Got a Girl Crush Issue 04

ISSUE 04

Issue 4

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#gotagirlcrush

in·i·ti·a·tive i’niSH(ē) div/ e

noun 1. The ability to assess and initiate things independently.

self-motivation, resourcefulness, inventiveness,

imagination, ingenuity, originality, creativity, enterprise

2. The power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do.

3. An act or strategy intended to resolve a difficulty or improve a situation; a fresh approach to something.

2

plan, scheme, strategy, stratagem, measure, proposal, step, action, approach

The Editors

The women we feature in each issue are all forging their own paths or continuing on the paths that others helped forge before them. They are speaking up for women’s issues in public spaces (like Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s “Stop Telling Women to Smile” street art project on p. 90) and on public platforms (like The Daily Show’s senior correspondent Jessica Williams on p. 41).

They are exploring cultures outside their own to gain a better perspective of our ever expanding global village (like Peace Corps volunteer Sarah Castagnola and coffee farmer Teddy Ithungu in Uganda on p. 78 and documentary filmmaker Mo Scarpelli in Afghanistan on p. 62). They are tearing down social norms and shamelessly questioning them (like real sex advocate Cindy Gallop on p. 28 and arts rights activist Carrie Marie Schneider on p. 18).

We’re commonly asked if there are “themes” to each issue of the magazine. The answer is even though they are diverse as people as they are their professions—one overarching tie is that all these women are taking initiative. Everyone is selfmotivated, acting on their ideas, and carving out their place in the world. And for that they have a common thread. And we are constantly inspired.

Love, Meg & Amanda

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Amanda Stosz

Bonnie Don Wachter

Creative director of GAGC, hustling in Brooklyn, New York doing what she does best, using her photography and all around creative and tinkering skills and going on adventures. amandastosz.com

Recently retired from teaching gifted education and language arts at a middle school for the arts in Akron, Ohio. She also served as a writing coach and judge for 14 years for Power of the Pen, a creative writing competition. With all of Bonnie’s experience in editing her students’ writing, it seemed a fitting opportunity for her to edit this issue of GAGC for her daughter, Meg!

Amber Fouts An editorial lifestyle photographer with an affinity for campfires, cats, and handstands.

When she’s not playfully chasing light, you can find her gardening, giggling, or making you a mean gin drink. amberfouts amberfouts.com

Andrea Cheng Pretends to be an adult in San Francisco. When she’s not beeping and booping away in tech during the day, she enjoys going on day trips, eating noodles, cruising Airbnb, snapping photos and staying cozy with her girls. earthtoandrea

Ariel Roman An Illustrator and Art Director based in Brooklyn, New York. Clients include BAGGU, Converse, Becks, Protein UK, MouthFeel Magazine, On Plate Still Hungry, Mex & the City, Luaka Bop Records, and Sterling Publishing.

Outside of commercial work, Ariel curates art shows, hosts dinner parties, and DJs. arielcrisis arielroman.biz

Canbra Hodson An East Coast photographer, teacher, writer, and editor. As a full blown Mainer she loves adventure travel, especially when it involves scuba diving, wind surfing, and any other adrenaline pumping activity. She is an amateur horticulturist and a member of the Providence Kickball League. canbrahodsdon canbrahodsdon.com

Caroline Framke A writer and stalker of taco trucks in Los Angeles.

She has written for Salon, Vulture, and The Atlantic, and writes reviews of Orphan Black, Broad City, Archer, and more at The A.V. Club. carolineframke

Celeste Prevost A designer and partner at Math Times Joy, an independent design studio in San Francisco.

Outside of work, you can find her biking around town looking for her next food tattoo. celesteprevost celesteprevost.com

Asha Efia

Christie Maclean

A fashion, wedding and commercial photographer based in NYC. She has been photographing for 6 years in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and currently New York.

She is one half of Design House, Q+A—a creative director and photographer duo documenting their entire creative process. ashaefia ashaefia.com

A New Englander at heart but lives on the West Coast. She is a photographer that never has a properly working camera. She is always scheming up new travel plans, looking for swim spots and drinking coffee with friends. christiemaclean christiemaclean.tumblr.com

Erin Griffith Writes about tech startups for Fortune magazine. eringriffith

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Girls Jackie Lee Young

Lisa Butterworth

A portrait photographer from Austin, Texas with a focus on travel and fashion seeking inventive methods of portraiture to convey human nature. She received her B.A. in literature and photography from Saint Edwards University. jackieleeyoung jackielyoung.com

A writer and editor covering all things awesome while soaking up the eternal sunshine in Los Angeles. She fancies herself a girl culture expert, and getting to chat with Lizzo for this issue was a dream. lisabutterworth lisabutterworth.com

Jess Schreibstein

Meg Wachter

A Baltimore-based cook, knitter, herbalist, cat mom and witch. She has written about food, travel and fiber arts for NPR, Food52, Knit Wit Magazine and more, and the summer of 2015 is participating in an artist residency at Have Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. thekitchenwitch witchininthekitchen.com

Boss-bitch-in-chief of GAGC and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her boyfriend, Henry the pug, Lobo the weeniechug (dachshund+chihuahua+pug), and 12-yearold lady-turtle named Charlie. Currently crushing: her newly-retired mama for copy-editing this entire issue! mtotheegg megwachter.com

Krys Blakemore An illustrator, cat enthusiast, adventure cyclist, aspiring sign painter, part time napper, full time thinker and sometimes gardener. Krys shares many interests and hobbies with the elderly, she in fact is an old soul in a twentysomething’s body, and would like a doo-wop club to open in NYC sometime soon. krysblakemore krystinblakemore.com

Laura Kerrigan Has a background in photography, anthropology, and the environment. After receiving her B.A. in Environmental Studies she has been working in diverse communities, doing education and outreach. For fun she plays music, takes photos, does yoga, and pets dogs. laurakerrigan.bandcamp.com

Lindsay Eyth

Natalie Capannelli A Brooklyn-based illustrator, cookie designer, and plant-obsessor, with a focus on handillustration and painted baked goods, for those with a penchant for the unique or irreverent. capacookie natcap.space

Sam Paul A New York native with a degree in writing and gender studies. She is a very literate bike messenger, who waits for freight elevators courteously, while being ever mindful of diction, syntax, and systematic oppression. sampaulsampaul

Tallulah Fontaine An illustrator and zine maker from Montreal, Canada. Currently based in LA. tallulahfontain tallulahfontain.com

A letterer and graphic designer living in Austin, Texas. She’s been told she’s surprisingly sweet, but some days drawing letters is the only thing that doesn’t make her angry. eythink eythink.etsy.com

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What’s Inside

09 Becca Barnett loves animals

18 Carrie Marie Schneider likes a challenge

34 Faythe Levine

28 Cindy Gallop

documents craftsmen

isn’t ashamed

41 Jessica Williams #1 old lady fan

48 Lizzo is a big girl, in a small world

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54 Martha Cooper hits the streets

62 Mo Scarpelli wants to share your story

68 Pakayla Rae Biehn

78 Sarah Castagnola & Teddy Ithungu talk Bukonzo Joint

supports the diva cup

86 Tamara Becerra Valdez has the cure for your ailments

90 Tatyana Fazlalizadeh wants to stop street harassment

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Becca Barnet Interview by Amanda Stosz Photos by Amber Fouts

Becca Barnet is an artist originally hailing from Spartanburg, South Carolina. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design’s illustration program as well as the Missouri Taxidermy Institute after becoming interested in preserving animals and utilizing them in her artwork.

Post-graduation brought her to New York City where she held a variety of apprenticeships stemming from her training in taxidermy, including a position with the American Museum of Natural History where she helped build traveling exhibits and preserve specimens. Becca has since escaped the hustle and bustle whirlwind of New York, settling in historical

Charleston, South Carolina with her bull terriers, Bruce and Ramona, and creating her own hustle by founding Sisal and Tow—a fabrication studio which combines her eclectic range of skills as an artist, illustrator, preservationist, taxidermist and sculptor. Her clientele and variety of work is so impressive it’s impossible to list them all here, but some of her work includes building exhibitions for institutions such as the South Carolina Aquarium, creating window displays for storefronts, shaping the atmosphere of restaurants with her unique installations, as well as creating personal work for sale and to be displayed in gallery exhibitions.

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Becca Barnet Amanda Stosz From what we understand, the animals that you work on through Sisal and Tow are ethically sourced, whether they are found, recycled specimens or hunted for food rather than purely for trophy and sport. Tell us a little about where you draw your personal and ethical boundaries, and a story of a situation where you may have discovered those boundaries.

Becca Barnet To say I love animals might be an understatement. I’m fascinated by them. I’ve always disliked the idea of hunting for sport, but I’ve always been a supporter of eating what you take. Things die, and death creeps us all out, but I’ve always loved the idea of honoring the animal by giving it a chance to enhance someone else’s life. So taxidermy, preserving that animal, makes sense to me. I think if it’s alive, you should probably just let it go do it’s thing, but if it had to be killed (for example, the roosters I mount have to be killed at a certain age because they start to bother the hens and fight each other to the death) or it died naturally or through some unfortunate event (road kill, stillborn, etc) why not appreciate its anatomy, and celebrate its existence?

Amanda Museums such as the American Museum of Natural History gained many of their older specimens during a time period when trophy hunting was more widely practiced, some animals having been hunted by the godfather of modern conservation, Theodore Roosevelt. How do museums currently gain new animals for display, and are there any ethical guidelines?

Becca Ethical guidelines pretty much sums it up. For the “Traveling the Silk Road” exhibit in 2010 we sculpted one camel and made four casts because it wouldn’t have been proper or realistic to taxidermy camels, or have them killed for mounting. PETA would have been all over us. As for common or small mammals, we used a taxidermist in New Jersey (I ended up going to work for him for a while) who would source those animals relatively ethically (also they weren’t protected or exotic—think raccoons).

AMNH’s traveling exhibits were all about that— traveling. Display items had to pass [wildlife

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transportation and conservation] guidelines for travel, entering and exiting different countries, so if you think about it, a fake model travels a lot faster and easier.

Museums can’t/won’t accept dead or even taxidermy animals without proper location/ migration/source data, so new animals are most often turned away unless they serve some specific data or display purpose.

Also I love/hate that the mentality of Roosevelt’s time was “kill to conserve”—I don’t blame him for it, but I’m glad we have different views now. We wouldn’t have AMNH without that guy. It just goes to show you can be an animal lover/nature worshiper and really screw up nature if you’re not careful.

Amanda Due to the technological limitations in Roosevelt’s era, these dioramas with his gathered

specimens were cutting edge at the time and the closest museum visitors could get to experiencing and learning about the animals’ natural habitats.

The relationship between the viewer and wildlife dioramas in a museum or zoo can be reminiscent of the relationship one may have with a religious altar, meditating on the subject, especially in museums as well designed as AMNH where the viewer is able to feel almost enveloped within

the stage of the diorama. As unfortunate as the origins of some of the specimens are, do you think these exhibits can ultimately serve as a means to promote conservation through fostering a reverence towards wildlife and the environment from the viewer?

Becca That’s an awesome observation and question. Like I mentioned before, I have a real love hate relationship with the “age of Roosevelt.”

The fascination for collecting was based on the thought that there’d “always be more where that came from.” You can’t blame those collectors though, because they didn’t know that one could really make an animal go extinct through overcollecting. Without these dioramas, people back then (and even today) would have never been able to see up-close animals portrayed in their natural habitats, which arguably gave the same effect as going to a beautiful church or seeing an amazing ship roll into a harbor—a truly moving experience. I find the dioramas honor nature through a beautiful complexity—they are peaceful yet full of turmoil—creation and destruction in one breath. I think the spectacle created around these reconstructions of nature were both deliberate and accidental: when created, men were “playing God” and now we are honoring these animals and preaching conservation due to the unfortunate current state of the Earth. Like anything worth obsessing over, natural history is beautiful and horrifying, and never ceases to amaze.

Amanda Tell us about your attraction to museum dioramas and zoo exhibits, and how your interest in working with these came to be.

Does the peculiar quality of the blurring of real and artificial play a part in the intrigue?

Becca When I was little I was terrified of taxidermy but I LOVED stuffed animals. I had quite a collection. I grew up doing plays and loving the set designs, especially the models of the sets. I always loved miniatures and things in boxes. I loved Disney World and the detail of the environment created there, even at a young age.

At RISD I had a chance to start making random art that had been inside of me for a long time, and I had the space and access to materials to make some interesting things. I think it was the hyperrealistic, completely fake newborn baby bird I made that pushed my teacher to suggest I go to taxidermy school. Another teacher suggested I intern at AMNH after I made a diorama for my final project.

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Annie

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&

Ellen

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Sisal Amanda You took some time away from Rhode Island School of Design to attend the Missouri Taxidermy Institute. Was the education with MTI your first venture into taxidermy?

Becca At RISD I was making a lot of animalthemed artwork. I was using a lot of animal parts but didn’t know how to properly preserve them. I had some really influential teachers who suggested I learn how to tan skins. I had only really seen one freshly dead animal until l sat down at class at MTI. It was a pretty shocking experience that I had to get over pretty quickly.

Amanda Founding Sisal & Tow seems to be the perfect continuation of the experience you have gained from your education at the Missouri Taxidermy Institute and your experience at the American Museum of Natural History. Was there a point that you realized you could really make not just a job, but an entire fabrication studio, out of what you were learning?

Becca At ANMH I met with the exhibit designer and he told me that there were fabrication studios across the country and even the world. My head exploded. I guess there wasn’t a specific point where I thought “I can make my own job” but I did quit my retail job to work at the South Carolina Aquarium to fabricate an exhibit there. When that gig was over, I was hellbent on making work for myself so I went around and tried to get people to let me make things for them.

I formed an LLC in 2012.

Amanda When it comes to your work we have found that just because it looks like it has had a previous life doesn’t mean it has…we’ve seen a few interesting reconstructions you have made, including deer meat cutlets, bananas, and catfish that are made of styrofoam, epoxy and fiberglass.

What have been some of your favorite projects which were completely artificially fabricated?

Becca I always tell this story, but it’s my favorite. At AMNH I made a replica platypus nest out of new material, and I had an old one to look at but not touch. When the head of the Mammalogy department came to pick it up they didn’t know which one was the real one. That’s

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& when you know you did your job well. Recently, I’ve loved making models of turtles because of the way they have to be delicately painted, and I am working on a project for a retail store in Atlanta where there will be lots of turtles.

Amanda How do you go about preparing for a pitch to a client interested in working with Sisal & Tow? Do you ever learn new techniques for a project?

Becca When potential clients come to me, I usually can read them enough to know if they want something subtle and conservative or wild and crazy. I usually ask

about the space, the clientele, the budget, and any other regulations. I usually compile sketches, inspiration images and past work, make a PDF of these ideas, and present them. I price later. I treat the project like an illustration assignment from college, for example, you must make an interesting piece of art that stands on it’s own out of context, but within context, makes sense, is intelligent, clever, delightful, and well-executed, within this budget, within these parameters, and within

Tow this timeframe. Sometimes it’s straightforward (“mount ten roosters”) and sometimes it’s really obscure (“what could go on this wall?”) I learn new techniques for projects all the time, but I hire out a lot of things I’m not set up for (i.e. metal work). I’ve tried a little bit of everything, but I also know a lot of talented people here in Charleston as well as artists who graduated RISD with me. I love hiring my friends. It’s the best situation because I know they’re amazing, and I enjoy working with

others and managing projects, even if I’m not physically doing the work.

Amanda Sisal & Tow is thriving in Charleston—what lead you to take the jump from New York to setting up shop down in South Carolina?

Becca I grew up in Spartanburg, SC. It’s about three and a half hours from Charleston. When I was working in New York, something wasn’t

clicking with me then, and I now know it was a pace thing. I love the fast paced, workaholic lifestyle—RISD implemented that into my brain permanently—but I also love the contrast of the moments you can hang at the beach or on the porch and breathe fresh air or zen out. I had no downtime in NYC, and not enough nature, so I felt imbalanced. I didn’t want to move home exactly, but I was considering Asheville (NC), Nashville (TN) or Charleston. I chose Charleston because of proximity to home, and the fact that the art scene was really booming. I also LOVE the preservation element here—the respect people have for historic architecture really excites me.

