The Stats

Name: Suzanne Littell Seesman
Current Location: Philadelphia
Education:  BFA Sculpture, Minor in International Studies from  Ohio University
MFA Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art
Preferred Medium(s): Sculpture
Children (ages and genders):  Expecting a baby (Due Sept 8th) the sex is female.
Website address(es): www.suzanneseesman.com

The Questions

What is your background (where are you from, education, important details, where are you now, etc.)?

I’m originally from Gaithersburg, MD a suburb in the DC Metro area but I’ve lived in Philly now for eight years.  When I was at Ohio University as an undergrad, Duane McDiarmid gave a lecture to the sculpture majors on “professional practices.” There weren’t many of us in the room but the seminar space off the foundry was small. He drew a huge detailed and tangled diagram that filled the entire whiteboard. It ended up looking a little bit like Jeremy Deller’s drawing for Acid Brass but this lecture described a version of “the art world.” Part of it was MFA, BFA, and “alternative” programs in various regions of the country. The diagram had notes on what some regional art communities were known for. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about grad school but the take away for me was the same. His advice was to think about where you might want to be and make decisions from there. The idea was to try to figure out where you might be able to make a life as an artist.

By the time I decided to apply to  graduate school, I had lived in Southeastern OH and Washington D.C. for many years and had also lived in The Northern Central Valley of CA and in the Bay Area. I’d also spent several summers studying Indonesian language in Madison Wisconsin. Living for the better part of a decade in Appalachia with midwesterners had had a big impact on my life and way of being, but I was still very much an east-coaster, mid atlantic to the core and I wanted to be closer to home. Tyler School of Art’s Sculpture program was at the top of my list, in part because it is in Philly. When I was accepted, I moved here and I’ve been here ever since.

When I talk about being a mid- Atlantic to the core Nancy Holt’s video “East Coast, West Coast” with Robert Smithson comes to mind which makes me laugh. I love Holt’s character but what I’m really talking about is communication and the culture of work.  At the time I moved to Philadelphia, I had been living and working in the Bay area for a while and I was craving direct – even blunt – communication.

For the majority of my working life I’ve had service industry jobs – waiting tables, tending bar, working in health food grocery stores, etc. While there are also major differences, the work I do as a teacher and curator, is similar in that it involves a level of social and emotional labor. Like service industry work, it is also unstable and contingent. While there are certainly all kinds of customers and coworkers everywhere, there is a generally low tolerance for pretentiousness here and there is a respect for work and working people. Communications tend to be direct. If someone is unhappy with something, or in need of clarification, they will usually tell you. This makes it fairly easy to find out what is going on which, for me, is crucial. At the same time, people here are friendly in ways that I’ve not experienced in other east coast cities – certainly not in the DC metro area. It irritates me when people say that Philly is “rude” or “hard.”. This doesn’t match with my experience. I think what people perceive is that life isn’t always easy and people here acknowledge and express that. To me, this doesn’t feel rude it feels realistic.

Often my work is about the (mostly feminized) labor of reading between the lines to find what is hidden within rhetoric, or in staged backgrounds. I look at the role that words and objects play in framing situations of authority and the ways in which they can secretly undermine it. I like this investigation, but, like almost everyone else I’ve ever worked with, I find it exhausting to have to guess or anticipate people’s’ needs at an hourly job.

Was there any part of your formal or non-formal training that prepared you for being a creative maker and mother simultaneously?

I’m brand new to motherhood but my formal and informal educations have always affected and shaped the way I live my life. I can’t imagine doing motherhood any differently. My practice has definitely informed my pregnancy. In terms of informal training, I think first about my family. Neither of my parents are professional artist but both have creative and craft practices. I learned a lot about making art and about living life from them. Watching and helping them cook had a huge influence on me. They made dinner almost every night after full and long work days. The most significant principles were practiced rather than spoken – use what you have, stay open to trying new things, if there’s mold cut if off! There were many unspoken lessons about valuing materials, processing over wasting, and being resourceful. This is how I cook and often how I work in the studio. I start with the materials (literal and conceptual) around me. Pregnancy and parenthood can be such consumer capitalist traps, I think this has helped me fend that off a little already. Of course google and amazon knew I was pregnant before my close friends and family so I was already receiving messages about things I should buy or read or see to address my insufficiency and lack of preparation for pregnancy and motherhood before I had the chance to talk with loved ones. Knowing how to make stuff and how to recognize the resources around me helped me tune a lot of this stuff out. I hope I’ll be able to continue that.

