Encounters

Social justice curricular encounters with Linda Stein’s art are designed to be encounters with specific works or with a series of works. Each encounter begins with processes to look at, discuss, and experience Stein’s tapestries and sculpture. The processes of encountering Stein’s art may involve making art or other sensory processes as a way to engage with Stein’s art in relation to self situated in current social, political, and environmental contexts. The processes of encountering Stein’s art provide experiences that extend from and then return to Stein’s art. The encountering processes focus on upstander identity, leadership, and social justice. The purpose is to facilitate agency, empowerment, empathy, reflection, and upstander intentions.

Curricular encounters with art are processes to examine cultural-historical roots of social and environmental degradation, and to motivate upstander actions in (re)making community. Several encounters investigate visual culture as a means of communicating and perpetuating cultural values. Encounters explore the ways in which visual culture affects perceptions of self and the world, and constructs power and privilege. The encounters are processes to analyze media, advertisements, photographs, alternative media, objects, spaces, places, signs and codes as sources of power, as well as to de/en/re/code dominate cultural narratives.

Underlying all encounters is teaching towards understanding the value of diversity (e.g., culture, ethnicity, religion, race, gender, sexuality, and ability) and understanding that everyone is responsible for the well being of others. The following are ways to encounter Linda Stein’s art as catalysts toward social justice education.

Blades

During an interview with Elie Wiesel, he was asked: “What do you think is the real purpose for us being on this planet?” His answer: “ You are here because you have to fight certain battles....” Pondering the phrase “to fight certain battles” I think of my art and why, over the last decade (mostly in the 1990s), I have been using the Machete Blade as metaphor and symbol.

There are many personal reasons, but the cultural ones keep attracting my attention. The violence that we see daily on our own “civilized” soil (most recently the Amadou Diallo murder, the Columbine massacre, the stock trader Mark O. Barton’s shooting rampage in Atlanta) presses on our individual psyches and presents a conundrum with no easy solution. I find that as an artist, I must give form to this puzzle.

In my battle with the Machete Blade, I confront its hard, cold, sharp steel and dull it, curve it, bend it to my will. I demand that it become accessible, intimate, knowable. My artistic process is arduous but I am determined: I tame the Blade. I make it harmless. I control it. I deprive it of its destructive potential and turn it into something soft and pliable, residing in a tactile, even playful environment.

I see the Machete Blade as an icon for our age of aggression. Ignore it at our peril. Instead of being repelled by it and denying its presence, we must address it: politically, socially, economically and, yes, artistically.

By incorporating the Blade into art, I give visual voice to its symbolic threat in our daily lives. By accepting it into a sculptural world of metal, bone, wood, stone and fiber, I deconstruct my own fears, and potentially those of my viewer, and psychically address the intensity of violence in our times.

And, mysteriously, on a psychic level deep within, my battle with Blade gives me strength and hope for a less violent future.

––Linda Stein, 2003

 

Click here to see the art in this series

Profiles (Below the Eyes)

In the 1970s when an androgynous facial profile (starting below the eyes) became my passion, I would see this profile everywhere: in contours of trees, clouds, buildings, landscapes and beyond.

In my art, I could not stop creating this profile in every media, on every surface imaginable, with every art tool available to me.

These myriad experiments formed different categories for my series called Profiles which you can see here.

What prompted this investigation? Why below the eyes? Did I not want to be seen? My struggle at this time (I was in my late 20s) was with my sexuality and my womanhood.

© Linda Stein, 2019

ENCOUNTERS with Profiles

Vulnerability

View Stein's Profile series, and start a sketchbook in which you draw an image about something that has impacted how you perceive yourself. Identify elements in the drawing that become your rules or criteria for redrawing the image. Redraw the image many times, in different styles and media. Reflect on how your series of drawings make you feel in looking at them together. Return to looking at Stein's series and watching the videos in which Linda Stein discusses her Profile (Below the Eyes) series.

Extinguish Gaslighting

Gaslighting is an abusive process of psychological manipulating a person into doubting self-worth, sensory knowing, and perceptions (Jackson, 2011). Once aware of gaslighting, you can extinguish its harmful psychological impact, although it is much more difficult to change the gaslighter. Artists, such as Linda Stein, in her sexism series, help us recognize gaslighting. Once recognized there are steps to extinguish. Begin by looking for gaslighting phrases in the tapestries of Stein’s sexism series.

