Category Archives: Art

May 15, 2013 · 4:01 am

Lady Art

I’ve noticed a pattern. Now that I’ve noticed I can’t unnotice it, so I might as well embrace it. I like to buy art when I travel because it feels more substantial than jewelry (which I’ll lose), coffee (which I’ll drink), trinkets (which I have no use for and will eventually toss the next time I move), and clothing (which I will probably stain/shrink/rip).

Here’s my new wall hanging from Cusco:

IMG_2910You see this image everywhere in Cusco, the backs of female heads. Sometimes it’s more literal as they sit in a circle, the goings on of which we are not privy to, sometimes it’s more abstract, like my pattern. They’re backs are to us, because what they’re doing is not for us, the viewer, the outsider; it’s for themselves. They call it “la chismosa,” which means “the gossiping.” I loved it immediately.

So I bring this thing home and start looking for a place to hang it, and that’s when I notice this…

IMG_2909And this

IMG_2908And this

IMG_2907And this

IMG_2906The vast, vast majority of my art is depictions of women. I’m fascinated by the ways that different cultures and communities and artists choose to represent them (One of the many reason I use the Rosie icon for this blog). Have you ever seen that stat about how much of the art in major museums is by women (very little), how much of it is of women (a bit more) and how many of the naked people are ladies (a whopping 85%).

Not all of my art is created by women (though much of it is), but the common thread (if you can find one besides gender of the subjects) is that I like images of women that push back on the idea that they are objects against which someone else can project intent (lust, desire, protection, etc). La Chismosa is amazing because it’s such a desexualized (without being ungendered) way to portray women as having relationships completely separate from their interaction with men.

The flapper, the “garden buddha,” the image of Radha and Krishna (bought in Chennai, India), there’s a self-contained agency about these women. They are not waiting for the actions or reactions of anyone else. I didn’t pick them for that reason on purpose, but when they’re all lined up, it seems so obvious.

Now that I’ve noticed it, I should probably stick with the trend, don’t you think? Where to next, and what should I bring back?

Related Post: The bent over cartoon character that ruined my Sunday

Related Post: Art for your Saturday night

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April 29, 2013 · 5:45 pm

So What Do You Do Exactly? Hair Model Edition

grace hair 1When I was a kid my favorite part of getting my hair cut was paging through those big coffee table books of crazy hairstyles. Remember when those tiny rubberbanded twists were all the rage? I always wondered, who are these people that waltz around rocking these edgy bowl cuts or mint-green stripes? Welp, turns out, I know one of them! This is Grace, and for the latest edition of my jobs series, So What Do You Do Exactly?, she will tell us a little about being a hair model.

What’s your actual job title? This isn’t so much a real job as an adult “extracurricular activity” [ed. note: Grace has a "real" job too], but when get hired for things I am either a “demo model” or a “presentation model”.  I mostly fall in to the category of “creative cut and color”, which tends to mean asymmetrical or severe looking cuts and colors not commonly or naturally found in human hair.

What would your title be if it described what you actually do? I work on event-based contract for a major salon brand as a hair “demo model.” That means I get my hair cut and colored by creative directors of different salons (basically, the top stylists and colorists, who set the tone for the styles that are “in”).

I think the most accurate descriptor would probably be “living doll”– my head and hair tend to be an experiment ground for whichever instructor is playing around with it that day. They know I’m quite open so I’ve wound up with pretty much every hair cut or color you can imagine. For public events that aren’t just in the salon, there is a makeup artist and wardrobe situation going on too.