In terms of formal education, I went to a very small school growing up with a liberal arts pedagogy. Everyone was encouraged to be involved in everything from sports to theater. The idea was to be well rounded and to find a way to participate in all kinds of things with your peers regardless of how good you may or may not be at them as an individual. From there, I went to a very large public High School where, for the most part, people were separated out into social and academic groups. I hung out with “art kids” and was in bands. We made our own fun and figured out ways to entertain each other.  All of this shaped my approach to living and to making art. Art (including music) never seemed like a separate or specialized activity even as it required setting time aside or focusing in a particular way. Until graduate school, which was very individually and studio focused, making art never struck me as a lone, or “personal” activity. I think this relates to pregnancy and parenting too.

Going to college and then living, and working, in Southeastern, OH also had a huge effect on me and the way I live my life. Having now spent considerable amounts of time on college campuses, working with artists who went to all kinds of schools, I’ve come to understand that The Art program at Ohio University required students to enact a level of agency and cooperation that is unusual. This was particularly true in Sculpture and Art History. Faculty were not there to tell you what to do or make. The approach was ‘This is your work and your practice and you are responsible for using the information and resources we are making available to you.’  At the same time, it wasn’t about individualism or competition the way that some programs are. No one was fending for themselves. There was intense comradery and community among students and faculty encouraged skill and knowledge sharing. If you showed up to class or the studio and you put the time in, the community support and faculty advocacy was immeasurable.

The pedagogical approach could be described as ruthlessly socratic. Art was about questions and questioning. Even in regards to craft, questions might be answered with questions. It was about learning how to learn. Demos were very thorough but were designed to get students started working on their own. Barring any obvious safety issues, we were encouraged to try things out and use tools and materials according to the demands and directions of our work not according to medium specificity or tradition. This is definitely the way I approach things in my work own and as a teacher. And I hope this will be how I approach things as a parent. As a professor, I have to describe these critical thinking and making skills as bulleted points. I use phrases like “the ability to grapple with ambiguity” and “the ability to formulate significant questions.”

Living in Southeastern OH during and after college also shaped my understanding of community and collaboration. This was another space and time of working with the people around me to make things happen. The region is marked by divestment and extraction at the hands of monetary and cultural capitalists. For the most part, the area doesn’t have the attention of people in the cultural centers. Motivations for doing and making things tends to be community focused. I learned even more about non-monetary forms of value that don’t fit the dominant capitalist culture. Sometimes this knowledge is difficult to put into action here and now. Philly is a very different environment.

This kind of resourcefulness and critical approach has already affected my approach to pregnancy. It’s easy to get caught up in all of the liberal capitalist directives and instructions targeted at pregnant people. Most of these are premised on the Pregnant person, especially the white woman, as a vulnerable bodied uber consumer. Even directives that, on some level, seem reasonable at first like avoiding the “dirty dozen” are premised on the mother as individual consumer uniquely and individually responsible for the health, well being, and fate of their “own” child or children. This distracts from issues we all share. I think that my formal and informal education has encouraged me to navigate the territory with humor and critical questions – not that I’m always successful.

The work I made for Weighty concerns at the Clay Studio is about what it means to engage with the directives of self-care but I hope not in the same ways. I accept pregnancy as a time for self care and of physical transformation, what if it can also be a time of critical study that examines constructions of motherhood and pregnancy too. As usual, I’ve used materials around me, botanicals from Philly public spaces and community art spaces, the Clay Studio, to make the work.  Parenting in our culture is, like so many things, also framed as personal activity when it’s actually something that is widely shared. I believe in self-care and self-study but fantasize regularly about shifting the massive amounts of energy that go into choosing the right pregnancy diet and the best exercise regimes into demanding affordable access to healthcare for all.  I think critical study could lead to shifting directives like “avoid the dirty dozen” into demanding access to clean water and affordable healthy food for as many people as possible. Wouldn’t it be great to wake up one day and have every blog about how to do a health pregnancy be transformed into a blog about demanding and or accessing affordable health care?

Are there any women that you find to be an inspiration for you as an artist/mother?