Amanda Charleston seems to be packed with culture & arts, restaurants and small businesses— and so many have utilized your artwork to help shape their image and space. How do you collaborate with your clients? What are some businesses in Charleston that are exciting right now?

Becca Collaborating with clients is my favorite part, because it never goes down the same way.

It’s never just an installation or a piece, it’s an alteration of the space that completes the owner’s DREAM PROJECT. It’s their BABY, that’s the coolest part. Some people start with a budget, others with an idea, but I like to pick their brains, see the space or at least get an idea, and I try to come up with the coolest, weirdest (or at least what we can get away with) custom installation.

The art is the icing on the cake of something into which they’ve put a whole lot of time and effort.

I put a lot of weight on my own shoulders about it, but I like to try to deliver the most cohesive, interesting art I can.

Amanda What are some of the current and upcoming projects that you are excited about?

Becca I can officially say I’ve been signed on to renovate the Charleston Museum’s Natural History Gallery. I’ll be designing it in it’s entirety, AND repairing over 150 taxidermy mounts. That’s a lot of hats for me to wear, but I’m up for the challenge. The museum technically opened in 1824, so they claim to be America’s First Museum.

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Becca

Lets just say there’s a giant polar bear I can’t wait to get my hands on.

I’m also working on custom wallpaper for a hotel, and an art installation for the lobby of a new multi-use retail/office space, and I’m STILL articulating a bulldog skeleton I started last year… that thing is taking me forever! There’s a lot of range going on.

Amanda What is some advice to aspiring artists and designers who might be interested in starting their own creative business?

Becca The main bit of advice I have is to think about where you want to be and imagine yourself THERE in your head every day. When you’re ready to start your journey, venture out and shake as many hands as possible. Be nice to everyone, because you never know what they might mean to you one day. Force people to meet you by bringing them coffee. Give them your resume after thanking them for their time. SAY YES to everything at first so that you can get your product/skills/good attitude in front of people’s

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faces. It’s almost like forcing them to believe in you the way you believe in yourself. When you notice that people are starting to believe in you, start only saying yes to things that will get you closer to your goal. Burn the candle at both ends, do stuff for FREE, as long as you can put your business’s name to it, and do a fucking good job.

Then STOP doing it for free when it feels like you have done enough for free. Then ask for a small payment, and then start asking for more. The worst that can happen is people won’t hire you, and then you have more time to perfect yourself and your craft.

Amanda Who are some of the women that you admire, whose craft is also a particularly unconventional trade?

Becca My AMNH co-worker Hannah Rawe’s latest project is really great. She’s set up a tiny shop at Giti Fashion in Park Slope called Lost & Find. In it, she carries tiny sculptures: jewelry and trinkets of backpacks, Metrocards, socks, scarves, gloves and other abandoned items you’re likely to

Barnet

see on the city’s streets. She also creates custom artworks: She designed a lego necklace for a friend who found a lego and created a sculpture of a finger for someone who lost some movement in his pinky.

I’m also inspired by Harper Poe of Proud Mary, she works with global artisans in the developing world to create its line of ‘ethnicmodern’ home and personal accessories. The products are beautiful and the fact that she’s engaging with craftspeople and enhancing their lives is really admirable.

Almost needless to say, I’ve got a whole lot of love for my artist girls here in Charleston, kicking ass and taking names, running their own businesses, making beautiful stuff. It’s a great place to be.

@beccabarnet

sisalandtow.com

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Carrie Marie Schneider

Interview by Jess Schreibstein Photos of Carrie by Jess Schreibstein Photos of The Human Tour by Lillie Monstrum Photos of CAMH Show by Lillie Monstrum & Paul Hester

It’s a cold February morning in Houston and the sky—usually a startling wash of blue over all of Texas—is an impenetrable pall of dingy gray. The sprawling beast of a city is bleached of color. My friend Carrie Schneider and I are about to go on a drive through her hometown.

Carrie is an artist born and raised in Houston, and she approaches her work as a trickster, problem solver, and conduit for change.

With her long blond hair, Texan

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accent and penchant for floral print dresses, Carrie comes off as sweet and unassuming—which has enabled her to get away with quite a bit. Since returning to Texas after earning her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, she has produced an impressive array of work that challenges the status quo and questions who in Houston has a right to ownership, voice, power, and change in the city.

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Carrie Jess Schreibstein So where are we going right now?

Carrie Marie Schneider (Laughs) Where are we going? In life?!

Jess No, where are we trying to get to?

Carrie That’s the thing. It’s hard to perceive this massive petrochemical infrastructure, to get to a spot where you can see all of it. Access is denied for security and privacy. But right now I’m just trying to get to a place where some of that becomes apparent. And there’s a really tall bridge we can get on top of it to see it. This is what the city is built on, giving everyone their jobs, but it’s shoved up in an area of the city that many Houstonians have never seen.

We exit the highway and Carrie takes us down some surface roads that run along the Valero refinery. There are no other cars on the road, and the only people we spot are security guards.

Jess Is any of this structure new or has it been around for decades?

Carrie It’s been around. And a number of the refineries here are grandfathered in, avoiding regulations that keep new facilities from being built in other locations.

It’s uniquely situated because of…we’re probably gonna get cut off. That’s the thing, we’re not supposed to be here.

Jess But there are no signs saying we can’t be here.

Carrie Hey look, a strike!

Jess With... four people.

Carrie Houston is known for being business friendly not for workers’ rights.

What we saw was actually a glimpse of the first wide scale walkout and work stoppage of Houston-

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area refineries in 35 years. It lasted two and a half months. As we drive along, it seems like Carrie is trying to find the right ramp to that bridge with the view, but then she reconsiders. Directly outside the car window are towering white tanks, pipes, glittering lights.

Jess Is this the biggest processing facility in the country?

Carrie Not this one, but all of the combined infrastructure in the Houston area. But it’s not just gas for your car—it’s things that come out of the petrochemical industry. All of those products are massively distributed in our lives every single day, no matter where you live.

It’s easy to hate the source, but the people in places that don’t have as much of this are also consumers of this. It just happens to be here. Instead of saying, “Houston is just a backwards wasteland,” well, this is the place that we all collectively made.

Jess Would you consider yourself an environmentalist artist?

Carrie No. If I wanted to make a painting about oil, that’s easy.

Instead, what is the space that would potentially allow me to blatantly celebrate this? Because we do, every day. It would be much more powerful to slip in, play by the rules, celebrate it, not announce a particular stance, let yourself not know a particular stance for awhile, respond to the culture that you’re in, then bring it all together in theatrically, overemphasized play and see what comes out of that.

My family history tracks with the booms and busts of this industry. I’m in a place to play with these ideas in art projects because my family’s history of employment by oil companies paid for my education.

I have a friend, Yudith Nieto, who is an environmental justice advocate who speaks all over and she’s from Manchester. People here are breathing these carcinogens at super elevated levels.

Jess Right in this neighborhood?

Carrie Yeah. We’re in Manchester, Avenue O. We’re right at the Valero refinery.

Small, colorful houses with tricycles and toys in the front yard sit squarely against the refinery. I spot the elementary school, framed neatly by towers puffing out plumes of white smoke.

Jess Wait, what is this?! There’s this playground right next to…

Carrie Manchester is pretty famous for being this fucked up. Look—this is somebody’s house.

Right there. Next to this. No zoning! People have to live here. A lot of these people work here and don’t necessarily have any other choice.

But that trailer parked over there is actually full of air quality monitoring equipment, because the community fought for it. In the middle of this stuff (she points to the smokestacks) in a city with the world’s largest medical center, making a lot of money treating cancer, while Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people. It’s crazy.

We’re not actually that far from my place though, where artists have been pushed to most recently.

And then what’s making up a lot of private collections and arts foundations—it’s profits from these industries.

Jess Let’s talk about that, about art funding in Houston. Mayor Parker and the new cultural plan.

Carrie Wait, I need to be quiet because I got to get on this bridge. Is that it? Yes! Yes, that is it.

I think.

In July 2014, Mayor Annise Parker announced the effort to create a new cultural plan for Houston.

The goal of the plan is to develop an overarching framework for arts, culture and creative business in the city, and Mayor Parker has earned accolades for her work—she was recognized by the U.S. Conference

of Mayors in January 2015 for her local arts leadership.

The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs is spearheading the effort along with “extensive outreach to the community at large,” but many local artists argue that they have not been included in the planning development and the role of those who are involved is merely symbolic. Mayor Parker has set a deadline for completion of the cultural plan by the end of 2015, prior to the end of her term.

Jess So what exactly is the role of the cultural plan?

Carrie With deindustrialization, a lot of cities lost their economic engines, and now there’s been a trend for cities to compete as destinations.

One thing that was really popular for a while was building stadiums. And now the next wave is having art centers and museums designed by “starchitects.”

Real estate follows where the artists are. Artists create value out of nothing, right? What we do is add value that’s not monetary, then somebody comes along later and capitalizes on it. The idea of cultural planning is really popular right now. People have bought into it, and major arts funding from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) is designated for these creative placemaking projects that are making sure that artists aren’t just making art but are doing this property value enhancement work too.

All of these cities are having their cultural plans done, and a lot of them bring in consultants. It’s an industry, a cultural plan industry. Consultants will go to different cities and tell them what they need to do to have a vibrant art center, and it’s economically based. Some are better than others, and Houston is having theirs done.

But there’s a weird contradiction. The idea is to make the city more culturally specific, like, Houston is different from Minneapolis, which is different from L.A. That’s what culture is supposed to do. But most of the things that get emphasized are actually the exact same five criteria in all cities. Won’t that mean they all get passé and obsolete at the same time?

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Carrie

Last I heard, there’s no new money with the cultural plan. City art funding in Houston is a percentage of the Hotel Occupancy Tax. So whenever someone stays in a hotel room they pay a 7% surcharge, and that gets divided up into tourism, like the Visitors’ Bureau and Convention Center. And part of that goes to art and artists.

Grants that artists receive from “the city” through the Houston Arts Alliance come from that and are required to be justified by tourism.

Carrie speeds alongside trucks and cars in the maze of steel and concrete that is nearly indecipherable to an out-of-towner. But as we rise up on an overpass and I look out my window to the right, I can see an ocean of machinery below that seems to bleed out into the horizon.

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Carrie We did it!

Jess This is it?

Carrie Yeah, this is it.

Jess So I should be looking out the window right now?

Carrie Yeah. You see the cranes on the left side? The ship channel? And the petrochemical complexes. The Port of Houston is right up here.

It’s a particularly dismal day. [Laughs] The landscape reminds me of some of Carrie’s earlier work. In 2012, she started “Hear Our Houston,” an online library of public-generated audio walking tours around Houston. To date, the project has gathered over 80 audio tours from residents of the city that anyone can download and listen to for free. In 2013, she and collaborator Alex Tu led “The Human Tour 2013,” a series of 10 walks covering 40 miles of Houston streets

The Human Tour

along a human body-shaped route outlined in 1987 by artist Michael Galbreth. During their walks, Carrie and Alex wore custom hazmat-style space suits.

Jess A lot of your work focuses on walking.

We’ve been driving in the car for almost an hour.

Can you talk about that, about why walking?

Carrie Houston is definitely an automobiledominated landscape built for and around the car. There’s a lack of public commons. In most areas you do not see anybody walking. Also, this town has so little density. It’s so spread out. You’re always your own little protagonist driving to different parts of the city, summoning up other humans when you need to buy something from them! [Laughs] It’s not like when you take public transportation and you’re like, “Well, I’m on my path and all of these other people are too!”

My work is a response to that and also how much there is unseen. If you’re traveling at this speed that the city is built for, you don’t perceive most of the city. And it’s amazing that there’s so much other gap stuff in that extra space, that negative space, the space that seems like blank space, or on-the-way space. So much is happening and that’s where I find a lot of the stuff that I think offers counter spirit.

Well, we are now exiting Mordor! [Laughs] This morning has been especially bleak and once we get off the freeway and back onto surface roads, we decide to find a place with coffee and cookies to cheer ourselves up.

This city has always been a working town.

You come here to do well for your family to send

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it back home to climb up the ladder. It’s a very practical city. After the mid-80s oil bust, the city filled in with immigrants again. We are the most internationally and ethnically diverse city in the nation. There’s no ethnic majority in Houston.

The four major ethnic groups are each about a quarter of the population, and one in every five persons here comes from a different country.

They have changed the face of the culture and made it infinitely more interesting and a more awesome place to live.

We also have this new workforce that flooded here while the rest of the country was in recession. For this class of people, they’ll make a section of the city really lovely and hip and cool and whatever to attract them. And there’s not always equal investment in the regular people.

I could fault these people, the ones that want to go to nice bars after work and eat at the artsy restaurant, but maybe they’re trying to pay off student loans, and maybe they won’t exceed their parents’ socioeconomic status either. The itinerant have no long-term benefits or security.

Everyone is expendable, redundant labor. And those people want to increase their cultural cache or capital because economic capital is only in the hands of a very few. So, I don’t know if it does us much good as artists to be pissed off at those people.

Meanwhile, this city continues to run on undocumented immigrant labor that’s basically a silent and invisible workforce, and this side of town is the invisible powerhouse and economic engine for the entire region. That unseen work— what does that mean? What do you do with that as an artist? What do you do that’s a response, other than just activism? And why is it worth doing art instead of just that?

Jess So why do you think that art is a worthwhile response?

Carrie Because it goes outside of the feedback loop. It’s a third thing introduced to the channel.

There’s political action, then opposition. An ethical stance and its opposite. And art does something else in between that channel. It opens

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up another gap, reorients it, recombines the joint between the bones that have been ossified in one set relationship. Art can do a pivot or open up a tiny sliver or do something else that’s maybe outside the frame of our ethical or political ability to what we think is right or wrong.

A lot of people talk about how you can be an artist in this era, what are you supposed to do.

And I think a lot of people have landed on being a

very aware and engaged individual and sometimes making art. We also need to stop saying that every time we do something it’s art. Because when I’m doing some organizing stuff, that’s not an art project! That’s real! I want that to be a change that’s affected in the world! It’s not cute, it’s not symbolic. It is not hard to get money to do something as a band-aid that doesn’t threaten any policy changes. I think a lot of people have landed

on—ok, you’re an artist, but not everything you do is art. Sometimes what you’re doing is action in the world. And sometimes it’s not.

Also, sometimes you’re not working. We were talking about this idea that artists will change cities, which connects with the idea of the so-called “creative class” as a model neoliberal workforce. Precarious, project-based, untethered, endlessly retooling, no security, very poor

about working for us. Just like an artist!” But this is also a good reason for artists to become aware of their situation as laborers.

Some say that the agency artists have over their own work makes them part of a disappearing middle class. Many artists’ income marks them as working poor, but with education or cultural privilege as cover. Some artists’ work is an asset class for the super-rich. And sometimes artists themselves are shapeshifters and go-betweens, able to pass across increasingly wider gaps.

In late 2014, Carrie joined Jennie Ash of Art League Houston to lead charge a practicum exploring alternative models and equitable pay for artists.

The two-day workshop series brought attention to alternative models and opened up a dialogue on issues of exploitation and remuneration that artists frequently face as they are used as cheap labor to create programming for museums, schools, and nonprofits.

monetary remuneration, no benefits.

Professionalized artists are stupid busy.

Meanwhile, while we’re doing all of our stuff, we’re like, “Damn the man!” But is the way we’re in charge of all of our own time and work exactly what they want to see? It’s so popular, there’s all this literature, “think more like an artist!” and corporate trainings like, “We are going to provide less for you, and you will be more enthusiastic

Jess You’ve been really active on issues of compensation for art and for artistic and creative work, and helped bring W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) to Houston. How does that come into play? Maybe resistance is actually getting fair work and benefits?

Carrie I don’t know what the right answer is, but I think that it’s really important that artists get paid for the work that they do. Asking for monetary value for things that we do that are beyond monetary value is necessary so we can live and so that not all art is created by really well-off people with safety nets. Because that would be really sad and boring. Maybe there’s something long-term lost about giving a monetary value to the non-monetary product, and it already feels like that everything human, or social, or not commodifiable is getting a dollar attached to it.