grace hair 6How on earth did you get into this line of work? Very simply: I got my hair cut one day, and one thing led to another! A friend in college turned me on to this website where you could sign up to get a free haircut from an “apprentice” at a salon who was auditioning to be a full stylist, and one day I went to quite a fancy salon for my free haircut and the head stylist asked me if I’d modeled before, and asked me back to model for an in-salon training they were going to be having.
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From there, I wound up doing a photo shoot with the same salon (You know those big pictures of people’s heads and faces up in a lot of salons? I’m one of them!) and some work as a color model for another salon. This was back in 2010 and I’ve been working for them regularly ever since. As I understand it, I am desirable as a hair model because I amiable and willing to pull off very creative work– I have very thick, dark hair that grows in stick-straight, takes color well, and I like to keep my hair short. I can pretty easily wear the kinds of haircuts people want to see as an example of creative work but don’t want to wear themselves– super angular or asymmetrical looks and “circus colors” for the most part.
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grace hair 4How many different haircuts have you had? Best? Worst?
I honestly can’t say how many different cuts I’ve had– in fact I’m pretty much sure I’ve only had the same haircut twice since I’ve started (this December and January actually, when a stylist I was modeling for was getting really in to classic cuts “invented” by Vidal Sassoon, and I had the right hair type to show one, the five-point cut.)
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I think my favorite was a few days before I graduated from college– I did a show where the stylist asked me what my school color was (maroon!) and what color the gown was (black!) and gave me these amazing angular bangs that were dyed maroon and intentionally super awesome peeking out from under a graduation hat.
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The good thing is there’s really no such thing as a bad haircut because the haircut I get on stage will often be completely different than the one I go home with– they let me know when they’re illustrating techniques that aren’t “wearable” (say, chin-length wispy sideburns or bangs that cover the eyes) and are totally not offended if I ask them to change the cut or adjust the color afterwards.
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grace hair 3Do you get to go to hair shows like the ones Chris Rock featured in Good Hair?  I’ve actually never seen Good Hair! But, I do a show every year called America’s Beauty Show at the Chicago convention center that is huge and really over the top, where lots of different salons and brands from all over the US show their work. The group I work for tends to be one of the classier ones there– cut and color with makeup and wardrobe, but no wigs, extensions, etc– but you will see girls (and guys) working for other groups with big hair, huge added-in hairpieces, body paint, etc. Shows are actually the best, though, because you get paid the most for doing them– depending on the number of days you work it can be in the high hundreds of dollars.
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Sidenote on the money thing since I know I would wonder if I were the one reading this: There is money in doing this, but it’s not a living wage. Sometimes you’re just getting the free haircut (which if you had to pay for it, would be a $200-300 experience, so that’s nice by itself), but for more public events you do get paid a base rate per day or per event; I used my modeling money to pay for my books while I was in school, so it was useful income but not life-sustaining.
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grace hair 5What would we be surprised to know about the hair modeling industry? Most people who do hair modeling are not who you’d be looking at on the street thinking, “Wow, that girl must be a model.” Hair modeling tends to be a lot more forgiving in terms of height and body shape/size; I’m only about 5’6″ and I eat food regularly and with much gusto.
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You do need to be able to walk in heels comfortably, but the “model walk” that’s actually desirable is not so much a strut and hip-swag as an “I am comfortable walking in heels and can go in a straight line”. While I’ve seen a lot of the traditional super tall skinny model-type at hair shows working for other companies, the group I work for especially tends to just pull people that have the look they’re going for when they come in for hair cuts (like I did) or by standing outside of art schools.
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Related Post: So What Do You Do Exactly? Tween Lit Edition
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Related Post: So What Do You Do Exactly? T-Shirt Edition

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· 2:01 am

Sunday Scraps 101

sun101

1. COLBERT: Did you hear Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s song “Accidental Racist?” More importantly, have you seen Colbert’s rebuttal, “Oopsy Daisy Homophobe?”

2. DOLLS: Man, I still remember Kirsten and the cholera epidemic. Apparently, the American Girls focus is a little different these days (The Atlantic). 

3. MUSIC: Insanely talented tween duo Lennon and Maisy cover The Lumineers on Nashville and it is oh so good.

4. GENDER: Sociological Images has a collection of photos of girls and boys surrounded by their pink and blue crap, respectively.

5. PREZ: The President at the White House Correspondants Dinner. My highlight = the joke about Michelle’s bangs.

6. LEAN: Man, this letter from a mom to her 8-year-old daughter just about breaks my heart. The girl asked her mother whether she loved work more than her kids and her mother responds pitch perfectly.

Related Post: Sunday 100 – Huma and Anthony, SCOTUS, Shulasmith, and more

Related Post: Sunday 99 – Cat politicians, Tavi, Rolling Rock, and Nick + Megan forever

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April 23, 2013 · 8:19 pm

Street Art in San Juan

Thanks to lightning storms in Chicago, my already brief trip to Puerto Rico became even briefer. In a grand total of 60 hours, I ate a lot of fried delicious things, swam with bioluminescent plankton, hiked to a secluded waterfall, did yoga on the walls of the forts of Old San Juan, imbibed a lot of tinto verano, sun bathed, salsa danced, heard live music and an applauded extremely talented 7-year-old dancer, ate fresh mangoes, and drank a lot of cafe con leche. Oh, and I saw a lot of amazing street art:

IMG_2810 IMG_2811 IMG_2815 IMG_2816 IMG_2820 IMG_2821 IMG_2822 IMG_2824 IMG_2958 IMG_2960 IMG_2961 IMG_3057 IMG_3063Related Post: That time I wrote for Women’s Adventure Magazine

Related Post: Pretty things in Costa Rica

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April 1, 2013 · 2:47 am

Sunday Scraps 99

sunday99

1. TAVI: 16-year-olds have no right to be so cool and self-assured. This kid says everything I figured out ten years later about media, feminism, stereotypes, yada yada yada.

