Commemorating Women Affected by Genocide

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I am honored to participate in an April 10 commemoration for women affected by genocide to be held at the Armenian Museum of America and is co-sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves. The event will feature a lecture by Anna Aleksanyan of Clark University, as well as survivor testimonies from Bosnian Genocide survivor Edina Skaljic and Rwandan Genocide survivor Chantal Kayitesi.

The program will also feature musical performances by violinist Armen Ghazaryan and pianist Levon Hovsepian, as well as a special blended poetic musical piece with poetry written and performed by Frank Cunningham.

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“By this accident of birth, my children thrive while others go hungry. How can this be? It’s not right.” Sonia

To coincide with the program, there will also be a number of guest exhibitions created and inspired by women who have experienced genocide; including selections from my series “Kindling“, “Pax Rwanda: Embroideries of the Women of Savane Rutongo-Kabuye,” curated by Juliana Meehan and Rutongo Embroideries, and “Every Stitch a Memory” by Netty Vanderpol.

All of these guest exhibitions, along with the museum’s “Stitching to Survive” and Traveling Genocide exhibits, will be available for viewing on the 3rd floor of the museum, in the Adele & Haig Der Manuelian and Terjenian-Thomas Galleries, 65 Main St., in Watertown.

The exhibitions will run for a few weeks after the event. For those that cannot make it in person, I’ve embedded a video I make for the Kindling series.

 

 

 

Images of Grief and Healing: Maud Morgan Arts

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I am honored to be included in a powerful show, Images of Grief and Healing in the Chandler Gallery at Maud Morgan Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition is curated by Deborah Putnoi, a distinguished artist and long time educator, and Emily Newmann, an experienced therapist and artist and runs through September 11, 2015. The piece I am exhibiting is called “Inside Out” from the series My Bones Laid Bare.

I hope you have a chance to visit in person. If not, I’ve included a link to many of the images above.

Inside Out, 22" x 30", Graphite and white charcoal on toned paper, 2013

Inside Out, 22″ x 30″, Graphite and white charcoal on toned paper, 2013

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Stoning in Syria

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PerfectStonefigFive72Possibly lost in the tragic news of the summer was story of two women stoned to death in two days by ISIS in Syria. Working on my series, The Perfect Stone, a few years ago I was struck not only by the horror of the penalty—what does it mean that in the 21st century there are still women being stoned to death—but by the question of what would be necessary to cary out the sentence: a pit would need to be dug, many volunteers would be needed to throw stones, and the right size stones would need to be decided on. This last item,  though chilling, made me think—what is the perfect stone for killing a woman?

I hope the video below, and the visual essay, can serve as a proper memorial to women targeted for honor killings in the 21st century.

 

Confronting Evil in Individuals and Societies.

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I am honored to have had the video from my series The Perfect Stone selected to open Facing History and Ourselves Day of Learning Confronting Evil in Individuals and Socities at Harvard University yesterday. The conference was stunning with presentations by a wide range of scholars from across the disciplines including Anthony Appiah, Elaine Pagels, and former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo as well as Jill Medvedow, the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. While I don’t have a photo of the film at the conference, here is a picture of the video on Facing History’s twitter feed.

Each presentation added to a layered picture of Evil as well as the challenges and opportunities we face if we hope to prevent mass violence and cultivate the next generation of thoughtful, engaged citizens. A particular focus was the translation of the work of scholars into resources and practices for schools
. Hopefully the video can be useful in the classroom. If any of you are educators, I would love to hear what you think.

In the meantime, I will share videos from the conference as they become available.

A few thoughts on a cold day

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From the series Kindling:

Traditionally home is the center of the family, the hearth is the heart of the home, a place where families come together for comfort and warmth. The kindling in these drawings echo this ancient ideal of comfort and security, just as the fragile and unsteady piles of wood echo the vulnerable position of women struggling to sustain their families in the most severe conditions imaginable.

“By this accident of birth, my children thrive while others go hungry. How can this be? It's not right.” Sonia

“By this accident of birth, my children thrive while others go hungry. How can this be? It’s not right.” Sonia

Drawing Poetry

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love song of j_2e alfred prufrockThere was a short piece in the Boston Globe this morning describing Julian Peters’ cartoon take on the Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Bostonians will be familiar with some of the imagery as he used a Beacon Hill mansion as a visual reference. To read the article, click here. Prufrock was the subject of a series I exhibited in 1990 and turned into a book (contact me if you are interested copies are very limited). Below are a few sample images from the series, to view the entire series and here Eliot read the poem, link here.

Video Preview: Extreme Beauty

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This video is a preview for the series Extreme Beauty which contrasts socially accepted standards of beauty with the extreme measures undertaken to achieve them.

Artist Statement: “If tiny feet suddenly became fashionable, would American women subject themselves to foot-binding?” This was the question posed in an article of the Los Angeles Times, denouncing breast implants, with the headline “Draw the Line at the Knife”. Standards of beauty are continuously changing, but what is the often grotesque reality behind the extreme measures taken to reshape women’s bodies? I began to investigate these notions by exploring various bodyshaping practices beginning with ancient Chinese foot binding. The vision of a teetering, helpless young bride was considered erotic, and a family prosperous enough to support a young woman made—by design—unsuitable for any kind of physical labor, gained status within the community. However, the reality of these treasured “golden lilies”, were deformed, painful feet, often malodorous due to rotting flesh and infection. Corseting began at a very early age in Victorian England and North America of the 18th and 19th centuries, and extreme tight lacing had an understandably negative effect on the developing body of young girls, effecting not only outward appearance, but the growth and position of internal organs. The vision of the delicate swooning young woman at this time was considered ideal, but how robust and active could an individual be with a compressed rib cage, gasping for breath? A loosely corseted woman, by contrast, was judged not only to be imperiling her health but to be of loose moral fiber as well. Today, there is no longer a need for girls to be excessively corseted, when they are willing to carve out their own bodies through surgery or self-imposed starvation. The rise in incidence of anorexia, has  made clear how much young girls today have internalized societal ideals of beauty, just as foot binding and corseting of young girls and women were signs of past repression through the idealization of the female form. 

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I’m experimenting with video/slide show versions of some of the visual essays on the site. This piece is based on the The Perfect Stone series. Follow the link for more information about the series and my artist statement for the project.

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