But right now, whatever your philosophical point of view is, artists are taken advantage of by the infrastructures in place. And people say, “If you pay artists, all of the little art spaces won’t be able to exist! You’ll just create less opportunity overall.” But the thing is that the small spaces do

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Carrie

a much better job at this—it’s the large spaces that are the issue. MoMA in New York is one of the worst, in terms of having massive annual operating budgets and not paying artists. The ones that are extremely successful and are cultural icons are the ones that are really fucking people.

Carrie was invited to participate in Right Here, Right Now: Houston, a curated show at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston (CAMH) in August 2014. Her exhibition was called Incommensurate Mapping and explored alternative models of CAMH through the unearthing of CAMH’s past archives to comment on its present, and collaborative models of CAMH’s characteristic silver parallelogram architecture—including The Balloon, a giant model of the museum made from emergency blankets that hung like a spaceship over the show.

Jess Let’s talk about the CAMH show. So last fall, you participated in Right Here, Right Now: Houston at the CAMH. Can you tell me about that?

Carrie Three curators at the CAMH picked an artist and we each had a solo show in the upstairs space. That was the first time they had a show introducing local artists in the main gallery.

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Jess Wait—this is the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, and this was the first time they had a big show of Houston artists?

Carrie Yes. They’ve had a couple shows previously, but only of established artists who’ve already been vetted nationally.

Jess Can we talk about that irony and what that means? [Laughs] Carrie A lot, a lot, a lot of people have somehow lost the ability to distinguish between institutions that actually support artists or just extract from them. With CAMH, it seems that they wanted to celebrate Houston artists but also have a no-budget show that would make them look benevolent to the community and seem as if they were being supportive of and invested in local artists. But we were not receiving support or investment.

Jess How much money were you being given to put on this whole show?

Carrie We were given an honorarium of $1500.

We had to pay for everything in the show. And I brought this up, this little thing I noticed, in meetings and along the whole way, and I think they were very surprised at how serious I was, that I didn’t drop it after awhile.

Jess They thought that the exposure was sufficient compensation.

Schneider Carrie Yeah, I guess. But to have a thriving scene in Houston, you can’t just take the local artists through the back door, not fund them, expect them to put on a show that looks as good as the shows that have a much bigger budget.

You know, actual priority and actual support to make them look good. We were all emerging artists. Actually, I don’t like that word—we are all younger artists. And our reputations are on the line and we’re not receiving what we would need to make good on that. But you’re supposed to be so thankful that they’re putting their stamp of approval on you that you don’t call into question the rest of the situation.

When I was putting my show together and I heard one of the curators on the phone casually say, “Hey, yeah, okay, well, his shipping is at $7000 now, but let’s just bump it up to $8000 to be safe.”

And meanwhile, I’m buying my own headphones for my installation at the museum. That is not supportive of or invested in Houston artists.

Carrie hacked into Glasstire, a Houston arts publication that she formerly wrote for, and published a mock interview with CAMH’s current director Bill Arning the day of the CAMH show opening.

The “interview” was actually segments from real interviews with Sebastian Adler, CAMH’s visionary director from 1966 to 1973.

Jess What would you say to people who would say to you, look, you need to pay your dues before you can make it big?

Carrie Sometimes “pay your dues” just means learning to play on the people beneath you.

There’s also just a higher premium on showcasing artists from somewhere else. I think that we should appreciate what we have here in Houston.

It’s a really interesting and complex and strange context to be making art in, and I think that the way that people respond to that and what they do out of that is well worth looking at and supporting.

If we’re in a mindset where we’re competing like that and expecting people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, that only good artists get

carriemarieschneider.com

paid, and if you’re not making money then you’re not good, that’s the exact reason why we’re all existing in a super shitty pyramid scheme. When actually what we’re making is culture, which is human expression, which is not something that should be run the same as Shark Tank!

But I couldn’t move to somewhere with less of these problems and have those problems be over. The infrastructure of this place is literally the built form of our economic system. It’s physically the seat of energy and deregulated politics. People buy into that here. It’s very much a part of the culture.

Jess It’s not something to question.

Carrie Yeah. The way that people question it is not by protesting it—it’s by unexpected subversive twists they put on it. So people will open their business underneath this drop tile strip mall, but what they do inside of that is anything but the rules. There’s something about this place that has made people take a different approach, and the built environment of this place—it’s so sprawled out and spread out—has created this situation where most of the city is not surveilled. And without surveillance, a lot of weird stuff has happened. And people have been left alone to create things. And the things that they’ve created are not self-consciously in a certain art dialogue because of the global art market. They’re in dialogue with what it takes to remain a human in this landscape. And I find that incredibly inspiring.

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Interview by Erin Griffith Photos by Meg Wachter

Cindy Gallop didn’t set out to become an advocate for the porn industry. But that’s where her career, which includes climbing the ranks at ad agency BBH, founding her own consultancy, and speaking at TED, has taken her. As founder of Make Love Not Porn, a site for real world sex, she navigates the business, technology, and adult entertainment worlds with her own savvy, whipsmart, dont-care-if-you-like-it style.

Or in her words, she likes to blow shit up. She is “the Michael Bay of business.”

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Cindy Gallop Erin Griffith You often say, “You’ll never own the future if you care about what people think.” How did you stop caring about what people think?

Cindy Gallop Not consciously. I just eventually, gradually realized that I just didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. I talk about that a lot because my single biggest obstacle at Make Love Not Porn is the social dynamic I call “fear of what other people think,” which operates more in the area of sex than in any other area of our lives.

And that, particularly, has led me to see that fear of what other people think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life.

And the majority of them were much younger.

So I suddenly realized I was every young guy’s fantasy—high flying career, never wanted to settle down, never wanted to have kids.

Through dating younger men, I began realizing I was encountering an issue. I realized what happened when today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online met our society’s equally total reluctance to talk totally openly about sex.

It results in porn becoming, by default, the sex education today, and not in a good way.

And so I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavior memes, and I thought, “Whoa,

Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn, because the issue isn’t porn. The issue is this total absence in our society of an open, healthy honest conversation around sex in the real world.

Which is why I say, “You will never own the future, or ever do anything worthwhile that is innovative or disruptive, if you care about what other people think”.

Erin How did Make Love Not Porn get started?

Cindy Make Love Not Porn started entirely by accident. I never intentionally set out to do anything and, by the way, that characterizes my life and career, generally. Everything has always been accidental and organic.

So I date younger men, often in their twenties, and by the way, that’s also an accident. I used to run an advertising agency and about 13 years ago we were asked to pitch for an online dating brand coming out in the UK. In advertising, if you want to pitch a client, you have to experience a product and the competitive landscape, so we all had to online date. The rest of my team were all married or dating people so they all created false identities. I was single and I thought why not do it for real? I was completely honest about everything, age included, and got an avalanche of responses. Much to my surprise, as I had not identified this as a dating strategy, about 75% of the responses were from younger men.

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I know where that’s coming from, and if I’m experiencing this other people must be as well.”

So I bought the URL makelovenotporn.com and six years ago I put up this tiny, clunky little website that balances the myths of hardcore porn with reality.

The construct is, “porn world versus real world.” I had the opportunity to launch it at TED. I took the deliberate decision to be very explicit in my TED talk, because I knew that audiences wouldn’t get this issue unless I was very straightforward about it. As a result, I am to this day the only TED speaker to utter the words, “come on my face” on stage. Six times in succession. The talk went far as a result, and it drove an extraordinary response to my tiny, clunky website that I had never anticipated. Every single day for the past six years, I have received thousands of emails to my Make Love Not Porn inbox, and they come from everybody. Young and old, male and female, straight and gay, from every country in the world.

The sheer cumulative impact of all of those emails arriving day, after day, after day, eventually made me feel like I had a personal responsibility

to take this initiative forward in a way that would make it much more far-reaching, helpful and effective.

So I always have to emphasize to people that Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn, because the issue isn’t porn. The issue is this total absence in our society of an open, healthy honest conversation around sex in the real world. If we had it, it would mean people bring a real world mindset when they view what is essentially artificial entertainment. So our title is “Prosex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference. Our mission is to help make it easier to talk about sex—talking about it more openly publicly, and talking about it more openly privately in your intimate relationships.

A little over two years ago, my team and I launched makelovenotporn.tv. It’s an entirely user-generated crowdsourced video platform that celebrates real world sex. Anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real world sex, and we are not porn, we are not amateur, we are creating a whole new category that doesn’t currently exist. Our competition isn’t porn, it’s Facebook and YouTube. Or it would be, if Facebook and YouTube allowed sexual self -identification and self expression. It’s not about performing for a camera. It’s simply capturing what is in the real world, in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly wonderful, beautiful human-ness.

We curate it and we make sure it’s real and we don’t publish it unless it is.

We have a revenue-sharing model. You pay to rent and stream real world sex videos and then 50% of the income goes to the Make Love Not Porn stars. Because we want our stars to one day be viewed the same way as YouTube stars, celebrated for their authenticity, individuality and realness.

And making just as much money.

Erin How is it going?

Cindy I have to contextualize the answer to that question by saying the one thing I had absolutely no idea about when I embarked on this adventure was that my team and I would fight a battle every single step of the way. Every

piece of business infrastructure that any other startup gets to take for granted, we can’t, because the small print always says, “no adult content.”

We can’t get funded. We can’t put payments in place. We had to build out an entire video sharing streaming platform from scratch ourselves because companies like Brightcove wouldn’t host our content. Even something as apparently simple as finding an email partner to send emails to our mailing list—we were rejected by six or seven providers before we found one that would agree.

So I fight this battle very publicly because the answer to everything that worries people about porn is not to shut down, sensor, lock, or repress—it’s to open up. We need to open up the dialogue, open up to welcoming, supporting and funding entrepreneurs that want to disrupt this world for the better, and open up to allowing us to do business on exactly the same terms as everyone else.

So that’s the caveat. Despite that, we have 350,000 members. It’s free to join and you pay to rent videos, so the number of renters is much smaller than that. We began taking in revenue on day one. We’re taking in a very small amount of revenue each month in the low five figures, but in a world where the perceived wisdom is that nobody pays for porn, our membership understands we’re doing something different and they see the value of real world sex and they pay for it. Several of our Make Love Not Porn stars are receiving four figures at each payout. But imagine how much better we would be doing if we didn’t have all the obstacles we face.

Erin What do venture investors say when you pitch them?

Cindy So I’m looking to raise a round of funding at the moment and our biggest obstacle to getting funded is the social dynamic of what other people think. Because when you understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, nobody can argue with it. It is always about the fear of what they think other people will think. That rules out two of the usual startup funding routes, venture capitalists and crowdfunding. People will

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Cindy Gallop totally publicly rally around a piece of hardware but they will not publicly rally in large numbers around anything that has to do with sex. And Kickstarter does not allow adult content.

So that leaves the third route, which is the one we’re going down, which is angel investors, or wealthy individuals. Our challenge there is that any other startup seeking angel investors can do it through searching and targeting investors that have said they were interested in a certain category. Nobody currently is putting their hand up and saying, “Bring me sex-tech.” Sex is the one area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside.

Erin Do you think your business would get different reactions or would look differently if it were thought of and created by a man?

Cindy A man would have never come up with it.

I say that very confidently.

The three most disruptive categories in tech today are sex, cannabis and bitcoin.

Erin You’re also a vocal advocate of tech companies in the cannabis industry. Do you see other so-called vice categories as allies?

Cindy I’m constantly trying to open up the tech and business world’s minds in order to overcome the business barriers in my part. So I deliberately draw analogies. The three most disruptive categories in tech today are sex, cannabis and bitcoin. And investors are flooding into the other two much more than they are the first. It’s enormously ironic that, by far, the biggest moneymaker of them all is still the category that people shy away from more than cannabis and bitcoin.

Erin Do you have industry peers? Are there people working on these issues behind the scenes?

Cindy Absolutely. I’m championing the entire sex-tech industry. I’m also inadvertently championing the porn industry as well. In my

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speaking and consultancy work, I talk about what you see currently in every sector is “collaborative competition.” That’s where everyone in the industry competes with everyone else in the sector by doing the exact same thing as everyone else. It’s a very bad idea. The future is what I call “competitive collaboration.” By which I mean, when everybody in a sector comes together and collaborates in a way that we don’t see currently in order to make things better for all on the promise of a rising tide that floats all boats.

That allows each of you on top of that to be uniquely competitive.

Erin Is the problem you describe new because of the Internet, or was it always there in the porn industry, but is just more prominent now, thanks to Internet?

Cindy The problem of our failure to talk about sex in the real world has always been there, but we are at a whole new zeitgeist moment in relation to two things: The first is that the Internet has changed everything. The average age at which a child is first exposed to hardcore porn is eight, and a study last year said that has dropped to six.

Its not because children go looking for porn, but they stumble across it. Somebody shows a child on a cell phone at the playground, or they hear a naughty word and Google it. “Penis, hey!” They can Google anything.

This is happening at a time when parents still find it as difficult as they always have to talk about sex. The difference was the conversation used to be purely logistical. “This goes into this when a man loves a woman.” The conversation they’re having today is, “Darling, we know you’re online. We know you’ve seen porn. We just need to explain to you that not all women like being tied up, bound, gang-banged, raped, choked and having men come all over them.

And actually, not all men like that either.”

So children are being exposed to porn years and years before they ever have their first sexual experience, and it’s not just porn of people having sex; it’s really traumatizing content. A lot of it is very brutal and it demonstrates relations between

men and women not in a way you’d want any child to be emotionally and psychologically impacted by.

So that’s the first thing that has never been true before. And then there is the porn industry, which has totally fallen prey to “collaborative competition,” and it’s tanking because its old world business model has been destroyed by the advent of free porn online and it hasn’t invented a new business model.

Every dynamic I’ve just cited is also true of the music industry or publishing or journalism or my own industry, advertising. Every single sector you can name. But the way those dynamics manifest in porn is more controversial and distressing.

The explosive growth in extremely violent porn is not driven by evil vicious malignant forces within the porn industry. It is not driven by, “Oh my god, we’ve all become depraved human beings.” It’s driven, very boringly, very prosaically, by a bunch of guys scared shitless because they’re not making any money, doing what bunches of guys being scared shitless because they’re not making any money in any industry does, which is play it safe. “Oh look, they’re all doing that, let’s do that too.”

The analogy I draw is reality television. When it was pioneered 20 years ago, it was amazing shows like The Osbournes and The Real World.

Really ground-breaking stuff. But then everybody jumped on the bandwagon and now we have the morass of things like Jersey Shore. The exact same thing happened in porn. And that is why the answer to all of this is not to shut down, censor and repress, it’s to open up and innovate.

Erin Are you interested in getting involved in the making or production of porn?

Cindy No. We are entirely user-generated. On Facebook you might see someone post, “We’re madly in love, and so here we are on a romantic weekend in Paris.” On Make Love Not Porn, it’s, “We’re madly in love and here is the phenomenal sex we had in our hotel room in Paris that weekend.”

Erin How do you get people comfortable with that?

Cindy Given our social reason and social values, people jump at the chance. The vast majority of Make Love Not Porn stars have never even filmed themselves having sex before. They do it because they believe in our mission.

We have Make Love Not Porn stars like Brad and Dorothy, who are a married couple that come from deeply religious fundamentalist Christian backgrounds. They said to each other, “We have to do this to overcome the shame imposed on us around sex by our religious upbringings.”

Erin How do you not get depressed or discouraged when you read frustrating news about sexism in the business world or, say, the government further restricting women’s rights over their bodies?

Cindy How do I not get depressed? With extreme difficulty. What keeps me going is that people are just wonderful. Whatever huge, ghastly issue exists out there, there are many people attacking that in individual ways. When I see those wonderful women protesters in the Ukraine who protested topless—I would never do that, but I love that there are women who will.

Every one of us should find the area that we feel passionately about and we know we can make the most difference in.

One of the things I’ve found in the six years of working on Make Love Not Porn is that people are very keen to load me up with all of their agendas.