Absolutely there are so many. I was reading Maggie Nelson’s “The Art of Cruelty” when I first suspected, and then found out, that I was pregnant. I reached right for “The Argonauts” again. Even though I seldom read a book cover to cover more than once I had to.  It read like a completely different book to me reading it again during the first trimester of pregnancy. Nelson gets into how closely pregnancy is associated with compromised physical and mental states in our culture, especially in terms of intellectual capacity and rigor. Even the most useful pregnancy lit has is moored to patronizing attitudes. She validated my infatuation with the talking fetus cartoons in the Sears’ “Healthy Pregnancy Book”.

After that, I wanted to read more by writers, who had been through pregnancy or were primary caregivers. It was easy to make a collection because there are so many great writers who have also had and or cared for babies and young children and many of the books I was looking for were already right there on the shelf. I’ve included some of these in the Clay Studio show – works by authors like Adrienne Rich,  Audre Lorde, and Susan Sontag. I also included some fiction with complex mother characters like Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” and  Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room. I discovered more recent publications through conversation with friends.  I loved Angela Garbes’ “Like a Mother” which just came out a couple of months ago and Eula Biss’ “On Immunity” which is from 2014.

Most of my inspirations though are people close to me. This city is full of amazing parents who are artists. I can’t stick too closely to the women/mother language on this question because the group of people that inspires me includes some extremely important people who do not use the markers women or mother but who have, nonetheless, given birth to and or cared for and small children.

So many people have offered conversation and guidance since I’ve been pregnant. This outrageously supportive group of artists, writers, thinkers, curators who continue to share their knowledge and experience with me is includes parents like Maria Dumlao, Alison Hardt, Catherine Pancake, Jennifer McTeague, Becky Suss, Ashley Lugo, Nichola Kinch and Leah Modigliani. This list could get really long really quickly because countless people have shared crucial words of support in passing or from afar too like writer, curator, organizer Abigail Satinsky, curator Bree Pickering, Musician Sara Hussain, and artist Jess Perlitz. You’ve also asked me about artists which keeps this limited I have an extended network of friends that I know to be creative and in my mind they are artists but they don’t practice as professional artists. Anyhow many of the parents among them have been touching base with support regularly since I’ve been pregnant.

I was anxious about being visibly pregnant. It was overwhelming to be in art spaces at first. Art scenes and institutions are not known for being parent or kid friendly and can, as we know, be particularly difficult for pregnant people and new mothers in the professional perceptions and careers. One thing I’ve enjoyed most though is hearing the stories and experiences that people share with me on a daily basis out in the world. People see that I’m pregnant and they talk with me about their pregnancies. I’ve been lucky too, the good wishes have far outweighed invasive, instructive, or judgmental commentary. Almost everyone who has shared their experience has followed up saying something like ‘it’s different for everyone though’. These daily connections have been very inspiring – to know that I’m going through something extremely common and also really special. It feels like there is a lot of support out there which is important given that structurally – from a national policy and labor standpoint – there is so little in this country.

Can you talk about how you balance your role of artist and the role of mother? Did you take time off after the birth of your children? How did that work? What about childcare? How did you navigate making artwork?

This is a big question with many parts and relates to the lack of structural support and the presence  of discrimination that I just mentioned. Since I’m new to all of this and haven’t yet given birth. I haven’t yet taken time off. My due date was over a week ago but I’m still pregnant so am still working. Hopefully by the time people see this we’ll be in a different phase. The idea was to take September “off” by working from home following the baby’s birth. My partner’s employer has granted him several weeks of paid parental leave, which is amazing and a surprising. We are so lucky for that. We’ve also managed to secure a spot at an affordable daycare close by that accepts babies at two months – which is when we will need to start. We are definitely in a situation where one of our hourly incomes matches the hourly cost of child care but we can’t really afford to stop working. Even if we could, I don’t think either of us wants to.

I currently work as both an independent contractor (1099) and adjunct. So, like many many people, I am a contingent worker with little access to benefits and no parental or maternity leave.  The instability comes with flexibility though – that’s the game! This isn’t exactly desireable or, a choice per se. I’m in a situation where I need to fulfil contracts or agreements so I can continue my work as Artistic Director on a two year grant funded project because I am able (ideally) to structure the work and accomplish parts of my contract over the next month. Given my due date, I wasn’t able to teach this semester.

