Three Women Artists Address Social Practice
Artists Andrea Bowers, Dana Awartani, and Rivane Neuenschwander include elements of activism, spirituality, and feminism in their works, which will be on view in the participatory exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours), opening September 16. Visitors will be encouraged to interact with and take home works by Bowers, Awartani, and Neuenschwander, part of a group of 42 international and intergenerational artists included in this convention-defying exhibition.
Andrea Bowers works at the intersection of art and activism. Her projects and exhibitions center on issues of social justice; here she addresses the 2016 United States presidential election. Bowers owns a vast collection of recent and historical agitprop, including ribbons that were once used to carry political messages, later replaced by buttons and pins. In Political Ribbons, she reactivates this bygone, stereotypically “girly” material to communicate her radical leftist social and political agenda. Visitors will be invited to take these ribbons home, and display them in solidarity with rights for women.
Dana Awartani promotes a sense of universality in her work, using patterns and symbols that are shared among people of many religious backgrounds and belief systems. For example, the six-pointed Star of David, a potent symbol for Jews, is also a shape extensively used throughout Islamic art and architecture. For her project in Take Me (I’m Yours) intricately crafted paper sculptures will be given away, which, when assembled, call to mind ceramic tiles, take their imagery from tile patterns on the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a holy site for Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
Collective action and mapping are often present in Rivane Neuenschwander’s work. In her work Watchword, she has embroidered words borrowed from the language of protest — take, back, justice — onto fabric tags similar to those used for clothing labels. Visitors are welcome to take a tag, either to sew onto their own clothing or to pin to the board. In both cases the migrating and accumulating words form a poetic, global map of resistance.
Through our Kickstarter campaign for Take Me (I’m Yours), which will enable the production of more than 10,000 pieces of each artist’s work that will be given away, we are offering the exclusive opportunity for you to take home works before the exhibition opens — a satin ribbon silk-screened by Andrea Bowers, an archival, limited edition print of Dana Awartani’s sacred geometry artwork, and an embroidered patch from Rivane Neuenschwander’s Watchword. Visit Kickstarter.com through September 8 to get involved.