And they do that because there are so few people willing to stand up and be counted in this particular arena. Everyone wants me to do all the things they’re not prepared to do themselves.

I’m doing Make Love Not Porn because I know exactly what I’m good at and that’s what I’m focused on. I can’t do everything. But to build on that, I’m driven by the classic entrepreneur question of, if I don’t do this, who will?

@cindygallop

makelovenotporn.com

cindygallop.com

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WHICHCRAFT Interview & Illustration by Krys Blakemore

I’ve been a strong admirer of sign painting since I was a little kid and saw window splash for the first time, followed by remnants of CocaCola signs on older buildings in my hometown. I always wanted to know the people behind these letters that I loved so much. At the time, I couldn’t find much information about it (early days of the internet) I sort of gave up trying to put faces behind the signs in hopes that one day, I’d catch a sign painter in action and annoy them with thousands of questions. A few years later I came across a book titled Sign Painters by Faythe Levine

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and Sam Macon. I immediately got excited, I felt like a little fascinated kid all over again. Then I later learned about the making of the Sign Painters documentary and waited anxiously for the release. While anticipating the online release of ‘Sign Painters’ I decided to look into the two people that put it together, wondering what their connection to signs were. I later learned about Faythe’s other documentaries and what an amazing lady she is. She is a very inspirational woman who has such a renowned love for creating and it’s reflected in her work.

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Faythe Krys Blakemore I read that your father was an astrologer? What was that like growing up?

Faythe Levine My dad, Rick Merlin Levine, is indeed a full time well known astrologer.

I compare growing up with astrology in the house similar to growing up with the influence of some type of religion, it’s just there and it’s a part of your daily life in some way or another.

Now I regret that I didn’t pay more attention. It was just always being discussed or referenced in the background. Like so and so blah blah blah is happening because Mars is in retrograde again.

Now if I’m dating someone new or I’m having a meltdown I can just call and say, “Dadddddd, what’s going on?” In all honesty, I’m the worst astrologer’s daughter and can’t even tell you your sun sign if you told me your birthday. I keep a note on my phone that reminds me of my “stats” since so many friends are now into astrology and it’s assumed I know my entire chart. For those interested, I was born November 20, 1977 with my Sun in Scorpio, Moon in Aries and Sagittarius rising. I have an exact Venus-Uranus conjunction in Scorpio, and Mercury-Neptune conjunction in Sagittarius on my ascendant.

Krys What were some of your childhood hobbies?

Faythe I was really into anything creative and my folks supported any interests I had. As an only child with two parents that worked, I was enrolled in a lot of after school programing, summer camps, and was in Girl Scouts until ninth grade. A notable moment was a black and white 35mm photography class I took when I was eleven.

We got to develop our own film and work in the dark room. That, and my dad always shooting everything, was the beginning of my romance with photos.

Krys You sew, you’re in a band, you make documentaries, you started out making zines? Is that right? Is there anything you don’t do?

Faythe Saying I sew almost feels like a white lie, but I do really enjoy embroidery and can use my machine for very basic projects. I haven’t been in a band for quite a long time but was in one for a number of years. A fun fact a lot of folks

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don’t know is that the soundtrack to my first documentary, Handmade Nation was my old band.

We were called Wooden Robot and I played the musical saw. And yes, zines were the gateway drug for me, in regards to self-motivated projects.

There are tons of things I don’t do. A few notable things being sing karaoke, bake, and speak a second language. But there is plenty of time to tackle those to do’s in the future.

And yes, zines were the gateway drug for me, in regards to selfmotivated projects.

Krys What inspired you to want to do the Sign Painting documentary/book?

Faythe A culmination of things brewing together really made the Sign Painter project happen. I’ve always been interested in letters and handwriting as well as urban landscapes, which obviously includes signage. I was living in Minneapolis in the late 90’s and had been making money painting sandwich boards and doing chalkboard lettering for small businesses. We all hung out on the West Bank where this guy, “sign painter Phil” had painted all the signs. Folks I was hanging out with started spending time with him at his shop. It was the first time I ever put two and two together and realized there was a “real job” for someone doing that. Well, I moved on to doing other work and a handful of those friends went on to mentor under Phil and other old-timer sign folks around the country. As the Internet became more accessible, I would Google “sign painting” every once and awhile and found there really wasn’t ever much information. As my art practice has matured, I’ve realized that making approachable and informative work is a priority.

As an independent researcher, an ideal project is something that doesn’t already have a ton of information available or folks don’t really know much about. So sign painting was the perfect follow up to Handmade Nation (my other doc/book about the rise of art, craft, DIY, and design). I

Levine approached my friend and long time collaborator, Sam Macon about working together on a feature length documentary and explained my idea.

Sam’s first question, and the reason he signed up for the project was, “What’s a sign painter.”

After explaining, he had the same epiphany I did years before, How does someone who is visually oriented and thinks about how things get to be where they are, not realize there was a sign painter who makes it all look a certain way? He was instantly on board and we jumped in full time from that moment on. Three years later, the book (based on content from the documentary) and then feature length film was released. It sounds so easy when I tell the story, but making independent films is exhausting— financially, mentally and physically. But making work that inspires, educates, and empowers people has made it all worth it for me.

Krys What inspires you on the day to day?

Are you a visual artist as well? I saw that you curate a gallery?

Faythe I have recently gone through some major life changes that have forced me to slow down and focus on self-care. And I just moved down south from Milwaukee, my home for the past thirteen years. The influence of these recent shifts has made me revisit what motivates and inspires me daily. But the basic equation of my inspiration does seem to remain the same: adventures (traveling/exploring) + treasure hunts = new things to shoot photos of = new ideas/inspiration.

Since my creative medium is fluid, depending on what I’m focusing on, it’s difficult for me to

ever claim any specific type of art. Making mixed media work is one of my long term go-to creative outlets. A lot of the time these projects result in presents or mail for folks, so the general public doesn’t see it. Bottom line, I make stuff; I always have and always will.

Making stuff for me has also resulted in my role as a curator/event organizer. My interest in community and providing spaces for nurturing creative expression is a part of my art practice. Over the course of my thirteen years in Milwaukee, the city provided me with affordable space that allowed me to run a number of non-traditional gallery spaces, and coordinate an annual show called Art vs.

Craft. This also opened up doors for me to do freelance curatorial work in other cities.

Being a bridge builder between makers and community feels natural to me. I assume that this will continue on in the future, although I don’t currently have any plans to open any new spaces for some time until I get a new home settled in the south.

When I was fourteen and wrapped my brain around what “no rules” meant, it forever changed how I viewed making.

Krys Do you think that making zines somehow lead you to creating documentaries?

Faythe When I was fourteen and wrapped my brain around what “no rules” meant, it forever

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Faythe changed how I viewed making. Because of this, zines are at the foundation of all my work. This DIY ideology empowered me to move outside my comfort zone and take my life into my own hands.

I am forever thankful I had access to the punk DIY community in Seattle that allowed me to grow in these ways at an early age. It’s so easy to forget that it was pre-internet and access to information was an entirely different game.

Krys Are there any women in your life that inspire you?

Faythe My mom, Suzanne Wechsler, rules at life; she runs an organic dairy called Samish Bay Cheese with her husband in Washington and her influence on my life is huge. She has worked in the natural foods industry for over 40 years and the way I eat and treat my body is because of the things she instilled at an early age. But really there are endless women who inspire me on a daily basis. I’ve always focused on nurturing and supporting women within my creative community, starting with my very first zine I did with E.T. Russian who I just recently reconnected with, so I’ll start with her. Her work as a writer, illustrator and performer is incredible. A super short list of inspiring women writers, performers, artists, musicians, curators, healers and educators: Caitlin Rose Sweet, Monica Canilao, Merrliee Challiss, Janet Kent, Nona Marie, Lizzo, Tanya Aguiniga, Astria Suparak, Laura McLaws Helms, Stephanie Syjuco and Michelle Blade.

The main thing I already miss about not having a gallery space is I don’t have an excuse to holler at folks I admire, with the lure of getting to know them by showing their work. Some of my best friends (and my current housemate) are people who I met through the art world. Now I’m just a regular old admirer, so get ready for some fan mail people because I always think we should reach out to one another with words of encouragement and support.

Krys Do you think that there is a sort of a renaissance with handmade crafts/artworks/ trades? I feel like people are starting to appreciate

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handmade items and crafts more than they used to on a consumer level. Quality over quantity.

If it makes you feel good to make it, keep going!

Faythe It’s difficult for me to answer this objectively since I’ve been immersed in promoting the maker community for the past fourteen years.

I feel like the renaissance has been happening and will continue to unfold, as long we all continue to make things as well as support one another. I can speak for my own personal taste and aesthetics which have changed drastically. I have a new and ever growing respect for people who have mastered their craft and trade, but still love some wild ass, weird, wildly beautiful, non-functional or thrown together work. If it makes you feel good to make it, keep going!

Krys I saw in a previous interview that you like to collect things. What sort of things do you collect?

Faythe I have no idea anymore! I just got rid of over half of my stuff for this big move; it was time to let go and start fresh. I kept my art collection, my archives, kitchen stuff and my miniature chair collection. But I’m always on the look out for treasures and have a hard time not wanting to buy art from people who’s work I fall in love with. It’s my way of tithing back to my community.

Krys What’s a random fun story?

Faythe When I was four, my folks sold their house and bought a van (the Maroon Balloon) to travel in until I had to start school the next year.

All my first solid memories are of that time, living in campsites, learning to make friends and living on the road. I think it really set the tone for my entire life of exploring.

@faythelevine

faythelevine.com

signpaintersfilm.com

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Jessica Williams Interview by Caroline Framke Photos by Meg Wachter

When The Daily Show first hired Jessica Williams, most people talked about how young she was (22 and still in college) or how she was the first black woman to be a correspondent in the show’s history.

Now, three years later as Jon Stewart prepares to hand the keys over to Trevor Noah, she is one of the show’s most senior correspondents, anchoring sketches that combine feminism, social justice, and Beyoncé worship to consistently hilarious effect. Got a Girl Crush met Williams in Brooklyn to talk about the next phase of The Daily Show, the sketches that mean the most to her, and why old ladies are dope.

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Jessica Caroline Framke This has been a big year for you; you starred in People, Places, And Things, which premiered at Sundance, and you’ve been on The Daily Show now for three years. So what are you looking forward to?

Jessica Williams I’m really looking forward to Jon’s final months on the show. I mean, it’s bittersweet. I’m not looking forward to it, like, “I’m looking forward to him being gone.” No. Not at all. I’m looking forward to enjoying him, his legacy and his style while we have it still, ‘cause now it seems super precious. Then maybe getting a little bit of a break, because then I think we’re gonna take some time off a little bit to reset the show…I’m really excited to figure out The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and what that’s going to be.

Caroline Samantha Bee recently left, and I know you guys are tight.

Jessica Yeah, she’s my number one homie.

Caroline Did she leave you with anything? How was that, when she left?

a sketch about this.” Like when you first did the “Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere” with the street harassment…it was startling, because we hadn’t really seen that before. Which of those segments were the most fun for you?

Jessica We’re still just a comedy show, but… the most fulfilling are things like the “Feminized Atmosphere” piece. I did a stop and frisk piece a really long time ago that I liked. I liked a black hair [in the military] piece. I did an on-campus sexual assault piece. Those things feel really, really good to do. Not only because they’re funny, but also because they really matter to me. I’m learning as I become older and a bit more seasoned, a little more experienced on the show, [that] it feels really good to follow my gut, because a lot of times with my gut I’m not the only person experiencing it.

So especially with the “Feminized Atmosphere” piece, I just talked about something that the women on the show and I found infuriating, and no one was really talking about. It meant a lot to

I like when people feel a little less alone. Especially black people, minorities, women…that matters to me. And then at the same time I still just get to be funny and fart around and do dumb jokes, so that’s good.

Jessica We liked to joke that we just wanted to have brunch and get some eggs. We both just really like eggs…but she always had really great advice in general. Why she is a woman that I will always look up to is because she is a woman with a beautiful family, beautiful kids, but is still hilarious and a comedy queen to me. So she left me with this idea that it is possible to sort of have it all, and be just this badass female comedian, and also be thoughtful and thought-provoking and still be a wonderful mom and a wife, you know? So she left me with that sort of idea, that I can aspire to that.

Caroline You’ve done a lot of feminist-bent sketches. I’ve seen a lot of my friends who are our age sharing these, and there’s a sense of, “finally,

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me that so many women responded to that. That’s the reason why I do it! I mean, it’s nice if guys like it, but I care a little less about that. I just…I like when people feel a little less alone. Especially black people, minorities, women…that matters to me. And then at the same time I still just get to be funny and fart around and do dumb jokes, so that’s good.

Caroline [Were] you and the women in the office talking about [street harassment], and the men were peripherally aware of it but not to the same extent?

Jessica They’re all really nice guys. I mean, that’s the thing. A lot of the men that we choose to have in our lives, they’re super nice! They just don’t know. If I’m walking around with my

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Jessica Williams boyfriend, I don’t get any sort of catcalling or any sort of looks. But if I’m alone…then yeah, a man on the street’s going to talk to you. So there’s no way for, really, a nice guy to know what’s going on. That was sort of the case with the show, even with Jon and all the male writers. They were like, “Whoa, we didn’t know…” And we just don’t say anything. But it’s insane. It’s bananas that you walk to work and somebody’s jeering at you verbally, and you have to settle into work, and then you just get to your computer and have the rest of your day. But it’s not something that you walk in and say to a man. Like, “Hey, this guy on the street said he wanted to touch my titties.” It’s not office decorum, or something cool to discuss with a man.

Caroline There’s some sort of level of embarrassment when you don’t talk about it…the more you call it out, the more people can be held accountable for that kind of stuff.

Jessica When I am getting catcalled or somebody’s talking on me on the street, I don’t like the feeling of not being in control of what is coming at me. I think a lot of it, especially since we started having this conversation as women and on the internet, people are saying it’s a control thing from a male’s perspective. It’s one of the ways to assert dominance just immediately to a woman. There’s no way for me, or for a woman, to physically not have that happen. So I don’t personally, as a woman, like the feeling of not controlling that part of my environment. And I think a lot of women feel that way, too. It’s like somebody handing something to you, and they’re like, “Deal with it. You have to process this.”

Caroline So by the time you came in, The Daily Show was really established.

Jessica Absolutely. It was a well-oiled machine.

Caroline As a comedian who’s developing your voice…how do you establish your[self ] in that?

Jessica I think that was the number one thing I was most stressed out about. Early on I would go into Jon’s office and be like, “What’s my thing?

What’s my character? Sam is the wisecracking woman, and Oliver is the super smart smug

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British guy, and Jason is Jason…just this super chill, laidback, super smart dude. So, what’s my thing?” And Jon was like, “You’ll get it. Don’t worry about it.” And I was like, “Okay, we’ll see.

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” But his main advice for me was to follow your gut, and follow what you feel is interesting, or what makes you upset, or happy, or moves you emotionally.

He’s like, “That’s where the good stuff is. That’s where the best bits are grown, and like, art and all that shit. Songs and stuff.” So I just sort of did that, and I learned to sort of follow my gut, and use the emotion that I felt about things that made me happy, or angry, or laugh. Use that, and be like, “There’s probably some good meat here.

There’s probably something funny here.”

Caroline If you’re feeling strongly about it, chances are someone else does.

Jessica Yup. So, that’s sort of Jon’s philosophy, and that’s become my philosophy.

Caroline Something’s worked, because you’re very popular on the show. I definitely see your clips shared. Maybe it’s also because I’m in your demographic.

Jessica Yeah, thank you!

Caroline I feel like now…the people we admire in pop culture have never been more accessible to us. We [can] tweet at someone, we can tell them a good thing or we can tell them a really shitty thing.

Jessica It’s like catcalling on the street.

Caroline Basically. And they can project what they want on you. I know that you’ve talked before about the pressures of that. How do you manage to deal with that without just going out of your mind?

