Given how much our world is rocked by catastrophe at the moment (we’re not just thinking about it and preparing for it, we live with it daily as witnesses or victims as well as unconscious and often unwilling perpetrators), it seems appropriate to offer this chapter now (it’s been simmering for a while).
The past 35 years have been deeply influenced by my introduction to some concepts that emerge from social ecology: the idea that social activists, community organizers, and cultural workers are not only critiquing and doing our best to dismantle oppressive systems, but are also coming up with inspiring strategies for what we would build in the rubble and implementing them. This way of framing activism deeply appealed to me.
In my early twenties, I had already developed a predilection for speculative fiction that posed possibilities that weren’t completely dystopic. The first time I heard Margot Adler (famously known as an NPR reporter as well as a witch & author of Drawing Down the Moon) read outloud the book, Ecotopia (by Ernest Callenbach) on WBAI Radio, I was transfixed. It was the winter of 1975-76. She read the whole book over a series of months, while I sat in my tiny, cockroach-ridden tenement apartment on East 15th St and 1st Avenue (NYC), depressed about the state of the world, waiting to hear if grad school was in my future, thinking there must be a way to shape a better destiny for humanity, and exhausted by a series of poorly-paying day jobs. My imagination leapt at the possibility of a feminist, ecological, and anti-racist future - it felt like the Whole Earth Catalog & the bioregional movement had met up with anti-war, queer rights, feminist, disability, and civil rights activists and created something potent and desirable. I wanted to get on that bus, but didn’t know how to except to write, make art about it, and discuss it with others.
In the Ecotopia vein, I read Doris Lessing (Memoirs of a Survivor and The Canopus in Argos Series had a significant influence), Ursula LeGuin (I was particularly fond of Always Coming Home, but there are many other of her books that still inform my dreams), and Marge Piercy (Woman at the Edge of Time and He, She, and It). Once I was installed in grad school, I was introduced to Ivan Illich’s work who helped me a imagine many forms of deschooling and dismantling. I had not yet encountered the series by Starhawk that started with The Fifth Sacred Thing or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, but I want to assert their presence in this lineage. Their visions became a deep well in my psyche that ran parallel to my encounter with my late partner, Bob.
During those first few months of living with Bob in 1988-1989, his excitement about the studies he had begun was contagious. Just two months before we met, he had been attending the summer session at the Institute for Social Ecology (then located at Goddard College in central Vermont). ISE was founded in 1974 by Murray Bookchin and Dan Chodorkoff. They had shaped a dynamic faculty that included Brian Tokar, Chaia Heller, Grace Gershuny, and others to work with students and community activists from all over the world. Bob had thought, at first, to create his Master’s thesis in social ecology focusing on his recent trip to Nicaragua, analyzing the cultural aspects of the revolution there. But after meeting me and seeing my work, and learning more about the socially engaged cultural work of many peers in Los Angeles, he shifted his focus.
Bob explained some of the basic concepts of social ecology in a very accessible way and told me that my work was already demonstrating some of the concepts: Naming in a variety of ways what is wrong with current oppressive systems and giving examples of how to intervene or interrupt those structures, by doing disobedient art and planting seeds of liberation. He was looking at the series, Taking the Empire’s New Clothes to the Laundry, and the interactive installation, Please Take a Numb-er. In both, I was reacting to public places that seemed immovable (the supermarket, the lecture hall, the shopping mall, the unemployment office, the gym, etc.) In the first, in each drawing and text of each public site, there were suggestions to encourage people to take action to shift the power dynamics in those places. In the second, I was creating space for people to move out of their consumer-imposed trance and share stories about what was meaningful in their lives aside from what could be purchased.
“Buy One Now” from the series, “Taking the Empire’s New Clothes to the Laundry,” graphite on paper, 22”x30”, originally created in 1982 and revised in 1988 - to see more of the series, go to the link above.
“Please take a numb-er,” Interactive installation, 1988-1991, mixed media, multiple sites, including a shopping mall in San Luis Obispo and a closed department store in Long Beach, CA, dimensions: 30’x25’ - use the link above to see more photos of the installation.
Here, I need to pause and share that Bob and I came from quite different class, cultural, and political backgrounds, but somehow our experiences took us to this place of imagining the future differently and working together to create that future.
I had begun working on a new project called, The Nightmare Quilt. This was both a pragmatic piece — I had lots of scrap canvas that I wanted to recycle into something beautiful — and an emotionally necessary one: my nightmares about the future were accumulating in my psyche and I needed to process them somehow before they made me sick. They intermittently infused me with a haze of anxiety that could be hard to shake. Being newly in love thankfully mollified those feelings a bit, but they were persistent and needed some catalyst to help them transform.
