Lisa Alvarado's New Installation

From my friend Lisa Alvarado, the following bit of news. Congratulations Lisa!!

Lisa Alvarado's Mexican Woman's Toolkit, Sin Fronteras is a large floral
tote bag hanging on wooden pegs, which visitors are invited to rummage
through. The bag belongs to a Mexican domestic in WWII-era Chicago: her
life is service to others, she has no privacy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markart/2414858942/

Reimagining The Distaff Toolkit

"Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit" is an exhibition of contemporary art,
each of which has, at its visible core, a tool that was important for
women's domestic labor in the past (the 18th century through World War
II). The old tool becomes the fulcrum for a work of art. Each work and the
exhibit as a whole have the power to speak to viewers independently,
Artists are placing objects such as a dressmaker’s figure, diapers,
graters, grinders, needles, pins, pots, pans, baskets,
garden-seed-packets, rakes, hoes, dress patterns, dish-rags, rolling pins,
brooms, buckets, darning eggs, knives, rug-beaters, and other tools at the
center of their work. One piece will have an early 19th century distaff at
its visible core. Part of the point of this exhibition project is to
explore the idea of "seeing as context." As I imagine the process here, I
look at a tool that facilitated very hard and repetitive labor and that
evokes women's degradation as domestic drudges. I look again, through my
early 21st century eyes, at a moment when "old tools" have become
commodified and expensive, and I see costly beauty. Reimagining the
distaff toolkit for the purposes of this exhibition might include
(overlapping) gestures in any of the following directions – or other
directions – history / memory / gender / labor / material culture /
household objects / family relations / power and powerlessness / drudgery
/ craft and beauty. Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit puts utility in
conversation with art, the past in conversation with the present.




March-May 2008 Bennington (VT) Museum
Oct-Dec 2008 The Mead Museum, Amherst College
Jan-Feb 2009 Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ
March 2009 Oklahoma State University
Sept-Dec Union College, Schnectady, NY


http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2008/04/double-double-toil-and-trouble.html

--
Lisa Alvarado, poet, novelist, literary critic

Soldaderas in the Mexican Military by Elizabeth Salas

Elizabeth Salas’ Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History is such a fascinating and useful book. I first came across it when I wanted to find out more about the Soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution. I was shocked to find that there wasn’t very much material on the subject except for brief mentions in books about the Mexican Revolution and of course songs like La Adelita. I was angry that there was so little material on a subject that I believed to be highly overlooked.

I bought the book, not expecting much after all the dead ends that I had found on this subject and was blown away by it’s detail and wealth of information.

Ms. Salas book is an excellent reference tool and an absorbing read. It sheds light on these amazing women who fought bravely for their country. Ms. Salas not only references the Mexican Revolution, she goes from pre-Conquest times and the warrior women who fought then to the Xicana activism of the 1970’s.

Soldaderas in the Mexican Military breaks the stereotype of the soldadera being a camp follower or a basket toting wife of a soldier. Sala’s tells of women who held high ranks in the military and even drew pension. She lets the reader know just how important these women were and how hard they fought. These women were spies, lieutenants, corporals and generals. They provided food, smuggled in arms and fought just as hard as any man. Viva la Mujer!