Jessica I think a lot of that stuff came from a really good place. Like, that’s super flattering. I’m honored that people like me enough to do what they imagine in their head is the best idea for me. But I think that there is this sense of agency that we fight for as feminists, and as women, and as girls, and transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual.

There is this sense of needing to feel like you are in control, that you get to choose what you want

People are going to always tell me what I should do, because they like my work and that’s just the way people are…but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it. I’m still a whole person. I’m still allowed to make choices. to do. Good intentions aside, in that particular instance, it was still a woman, someone telling me what to do.

Caroline When [Ester Bloom of The Billfold] said you just needed to “lean in” and host The Daily Show.

Jessica Yeah. And it was them shaming me for not doing that, in a public forum. I’m not gonna go through that again and explain myself again, I think that I have explained myself as much as I need to for, all things considered, the people that don’t know me personally. But I think it’s just sort of learning, and a part of growing up, is learning that I do have agency. People are going to catcall.

People are going to always tell me what I should do, because they like my work and that’s just the way people are…but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it. I’m still a whole person. I’m still allowed to make choices. Just because somebody says something to me doesn’t mean that I have to do what they say. I think that’s a part of me growing up, and sort of not letting people control my reactions so much.

Caroline And being confident in what you’re doing, and just saying, “I know what I’m doing, and you can think what you want.”

Jessica Absolutely. Because I did feel bad. I totally felt bad for like, two hours after I read that: “…maybe what I thought wasn’t what I really wanted.” And that’s not the kind of woman I want to be. That’s not the way I want to live my life, especially now that I do something on a public forum. But that was a lesson. It was more of just me respecting my own womanhood, I guess.

Caroline It takes some time, and some real selfwork to actually get to a place where you’re like, “No: I know what I’m doing, and I know myself, and I feel good about where I’m going.”

Jessica Yeah, totally.

Caroline It’s all that matters, really. Like when you went in to Jon: “What’s my thing?”

Jessica Right. But it was really cool that he let me figure it out.

Caroline He didn’t say, “We hired you for these reasons, we thought you could do this kind of thing.”

Jessica I think that’s a sign of a great teacher, a good boss, and a good man. That’s one of the reasons why it’s also bittersweet that he’s leaving.

I’m happy for him, but I’m also like, “Dude, bro, I love you.”

Caroline But he’s also passed on so much to you.

Jessica He’s left a whole legacy…a lot of people when I walk down the street, their gut reaction is, “I love you.” Or it’s, “I love you guys.” Whether they mean it or not, it’s not people expressing like, “I really enjoy you.” People are always like, “I go to bed watching you every night.” In making the show he’s left this legacy of people that love him and love the show and get to love the correspondents, because we are expressing something that they felt deeply. And that’s awesome. I don’t know if other actors get that a lot, but just…“I love you.” Instinctual. And it’s like, “Oh, sick. Thank you so much!” I’m really bad at commitments. I’ll say “thank you” to this love.

Caroline You’ve probably been asked, “Who were your role models growing up?” a thousand times, so in the spirit of Got a Girl Crush, I thought I’d ask you more about who of your peers or your friends inspire you.

Jessica My mom inspires me…she taught [me] everything. I feel like moms are amazing, for good or for bad, they can do really amazing things. Sam Bee inspires me. Strong women inspire me, just in general. Frank Ocean, I find very inspiring…I just think he is this super talented, beautiful sweetie boy. He doesn’t put himself out there because he

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wants to cover the market. He just specifically does what he wants to do, because he feels moved, and that’s something in an artist that I really like.

Jon really inspires me, just everyday. He works so damn hard, and he’s so smart, and that’s a level that I aspire to be at as a comedian. Tina Fey inspires me; I think she’s like, a go to for everyone.

The Broad City girls inspire me a lot. I just think they’re kickass. My girlfriends, who are living really normal lives but who still I have found support me a lot, no matter what, I really love.

I think a lot of times with politics and comedy it’s easy for some of your friends to fall by the wayside in general, but my girlfriends that I have still stayed tight with, [who] actively try to be my friend even when I’m busy—they inspire me. It takes a lot of work to be my friend! Just because I’m so busy, I’m awful! I can’t do anything! For the most part I just travel and I work and I put my

I’ve been really into old ladies lately, just because they’re so smart. Like, they’re so much smarter than us. head down. It’s amazing, the payoff ’s great.

Caroline And the friends who can appreciate that…

Jessica Yeah, that means a lot. Because it’s not every friend.

And you know what? Just old ladies. I’ve been really into old ladies lately, just because they’re so smart. Like, they’re so much smarter than us.

We think that we always know what we’re talking about, and you know how every five years you’re like, “That thing I was doing five years ago was dumb”? Old ladies have just done that a million times. They have to watch us all traipse around in our sports bras and our hot bods. They have to deal with that. But then a lot of them are just chill as hell. They’ve had their kids, or they’ve chosen not to. They don’t have periods anymore, which is dope. They’ve been with their husband for a really long time—or they’re dead, [and they’re] like, “Whatever, it is what it is.” And I’m like, “Damn.

You’re my hero.”

@msjwilly

thedailyshow.cc.com

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Interview By Lisa Butterworth Photos by Asha Efia Lettering by Lindsay Eyth

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“People like us can change the world,” Lizzo, née Melissa Jefferson, says into the microphone, addressing a rapt audience at Pittsburgh’s Stage AE venue. And for that moment you can tell that the crowd believes it, that we think we can. The Houstonbred, Minneapolis-based rapper with a bring-the-house-down singing voice has just finished performing one of her newer songs, “My Skin,” during an opening set for SleaterKinney. She had the lights lowered, asked everyone to light up their smartphones (the modern-day equivalent of actual cigarette lighters), and declared, fist raised, that “Black lives matter”—a powerful moment that sent chills down at least one spectator’s spine (mine).

But even if you had never heard of the self-declared “big girl” in a “small world,” or her 2013 debut album Lizzobangers, full of catchy and politically charged songs, you probably wouldn’t be surprised by this powerhouse performance.

Because when Lizzo takes the stage, you can tell something epic is

going to happen. On this occasion, the 26-year-old bounded out to the Star Wars theme song, her big blonde, crimped wig undulating.

She wore all black but she seemed to light up from within. Between her feminism, fresh-to-death talent, and body positivity (if you haven’t seen the Style Like U video in which she movingly strips down, Google it immediately), it’s no surprise she was tapped by Sleater-Kinney to open the East Coast leg of their hotly anticipated tour. But we’re pretty sure this is just the beginning of her global domination. Because even though the crowd’s belief that they can change the world probably waned as they filed out of the venue, there is no doubt about Lizzo’s ability to do so. It’s a sentiment that was strengthened when we caught up with her by phone several weeks later and she got real about everything from the true meaning of happiness and music as activism to bullshit beauty standards and always stopping to smell the roses.

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Lizzo Lisa Butterworth I got to see you open for Sleater-Kinney in Pittsburgh. It was such a powerful performance, sometimes the opening act doesn’t get much attention, but you had the crowd in the palm of your hand.

Lizzo Aw, well, thank you. I was just doing my job, you know what I mean? All in a night’s work.

I don’t know how other support acts do it, but we just totally immerse ourselves in the moment and share energy with all those people who are staring up at us.

Lisa Did you know Sleater-Kinney before going on the tour?

Lizzo No, I knew Corin’s husband Lance Bangs but I didn’t know any of them. They heard my music from Katie who’s their auxiliary musician, the fourth member of Sleater-Kinney, and they asked me to come along. It’s funny, everyone’s like, “How did this happen?!”

There’s no actual story behind it except for it’s a small world.

Lisa I got one of your hats at the show, which says GRRRL on it, because I loved your set but also because the Riot Grrrl movement was really important to me. Is that an intentional reference?

Lizzo It wasn’t intentional. It’s funny how that came about. Our crew, we were doing these things called Girl Parties. We decided to drop the vowel and then someone suggested that we put three Rs because there are three of us in the group. Then our manager was like, “Hey, do you guys know about the Riot Grrrl movement?” and sent us all of this literature. Then our DJ was like, “You guys have to watch [Kathleen Hanna’s documentary] The Punk Singer and you guys have to know what is going on right now,” and from then on I was into it. We do represent and stand for the things that the women of the Riot Grrrl movement stood for and represented. It’s like we just caught something in the universe and held onto it and perpetuated it.

Lisa Have you always been a musical person?

What were you like as a kid?

Lizzo I was a bookish child; I really liked reading and writing—fictional stories, fantasy

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novels. I was really into astronomy and stars and I wanted to be either an astronomer or a writer.

Everyone else in my family was so much more musically inclined than I was. But I played flute from fifth grade to college and I went to school for music performance in flute, so that’s when music started to take over. From there I took my literature skills and utilized them musically by writing poems and songs—pop songs, R&B songs.

Lisa It’s cool that you were able to combine your talents like that.

Lizzo When you’re a kid and you’re just doing what feels good, your impulses are so much more readily available to move with, versus when you’re an adult and you’re like, “Aww, I really want to do this but I got bills to pay.” So I was just going slow in a sense and a lot of times against the grain. Like, singing was something that I had just decided to not do. I was like, “I’m not the best singer so I’m just not gonna sing.” [Laughs] And then eventually I broke when I was 19. I was like, “Dude, I’m gonna sing, I don’t care. This is what I want to do.” I keep just looking back like, It’s really working out! [Laughs] Lisa Do you feel like Minneapolis has played a big role in the musician that you’ve become?

Lizzo Oh yeah, the way that they support arts here, I’ve never seen anything like it. They just want to discover all the time, versus other places where they don’t want to know about someone they’ve never heard of. Here they just dig and dig and dig in the folds of the music scene and they find these jewels and gems. I mean, I wasn’t hiding by no means—my personality and what I was doing, I was kind of sticking out like a sore thumb. But also the collaborative nature of the artists here challenges you to step outside the box, because an electronic producer will hit you up and be like, “I want you to rap or I want you to just make dolphin noises on this song,” or a hardcore noise band will have a rap blitz and bring all the local rappers on stage. Everyone is dipping and double dipping, it’s delicious. That helped me break a lot of mental barriers that I had about what it means to be a performing artist. And it

also gave me this huge confidence boost because people were like, “You’re good, play here, get on this song, do this, be in this video,” and I was like, “Okay!” Doing everything that I could cause YOLO, you know? [Laughs] I did it, Minneapolis just put the cherry on top of the sundae.

I’m speaking on how I feel and right now the world is in such an energy spike and everything is going through it.

Lisa You cover a lot of ground in your songs from race to gender to LGBT rights. Do you consider your music a form of activism?

Lizzo That’s an interesting question. I’m not trying to be anything but myself and anything but free and I feel like a lot of times when people are like, “Oh, this is my song about so-and-so,” it can get really contrived. I want my art to always be an extension of my soul and how I feel and I never want it to be something that people put in a box or put on a pedestal. So I don’t want to say that my music is a form of activism ’cause I didn’t intend on that. Choosing to use my field as a forum to

speak on things that I want to speak on, that I am unhappy with, or that need to change is the activism in my work. The music is always going to be an extension of that so sometimes if it touches you or it moves you then yes, and if it doesn’t and you just want to dance to it, then it is what it is.

I really don’t want to be a one-trick pony; I don’t want to be that “activist rapper.” I want to be a musician and an artist that you can enjoy and that you feel. So if I’m like, “The rent is just too damn high,” and I make a song about the rent being too damn high then people will feel it. If I’m like, “Man, I look good tonight,” and I make a song about that I want them to feel that. I don’t want them to be like, “Well, why isn’t she talking about so-and-so anymore?” I’m speaking on how I feel and right now the world is in such an energy spike and everything is going through it. I’m gonna speak on it, I’m gonna put it in my music, but when all is right, or when all has changed, you’re gonna hear the change too.

Lisa People probably really connect with what you’re singing and rapping about. Do they ever share that with you?

Lizzo Oh yeah, they definitely do. I get it a lot from women who look like me, thicker girls.

They’re always like, “Thank you for just being

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Lizzo you.” A lot of people are moved by me being able to say, “Black lives matter” on stage—people of all races. It’s really humbling. And it just motivates me to continue to be me.

As women we are put in this world that has outrageous standards and these crazy fixed rules, and a lot of them are just bullshit.

Lisa I want to ask about your Style Like U “What’s Underneath” video. Why did you decide to do it and did it change the way you feel?

Lizzo I didn’t know that I would have to take off my clothes. [Laughs] So the day of I was kind of underdressed. They were like, “Oh yeah, you’re supposed to have a certain amount of layers.” And I was like, “Oh my God, well, I guess I have my hair I could take off.” And that was scary. Doing that video kind of changed the game for me. It made me feel like, Well, anyone who wants to see what I look like in my bra and panties and no wig can go online and see this video. And that gave me this new sense of owning it that I’d never had before. All my music post making that video has been a reflection of that. It was a crazy pivotal moment. As woman we are put in this world that has outrageous standards and these crazy fixed rules, and a lot of them are just bullshit. And I feel like all of my insecurities are born from that. I came into this world a happy, chubby brown baby with really kinky hair and grew up hating all of it.

And now I can appreciate it and I feel like because I’m an artist and because there are people who listen to my music and look at me and are inspired by what I’m doing, it’s my job to love that and to help other people overcome and love that too.

Lisa You seem to have such a sunny disposition.

Is that something that comes naturally to you?

Lizzo It’s so weird. You’re you for so long that you don’t know how people perceive you and it’s just hard to even imagine. My friend in L.A., he was like, “You’re just always happy, huh.” I’m like,

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“Am I happy? Is this happy?” But I feel like my sunny disposition, which I appreciate, just comes from the way that I view the world. I find humor in a lot of things. I do get sad though, I do. I get really sad when I’m alone, and that’s something I need to work on. And I get really down on tour in between shows. But when I get around other human beings, especially people I’ve never met before, their energy excites me; I definitely feed and exchange energy. Then there are people who’ve known me for a while, like my mom, we know each other’s energies and sometimes I’m allowed to be mopey around her. So yeah, thank God I’m happy because the field that we’re in, I mean, we’re doing what we love every day so you can’t complain, but it is really emotionally taxing ’cause you’re giving so much. So I’m glad you think I’m happy ’cause I’m really trying to be. [Laughs] Lisa Speaking of your mom, I saw your performance on Letterman and it looked like you maybe said hi to her on the air at the end?

Lizzo I did. [Laughs] Lisa That was so cute. Is she a big influence in your life?

Lizzo Yeah, my mom is amazing; she’s a rock.

She sang a lot when we were kids, and she still sings a lot. My mom is definitely where all my musicality, where the power comes from. And I just wanted to really, really, really stick it in the ground that, that was my first national television debut. I want everyone to know that this is like the coolest thing in the world—“Hi Mom! I’m hugging David Letterman! I’m actin’ a fool.”

[Laughs] for a very long time I’ve been going through the motions. Everyone’s always like, “You’re never freaked out,” or “You’re never star struck, you live like you’ve done all this before.”

Well that’s good and it’s gotten me somewhere but then I don’t stop and smell the roses. So now I’m at this point in my career where I’m stopping to freak out and geek out and I’m gonna act like I’ve never been here before because it’s gonna pass and I want to enjoy it. [Laughs]

@lizzo

lizzomusic.com

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Interview by Canbra Hodson Illustration by Ariel Roman Photography by Martha Cooper

Since she could hold a camera, street photographer Martha Cooper has been bringing attention to the artistic subcultures in American cities that are often overlooked by the everyday passersby. Through her photography she has shown viewers the art that lies beneath seemingly impulsive urban graffiti and found inspiration in the thought behind each work. Cooper also provides an intimate glimpse into the lives of NYC’s residents through her engaging street photography. With a background in anthropology, Cooper has an acute eye for the human condition and a skilled talent for visually drawing the viewer into each scene she photographs. Widely known for her images of the New York City graffiti subculture in the 1970s and 80s, Cooper’s work has appeared in publications such as the New York Post, National Geographic, and Smithsonian Magazine.

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Martha Canbra Hodson Do you remember what was the first photograph you ever took ?

Martha Cooper Not the first but I had a camera in nursery school. I took photos of my toys and my dog.

Canbra Before turning to photography full-time, you earned a degree in anthropology.

