WRITTEN JANUARY 22, 2018
1. In the three weeks that you were on tour, how many individuals did you depict in murals? Can you share one or two of the more memorable stories you came across in your search for subjects?
While traveling, we painted 5 murals total - 1 in Berryville VA, 1 in Philadelphia, 2 in Brooklyn, and 1 in Burlington VT. In those 5 murals I was able to include only 35 of the dozens and dozens of womxn submitted in pictures.
My call for submissions was very simple: "send me a picture of a womxn you know, and tell me why she's rad." I was hoping for a sweet little taste of insight into that person, maybe "This is Maura and we grew up together." or "This is Chris and they're the bravest person I know." Some people, they just sent a short "I hope you include my daughter." Others, though, sent short novels about their person - background, relationship, current projects, outstanding qualities... They entrusted me not just with this person's image, but with their whole story. I won't pretend that I was able to represent even a small part of that story in most cases - I was mostly just overwhelmed (in a positive way) to receive it. The murals are just the images - but I'm trying to include the story part on instagram - as I post each drawing or painting I include the original quote, as I received it, from the person who submitted the picture.
In Richmond I tapped into the growing community of womxn who are self-employed or small business owners, so their stories were full of success in changing the world around them, balancing life and home, and mutual support for others in their position.
Angela Hutton of Girls for a Change treated me to a breakdown of exactly why she chose to submit the images she did. There was one of her summer camp girls working on a science assignment in a lab, one of a friend yelling into a megaphone at a rally, and one of two girls leaning on one another and flexing their arms. Each pictures' subject was black, and each spoke to a way that black girls are rarely shown in a positive light: Despite black females being the largest demographic to be accepted to college in the US, the are the smallest demographic to get jobs in their field upon graduation. The community of black female scientists is painfully small, despite a huge interest in science among elementary school girls. Black womxn are typically punished socially or legally for raising their voices or advocating for themselves.
So, as a teacher and advocate for black girls, she picked images that represented her girls in way that would combat those problems.
My favorites are when people describe themselves. On the road, one of the most striking submissions I got was from lady who sent in two pictures of herself, with the caption: "Here's me when I was sad and me when I was confident." She got right to the heart of what I'm trying to do, so simply.
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2. You've stated that your project was motivated, in part, by your frustration with the common media depictions of women. Can you tell me a bit about how your work represents women as multidimensional?
I can ramble on and on but as an artist, I believe the most concise and clear statement I can make is with images. No matter what I say here, the images offer the most explanation, the best enthusiasm, the clearest thought, the boldest statement. With these words I'm just trying to restate what I've already said and am still saying in pictures.
I'm holding two things up next to each other and asking the viewer to see the dischord: Strip club signs represent the broad swathe of media that only show womxn of a very narrow age, body type, skin color, lifestyle, and disposition. There's an inherent statement being made about what is the 'right' way to look and live. The womxn I'm painting alongside are just normal people... but they are almost never who you would expect to see associated with those signs. The contrast is important - This project focuses on highlighting individual contradictions and complexities, sometimes within one person, but always with what we expect to be shown vs what is real.
The strip club signs specifically are essentially ads intended to sell women as products, but they're so simple that out of context, they're downright celebratory. They stuck in my head, and started to symbolize a lot of the problems I see with how women are portrayed in art and advertisements.
In ads, of course, there's the extreme focus on a narrow range of body type and lifestyle. Flawless, slender/fit/sexy, light skin, focused on appearance. That's not really news, but it's still so mind-numbingly ubiquitous. In addition to that, there's subtler tendencies to always show women as happy, calm, or sexy, and always young or young-for-their-age... or not show them at all, since the default neutral 'character' for any image is a white male.
The art world honestly doesn't tend to do much better - "the beauty of the female form" in a lot of fine art tends to ignore the actual humanity of the person in there. There's a category of illustration and painting that I call "girls with hair"- I actually have a tumblr collection of it. It's populated by tons of artists whose subject matter is just drawing pretty girls, with pretty hair, over and over again. I'd never point at one individual painting and say it's wrong or hurtful, but the waves and waves of these images have the effect of simplifying women into objects rather than subjects, still lives instead of portraits.
Like many gendered problems, this one jumps into focus when you switch to men - an acquaintance online whose typical bread-and-butter work is drawing sexy ladies decided to switch to drawing sexy men for a month. The backlash he got as he posted his work was so strong that he questioned whether he could even finish out the month.
SO! My goal is to help normalize the glorious variety of ways that female-identifying people occupy the world by making images that just.. show that.
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3. Was there a significance to ending the tour, and replicating a mural you've done in Richmond, in Burlington? (I'm a native Vermonter and am just curious if this was an arbitrary choice.)
I hate to disappoint, but Burlington was fairly arbitrary - I knew we would go north, to escape the heat, and I planned to stop where I had friends who could help me get walls. Burlington happened to be a place that many people pointed to and said 'you MUST go there!' Then when I put out a call for walls, I ended up making a great connection there with Stu Sporko, owner of Battery Street Jeans (a store similar in attitude to Circle Thrift, here.)
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4. What were some things you learned, or some unexpected moments that arose, during your tour?