While I’m anxious about how all of this will go, I’m also lucky to work for people who have experienced similar situations. Two of the people I mentioned above Nichola Kinch and Leah Modigliani head the departments I teach in at Temple. Both are mothers and artists Leah is also a published author and scholar. Because of the academic planning schedule, I told them both about my pregnancy before I told most other people. It is amazing to work in a place where I can trust the people in decision making positions. Both were and are extremely supportive. Job security and support shouldn’t be up to the responsibility of individuals at the departmental levels though. In addition to working these past weeks, I also attended a meeting of the Adjunct Constituency Council of Temple Association of University Professors which is Temple’s faculty union. Adjuncts won our union campaign in 2015 and have been a part of the faculty union since then. While I won’t be teaching this semester, I’d like to stay as involved as possible. This is another thing to ballance. I’m not sure how I will handle it all.

The first trimester was a good wake up call that I need to cut back and make priorities. I would get home from work and my body would drop. Where ever I was around 6:30 pm I would just want to lay down. A couple of times I was out in the world and it took everything in me to not fall asleep. This made my partner kind of happy.  He’s been trying to get me slow down for a long time. I usually work on things late into the night.

In terms of art-making, I imagine being a parent will change my work, when and how I make it. I expect it to have an impact on what I make also. I’ve often made work in response to issues of power, hierarchy, knowledge, communication, affect. These are all the stuff of parenthood too. I hope to maintain a practice of be playful engagement with these things and that making art helps me to have perspective on parenting. I’ve seen artists become parents and one thing I’m really excited about is the effects that play can have on people’s work. I’ve seen this come in with the parent artists I know.

Right now, I’m interested in how things are framed as choices. In terms of Motherhood, so much is framed as choice, most often individual choice – from what one eats while pregnant to diapering choices, sleep training, and parenting styles. These “choices” are so deeply driven by myth and ideology. They provide ways of moving and coping within systems of power. This is all really interesting to me. I don’t know what will come out of it, writing, curation, artworks, but I can’t imagine this not being the focus of what I make in the coming year.

I am fascinated by the ways you investigate and deconstruct structures. To quote J. Louise Makary in a writing about your work, “Seesman uses her work to make pedagogy itself a subject and to personify the difficult process of becoming knowledgeable and discovering one’s place within a social or political system”.  What was the impetus for this approach and analysis? What has it helped you to uncover or understand about our world? How has it evolved?

I don’t know if I ever actually uncover or understand much but I think it goes back, in part, to what I said about being at Ohio University and learning to ask critical questions. It’s definitely also related to my background growing up. I’m not interested in disclosing personal spacifics about this here, but I learned from direct experience at a very young are that the power of authority is related to control and anger and that there is an extreme absurdity to it. I think most people can see this clearly since the 2016 election. Unfortunately this absurdity does not mean that it is easy to contest or deny.

So, I’ve wanted to know how and why we perpetuate the kinds of relationships and behaviors of hierarchy, authority and power that we do. I also want to know about how people have coped with their positions within social and political structures at various time.  and am interested in people and movements who have contested these forms of power or engaged with non-dominant and anti-dominantive forms of power.

Visual culture holds so many cues and so do our built environments. I like to play around with the materials and images. Sometimes I’m simply trying to show something, other times I’m affirming what’s available and still other times I create fictions that show a parts of relationships, or texts that go unnoticed. Almost all of this is playful though.

With “22 Sweaters for Patricia/Juliet” I tried to bleach a series of blue vintage sweaters and re dye them yellow for the female protagonist of Godard’s 1969 film “Le Gai Savoir” and for the actress who plays the character. I’m highly suspicious of Godard’s framing of female characters and this actress was targeted by Cointelpro. For me transforming sweaters was about wondering what was possible for women at the time in relationship to radical politics and culture.  I see these femmes as being pushed on by both sides – pressure to be and represent. I think was my way of looking at that.

“Where Nothing Ever Happens” looks at the last letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno from the perspective of a scholar (probably female) who gets caught up in Adorno’s anxieties and his concern with choosing the perfect alpine setting for meeting and making amends. I was looking at the very real vulnerability of this person who holds a position of great authority in the academic world.

“Ideas that Fly” is a work I started just after the 2016 election. This is also about exploring what is possible and honoring the work of thinkers who wrote throughout difficult political times. I was on my first real residency just after the election. I had taken a series of books with me. One was a book on kite making. I wanted to make kites that corresponded with ideas in the works of writers that had written critically and powerfully. At the time I was also thinking about forms of resistance ways of maintaining ourselves that involve insisting on joy. Maybe it is about remembering that we have practices and parts of our lives that can resist being dictated to. I’m still not sure about this one exactly but I wanted to make kites for writers and I wanted to try flying kites in the winter and in all sorts of weather.