What inspired you to turn more of your attention to photography?

Martha Photography was my first interest.

Anthropology came later. I had an idea that I would like to combine the two and that’s what I’ve tried to do in my work.

Canbra With your education in anthropology, how do you find that it has influenced your methods of visually investigating people on the street? What anthropological aspects do you find yourself most attracted to when photographing?

Martha I always try to shoot people (or artifacts) within the context of their culture.

Canbra Was there any point when being a female was an issue when photographing the male dominated graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s?

Martha Not really. The graffiti writers were very welcoming because they could see that I was serious about documenting their culture and they were appreciative of the photos of their work that I gave them.

Canbra There is a sort of artistic poetry in the impermanence of graffiti and how your images are the only surviving records of these specific works. What was it that drew you to photograph what was often regarded as mindless vandalism?

Martha I was attracted to graffiti because I saw that there was a lot of thought and technique behind the writing—the opposite of mindless.

I also viewed my photographs as a form of historic preservation although I didn’t predict the longevity or worldwide spread of the art form.

Canbra Do you think that people in general have developed a greater appreciation for street art since its conception?

Martha Street art yes but probably not graffiti—they are different forms. Graffiti is

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Cooper mostly about letters and names, street art about images.

Canbra There are some photographers who find shooting street photography very intimidating. How do you approach/interact with your subjects when photographing them on the street as to peel away any layers of intimidation?

Martha I don’t hide my camera. I smile a lot. If I sense resistance or suspicion, I’ll make an effort to interact even though that might change, stop or ruin the photo.

Canbra I read where you had an incredible journey from Thailand to England on motorcycle.

What made you decide to make the crosscontinent trek? What was the best part about that voyage? The worst?

Martha Meeting nomads while crossing the desert in Afghanistan in 1965 was pretty great.

Trying to stick to my $3.00 per day budget for gas, food and lodging was difficult.

Canbra In 2013, an entire wall on Houston Street in NYC was turned into a street art birthday card for you created by a collaboration of artists.

What was it like to see such an effort to give you such an epic birthday present? Did you feel like a rock star?

Martha That was an incredible and amazing surprise. I don’t think “rock star” exactly describes what I felt but I don’t think anything before or after has or could ever equal that.

Canbra You seem to be a very adventurous woman who isn’t afraid to step outside of her comfort zone. Is this a trait that you have always had or have you found that it is something that has developed over time? Was there ever a time when you found yourself too far outside of your comfort zone?

Martha Once I traveled to Suriname to try to shoot a story about the art of the Maroons.

Access to where I wanted to go was forbidden and I wound up illegally hiking across borders with the help of jungle commandos who were waging a war at the time. That was outside my comfort zone.

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Canbra Recently, you went to photograph street art at the POW! WOW! Hawaii Festival.

What was that like? How have you found that street art has evolved?

Martha I’ve been traveling a lot on what has become a street art circuit. I’d never been to Hawaii before so Pow! Wow! was a fantastic chance to go someplace new and do what I enjoy—shooting artists at work. I’m always interested in meeting new artists and seeing new techniques. I also love reconnecting with artists I’ve known for a long time or met in some completely different place. Street artists who are invited to paint at festivals around the world are as sophisticated as any other “fine” artists. Since they are given the walls, tools, lifts, paints and the time to create, it’s impossible to compare their work to graffiti writers who had to supply everything themselves. Good artists are good artists no matter how they create their work.

Canbra I understand that you like to collect anonymous snapshots. What is it about these personal snapshots of strangers that draws you to them?

Martha My snapshot collection is specialized.

I collect images of people, mostly women, with cameras. I enjoy tracing the history of

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photography through photography. In addition to the subject matter, I’m drawn to the charm of the casual captured moment in time.

Canbra Your bio reads like something out of Indiana Jones with an education from Oxford, work with the Peace Corps in Thailand, an epic Asian motorcycle journey, and working as a photo intern with National Geographic. With so many incredible experiences under your belt, what is at the top of your bucket list?

Martha Nothing really—I like to be open to whatever comes along.

Canbra Do you have any new or upcoming projects you can tell us about?

Martha Since 2006, I’ve been documenting a neighborhood in my home town of Baltimore.

It’s called SoWeBo, named after Soweto in South Africa. I’ve been shooting a series of photos comparing the two places. On Thursday, I leave for Sao Paulo to begin a project about recycling. I won’t be able to tell you anything about it until I get back.

Canbra As a photographer, I have to ask. If you could choose only one for the rest of your life, film or digital?

Martha Digital rocks!

@marthacoopergram

nycitysnaps.com

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Martha Cooper

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Mo Scarpelli Interview by Laura Kerrigan & Got a Girl Crush Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine Photos supplied by Frame by Frame

Mo Scarpelli is a journalist, filmmaker, and photographer. Along with her documentarian partner Alexandria Bombach, they raised over $75,000 through Kickstarter to fund Frame by Frame—a compelling documentary following the lives and daily risks of four Afghani photojournalists and their futures as storytellers after the decriminalization of photography with the fall of the Taliban. We were able to speak with Mo on the phone while she was touring with the film to various festivals. Find out where it’s screening near you at framebyframethefilm.com

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Mo

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Got a Girl Crush Can you tell us about your photographic and videographic journey? What drew you to photography and film? Do you have an artist that influenced you in particular?

Mo Scarpelli I’m trained in journalism; I’ve always thought that documentary photography was a timeless and amazing way to capture moments that can say so much with one frame. I’ve always been inspired by amazing photojournalists, who are courageous in taking breaking news photos. Photojournalism has always been a huge part of what I think is so important to understand other humans in the world.

I also was exposed to really very forward facing, enterprising, creative, and challenging documentary cinema at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, which is in the same town as I went to college in. I was going to journalism school and being trained as a TV journalist with lots of soundbites, and oversimplifying a lot of the issues, and it’s like, “Wow, this is not exposing truth. This is solidifying this specific fact, and it feels like I’m not enlightening anybody or giving anyone any sort of idea of what the hell is actually going on

in the world.” So I wasn’t super excited about that form of journalism, even though I believed that journalism is really important, and I definitely consider myself a journalist.

I want to be able to translate truths of the world, that’s what a journalist does in my mind.

Through the film festival I realized that this could happen in documentary. It can be done in a more human way, and to me, more honest way, by following people as they live their lives, and try to transfer their experiences. Since college I’ve been doing shorts, on my own. I’ve done a couple of independent shorts, and then I’ve filmed them for news organizations, and then I’ve done them in production as a partnership with nonprofit.

That’s always been something I’ve been doing.

Two years before Frame by Frame, Alexandria Bombach and I had met because I hired her to come to Ethiopia to shoot a film. She had seen footage from Afghanistan of everyday life, while she was editing a short film about a woman who went to Afghanistan and basically had this opportunity to go there and was curious about what it’s like to document stories in Afghanistan.

We had heard that the Taliban had banned photography when they were in power. We thought, “What is it like to document truth now?

What is it like to live in Afghanistan right now and be one of those documentarians of truth?”

She reached out to me and asked me to come along as a shooter, while she was going to make a short film about that. When we were in Afghanistan we realized that there were these more amazing people who really stood out of the

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Alexandria woodwork for us. They were not only trying to capture the truth of their country, but they were also trying to capture their own truth and trying to come to terms with their own truth, and their own pain from the past with a lot of things that they’ve done in Afghanistan.

I wanted this amazing human story. We were already interested in the photography and the idea that documentary photography can have an immense impact on the worldview of a place, and the way it interacted with these amazing humans. You can really show that through a really intimate story.

GAGC You’ve documented so many different, compelling, important issues, from water shortages and poverty, to health epidemics, and artists rights.

What has been your process in choosing which issues to document? Do you have a specific interest in what guides you, and has been based on your involvement with, you said earlier, different organizations such as Charity Water (the nonprofit organization that provides clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations)?

Is it a mix of what you are personally interested in, and the work you’ve done for nonprofits?

Mo To be completely frank, I’m not really interested in profits or nonprofits at all. I went to journalism school, and I came to New York and was working at the Wall Street Journal as an editor for a bit. Then I realized I really wanted to get out and tell stories. I had an amazing opportunity to work with Charity Water, because they were looking for someone to tell multimedia stories for them. I was like, great let’s do this in a journalistic capacity, but really the reason why I came on staff there, and the reason I was doing that job, was the storytelling aspect, like the water issues to be honest.

I left Charity Water but continue to do assignment work with nonprofits; my film company Rake Films does that. I straddle the line the way a lot of filmmakers will have client jobs with a company; all my clients are nonprofit.

I work with them on assignments, and I work with news assignments, and then also on my independent film stuff. I work in that capacity because of the opportunity to tell those stories. So it’s cool because I think it helps the cause in a way.

I don’t get inundated with the tribal knowledge that comes with the nonprofit, because I try to stay out of that and just focus on what the best story is, outside of advocacy or what the cause could be. Sometimes it can cause a little bit of riff because they’re like, “Oh, we need to be more causey.” I’m like, “No, I wanted to be more true.” It could be a really good marriage, and sometimes it could be really uncomfortable but turned out to be good.

It’s an interesting process, but I really love teaming up with nonprofits a lot because I really get in the weeds with them. They have the most amazing conversation with local people; they have amazing connections with communities that would never otherwise go to them. There’s no reason for me to travel to a remote island in the middle of Lake Kivu (located in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo) otherwise. I didn’t even know this existed. Then they asked me to come out there, and while I’m there I find out the stories, and my brain starts moving on other issues that I would love to follow up on.

I think it’s a really great situation for any filmmaker to be in. I feel like it’s a very specific one. I only know a handful of people who do this kind of work, because it’s also really hard. Really long days, and working in adverse conditions, but it’s super fun. It’s the most fun work ever.

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Frame by GAGC In your projects that are in areas of geographic regions of extreme poverty, documentary crews are typically smaller to be noninvasive. Have you had any pushback from communities because you’re a white American?

What did you do to mitigate any issues that communities might have that was based on nationality, ethnicity, or gender?

Mo Yeah, I think there’s awkwardness because I am a white American. My privilege becomes even more ballooned in ways I don’t want it to.

People are sometimes trying to accommodate for something they think I want, but I don’t.

It’s a delicate thing that I think is present in humanitarian work across the board, not just filmmaking, and also present in anything where people are trying to form a gap between these totally different stratums of living conditions. For the most part my place as a white American gets me a lot of access actually. In ways that I don’t feel like I always deserve.

I’ve always been really careful to communities that are willing to open up to me, because why do they do that? They don’t need to do that. Is there discomfort here because we shouldn’t do this? Do you not want me asking you these questions because of where I come from, and the privilege which I am obviously coming from? Is that going to be a part of something that makes you uncomfortable? Then we shouldn’t do it this way, or we shouldn’t do it at all, or wish to have a conversation, or we should put the cameras

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down and try to figure this out. That’s a big, big, big thing for me, because I feel like I’ve got to work a lot in the field with people who just come in, and they’re like, “It’s great! We have a great relationship with them, and they were so easygoing.” I’m like, “Do you know they missed out on two days of work just to do interviews with you, and they make less than a dollar a day. Is that okay for you? Are you ignoring the fact that they did everything for you because you’re from America?”

When I work with clients, the organizations that I work with are very cognizant in these things. Newer organizations maybe want to swoop in and tell a story and get everyone to do whatever based on their own schedule.

I like to work a lot with organizations who have years of experience in humanitarian fields, understand the nuances of being from a place of privilege, and coming to a place across the world to try to have a real conversation about what is actually helpful for everybody. Those are really important relationships in which the work that I get to do with these nonprofits. It’s a little different with news because there is license in news to just go in and shoot whatever you can.

I find myself gravitating more and more to this longer format, and a documentary style, of trying to build rapport with the community first. Then build the trust and the relationship there before shooting things that are personal to them. The fact that they are almost living on a dollar a day, or that five of their children died this year from something, or that their community is facing all these kinds of issues that most of the people

Frame watching the film later would never really truly know about, if they were watching a film about it.

It’s a delicate thing, and I think for the most part though, when it comes down to forming relationships with people, I do actually work in a lot of places where I’m constantly surprised by the graciousness of human beings who are, despite the fact that their country has been occupied or bombed by America in the past ... it’s like, “Oh well you’re not them. You’re this person who’s just showed up here. This weird white girl, with blonde hair, who looks like a weirdo, just tall and skinny and falling over herself. Maybe we’ll just hang out with you and have peace.” I ask really stupid questions, and we laughed together.

It’s just this amazing thing, but it would only be possible because people in the world are so opening and gracious. That’s a pretty incredible thing to me. I don’t know if I would open my world to someone else who wanted to film it.

GAGC We’ve had the honor of seeing Frame by Frame and it seems like there is a very legitimate fear that after the US leaves, the Taliban will come back, and photography will be banned. All the photographers in the film made it clear that they will continue to be making the reality of their situation visible for as long as they possibly can. What do you and photographers you documented think the best steps the international community can take to ensure that their freedom of speech will be taken away again, if anything?

Mo It’s hard for me to speak on their behalf.

I’m not very good at speaking to this. I think everyone’s holding their breath right now for Afghanistan, including Afghans. No one really

@moscarpelli

maureenscarpelli.com

knows what’s going to happen, but at the same time there’s this mix of immense hope, because so much has been built in the last ten years in terms of free press specifically. There’s also an immense fear that it could fly away quickly. All you need is one brutal regime change, or want to overthrow a power to undermine all the human life progress that has happened. It’s a hard thing to know what will happen, and the photographers just know that it’s important to them to keep working. To keep documenting whatever does happen, their cameras will keep steady on what is happening.

They will continue to document how things are getting worse. They’re trying to get out to the world, remind the world what is happening in Afghanistan, and try to keep Afghanistan relevant. At the same time, they’re also aware that Afghanistan has been forgotten before in the past. They told us that, we could come up with that on our own, just by looking at the trajectories of international attention on Afghanistan, but the photographers feel that way. Afghanistan has been forgotten in the past, and there’s a chance that we’ll slide into that situation again. They’re trying to figure that out, and they’re just going to have to be there and be present for whatever happens.

framebyframethefilm.com

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Pakayla Rae Biehn Interview and photos by Andrea Cheng

Pakayla Rae Biehn is the best friend you always dreamed of having growing up. Or in my case, in my mid-20s. I first came across Pakayla’s work in 2010 on a Bay Area-based art blog and even wrote about her on the Got a Girl Crush blog. It’s hard not to be immediately captivated by her paintings, which comes from a purely visceral place and also a studied appreciation for her technical prowess. It wasn’t until last year that we met in real life and became fast friends. A

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mix between Claudia Kishi from The Babysitters Club, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ilana from Broad City, Pakayla is spunky, dependable, wise, accomplished, and just so fucking funny. All the things you could ever ask for in a BFF and I’m lucky to call her one of mine. It’s not often you get to know and become close with someone you used to admire from afar, so I seized this unique opportunity to ask her all my burning questions as a friend and a fan.

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Andrea Cheng How did you become an artist.

What drew you to painting as your medium?

Pakayla Rae Biehn My mama has always been creative; she attended the Kendall School of Design in Michigan. So it’s always been around and encouraged, which isn’t abnormal for most childhoods. I remember her doing all these very elaborate birthday decorations and themes for me. Looking back now, it was such a housewife way to deal with lack of artistic expression. Pour everything into crafts! Anyway, I took a lot of after-school painting classes with private teachers and that just stuck. It felt the best and most natural medium. I studied sculpture in college, however, because I wanted to develop my spatial skills and also learn to weld and woodwork.

Andrea At each stage of your life—tell me about your favorite piece of art.

Pakayla Dang, that’s a really difficult question. I don’t usually have a definite favorite piece, more just a gaggle of greats that I love. I can’t remember too many specifics from being younger, but it was most likely the usual: Van Gogh, and all those Flemmish and Dutch renaissance dudes that you admire in big museums, sometimes a Helen Frankenthaler. I do remember disliking the idea of Jackson Pollock for a long time, but then when I visited SF MoMA and saw one for the first time, I cried and then understood. [Laughs]. Tauba Auerbach has been at the top of my list for some time now. I think if I had to pick an eternal and durable favorite it would be her. My first major art purchase was her work, so she’s extra sentimental/ meaningful. Uhm. Jonas Wood. Henrik Vibskov.

