WHAT:
The Birth Justice Podcast NYC takes a close, comprehensive and creative look at how folks in New York City experience and navigate reproductive oppression and create resilience strategies for their health and their families. Through storytelling and conversations, BJP NYC provides a space for dialogue and debate addressing one of New York City’s most pressing public health and racial justice issues: birth. Hosted by Taja Lindley, podcast episodes feature one-on-one long form interviews and conversations with advocates, organizers, historians, scholars, healers, birth workers, pregnant and parenting people, and folks of reproductive age.
The first episode dropped Wednesday July 8th and featureds an interview between the host, Taja Lindley, and her mother, Adrianne Robinson, where they discussed Robinson’s experience giving birth to Lindley in 1985. This was a special occasion because the release date is also Lindley’s birthday.
WHY:
In the United States, Black women are three to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy related causes than white women. But in New York City, Black women are eight times more likely to die than white women. This is twice the national average. And during this pandemic moment, matters of public health are brought into focus, including long standing health inequities like maternal health. For example,when COVID first hit, NYC hospitals barred visitors during childbirth, leaving many people to labor alone. In response, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order allowing laboring people to have one support person during their childbirth. A few weeks after it was issued, however, Amber Rose Isaac - a 26-year-old pregnant Black woman - died after giving birth in a Bronx hospital.
Working from a feminist perspective and employing images and materials from daily life, Claire Greenshaw engages with the tensions that arise from the ambiguity of representation. She channels this into humorous and idiosyncratic poetic gestures that provoke questions around perception, the complexities of history and systems that create and enforce the values we live by.
The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2020.
https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/exhibitions/the-artists-studio-is-her-bedroom/
The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity.
This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering.
The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.
We (Cayla Skillin-Brauchle and Danielle C. Wyckoff) have come together to birth Reproductive Media, a project that focuses on all things family, gender, sex, and reproduction. Iterations of Reproductive Media have included a Mobile Zine Library and performative actions and workshops in which we facilitate discussions on these themes. The Reproductive Media Zine Library’s collection includes dozens of contributors who have produced zines related to these topics, ranging from personal experiences to statistics and facts. Our curatorial vision for this library is inclusive: we encourage individuals to share diverse information, experiences, and interpretations. This collection is an ongoing and ever-growing library.
Part of Reproductive Media’s larger mission is to provide educational and advocacy materials and support. Current resources we have produced as free booklets include ways to advocate for family-friendly* workplaces, suggestions for creating more inclusive educational settings, and other tools to advocate for legislative change such as ones that would support families for medical leave. (*We recognize an inclusive definition of family and remember that people receive love and support from partners, elders, children, siblings, lovers, pets, friends, and more.)
Reproductive Media stems from our shared investment in discussion and because our individual artistic practices utilize conversation and crowdsourcing as a tactic to research and create projects. Wyckoff’s project, “Please Tell Me a Story About Love,” has traveled around the world asking folks to do just that. The project’s open-ended structure situates the artist as listener, hearing and recording stories about all forms of love. Skillin-Brauchle’s “Data Collection” performances seek to create local data sets by interviewing community members in public places. While disparate in their approaches, these projects act as non-judgemental agents, recorders of contemporary experience. Our projects focus on the ‘local,’ whether that be a site or a community, and both projects collect responses that fuel our individual artwork in other material forms.
We believe that critical discussions require space. Reproductive Media creates such a space, one that is a public yet private forum, to talk about all things family, sex, gender, and reproduction: the choice to parent or not; the experiences of non-binary lives; governmental policy that is restrictive and policy that is protective; the challenges and rewards of parenting; experiences of becoming a parent through adoption, foster care, birth, or other paths; LBGQTIA+ rights; infertility and the emotional, physical and financial implications; miscarriage and fetal loss; birth control; abortion; models of prenatal care and giving birth (medical model and midwifery model); reproductive rights; reproductive privilege based on identity and socio-economics; sex; babies; gender; consent.
I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK
Ad Nauseam Lyceum is pleased to present Domestic Skin, an exhibition of photographs by Morgan Levy and Anna Ogier-Bloomer, two New York based artists whose portrayal of family is central to their work. Ad Nauseam Lyceum’s first exhibition devoted solely to photography, Domestic Skin addresses the tension between destiny and growth, presented through the lens of two distinct female photographers. Morgan Levy’s portrayal of pre-adolescent girls in paper costumes and placed against a backdrop of her landscape photographs serve as a metaphor for the psychological complexities her subjects face. Anna Ogier-Bloomer’s documentation of her middle class family in Ohio captured over a five-year period illustrates the stark reality and familiarity of loved ones in transition. Together these artists present a story of growing up female, stepping out of what’s comfortable, and whether by idealistic choice or bare necessity, putting on a new persona.
Ad Nauseam Lyceum is an artist run organization committed to showcasing multi-disciplinary work by emerging artists in New York . The group aims to give young artists an opportunity to collaborate, present work, and have a creative dialogue outside the traditional art market. Founded in 2006 by Ryan Frank, Deena Selenow, and Rory Sheridan, the group has hosted previous events at Emphemeroptera Art Space, chashama, EXPLOSIVO! and Studio 717, and has collectively shown the work of over 50 visual and performing artists. Dedicated to blurring the lines between various artistic genres, Ad Nauseam Lyceum is a platform for a new generation of artists working in performance, visual art, and new media.
chashama is a non-profit New York City arts organization with a nine-year history of supporting artists of all genres and experience levels by offering them access to space and major support resources. chashama provides opportunities for artists by transforming vacant real estate into multi-arts complexes and animating them with innovative and challenging art. Through low and no-cost admissions, chashama provides more opportunities for audiences as well as artists.