You are part of an exhibition at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia titled Weighty Concerns: Both Artist and Mother. What concerns did you focus on for this exhibit? What are some of the ups and downs of artist/mothers that you find compelling?

As I’ve mentioned, I am brand new to motherhood. So this work is about pregnancy and self care. Tied into this are some tongue in cheek acknowledgements of the anxieties of becoming a “mom”. I made positioning pillows because pregnancy is all about positioning, literally and figuratively. Instead of the position of a pregnancy pillow for sleeping, yoga, or birth exercises these bolsters are for supporting the pregnant body while reading or thinking. I made them out of jean fabric as a wink and nod to mom jeans – the archetypal fashion item signifying loss of physical definition and social identity. Moms are definitely not associated with thought. Especially mothers of infants are often considered especially compromised in regards to thinking – hence the title “Mom Brains.”  Care and affective labor really are seen as at odds with intellectual work and capacity. I’ve made work relating to this before but this is the first time I’ve made work about this kind of feminized labor in relationship to Motherhood.

I also made perfume sniffers. The nine here “Seasonal affective order“ are a reference to a lot of things. Aromatherapy, the role of scent in breastfeeding and the experience of heightened senses during pregnancy.  I started making perfume from plants around Philadelphia a couple of years ago for a project about an anarchist named Voltairine De Cleyre who lived in Philadelphia, at 6th and Brown streets at the turn of the last century. That work was about marking space and memory, specifically in relationship to a historically significant person who did not own property. This became a part of a group of works that looked at femme and feminist figures in the history of anarchism (Behold, behold, How a moan is grown!). To me feminism and anarchism are very linked. Though there are many schools of thought under both titles, some of which I vehemently disagree with I think that there are a lot of connections. These movements are complex and not monolithic but I’m most interested in the key theories and practices of both that, as Chiara Bottici points out share the objectives of contesting hierarchical power and systems of domination through transformation.

I’ve continued making perfumes since making this body of work focused on anarchist feminists. I’ve been thinking about making perfumes for people I know or making perfumes for general bodies. There are nine here associated with months and seasons. Most are made with materials from public parks which I have come to associate with motherhood, care workers, strollers etc. It’s interesting to think of mothers, nannies, kids and babies as being dominant users of public spaces. Publics are seldom defined in relationship to care.

Coincidentally one of the first “symptoms” of pregnancy that I experienced was an extremely heightened sense of smell. It felt like a super power. Fortunately most of what I noticed was wonderful – tones, I hadn’t noticed before. It was happening before I knew I was pregnant and it was really strange and a little worrying because I was experiencing it but I kind of couldn’t believe it. At the same time it was undeniable. I could smell really good things in a different way as well as nauseating things but my brain tended to gravitate to the good. I’ve been reading about the significance of smell to infants and parents in the first months of life and this is also part of the work. I think of the sniffers as noses and boob like body parts. Also the scents permeate the raw clay of the forms staining them. They are leaky containers by design.

The most cryptic piece that I have in the installation for Weighty Concerns is a name plate that says “Paula Who.” I made this for and about my mother. When she was pregnant with me, she had to leave work earlier than she had planned. She also had to have a C-Section with me, so ended up taking more time off afterward than she had intended to. When she went back to work her coworkers had replaced her name plate that had read “Paula Seesman” with one that read “Paula Who.” It was a joke about her long time away. To her it is a funny story and is about how close she and her coworkers were (and in some cases still are). To me though it’s also a joke about an undeniable truth. Having a baby poses real questions about absence, presence, identity, and priorities. This is especially true in relationship to work where females especially, are expected, to attend to anticipate and attend to the needs of the people around them. For us as mother and daughter, I think the story and the nameplate are also about acknowledging the complexity of the parent child relationship. Children shape, alter, limit and sometimes threaten parents’ identities. I wrote about the classic children’s book “Are you my mother?”  for the show. This book is a perfect example of what I mean. Mothers are subject to major restrictions in regards to their roles and identities.

You have worked in the areas of  labor rights, cooperative organizing, service industry, and education. All of these arenas have impacted your creative practice. Can we talk about how you draw from these experiences? How did they change how/what you make? How did they impact your creative ideology?