2. HEALTH: This American Life is on a roll. Killer piece about the huge upward trend in Americans filing for disability. Why? When? How did this happen? Better question, what do we do it about?

3. ADVERTISING: Sociological Images uses the interesting case of Rolling Rock beer to discuss the appropriation of working class iconography by upper class cohorts for the purposes of “seeming real.”

4. ROMANCE: Nick Offerman + Megan Mullally = Forever. THEY ARE THE BEST, and lucky us, NYMag compiled a history of their love.

5. POLITICS: Just for kicks, cats that look like politicians. Or politicians that look like cats?

6. LGBTQ: Really thought-provoking essay for BuzzFeed about the importance of gay porn, by gay porn performer Connor Habib.

Related Post: Sunday 98 - Marriage in China, mean girls, George Saunders and his editor, etc.

Related Post: Sunday 97 – Writing with a gender neutral name, Cindy Gallop, Anita Sarkeesian, etc.

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March 26, 2013 · 9:15 pm

Update on the Re-education Project

The view from the Sixth Floor Museum, in Dallas. See those green signs? That's about where Kennedy's car was when he was shot.

The view from the Sixth Floor Museum, in Dallas. See those green signs? That’s about where Kennedy’s car was when he was shot.

Apologies for the radio silence, mi amors. I’ve been in Texas complaining about the weather (I was cheated out of my 75 and sunny!), eating, and weeping at the Sixth Floor Museum (in the building from which Kennedy was shot).

You guys are seriously the best. Last week, I put out the call for movie/TV suggestions to help launch my “re-education project”  in which I try to round out my knowledge of historical on-screen portrayals of the ladies. The suggestions were fantastic and I’m just about ready to quit my job and sit in front of netflix all day. Later this week, I’ll list out all of the suggestions in case you want to undertake your own watch-a-thon.

Let’s talk about Waitress. This wasn’t even supposed to be an official part of the project; I had it filed away in my head as cutesy romance about a pregnant pie maker and her OB. Wow was I wrong. I mean, I’m not entirely wrong, that is what it’s about, but it’s about so much more! This is a feminist movie. About pie. And pregnancy. And romance. This proves, once again, that feminism is not about shitting on pies or babies, but is instead about thinking critically about what choices we afford people, what assumptions we make, and how gendered expectations can limit opportunity.

Waitress, if you don’t know, was a film written and directed by Adrienne Shelly (who was murdered in 2006), about a small-town diner waitress, Jenna, stuck in an abusive marriage. It could have been a heavy-handed film about domestic violence, capital D, capital V. Instead, it’s a sweet, silly, beautiful movie that also happens to capture some truths about domestic abuse that we are all very good at ignoring.

I happened to spend my Texas weekend with a friend who is a domestic violence counselor and she agreed that Waitress, through it’s humor and likability, is able to get at some of the insidious, less acknowledged components of abusive relationships. So many people say to her, why don’t these women just leave? Money is often the culprit, as it is with Jenna, who addresses “how lonely it is to be so poor and so afraid.”

waitressHer husband, Earl, is also not the caricature of an abuser we often see. He is not outright mean and aggressive, but controls Jenna through manipulation and subtle threats. He keeps her money so she won’t have other options. He undermines her confidence with casual insults. He tells her exactly what to say, and how to say it, forcing her to repeat to him the words he wants to hear. He also cries against her pregnant belly. He is weak and insecure, and he hides his insecurity behind faux swagger. He says things like:

“After everything I’ve done for you…”

“I provide for you. I put the clothes on your back, the roof over your head.”

“You’re the only thing I’ve ever loved.”

“You belong to me.”

“Ask me how was my day. Ask me like you mean it.”

Not all abuse looks like a black eye. Waitress also acknowledges the extremely precarious position Jenna’s pregnancy forces her into. Take Jenna’s observation about her unborn baby:

It’s an alien and a parasite. It makes me tired and weak. It complicates my whole life. I resent it. I don’t know how to take care of it.

It’s frank, it’s candid. She later says to her friend, “Not everybody wants to be a mama, Dawn, that doesn’t make me a bad person.” These are poor women. They are uneducated women. They are diner waitresses who expect to be diner waitresses forever, because there are no other choices. The ending of the movie (Spoiler Alert) also reinforces how trapped they are. Jenna is given a whopping financial gift from a dying customer and is able to rescue herself and her baby from her situation. It’s a fairytale, but through the transparent rosy glow of Jenna’s happy ending, it’s all the more evident how few happy endings real women in her position would have.