Phantom Limb Company. Mercedes Helnwein.

Clare Rojas. Alex Kanevsky, Tom Sachs (whom I worked for briefly in New York.) Wes Anderson.

Isabella Rossellini. Paul Urich. It’s so hard to narrow it down. UGH. Andrea You’ve lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam and spend part of your year in Kauai. Is there any relation between your work and your surroundings. How has your work changed with each move? Do you go to any particular place in your mind when you’re painting?

Pakayla California raised me, San Francisco more specifically, I feel at my best and most comfortable here. New York broke me down. I was working for Jeff Koons and it completed fucked me up. I was totally ready for New York to be this incredible and inspiring place, but that never came. Only panic attacks, meltdowns and a few shitty paintings came instead. It was rough.

I’m very emotional and responsive to my emotional environment and New York’s energy was absolutely too intense for me. I feel it ALL. The bad and the good, but mostly the bad. In retrospect New York definitely changed my work the most, it just took some time to settle in me.

Amsterdam was really emotional, but in a more inspiring and positive way, it’s my heritage and I had a truly intuitive relationship with that city. Everything is simple and beautiful and perfectly colorful and well designed.

I have to be cozy and nested in a work environment. It’s hard to wait for my mind to prep for work; usually I have to struggle through some procrastination tendencies and force myself into it. A lot of folks have this romantic ideal of artists being struck with inspiration and creating a body of work over night, when reality is that’s rare (for me at least) and most of the time I have to push myself. I love to watch a lot of rom-coms and

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shitty sitcoms while I work. I need background chit-chat that is easy to digest.

Andrea I first became familiar with your work through your double exposure paintings.

I was like, “Oh shit—these aren’t photos?” Then not so long ago, I watched the documentary Tim’s Vermeer about this one dude Tim that was convinced Vermeer had to have used some kind of technology to achieve the crazy level of photorealism in his paintings. He thought how is it humanly possible to master that kind of technique just from your hand and your mind,

and so the dude set off to build this camera obscura-like contraption and gave himself the challenge of recreating a Vermeer painting and he was totally able to do that with an insane precision...So, is your process kind of like that?

Pakayla My dad has been trying to get me to watch that movie! I own the book and movie, Secret Knowledge by David Hockney, which I’m assuming is along similar lines but about ten years older. Hockney delves deep into art history and uncovers exactly when he thinks old masters began using lenses and simple projections like

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Pakayla camera lucida and obscuras. He explains that around the 1420’s, everyone could draw better… just sort of arbitrarily everything was incredibly rich in detail and perfectly proportioned. It’s fascinating shit. I love learning about the applications of current technologies to painting because it’s so relevant to me. I use projectors and computers and all sorts of helpful technology. It’s silly to me when artists choose to actively avoid those things. This is a job, just like any other, and if you can find a method in which the results are the same, but the speed of getting that final object is increased, why not use or at least try it.

Andrea Who are the girls in your paintings?

How do you go about pairing up the images?

Pakayla Friends, friends of friends, strangers. A lot of my images are in camera. Some of them are made by me via Photoshop. There’s no real secret equation that makes a great image, it’s just a lot of hours layering on Photoshop and finding what feels best. It’s about the feels.

Andrea For your recent Oh, Comely show at Park Life, you introduced some work that’s pretty different than what you’ve done in the past. At the risk of oversimplifying it, there is a fragility in your double exposure paintings—a feeling of impermanence. Like a reflection in the pond, always at the mercy of a ripple that would wash it away. While your new pieces with the bouquet and faces feel much more weighted and playful.

What’s behind the shift?

Pakayla That was so poetic. Wanting to not have that fragility you talk about was a huge part of it. I felt like my work was always very feminine, which isn’t a bad thing, and I wanted to move in a different direction. This feels more true to me, more contemporary. I think my work was stagnant for so long; I needed to check in and refresh it. I did a group of really graphic paintings, removing portraiture completely, which really sparked these.

Andrea What are some pros and cons about being a woman artist in these modern times.

Pakayla Cons— Social Media (which is also a “pro”, but see the answer for the next question for

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Rae

Biehn an in-depth explanation). Work being brushed off as too emotional or feminine. A feast/famine money situation, which is less gendered and more just being an artist but still applicable. I have faced a few gallerists (who shall remain nameless/ Voldemort) who’ve been extremely misogynistic and said some pretty nasty things to me.

Pros—Being surrounded by a group of supportive strong artists, which eclipses most of the things on this list. No 9-5s! Learning always and forever. The ability to safely fail.

Having comfort in being an extrovert. Building insane ideas.

Andrea For someone who loves the Internet so much and is Queen of Internetting—what’s it like having a career in something that is completely offline? Or is it even completely offline?

Pakayla It’s definitely not offline. I attribute a lot of my success to the internet. I was featured on Booooooom a long time ago, 2008 maybe, and got a lot of attention, including my first show in LA. Most artists know that an online presence is important. It’s no secret. It’s hard for me to navigate things like social media because it takes a specific type of person to be successful at it. It’s hard for me to brag and post photos everyday, and take a lot of “cute” photos of myself looking pouty next to my work. I have a difficult relationship to people who use the way they look to create thriving “art” careers while pushing their actual art and concept to the back burner.

Andrea Okay, so enough talk about art. Tell me about the virtues of the Diva Cup (the reusable silicone menstrual cup) and why I should spend $30 to buy one. And how do you not gross yourself out when it comes time to clean it? It’s so weird that you have to boil it on the stove. Do you have a special pot that you use just for your Diva Cup? Pakayla HAHAHA, I’m really glad you asked me about this! You know Celeste (GAGC’s designer) and I have been trying to get you on this tip. Cost-benefit wise, $30 is what you spend on tampons in like two periods and this little silicone wonder lasts ten years! (Also, as much as I dislike Amazon and their antics, it’s only $25 on there,

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Pakayla I checked.) Either way, that’s like a 120 periods worth of savings. Pow! It was so so gross to me at first, but then you just sort of get over it and revel in knowing the most about Shark Week*.

Tampons are (literal) garbage, and pads, ugh pads shouldn’t even be mentioned because: WOOF. But for real, it’s a lot more comfortable and earthfriendly than most vehicles for v-blood. [Laughs].

Go buy one! Try it out! Everyone! Actually, I think I’m just going to get it for you as a wedding present. *Shark Week is my period week. You can use it.

You’re welcome.

Andrea Outside of your art practice, you’re also a stylist, nanny and sometimes production assistant for a few fashion designers. What’s your favorite job you’ve ever had?

Pakayla I used to teach preschool and that was one of my favorite gigs, by far. It’s really gratifying, full of love and important and wonderful, but the pay is such shit. It’s really a shame, because you can’t be a preschool teacher and live comfortably. It’s definitely a labor of love.

I prefer jobs where I’m on my feet more than not, so styling is advantageous because those days are long days of running around. I loved the people at the Koons’ studio—a lot of very sharp, creative people who unfortunately hate their jobs.

Andrea What’s it like having a Dad that’s a professional Bill Clinton lookalike?

Pakayla Totally rad! My dad is a champion.

He paid for two college tuitions doing Clinton impersonation gigs! He was on those VH1 “I love the 90’s” commercials, he’s sharing a milkshake with Monica Lewinsky (very tongue in cheek, no?). He was in Master P videos, George Clinton, Salt and Pepper videos, he plays the saxophone and, oh man, it’s really hysterical and otherworldly. However, one time I did have a random guy walk up to us on a beach and say “You know, you could get shot cause you look like the President.” And that was pretty traumatizing.

But generally it’s really great.

Andrea If you were to assemble an ideal lady squad, who would be in it?

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Pakayla Uh, I have the best squad already!

I truly feel like an adult, you know? After adolescence when you start to shed all those people that don’t make sense. You, Celeste and my other various lady friends are the highest level of fly-ness. The only side additions I would make in a ridiculous-perfect world would be Elizabeth Warren (because knowledge/power), Abbi and Ilana (the Broad City magical boss bitches), and probably Smurfette or a Disney princess or some fictional wild card.

pakayla.com

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Interview with Sarah Castagnola by Christie Maclean Interview with Teddy Ithungu by Sarah Castagnola Photos by Christie Maclean & Sarah Castagnola

Nearly four years ago, Sarah and I were first introduced, not because of our (soon to be realized) cast of friends in common, but because we stood at the same bus stop in the morning, with our to go coffees from the same coffee shop, shared a kind smile and were bound to share the bus ride home after work. I don’t know that we actually shared a word until we had dinner at our mutual best friend Anne’s house. From road trips to West Texas and camping in New Mexico to scheming up day trips and travel plans on a daily basis, the three us became nearly inseparable.

The instant connection with Sarah is one that anyone who has met her experiences, one that drew us to travel 9,000 miles to visit her in a small village in Western Uganda

last Spring. After Anne and I visited Sarah, traveling around the country for two weeks and ending our time in her remote village, Kyarumba, at the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains, it was amazing to see the bonds she had already formed. As she walked us down the dirt road into her village, people greeted her in Lhukonzo, the local language, stating “You have been lost,” which she hears every time she walks back into the village even after just a few days away.

As a testament to the connections Sarah creates through her travels, I asked Sarah a few questions about her experience thus far, while she interviews Teddy, a local woman who works at Sarah’s work site, Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union.

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Sarah

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Christie Maclean Hi Sarah! Okay, so tell When you walk by women cooking outside on me. Where did you grow up and where have their charcoal stoves they always call out, “Asa you traveled? thulye,” which translates to, “Come let us eat.”

Sarah Castagnola I was born in Juneau, It doesn’t matter how little food they have or if Alaska and moved to Northern California when you are full, it is what you do in a village. You I was two. I was ten when my parents accepted take care of your neighbors as though they were positions working at an International school in your own family. This type of generosity, despite Spain. Between the ages of 10 and 18, I lived in overwhelming poverty is truly inspiring.

Spain, Indonesia, Connecticut and the Dominican Christie What do you value most about your Republic. This was the beginning of my life long time in Uganda? love of traveling. I moved to Oregon to attend Sarah The best part of my experience in university and stayed in Oregon for ten years with Uganda is the relationships I’ve formed. Generally, two to four months breaks in Argentina, Ghana, women in my village are married by 18, usually Nicaragua and Indonesia. younger and have their first child before 20. You Christie So you joined the Peace Corps in April are not considered a woman until you have a 2013. Tell us more about your work and day-to-day family. As a single woman with no children, I have life there. become everyone’s Sarah In December adopted daughter.

2012, I received an People take care of me, invitation to serve as a look out for me and community economic check in on me. This is development volunteer both a heartening and in Uganda. I now live in challenging aspect of the town of Kyarumba living in a communal (cha-ROOM-ba) in culture. This is very Western Uganda. I live different from United about 30 kilometers States cultural norms. from the border of the Personal space and Democratic Republic privacy are nonexistent Sarah Castagnola (center) of Congo. I am working here. If I don’t open my with a coffee cooperative with over 5,000 farmers door by 8 am on a Sunday, people knock on my called Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union. We are door and ask if I am sick. I feel very safe and loved largely a women run organization, 85% of our but if I need alone time, I take a weekend break farmers and the majority of our board are women. away from the village.

I live in cooperative housing built by the farmers.

In front of the compound is our coffee warehouse.

While Anne and I were in Sarah’s village, Teddy On market days, women carry 50-kilo sacks of welcomed us immediately, inviting us to her home coffee on their backs down from the mountain for a true Ugandan meal. We sat with Sarah, Teddy barefoot. My village is a 40-minute drive on a dirt and a few of their colleagues for hours, telling stories road after you turn off from the paved road. If you while people stopped by to say hello and welcome us to drive into the village in the morning, women are their village. heading to the fields with a jerry can balanced on their head, a plow on their shoulder and a baby Sarah Thanks for letting me interview you on their back. It always amazes me how strong Teddy. I guess we will start with the basics, how women are here. old are you? Where were you born?

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Teddy

Teddy Ithungu (right)

Teddy Ithungu I am 38. I was born in Bwete. Let me go get my documents.

It turns out Teddy is 39, not 38. Her official documents also say she was born in Musasa not Bwete.

This lack of information is common here. Details that most Americans consider important to personal identity is not really important here. This also includes spelling of names and towns. My town of Kyarumba is spelled three different ways. After two years here, I’ve yet to find the correct spelling.

Sarah What do you do for a living?

Teddy I farm. I have farms for coffee and bananas. I have 618 coffee trees on eight acres of land. I have a eucalyptus plantation and ducks, hens, goats and three pigs. I am a community worker and a Gender Action Learning System (GALS) trainer in Bukonzo Joint. I am a teacher at Musasa Primary levels 1-7 and all subjects at a government school. I own a motorcycle. I rent it out for 10,000 UGX ($3) a day. I buy and sell beans and coffee from others.

Sarah How did you get your land?

Teddy I sold coffee. I also got a loans from Bwete cooperative, a cooperative of Bukonzo Joint.

I bought this land for 1.5 million UGX ($500).

Sarah How many children do you have and how old are they? Where is their father?

After a 20-minute conversation in Lhukonzo with friends observing our interview, she tells me the age and dates of her four children and changes them a few times. I ask to see papers to verify her oldest child’s age, however they were lost during the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) war. ADF attacked this area until the late 90s and forced many people to leave their mountain homes and head down to the town for protection. Many of the mountain homes and farms were ransacked and burned.

Teddy I have four children. I don’t know where their father is, he’s just in the world. He left when Mary was six months. I hear he’s marrying other wives, then he goes and he marries another. I don’t know.

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Bukonzo Joint

Sarah Does he help financially with the children?

Teddy No, I have educated my children. I do business. I have sold everything, except tobacco.

Sugar canes, beans, sweet, fish. From that process I have survived. I learned how to make profits and seasonal calendars. Like, this is the time to buy beans and you wait for the right time to sell your commodities. Like today I have bought beans and I’ll keep it and then wait a time and sell that.

I also look at quality. Beans and coffee if you have quality you get high price.

Sarah Who lives with you now?

Teddy I live with Masereka Gofred. He is an orphan from Kitabona. Masereka is living with me because he had no parents or place to stay, so I brought him here. Christine Ithungu is a daughter to my step-mother. Her school is 12 kilometers from home to school. They request she stays with me so she is near the school. In our culture we usually do like that. We stay with people from different areas. They stay like my family. Like an orphan, how can you say that he should pay rent?

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Sarah You volunteer on all sorts of projects in the community. How did you get interested in volunteer work?

Teddy During 1996-1997 I took a course called Change Agent for six months. I learned about savings groups and how to volunteer in the community. I also learned how to plan time from morning to night. After that course I got a loan through my cooperative for a teaching certificate. My volunteer activities have created friendship. I volunteered for five years at Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA). Now they contacted me and I passed a test. I will start to teach good agronomic practices.

Sarah What’s your daily life like?

Teddy I wake up at 5:30 so I can I get water and put in pottery filtration system. (This is another one of her many community projects she started during a typhoid outbreak during floods last year. Most people drink water directly from the river causing many water borne illnesses). I put water over fire and sweep. I wash the plates from the night before. I water the coffee seedlings in

my nursery bed. I prepare water for the ducks and hen. By 7:40 I am at the school in class. It’s a 15-20 minute walk to school. I get home from school at 6 pm, collect wood for the fire stove and prepare dinner. I fetch water from the river Nyamugasana. I eat around 9 or 9:30. I prep for school or I do work for my organization (Musasa Lower Cooperative). I go to bed at 10.

Sarah Is your life like other women in Kyarumba or different?

Teddy It is somehow different. It is different because I have to cater myself by myself only. It is all provided by one, it’s Teddy.

Sarah How did you get involved with Bukonzo Joint?