The truck breaking down was certainly the most unexpected moment, but that whole story is on the blog if you'd like to read it http://www.herrsuite.com/mobile-studio-blog/philly-brooklyn-breakdown-city
http://www.herrsuite.com/mobile-studio-blog/burlington-at-last
My best lesson was in Philadelphia. While planning the whole trip, I put a lot of energy into trying to coordinate walls beforehand. I'd had a lot of people tell me 'don't worry about it! just get on the road and make it happen on the fly!' This sounded totally insane to me - nearly all my regular mural work takes weeks or months of design and planning, so I couldn't imagine that I'd get any good work done by just knocking on doors.
But - lo and behold - we ended up doing basically that. While in Berryville and Brooklyn we lucked out with connections, in Philadelphia we were on our own. We toyed with the idea of 'just painting something' (illegal, scary, not a good look when you have sponsors backing you) or painting on the truck in lieu of a wall (clearly a cop-out). Finally I mustered my courage and walked into a bodega with a few sloppy tags on the front. After seeing a couple of pictures from my Instagram account, the guy behind the counter said he was 'kind of' the owner, and that he was largely ambivalent to us painting the front of his store, since he'd have to paint over the graffiti anyway. As easy as that, we had permission to paint pretty much whatever we wanted! Bang! Over the next few hours, this guy became our biggest fan, and was ultimately really happy with what we did. He even made us sandwiches for the road. Picking a wall with graffiti already on it definitely made a huge difference there. But it grew my confidence enormously in terms of what to try for in the future.
From the beginning, the goal was to treat this like being a band on tour, which is something I know nothing about. SO I learned a lot about how to do that. I wrote down some lessons:
1. for documentation, take BOTH pictures AND videos ALL the time. Also, if it's worth taking a video, it's worth taking at least one picture!
2. also for documentation, doing a trip like this (where there are sponsors involved, and a lot of people following along, and you want to show the story as a whole later) would be a LOT easier with someone dedicated to documentation. that is seriously a full time job, and it's hard to be making decisions and framing the situation at the same time.
3. flexibility is the MOST important! As a frequent traveler, I know this, but I learn it again on every trip. The breakdown threw us off for sure, and staying on our toes meant it wasn't a disaster. Planning flexibility outside the trip is important too - having a more open-ended return date would've helped.
4. We crashed on many couches, which I love - seeing friends and family is the best, and not having to deal with airbnb or hotels is luxurious. 3-4 days is the well-known sweet spot for a reason - move on after that. I learned it's totally fine to sleep in the truck, though parking in a remote area is key to that being a comfortable experience.
5. Having partner on this trip was absolutely vital, as a sounding board, for help talking with everyone from mean NJ gas station attendants to friendly mural admirers, splitting up responsibilities, making an excuse to leave a conversation or event or a whole city, for help painting of course, for staying motivated .... I would be deeply hesitant to plan a solo trip.
6. Collaboration is awesome! I was so excited to work with Sarah not just because she's my friend, but because she's an excellent designer and letterer. She was responsible for all the words in these murals. I'd love to expand that to other artists in the cities, and make an effort to do more collaborations along the way.
7. Tolls are real, and plentiful, and infinitely more expensive for the Mobile Studio than for my little car. Getting into NYC was $42 one way, on just one bridge.
8. It is very hard to tell from Google Maps what roads are going to accommodate trucks.... at one point we had another driver yell at us out the window on a freeway to 'get off! you can't drive here!' Sometimes the regulations are for heights, sometimes for weight... it's more ambiguous than you might guess, and the Mobile Studio is technically a van....
9. Bringing bikes along saved us over and over again, especially with the truck breaking down. Driving around in the truck just isn't practical most of the time, especially once we're all set up working. A bike rack would be nice though.
10. I learned a lot about what I need to change on the truck.... I won't go into it here but I will on my blog ;)
11. Momentum matters. The first week of the tour we were in power mode - go go go go go! Wake up early! Stay up late! Paint every day! After the breakdown though, we lost a lot of momentum, and had a hard time getting back up to speed. We woke up later, quit working earlier, and everything just felt harder to accomplish. It took nearly the rest of the trip to get back to full force.
Of course, like all travel, the main learning experience of this trip was just to experience a little more of the world. I met many, many new people, and was introduced to many more via these submissions. Travel to me does not feel like a luxury - it feels like a necessary education experience, to remind you how big the world is. We travelled through a very small part of it, largely surrounded by people very similar to us in many ways, and EVEN SO it was a potent refresher on that lesson.
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5. You hint in your blog about doing a more extensive tour in the future. Is it too early to share some details?
I consider this trip a practice run, a scouting mission, a learning experience by which to plan a much, much longer and larger-scale adventure. I'd love to do something 6 months long, reenacting this trip across the country: plot several big murals and call for submissions, then paint smaller pieces along the way, wherever I can.
The tour is done, but the project is far from over. I am going to continue painting walls around Richmond, as many as I can. The trick there will be working this around paying jobs. For now, I need to finish what I started in town, save up money again, and start the planning seeds early... It took me like 5 months from conception to departure to plan this trip and get it off the ground, so if I'm going to plan something 6 times longer.... I have work to do!
Hopefully this finished trip can serve as proof of concept for some larger funding as well. I'm specifically not asking wall owners to pay for the murals (though if they want to contribute to the project as a whole, that's great!) so that I can maintain creative control over the image, and remove a potential obstacle for getting permission to paint. The gas and paint and food have so far been covered by tshirt and print sales, donations through our fiscal sponsor Studio Two Three, and a handful of sponsorships from local Richmond businesses: Campfire + Co, Chesapeake Bank, Worse for Wear, and Cut Cut Creative have all been super supportive and awesome. A longer lead time would let me apply for grants.