Work by Women on the Rise! Collective members Susan Lee-Chun, Nereida García Ferráz, and GisMo (Jessica Gispert and Crystal Pearl Molinary) was featured in the award-winning exhibition project Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by MacArthur Fellow Nicole Fleetwood at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in New York. Their projects responded to experiences engaging with girls in juvenile detention in Miami through Women on the Rise!.
In 2004, I founded the feminist community arts project Women on the Rise! (WOTR) at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami, Florida. I developed WOTR in response to learning about the increasing number of girls committed to the juvenile justice system in Florida in the early 2000s. When I researched the kind of educational opportunities available to them while incarcerated, I found that none of their classes provided a space for creative release in the midst of what was a profoundly disorienting and distressing experience. I learned that the girls were regularly subject to various forms of dubiously effective, and at times violating, state-supported group and individual counseling. When not in those spaces, the girls were either in remedial education sessions in dismal classrooms or forced to entertain themselves in the cellblock with random collections of old DVD movies and books.
With that knowledge, I designed WOTR as an intergenerational feminist art praxis, rather than a form of art therapy, self-work, or carceral reform. The goal of this praxis was to generate a place for girls of color, both in detention and at other community sites, to engage in self- expression and critical dialogue, practices that they were either socially and institutionally excluded from (being artists) or believed incapable of (being theorists). WOTR workshops were conducted off-site from the museum in the spaces of collaborating non-profit, government, and educational organizations that work with girls (ages 10-18) and young women (ages 18-25). The project consisted of workshops that introduced participants to the work of feminist, anti-racist, and queer artists. These workshops, which were free of charge, culminated in the production of artworks by participants in a range of media that were inspired by and responded to the particular practice of the featured artists. For example: girls created and documented silhouette forms they forged in nature with their bodies for the workshop on Ana Mendieta’s Silueta pieces of the 1970s; they captured images in their schools and neighborhoods through gilded frames when they learned about Lorainne O’Grady’s Art Is (1983) project; and they composed performative instruction writings such as those found in Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964). Bedazzled photo-collage self-portraits are made when WOTR covers Mickalene Thomas, and participants fashion elaborate headdresses for iconic women of color in the project based on Firelei Baez’s work.
teaching Artists
WOTR workshops were collaboratively led and developed by local women artists such as Anya Wallace, Crystal Pearl Molinary, Nereida Garcia-Ferraz, Guadalupe Figueras, Fabienne Rousseau, Isabel Moros, Ali Prosch, Dinorah De Jesus Rodriguez, Monica Lopez de Victoria, Susan Lee Chun, myself, and many others. Teaching artists also conducted workshops based on their own work, and WOTR organized trips for participants to visit artists’ studios and exhibitions around Miami. This pedagogy fostered creative intergenerational and trans-racial relationships and genealogies between working-class Black and Latina young women and the artists who teach and are taught in WOTR.
Girls Summit
The Girls Summit is a program I launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2012 in order to bridge the gap between the scholarship on girls being produced in the academy and the girl-centered praxis being developed by teachers, youth educators, and artists in South Florida. The aim of the program was to facilitate dialogues that would productively expand the work and approaches conducted in both contexts. The Girls Summit presented some programming intended for girls, but it was geared overall as an educational and networking project for scholars and professionals who center girls of color in their work.
Lesson plans from WOTR! are available for download through The Feminist Art Project.
WOTR! logo design by Andrea Bowers