So yeah, it’s a movie about pie. There are lots of pastel colors, and Cheryl Hines cracking jokes, and Nathan Fillion looking dashing. But really, it’s a movie about what happens when you’re trapped and how hard we’ve made it to rescue yourself.

Related Post: Another great feminist movie, For a Good Time Call…

Related Post: Beasts of the Southern Wild

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March 10, 2013 · 10:21 pm

Sunday Scraps 97

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1. GENDER: Remember when Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency got seriously harassed by the internet? The fruits of her labor are now available in the form of part 1 of her exploration of gender in video games.

2. RACE: W. Ralph Eubanks at the American Scholar explores what happens to conceptions of race when DNA tests prove your origins diverge from your sense of self.

3. PORN: Here’s a profile of porn entrepreneur Cindy Gallop (of Make Love Not Porn) from Vice. I think there’s a reason we don’t watch regular people have sex, but I wish her all the luck in the world if she can change some of the most offensive porn norms.

4. PUNDITS: Ta-Nehisi Coates invariably blows me away with everything he writes. The New York Observer tracks Coates’ rise to intellectual stardom.

5. PRETTY: Smithsonian Magazine’s best photos of 2012.

6. NAMES: Nico Lang writes for Thought Catalog about what happens when his readers can’t tell whether he’s male or female and how that changes their reactions to his pieces. I wish I had written this, but Emily is kind of an obvious name….

Related Post: Sunday 96 – Harper High School, Philip Roth, duct tape art

Related Post: Sunday 95 – Girls in the NFL, Seth McFarlane, Orson Scott Card

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March 8, 2013 · 10:24 pm

A Lazy Post About International Women’s Day

I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do on International Women’s Day that I don’t do everyday. Think about how awesome it is to be a lady? Check. Think about how the rest of the world still treats ladies like shit? Check. Think about how here in the U.S. we still treat ladies like shit? Check. Think about the kind of world I want my hypothetical children to grow up in and how much work we have to do to get from here to there? Check. Sigh.

I don’t really feel like celebrating or writing; the very existence of International Women’s Day kind of makes me sad. Really? We’re still stuck at this point? We still need this? It just seems to make it so obvious that the other 364 days are International Men’s Days. I suppose it’s worth calling attention to that inequality, of course, it just makes me feel tired.

So, in honor of this holiday that I wish weren’t a holiday, here is a collection of things that I like, find powerful, find moving, find tragic. Creating art about “the female experience” (more accurately, about the range of female experiences) is one of the many tools we have at our disposal to tell our stories and remind everyone just what a long way we have to go.

  • An illustrated account of the attempted murder and miraculous recovery of 15-year-old Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai (by artist Gavin Aung Than).

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streetart

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/51920265″>”You Don’t Own Me” PSA</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user14231652″>You Don't Own Me</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Feminist

Is there any art or writing that you want to share this International Women’s Day? Anything that rings familiar, makes you proud, feels enlightening? Post in the comments!

Related Post: Happy Equal Pay Day

Related Post: 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

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March 3, 2013 · 11:39 pm

Sunday Scraps 96

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1. ART: This Colossal photo series of art by Takahiro Iwasaki is called called Topographical Maps Carved from Electrical Tape. I think that about covers it.

2. DATING: Jory John’s take on Nate Silver’s take on the statistical realities of your relationship (from McSweeney’s). 

3. FAMILY: If you don’t cry, you have a heart of stone. Twelve years ago, a young gay couple found a baby on a subway platform.

4. GENDER: The always excellent Amanda Marcotte for Slate writes about Philip Roth’s relationship with women. Wanting to fuck them is not the same thing as respecting them.

5. PLAYBOY: Fun little personal essay from Lynn Levin on meeting her father at the original Chicago Playboy mansion in the early 70s.

6. EDUCATION: Part 2 of This American Life’s series on Chicago’s Harper High School.

Related Post: Sunday 95: Seth McFarlane, missed connections, Leslie Knope’s wedding dress

Related Post: Sunday 94: Connie Britton, Queen Bey, Jane Austen

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February 19, 2013 · 5:16 am

Rosie in the News: Alfred T. Palmer Edition

I can’t figure out why these photographs are suddenly showing up in my internet lap this week, but I’m not mad they’re here. Alfred T. Palmer was a photographer most famous for his WWII portraits, including these fabulous color prints of Rosies riveting:

Rosie1

Rosie 2

Rosie 3

Rosie 4

Related Post: The whole Rosie in the News archive

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