In the summer of 2010, when New York’s Ohio Theater was set to close its doors forever, I wrote an essay for The L Magazine about the cultural history of the plot of land that the Ohio had sat upon for decades. Through this discussion I opened up questions about the ways that artist-led gentrification effects neighborhoods in urban centers and the ways that contemporary city’s try to use artists as a means to an end in stimulating economic growth.
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What if you could always get what you wanted from the other person in every conversation? What if there was a systematic approach to communicating that would never leave you feeling like you had messed up, that you hadn’t said what you wanted to say? Those are the questions that led me to first write a short essay on the topic, and then later morph the ideas of that essay into a character who develops a theory to help overcome her own problems with communicating.
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The Work Office, a collaborative art project led by Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller, was soliciting work for a new iteration of their project. I applied and was accepted to participate in the group exhibition. Inspired by the Works Progress Administration, which employed artists in US during the Great Depression, the project offers Depression-era wages to artists to generate “idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York.” Each artist has only 2 weeks to produce the work, and then it is presented in an exhibition. I chose to record a sound collage and build images and text to accompany the sounds.
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Both my aunt and my grandmother attended the same secretarial college in St. Louis, MO—Miss Hickey’s School for Secretaries. After doing a little digging I discovered that not only is this school still well known among many generations of St. Louis residents, its founder Margaret Hickey has a fascinating and rich history all her own. This play was inspired by Margaret Hickey and the many generations of women who graduated from her school.
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Benjamin Franklin is a figure that most Americans and many non-Americans feel they know well. But the man we think we know as Ben Franklin is almost entirely a mythic figure—an incredibly persistent and omnipresent myth. Why do we want to believe that myth? What’s attractive about it to us as a culture, and what purpose does it serve? And what would it mean for Franklin to be portrayed as a human being instead of an idol?
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Radical politics is a serious endeavor that many people engage with for a lifetime, struggling to reach a revolutionary end point. But many people who engage with radical politics burn out quickly, or their lives change, or they can no longer sustain the lifestyle demanded by their strict beliefs. My initial relationship with this world was relatively brief, and looking back on it, I wanted to find a way to respond to it with a humorous gaze, highlighting a very small slice of the human realities of living at the fringes.
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Throughout my life I’ve been interested in the relationship between art and science. It’s come up in a lot of my work, both creative and critical. I’m currently working on a couple of projects that look for ways to align art and science, demonstrating the ability of both fields to increase human knowledge and provide solutions for society’s challenges. I’ll be posting more information here about these projects in the future.
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