It’s difficult to describe how I draw from these experiences because I think art making is part of all of this and visa versa. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation. But I do accept that art is a different kind or category of action. I’ll acknowledge that. Making objects or images or even performing in the context of art is different than organizing, teaching, or waiting tables. It often involves a space and time set apart from these other activities. For me, though making art is about processing what goes on when I’m in these other roles or doing these other activities. I use art to think through things in a different way than I do through other forms of work but they are all connected. It may sound corny or trite but it is like play time or recess at school. The unstructuredness of it allows me to ask different questions than I do when I’m writing, or working for money, or trying to support and facilitate other people’s creative, intellectual practices.

One way that I’ve conceived of the difference before is in relationship to critical writing. This is an oversimplification but when I start out with a critical writing project, I feel like I’m performing a slicing action, like using an exacto blade to find and separate things out. This is the feeling of analysis. Writing can also feel very generative and combinatory but that usually comes later in the process. Making visual art feels more like fastening, connecting and pushing things around to see what happens. It is open and is about connection from the outset. The dominant move when I’m making is additive, generative combinative. It’s also playful and humorous. I think I am more easy going with art-making than I am with other activities. This is not always the case when I’m installing or showing my work but when I’m making I think I am less self conscious than I am with writing organizing or working. This has to do with the play idea. I often imagine scenarios and focus in on things that I wouldn’t at work or as a writer.

Are there any projects, hobbies, or activities (ex. Running, knitting, tea connoisseur, arts organizations, volunteering, etc.) outside of your artistic practice that you feel passionately about? What are they? Do you find that they feed your practice? If so how?

Well I can’t wait to ride my bike to a friends house and drink a beer when I’m able and maybe eat some potentially dangerous foods like soft raw milk cheese, sprouts, or oysters!  So maybe these are my hobbies? I also love swimming, especially in the ocean.

I suppose I bake bread and make ice cream. I’ve been making a lot of ice cream. So much that this could be considered a hobby.

Hobbies are hard. I tend to overdo things so hobbies quickly become more than that. I also have a habit of incorporate the things I love to do into my art-making so that I get to do them all the time. It’s only recently that I’m showing the works I make in clay. I suppose working in clay has been one of my hobbies. The work I make in clay overlaps with the work I that I, and others, consider my “art” – the stuff I show in galleries.

Working in clay could be defined as a hobby because I make my clay work in community studio settings and work alongside other hobbyists. I enjoy working in community art spaces. The Clay Studio and Fleisher Art Memorial are two examples. I don’t know about calling these hobby spaces exclusively because there are serious artists working in these spaces for sure. However, because people are making art for themselves and their lives and not for money, grades, or professional gain, conversations tend to be more supportive, inclusive, and open than they are in professionalized or academic spaces. It feels good to work around people who enjoy this freedom. When people feel free to make what they want or need, and to follow their instincts, I think they are freer with sharing ideas, technical knowledge and even tools and materials. This is my experience in community art spaces anyway.

In galleries, schools and private studios people tend, more often, to believe in myths like competition and scarcity so these spaces tend to feel that way and reflect that.

Anything else we should know or be on the lookout for in the near future?

Many things! But I’d be remiss to not mention Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary. This is the amazing Pew Center Funded Project out of Swarthmore College that I have had the honor and good fortune to be working on in my position as Artistic Director. Aside from my time as a Vox Populi member maybe, I’ve never worked with this many amazing and creative people on an arts-based project at once before.  Readers can check it out at http://fps.swarthmore.edu/ or follow the project @fpsbookarts on Instagram Twitter and Facebook.

I’ll also be teaching a five session seminar at Fleisher Art Memorial in February called “In a Dark Room: Video Art – History, Craft and Criticism” For anyone in Philly, come check it out. Fleisher is an amazing space. I’m so happy to be teaching there again this winter.

Finally just for fun. If you were to make a playlist today what would be your top 5 favorite songs?

Today? Hmmmm…… Definitely thinking about songs for the labor mix. Here are a few.

1.Embuwa Bey Lamitu – Hailu Mergia and Dahlak Band or Black Sabbath- Sweet Leaf
2. Arthur Russell – Wild Combination
3. Laurie Anderson – Oh Superman
4. Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady
5.Jean Knight – Carry On