Roz Hunter, Kate Wadkins, Sarah Hanks, and Lauren Denitzio host a panel that discusses their work in New York-based “For the Birds,” a feminist social justice group and arts-based collective. Through For the Birds, they have curated art and music shows, promoted community networking, and disseminated feminist information; this paper thus discusses the ways that gender informs their curatorial practice and their understanding of “safer spaces.” As feminists, they have looked to both the theorists and activists before them to guide their feminist praxis, and they hope this panel will be part of a larger, round-table discussion.

They will present at 4:30pm on Saturday March 3rd, 2012 in Heimbold Visual Arts Center.

Re/visionist asked a few questions of Jamie Agnello, an MFA candidate in both SLC’s Theatre and Poetry programs, and Greta Minsky, her co-director, a professor in the Theatre program and MA candidate in the Women’s History program.

R/V: Tell us about your project.

J & G: MIXED RELIEF will be a glimpse of some great women writers, directors, and actors. You might pick up a few survival tips. The reading features the work of Jamie Agnello, Nehprii Amenii, Naché Buie, Karen Cellini, Jesse Freedman, Daniel Glenn, Dave McRee, Cassandra Medley, Greta Minsky, Roxy MtJoy, Erica Newhouse, Kat Norcutt, Julianna Rusakiewicz, Fanchon Scheier, and Pamela Sneed.

R/V: The title of the 2012 Women’s History Conference is Women, the Arts, and Activism. In what ways does the play shed light on these themes?

J & G: Women in the arts are still scrounging.  MIXED RELIEF explores the struggles that women faced in the 1930s and still face today.

R/V: How did you stumble upon this play, and what inspired you to co-direct a reading of it?

J & G: Pure chance.  While looking for material that spoke to the ongoing challenges that women art workers face, we found this play written for SWAN (Support Women Artists Now) Day.

R/V: Each of you are scholars of the theatre. In your views, what is the importance of theatre for improving and empowering women’s lives today?

J & G: We think women artists should heed the advice of Jackie “Moms” Mabley when facing the future: “Duck!”

This reading of MIXED RELIEF is on Saturday, March 3 at 2:45 in the Donnelley Theatre in Heimbold Visual Arts Center.

Andrea J. M. Harms was the graduate assistant to director of Women’s Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 2009-2011. This experience greatly influenced her research on 19th century British and American women’s literature. She is currently working on her dissertation titled, “Answering the Woman Question: Domestic Professionalism of Women Writers and Women Painters in 19th Century American and British Women’s Literature.”

In this paper, Harms investigates novels in which the protagonists pursue and often receive pecuniary recompense for professionalizing the “feminine accomplishment” of painting. By creating characters of women painters who undermine the proscribed role of the domestic sphere, women authors are representing how the domestic sphere may be used as a place for work that can be financially rewarding for non-painters as well. The protagonists from these novels are mostly middle-class women, however, because work must begin with capital. Harms therefore also touches on the class limitations that prevent all women from pursuing the same means of autonomy through domestic professionalism.

Andrea J.M. Harms presents at 4:30 pm on Saturday March 3rd, 2012 in Heimbold Visual Arts Center.

In this presentation, Kristin Moriah analyzes the contributions of 19th-century African-American women performers in domestic and international contexts through teh reading of plays, novels, performance reviews, and journalistic accounts of the reception of their performances. Her study also considers representations of black women found on sheet music, playbills, and broadsides. These documents illuminate the cultural context from which early African-American women’s stage performaces emerged and the prejudices they sought to overcome. The complexiities surrounding their performances are manifold; Moriah argues that they reflect a deep understanding of the transgressive social and political uses of black femininity and were thus instrumental to the formation of a post-slavery black identity in 19th-century America. These women’s performances were always political. However, the stage-work of women like Elizabeth Greenfield, Sissieretta Jones, Pauline Hopkins, Mary Webb, and Ida B. Wells pointedly undermined mainstream representations and notions of black womanhood and became powerful weapons in the war against institutionalized racism and racial violence, like lynching. In the words of Koritha Mitchell, 19th-century African-American women performers embodied practices of black belonging.

Kristin Moriah presents at 2:45pm on Saturday March 3rd, 2012 in Heimbold Visual Arts Center.

Lampert’s paper explores the connection between female celebrity around the dramatic stage, the project of great woman biography, and mid-19th-century feminism. It uses Anna Mowatt’s Autiobiography of an Actress as an entry into a key historical moment in which American actresses experienmented with new forms of femininity on stage while simultaneously transforming and expanding the scope of female celebrity. Lampert argues that this expansion of female celebrity did important, if at times ambivalent, cultural and political work within the context of women’s rights and an expanding cultural feminism. Male female celebrities of the 1850s liek Anna Mowatt and Jenny Lind epitomized a sentimental femininity that can be seen as a backlash against the “gender trouble” of women’s rights and dress reform. And yet, as Lampert also argues, the range of public roles that actresses like Mowatt played onstage and offstage participated in a proliferation of images of female cultural and literary achievement and economic autonomy. The emerging image of the actress as heroine contributed to a broader interrogation of the relationship between women as prominent public figures and the advancement of women socially and politically that must be understood in dialogue with political movements for suffrage and growing calls for expansion of women’s economic rights and autonomy.

Sara Lampert presents at 1:00pm on Saturday March 3rd, 2012 in Heimbold Visual Arts Center.