Episodes
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Season 2: Rethinking Systems
Maternal labour is invisible and we need more than ever artist-designed strategies for change and initiatives that propose alternative ways of being with/without children; intervening in systems and institutions. Join us for this season, to discuss this in dialogue with some of the most prominent thinkers in the field!
Can mothers be "at home" in the art world? Join Rachel Epp Buller for a conversation with two artists, Weronika Zielińska and Ruchika Wason Singh, who set out to prove they could, by establishing residency programs that blurred the lines between home and studio and by spotlighting women across Asia who sought to balance the competing demands of art and mothering.
Weronika Zielińska-Klein is the leader of Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She also is founder and director of Upominki, a non-profit contemporary art space that focuses on hospitality, reciprocity and gift-giving theory. www.upominki.nl
Ruchika Wason Singh is an artist, researcher and art educator based in Delhi. In 2016, she founded the Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia to foster the mapping, visibility and mobility of mothers/artists of Asian origin through documentation, workshops and artist residency programs. ruchikawasonsingh.com. www.ammaathearchive.com
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We know that making sound can be an art form, but what about listening to it? And, what if listening is about more than hearing and sound? In the last episode of "Renewing the World" Season 1, Rachel Epp Buller discusses her artistic practices of listening with co-host Charles Reeve, particularly in light of her 2021-22 Fulbright fellowship at the University of Alberta's CoLaboratory for Research-Creation and Social Justice.
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Missing episodes?
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What are the generative possibilities of being an artist, a parent, and an academic? In this episode with Maria Velasco, we address both the challenges and the promises of those intersections in her own life and work while also touching on issues of migration, displacement, parent-child collaboration, and curatorial practice.
María Velasco is a Spanish-born artist who has been living and working in the US since 1991. She creates site-specific installations, public art and participatory projects about displacement, gender identity, vulnerability, and the structures of authority that govern our lives. She has exhibited at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; ARC gallery, Chicago; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence; H&R Block Artspace; Avenue of the Arts, Kansas City; Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Saint Joseph; Paula Cooper gallery and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NYC; Salón Tentaciones (Madrid, Spain); Museo Del Barro (Asunción, Paraguay); Paradise Gardens Biennial VI (Darmstadt, Germany), Mexico, Argentina and Morocco. Her work appears in Art In America and Sculpture Magazine. Among her numerous accomplishments is a Rocket Grant of the Kansas City Charlotte Street Foundation, and an Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Emerging Artists Grant. In the summer of 2019, she attended her first-ever family-friendly residency at Elsewhere Studios, in Paonia, CO, where she began filming her award-winning documentary All of Me: Artists+Mothers. The film has since screened in more than 10 Film Festivals, and been awarded Best Female Representation Award at WIFTA (Women in Film and Television Atlanta), Honorable Mention at Screen Power Film Festival in London, UK, and semi-finalist at Dumbo Film Festival in NY and at Boden International Film Festival, in Sweden. Velasco was the first art student to obtain a scholarship to further her studies in the U.S. through the Madrid-California Education Abroad program at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she received her B.F.A. and completed her doctoral courses. She obtained an M.F.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
She is a Professor of Visual Art at the University of Kansas and lives in Lawrence with her twelve-year old son, Alex, who loves to read, write, draw, play music and make art.
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In 2019, the law in the UK changed to allow surrogacy for single father. As Wayne Jacksons says the law changes all the time. A continuous catalogue of amendments, acts, and appeals, and just one more signature on yet another piece of paper. But, in 2019 something shifted for him. From one small piece of legislation an impossible story grew. And for the first time, he began to imagine. He developed the piece From Me to Us a piece that provides the space for discussions about parenthood, whilst documenting the political change against the backdrop of autobiographical experience.
Wayne Steven Jackson began making theatre, as co-founder of Escape, in 2004. Since then, he has become a solo artist, lecturer, workshop facilitator, writer, and collaborator. His work explores autobiographical experiences and the vulnerability of memory to map, challenge, and document social change. He exploits and experiments with technology as a second performer to represent voices that are, for a number of reasons, not present.
If you are interested to see and read more about the issues discussed in this podcast, we can recommend the following resources:
Wayne’s personal webpageBrilliant Beginnings is a charity that support families through surrogacy and they also supported Wayne’s work.You can read aboutthe needs and protection of surrogates in Sophie Lewis’s book Full Surrogacy Now Feminism Against Family -
“Are friends electric?" Gary Numan asked, anticipating a near-future in which menacing machine networks manufacture our thoughts for us. But this conversation with Alicia Harris (Assiniboine) considers the opposite possibility, drawing on Dr. Harris' interest in Indigenous art, Native feminisms and curatorial representations of Indigenous peoples to consider a model of community and support that goes beyond the human...including whether we can contemplate less antagonistic and instrumentalized relationships to artificial intelligence.
Alicia Harris is an assistant professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma, which is where she received her PhD. She is invested in studying the various ways Native American artists represent their relationships with the land in visual form. Her research areas also include Native American women, Native feminisms, Native political activism, curatorial representation of Indigenous peoples, and photography. Alicia is Assiniboine and isan Associate Member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes.
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Mirror balls, port-a-janes and breast milk tasting bars: hear about all this and more in Jess Dobkin’s conversation with Charles Reeve, recorded on the occasion of Dobkin’s Fall 2021 exhibition “Wetrospective.”
Jess Dobkin has been an artist, curator, activist and mentor for more than 30 years, creating and producing everything from intimate solo theatre performances to large-scale public happenings and socially engaged interventions, in venues that run from black boxes and white cubes to art fairs and bathroom stalls. Among many other projects, she’s organized an artist-run newsstand in a subway station, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar and a performance festival hub for kids. She’s also been very active as a teacher, including being a Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
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Times of crisis demand creative thinking. The podcast Renewing the world: creative discourse on care, time, and the maternal will offer provocations and discussions on the impacts, consequences, and potentials of maternal artistic voices on the central issues of our time. Our topics range from contemplation of the relative absence of maternal bodies and experiences in so much of art history, to musings on reproduction, care, ecology and politics of the maternal in times of immense crisis. As we now seek to consider possibilities for rethinking the state of the world, we started this podcast as a way both to stay connected and to carefully nurture discussions on care and the maternal over a prolonged period of time and over geographical and emotional distance.
The podcast is hosted by Rachel Epp Buller, Elena Marchevska and Charles Reeve.
