemeral “here today, gone tomorrow” quality. Lacking the grand scale, some public art integrates into its environment, engaging community members in dialogue and creating a lasting change of perspective.
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112 Free Voices: irrepressible protector of the right to free expression, Sanar Yurdatapan

“I loved the idea of the Table from the very first moment I heard about it. In a world drawn in fire, blood and tears, in a world where the jungle rules are imposed on humanity once again, the witnesses of the century should have some words to say to the present and the future. I feel proud to be one of them.”
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112 Free Voices: “social storyteller” Jonathan Stack

“It takes one person intent on causing pain to explode misery throughout the planet. Can we explode love as effectively? Where will the answers to today’s problems come from? How can we empower hope? Maybe 112 people coming together in one place can generate sufficient energy to move us forward on a positive path. The truth is, there was nowhere I’d rather be this September 9 and so I chose to go.”
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112 Free Voices: Maestro Giora Feidman plays the music of peace

“Human society needs to re-examine the most essential fact of life. We are one family: the human family. There is no alternative.”

Giora Feidman is a true ‘World Musician’. Born in Argentina and raised on traditional klezmer music, he had a classical education as a clarinettist and spent two decades with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. Going solo in the 1970s, he was free to indulge his passion for all kinds of music: jazz, tango, klezmer, contemporary and classical.
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Making Moves under 30: Youth Activism

Entering “youth” into a mainstream media site’s search engine is bound to produce a list of results revealing the myriad of problems facing youth worldwide. Youth activism, however, is often missing or hidden as “extra-curriculars” for the university bound. Our Time is Now: Young People Changing the World highlights thirty young men and women working for social change.
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Hobo Days

The Great Depression forced 4,000,000 Americans away from thier homes and onto the tracks.

Every August, hoboes from all across the United States gather in Britt, Iowa, to celebrate National Hobo Convention. Living reminders of a bygone lifestyle, they travel into the city ‘the hobo way’: by hopping freight trains. This year, the convention took off by celebrating the opening of the new Hobo Museu m.

The hobo life of reclusion from society and constant transition in risky trains has its roots in eras of economic hardship in the United States. As the nation expanded westward after the Civil War, many veterans who had been left homeless assumed a transitory lifestyle, finding work on farms or in construction, building dams, gas lines, or the railroad itself, and hopping a train when the work ran out.
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A Total Clash of Civilizations

Shah Muhammad Rais in his Kabul bookshop

Suraya Rais, the wife of Afghan bookseller Shah Mohammed Rais depicted in the international bestseller ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ by Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, is applying for asylum in Europe because she claims the book has endangered her life. ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ was recently published in Afghanistan, making life in Kabul impossible for the Rais family. But Mrs. Rais’ asylum application is only the latest development in the bitter aftermath of the book’s 2002 publication.
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112 Free Voices: DJ Spooky in the Mix

DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is well-known for stringing together concepts and making connections using sound and the printed word. He’s at it again in a new Copyleft Question Film — this time, using a piece of chalk. This clip may be a taste of more to come from the celebrated NY-based DJ, author and artist (born Paul D. Miller), who we’re hoping will jet to Berlin straight after playing a set at Norway’s cutting-edge Numusic Festival to join the Table of Free Voices.
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Children´s Drawings of War-Torn Darfur Color Copyleft Question Film

Making of: drawings of Darfur refugees became part of a video on child soldiers.

Bukeni Tete Waruzi Beck directs the AJEDI-Ka Project, an NGO that rehabilitates former child soldiers in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The dropping knowledge film crew spoke with Beck on a recent trip to New York, but when they brought the footage of the interview back to the cutting room in Berlin, something was missing.
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112 Free Voices: Nadja Halilbegovich inspires a generation

“I am honored to be a part of The Table of Free Voices. I believe that to share and learn from hundreds of different people with different experiences and perspectives is a thrilling process and a first step towards creating a deeper understanding, wider awareness and, ultimately, peace and harmony.

Born in Sarajevo, singer, author and peace advocate Nadja Halilbegovich was just 12 when her home city was placed under military seige. Six months later, she was almost killed when a bomb exploded seven feet from her. In the tradition of Anne Frank, Nadia Halilbegovich confided her thoughts and feelings to her diary.
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112 Free Voices: Dr. Homero Aridjis, ambassador of the written word

“I like to be in the right place at the right time, and sitting down at this banquet of contemporary global knowledge could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Homero Aridjis has been called “one of Latin America’s leading writers” and Mexico’s “green conscience“. The American author Kenneth Roxreth described him as “a visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces”.
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112 Free Voices: Andries Botha, sculptor of wisdom

“I decided to participate at the Table of Free Voices for two small reasons: (1) I consider it a rare opportunity to be with individuals who have committed their lives to contemplation and social justice. (2) To have the global community generate questions around issues that are deeply significant to them affords for us an opportunity not only to hear these but also to struggle to offer real and sincere answers to our struggling humanity.”

Internationally renowned sculptor and human rights activist Andries Botha has worked with both governmental and non-profit organizations to promote and preserve South African culture. In the early ’90s, he served as the National Visual Arts Chairperson for the newly elected democratic government.
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112 Free Voices: poet, scholar & novelist Raymond Federman

“As a survivor of the Holocaust, as someone who during his childhood suffered hunger, and as a writer who has traveled in many parts of the world, I have witnessed many injustices and much suffering and I am concerned about the state of affairs on our planet. To have been invited to the Table of Free Voices gives me a rare occasion to articulate my concerns.”

Raymond Federman was born in Paris in 1928, although he prefers to give July 16th, 1942, as his ‘real’ date of birth. That was the day that the French capital’s Jews were rounded up and deported by the occupying German army.
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112 Free Voices: educator-agitator-illustrator Robbie Conal

“What is government for…? Is it to provide health, education and welfare benefits and protections for the citizenry? Or is it representing somebody else, some other entity? Is government really here to represent big business?”

Robbie Conal is a guerilla poster artist who uses an army of volunteers to plaster his politically charged work across urban areas.
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Safi Mafundikwa: Trailblazer in the Digital Arts

Amid the political turmoil of the Mugabe government, a beacon for arts is slowly growing in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare at ZIVA, the Zimbabwe Institute for Vigital Arts. Director Safi Mafundikwa opened the school in 1999 with only 4 students. Since then, enrollment at Zimbabwe’s first graphic design school has grown tenfold.
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