I started painting nightmare images on small squares and rectangles of canvas in my San Pedro, California studio (Angel’s Gate Cultural Center). The images and text emerged easily, given both my epigenetic training in catastrophic thinking and my daily observations of life in southern California. The harvest of horror was gathered pre-internet, mind you, so the revision of this project that was commissioned almost 30 years later reflected the total inundation of crises that existed pre-pandemic. After a slow beginning, I eventually brought these scraps into our apartment’s living room in Long Beach, CA where I began to figure out how to assemble them together, and began piercing the edges of each piece with holes, lacing them together with jute twine. The quilt began to take shape.
On the reverse side of each nightmare image, I began painting the dreams for the future. This was much bigger challenge than painting nightmares, given that the dreams of a better world created by dominant culture often seemed coated with artificially-flavored icing painted onto styrofoam. In other words, I did not want to offer up indigestible, non-nutritional, superficial crap that would be dismissed as inaccessible and overly idealistic.
The dreams I wanted to make visible needed to be deeply considered possibilities, even if they seemed far-fetched in the moment. They could not be clichéd or simple-minded; when I say the latter, I’m thinking of heart-shaped stones with the word “peace” engraved in them that one often sees in kitschy gift shops. Consumerism eats everything and trivializes things we really care about, doesn’t it?
My sincere aspirations for my community and the world needed to have real traction in people’s minds, so I would talk them over with Bob to find some words that felt like essential medicine and then attempt to find symbols, colors, shapes, etc. to push them into the imagination. This process was much more self-conscious than I wanted it to be. At times, I wanted to abandon this aspect of the project, but I knew it was necessary for me to overcome my resistance to it; I plowed ahead. I also wanted the dreams to be visually connected via some larger image (unlike the nightmares which were scattered randomly).
The project was designed to be displayed on a bed. In order to see both sides of the quilt, I needed to create a compelling method to get visitors to touch and lift corners of the quilt up, otherwise they would only see the nightmares. People were invited to write down their own nightmare or dream about the future and place it under the quilt. If they did this action without speaking to anyone, they would only see a small portion of the dream images. If they wanted to see more, they needed to ask someone for help. In other words, we don’t get to enjoy those visions unless we act collectively. This instruction to handle the quilt confronted a serious taboo that museum and gallery visitors have internalized - “DON’T TOUCH THE ART,” but I’m pleased to say at this first exhibit of the quilt at California State University, Northridge in the winter of 1989, as well as at subsequent displays, people seemed to overcome their inhibitions, especially if there was a gallery assistant around to help.
This solo exhibition was titled “Will You Stop Depressing Me?” (another phrase that an audience member left in THIS IS NOT A TEST at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1987). This show featured four projects: THIS IS NOT A TEST, Please Take a Numb-er, Taking the Empire’s New Clothes to the Laundry, and The Nightmare Quilt.
After the show opened to the public, Bob and I discussed the path my work was taking at length. I expressed some doubts about seeking out gallery audiences for my work, but understood that universities might be one of the best places to raise consciousness about the topics my work was addressing. Yet I was feeling impatient; my sense of urgency about the environmental crisis, as well as other social issues, was weighing heavily upon me, and I wanted to find new strategies for getting my work out into the world.
Fast forward a couple of years: Bob completed and presented his Master’s thesis at ISE in Vermont in the winter of 1991, and we were subsequently invited to their summer residency as faculty. I was asked to be the artist-in-residence (a role that had recently been filled by the amazing Peter Schumann, as his Bread and Puppet Theater community). I was honored to take on this work every July for the next 10 years or so.
Facilitating classes at ISE was one of the most profound teaching experiences of my career. I was working with mostly young activists from all over the world who were learning about organic farming, political organizing, bioregionalism, anarchism, direct democracy, municipalism, eco-feminism, liberation movements around the globe, and permaculture design. I felt like I had landed in a precursor of Ecotopia and it was an exquisite feeling. I had the privilege of co-teaching with Bob for many summer sessions up until 2001. My last summer, 2002, I was able to co-facilitate a course with David Solnit, activist artist extraordinaire.
In my next post, I will share some of the inspiration I received from sitting in the eco-feminist class facilitated by Chaia Heller. The insights that I gained from her course generated new art projects and a new way of understanding how much I had internalized patriarchy.
I love to trail along in your orbit and marvel at your GIANT attention to the world and resilience to ALWAYS trying and change what sucks. You amaze me beyond words. I read these chapters and gain a strength to sharpen my outlook on so many numbing situations EVERY TIME. Bob was indeed a well deserve magic gift to your world. Thanks again for orbiting and sharing via the clicks to the art works' past!!! I admire, support and revel in your non-cliched light filled visions (try putting that on a rock!) XXX