Teddy I started with Bukonzo Joint in 1997 during the Uganda Change Agent course. After finishing this course, my colleagues and I sat together and thought of bringing our mother organizations together and we started a savings and credit scheme in 1998. Bukonzo Joint started in 1999. Bukonzo Joint provides microfinance service to its members and has over 72 active savings groups. I was a multipurpose trainer. I trained in bookkeeping, Gender Action Learning System (GALS), agriculture and group formation. That was through the effort of Baluku Paineto, he was the one who mobilized us to join Change Agents. Paineto is the current Managing Director and Founder of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union. I also work a lot with my dear friend Joseph Kasibirehe.

Sarah Why is it important for you to work with other women?

Teddy What makes me important to these women is I am an educated person so I have to give them the skills I have. In my marriage I suffered, so I help them. I help them with savings and guide them to save money. I teach those who are suffering in marriage to be self reliant. When you are empowered as a woman you can stay without a man, and leave and do things on your own, and support others.

Sarah What are the biggest struggles for women here in rural Uganda?

Teddy Women have a heavy workload. Women access land but they don’t control it. You can bring up animals, you can dig on land but when you want to sell it the man will say it’s not yours.

There is coffee you care for but you cannot pick it.

The man can give to another wife.

Government policies aren’t being implemented.

They can say a woman has a right to this but they don’t cater for human rights. Those laws are not working but they are there. Government policies say we have a right to land. For instance, they say women have a right to have half the land in divorce. But if a woman divorces, women have no right to the land. If you go to government officials, they look like this: (scowls). Most of the men here are polygamists. They have two to three wives. When a man has multiple wives he cannot cater for them or give children education.

Women are suffering paying fees to children.

Out of 100 men, 30 can pay but 70 do not. Gender education has helped a lot or women would be seriously suffering.

Sarah What are you of the most proud of ?

Teddy I am proud of my education because I have been educated at an old age with my children. I am proud of Bukonzo Joint because Bukonzo Joint has helped me up to where I have reached. I have my own house and land. My land is in the name of Ithungu Teddy.

@sarahgenelle

bukonzojointcoffee.com

sarahgenelle.vsco.co

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Tamara Becerra Valdez Interview by Meg Wachter Photos by Jackie Lee Young

I discovered Tamara and her work the way many people these days connect to each other across the country and the world—through Instagram. I was drawn by the stark contrast of her seemingly naturefilled world living in Austin, Texas compared to my own cement and skyscrapers living in Brooklyn, New York. Not to say Texas doesn’t have it’s fair share of concrete and cars— but there is a certain ethereal quality that transmits even through Tamara’s 612 by 612 pixel photos. My own newfound interest in the practice of natural healing with it’s accessibility, rich history, and beautiful simplicity sealed my wanting to know more about her combined passion of her art with her talents and family tradition for wildcrafting.

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Tamara Meg Wachter Can you tell us a bit about your background/family history that led you to ultimately becoming a mystic mama?

Tamara Becerra Valdez I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas and was raised by a dynamic and productive set of women in our household. For most of my life, there were four generations of women living under one roof. Needless to say, there was always some kind of activity or loud laughter coming from inside the house. Everyone carried different dynamics and they have all made an impression on me, today.

My mother has faith in saints and secular prayer as well as traces of curanderismo (a form of folk healing that includes various techniques such as prayer, herbal medicine, healing rituals, spiritualism, massage, and psychic healing).

Frankincense resin and agua de florida (Florida Water—an alcohol-based cologne widely used in rituals of home protection and spiritual cleaning) and herbs for burning are all loyal expressions of my mother. I am my mother’s daughter and the most memorable times of my mother are surrounded by those experiences. I’ve reformed those memories into my art practice and self-vcare today.

Meg Where did Folklorica come from and what do you hope to achieve with it?

Tamara Botanicals Folklorica defines the apothecary line in the studio. The line came from an interest to rework and retell stories of herbal medicine with more emphasis and integrity to the origin and place. The apothecary is an extension of cultural heritage and my personal knowledge of plant medicine. However, I have been working under the moniker Folklorica for new creative projects that are outside of the apothecary. Over time, I hope my work leads me to

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the most deserving place. I only hope for the best opportunities with Folklorica.

Meg How does nature inspire your art?

And, conversely, how does your art inspire your apothecary?

Tamara Nature inspires me daily. I don’t see that element ever going away as an inspiration in my life. Nature feels celebratory for me. And my art is definitely an investigation of various materials and elements of nature. Art inspires the packaging and overall feel of the products that come out of my apothecary. I’m particular about materials. I think about the qualities of an heirloom and hope that the way an object is wrapped or the label of the bottle can be something kept for long after its use.

Meg What’s the most rewarding part of wildcrafting both your art and medicine?

Tamara The most rewarding part of wildcrafting plants is the full use of the material. I can dry the plants and store them for later medicinal use. I can hang dry the flowers for bundling.

I can draw the plant subject in front of me. It all feels cyclical and sustaining. Even more, sharing knowledge with those around me feels the most rewarding.

Meg Why do you think there’s a sudden interest again (and with women specifically) in plantbased and alternative medicine?

Tamara I can only speculate that women want to have more integrated control of their health and their bodies. I love that women are encouraging more compassion and attention to their well-being. Its a move of empowerment. The interest is also a motivation to bring more women circles together. For me, the ability to be in tune with my body, know what my body needs for balance is absolutely fulfilling.

Meg To those that have never visited, describe what it’s like to live in Texas since it’s so unique to the rest of the US. Tamara Texas is absolutely stunning! Texas springtime begins with an abundance of leaves growing on some of the most memorable trees, like the Redbud with sweet pink blossoms, then the roadside highways fill with Texas bluebonnets and other wildflowers. All the while, in the west Texas Pecos region all the cacti begin to bloom the most attractive flowers you can imagine. Our summertime can be the most callous of seasons.

We reach high temperatures over 100 degrees. But our swimming holes are refuge and cold paletas (fresh fruit ice pops) and street tacos are the most satisfying! After the summer, our fall and winter is something to look forward to with a change of pace and condition.

I asked several friends why they love Texas.

I want to share some of my favorite qualities they mentioned. I’m going to make this a big list because I have to follow through with the motto, “Everything is Bigger in Texas.”

• Pink lightning and green rivers • Breakfast taco mania • Barbed wire and cattle watching • Springs, like whoa • Foodways • Sweeping thunderstorms in the panhandle • Western cacti and eastern forests • Irish cowboys and mexican punk rockers • Vaqueros and caballeros, get it straight • Bbq like no other • Border culture • Wildflowers • Waterfalls • Friendly dispositions • Roses in Tyler • Unforgettable sunsets • Figs, nopales, birds • Creepy critters • Selena • Honky tonk • Conjunto music, especially los pinkys!

@folklorica

workbyfolklorica.com

• Clemencia zapata • Xicanas • Raspas • The “friendly wave” as you pass by on the highways My ancestors have lived and died on this soil for over 10 generations. It’s hard to think I would want to do it any other way. And its politics, well, I think we all miss Ann Richards.

Meg Can you tell us more about your field guides you’re publishing?

Tamara I’m self-publishing a series of field guides about the flora and folkways of Texas. Each of the field guides will cover a different region and direction of the state. The guides include drawings, music, folklore and folkways of the region, native plant profiles and other interesting facts of the area. The first one is called, “Ode to the Desert: A Field Guide to the Chihuahua Desert”.

The field guide features some of the most prolific medicinals of the Pecos region. Along with, a couple Texas folk songs! Overall, the pamphlet draws its inspiration from the ideas and stories that make this desolate region of Texas so unique and remarkable. The guide includes a large poster of the Sierra Madre Mountains with the company of a vaquero and his horse.

Meg What other projects are you working on?

Tamara I’m teaching Latino visual art and culture classes in Austin and assembling ideas for an upcoming exhibition opening this summer. I hope to have the east Texas field guide come out by the fall! I may have a few other print ideas up my sleeve, too.

Meg Who are the women that inspire you?

Tamara The women that inspire me are those that have their own unique voice. I’m inspired by a woman’s intelligence and humor and the importance to live honestly and totally. I love a woman with poise, grace and dignity. I’m inspired by the woman that chooses to not wait for tomorrow to be ready.

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Tatyana Fazlalizadeh Interview by Sam Paul Photos by Amanda Stosz

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a fiercely talented artist and activist. Her artwork—beautifully rendered oil paintings, large murals, and black and white wheatpastes—is unmistakably her own. With a degree from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she is a classically trained artist with a background in illustration. Fazlalizadeh is also a woman with a lot to say. In 2012, she took her art and her activism to the street with her project, Stop Telling Women to Smile, a series of wheatpastes portraying women, along with captions that describe their experiences with street harassment. In the years since the project began, Fazlalizadeh has traveled far and wide, putting up her work and collecting women’s stories. Her poignant words and images have spread to walls across the world.

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Tatyana Sam Paul You come from a background in illustration and have focused a lot on oil painting.

What influenced you to use wheatpaste as your medium for Stop Telling Women to Smile?

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh I wanted to talk about street harassment, so it made the most sense for me to do the work in the street. I try not to limit myself by what I usually do, by what I’ve done in the past, but instead try to think about what space, what medium, what area will make the most impact and be most appropriate for whatever topic that I’m working on.

Sam Being born in Oklahoma City and then moving to Philadelphia and, now, New York, you are coming from three very different environments. How did your experience of street harassment differ from city to city?

Tatyana When I moved to Philly, it really started to become this sort of huge problem that was a daily part of my experience. When I was in Oklahoma, I think sexual harassment was something I was experiencing, but I wasn’t experiencing it outside in a public space. It was coming from my peers, or from adult men, or was happening in these other environments.

In Philly, it became this more aggressive thing that was happening to me, coming from strangers multiple times a day because I moved throughout the city in public spaces. I became really conscious of it, and aware that this was something that was not okay and shouldn’t be a part of my everyday life.

Sam What led you to start the project in 2012?

Tatyana I’d been wanting to do this work around street harassment for a while because I’d been experiencing it for a long time, since I moved to Philly in 2003. I didn’t really know how to create art, or in what medium to create art around it. Oil painting didn’t seem like the way to do it. I finally decided on street art and wheatpaste after working on a mural. Working out in public changed the way I thought about art outside on the street, and the way people interact with work in public versus in a gallery or in a studio, and just

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thinking about using the street as a medium led me to decide on wheatpaste.

Sam You’ve traveled widely for the project.

Did you notice differences in your experience in different cities or were you more struck by the similarities between them?

…women in most places are experiencing the same stuff. That’s because street harassment and sexual harassment happen for the same reason everywhere.

It’s all about power and control.

That’s never going to change based on the city you live in.

Tatyana I do remember experiencing more street harassment in Los Angeles, which I wasn’t really expecting. From talking to other women and hearing their experiences, it seems like it’s very similar in all places. It’s just the way that it’s acted out that is different. In places where you drive a lot, or where women are walking in the street a lot, there’s a difference in how women are harassed in public spaces. It could be coming from a car, or it might be happening more in buildings, rather than the direct face-to-face contact that you have in New York.

I notice small, regional differences like that.

Other than that, it seems that women in most places are experiencing the same stuff. That’s because street harassment and sexual harassment happen for the same reason everywhere. It’s all about power and control. That’s never going to change based on the city you live in.

Sam How do you select your subjects?

Tatyana I select them based on what they tell me, on what their stories are. I’m always looking for a new perspective, a new story, a new narrative to reflect in this work. If someone tells me something or has a specific experience I haven’t heard before or that I think needs to be told

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Tatyana

through this project, then I choose them based on that. Sometimes the caption on the pieces is a direct quote, or sometimes it’s something that we come up with together. It’s always trying to take this idea, or take this experience that they had, and boil it down to one statement that they want to put out there in the public. It’s not really based on what they look like aesthetically. It’s based on their experience, and that experience is influenced by their race, their gender, their sexuality, and things like that. It’s based on their story and what they have to say.

Sam The project has become participatory and collaborative. People put these up in their own cities all over the world. How have you facilitated that?

Tatyana Last year, I put together an international wheatpasting night, where I released PDFs people could download, print, and put up. The idea was for individuals and groups of folks from all over to have access to this work and wheatpaste them all on the same night.

It gave people the opportunity to put the work up in their own cities and towns, wherever they

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wanted to, and to be in solidarity with women from all over. It was important to me that everyone did it on the same night, so it felt like you were a part of something larger than yourself.

I went back to the some of the cities with some of the folks that wheatpasted and tried to put together teams of people who participated and want to continue to put up the work routinely. That’s happening in a few cities and, other than that, the folks that still have those PDFs are free to go out and wheatpaste whenever they want. I’m opening it up again this year in a few weeks, and I think that more people will participate.

I’m working on trying to figure out how to make it a little more structured and a little more routine, but it’s good for me to open up the project. I realized a little while ago that the project is bigger than myself now, and I can’t do it all by myself. And I don’t need to, because a lot of people want to be involved and help with this.

Sam Do you have other general goals for expanding or moving forward with STWTS? Tatyana I really want it to be this stable project that is ongoing. I’m working mostly on sustainability right now. How do I keep this project going, while also doing other things, without having this be 100% of my day? I want it to live on as long as it can. If it eventually dies out, that’s fine. I think it’s made a huge impact already. I’m working to put it into other people’s hands and let the project live on as long as it can.

I’m taking it to different cities, planning the next international trip. Stuff like that is going to continue to happen. The most important part for me is that the project is visible outside on the street, to have the wheatpastes on walls in cities across the world. It’s great that it’s getting all this attention online and I’m doing all of these interviews. That’s fantastic, but what is really important is that there is a sheet of paper outside on the wall on a corner somewhere.

Sam What are some of your other projects?

Tatyana I’m doing a few things. I’m working on a series of paintings. I’m working on a new project that’s also about street harassment that I don’t want

Fazlalizadeh to talk too much about because I want to just put it out and have people see it. That’s the main thing that I’m doing, and I’m hoping to release it in a few weeks.

There’s that and I’m traveling a lot, and I’m collaborating with a few other artists. We’re doing a project around the visibility of women of color who have been killed, either by the state or through sexual violence.

I’m juggling a few things at the same time, but I’m mostly just trying to create and make stuff.

That is what my career and what my life is like— trying to make cool stuff that people relate to.

Sam What are some of your long-term goals for yourself ? Where would you like to be in five years?

Tatyana I’ve been blessed with a lot of opportunities recently, and for me it’s about creating more opportunities. It’s about deciding what I want to produce, how I want it to be presented, and who I want it to be in front of.

It’s about making that happen—whether it’s a street art project, or a series of paintings that I want to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum,

@tlynnfaz

tlynnfaz.com

or publishing a book. These are all things I am thinking of and I want to have happen in the next few years.

This project has been received very well, and I would love for the next work I do to be even more well received. I want to create work that represents folks that I think are underrepresented and present that to a larger public. I think that’s what Stop Telling Women to Smile is doing, but I think I could do it even better. Those are my goals: to continue along the same path, and to do it even better.

Sam Because this is a zine about the women we look up to, who are some of the women who inspire you, or you would call a “girl crush”?

Tatyana There are the legendary people I always look up to, like Frida Kahlo, and Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whom I read and who inspires me as a woman and a feminist. There are some more contemporary people who are doing work and are brilliant like Janet Mock and Lizzo Harris-Perry.

I am really surrounded by amazing women who are doing amazing things. My peers, my friends, Molly Crabapple, people I could name but I don’t think you would know them.

I am constantly inspired by women who are known and women who are not known. I’ve met a ton of women over the last year and a half through this project. And some of them are just badass and are doing amazing things in their everyday lives. I’m inspired by them, which is why I do this work, why I do this project, why I do my art practice in general. I’ve met so many wonderful women, and all of them inspire me .

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Issue 4

Meg Wachter & Amanda Stosz missus managers

Celeste Prevost shined this puppy up

Natalie Capannelli cosmic cover craftswoman

Bonnie Wachter letter wrangler

The Prolific Group printed this in Canada

Stalk Us gotagirlcrush.com @gotagirlcrush #gotagirlcrush

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Becca Barnet Carrie Marie Schneider Cindy Gallop Faythe Levine Jessica Williams LIZZO Martha Cooper Mo Scarpeli Pakayla Rae Biehn Sarah Castagnola Teddy Ithungu Tamara Becerra Valdez Tatyana Fazlalizadeh