Since the 1944 film Gas Light, based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, the term and awareness of gaslighting entered popular culture (Tripney, 2019), such as the Dixie Chicks’s 2020 song “Gaslighter.” While the phrase gaslighting is not always used, once you know how to recognize gaslighting you will see how it is used in tweets that belittle, and explored in films and literature, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 long-standing popular short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

References

Dixie Chicks (2020). Gaslighter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbVPcPL30xc

Jackson, T. A. (2011). Which interests are served by the principle of interest convergence? Whiteness, collective trauma, and the case for anti-racism. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(4), 435–459.

Perkins Gilman, C. (1892). The yellow wallpaper. The New England Magazine. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

Tripney, N. (2019, October 8). Gaslight: the return of the play that defined toxic masculinity. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/08/victorian-melodrama-gaslight-love-island-psychological-abuse-patrick-hamilton-play-buzzword

Tango

Tango is “an exchange of movement and touch, about a transnational negotiation of desire, of gender roles and communication” (Manning, 2006, p. x). As Horacio Ferrer writes, “before being an artistic expression, before tango came to light as such . . . tango was a certain attitude, a way of life adopted by those of diverse cultures” (1995, p. 11). Linda Stein asks: “In dancing tango does a women give and a man get?” Watch the 9-minute video of Stein discussing her tapestry in the sexism series titled “Loreen Arbus Says Tango is Egalitarian 974.”

“The history of the tango is a story of encounters between those who should never have met or between those who, having met, will remain forever disencountered … This political moment of (dis)encounter is initiated through an embrace that rarely lasts beyond the duration of the tango itself. This encounter, relentless and short-lived, proposes a violation of critical distances, inviting at once intimacy, tension, and conflict.” (Savigliano, 1995, p. xv).

“Tango is everything from a dance of solitudes to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a fierce locator of national identity. It is a dance of encounter and disencounter, a voyeuristic embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of (mis)understood directions. …

Tango as I encounter it is a peripheral engagement with the world that introduces us to a different way of living with an other. It is a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters. It is a dance that turns us toward an other to whom we might otherwise not speak. …

A product of cultural exchange, tango has never ceased to transform itself through contact with new cultures. …

Tango is the dance of the impromptu rethinking of the politics of communication.” (Manning, 2006, pp. x).

References

Ferrer, H. (1995).

Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota.

Savigliano, (1995).

Data Visualization Art

Zoom in on Linda Stein’s tapestry in the Sexism series titled, November 6, 2015, New York Times 865

What is the data? How is it presented in the tapestry? What is conveyed? When you look at the art section of the NYTimes, do you find artists promoted who share similar life experiences to you? What genders can you guess (from the names of the artists) in these ads? What do you think is conveyed by the artist’s captions and text in the tapestry?

Data visualization art, documentation, methodology, and activism protect individuals from harassment while producing evidence of the massive scale of a problem such as is revealed in the hashtag movements of TimesUp, and MeToo, and the collection of signatures such as with the Not Surprised letter. Feminist theories and practices that have moved away from monolithic notions of women, engage difference by focusing on context-specific positionings of women in relation to other identities. Digital dust (Bernardi, 2018), webscraping, and reverse-engineer strategies can be used to gather data about issues important to you. 

Discuss feminist data visualization art, strategies, manifestos and movements, which could include: glitch feminism manifesto, First Cyberfeminist International manifesto, Post-Cyber Feminist International, feminist data visualization (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2016, 2018; Gallagher, 2017) strategies such as mapping (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010), One Billion Rising, Technofeminism, and FemTechNet.

Return to study of Linda Stein’s tapestry in the Sexism series titled, November 6, 2015, New York Times 865 and discuss this work as feminist data visualization art.

Create an artwork that uses data visualization strategies to bring awareness to sexism. Refer to strategies, resources, and examples at http://cyberhouse.emitto.net/dataViz/.

References

Alexander, J. M., & Mohanty, C. T. (2010). Cartographies of knowledge and power: Transnational feminism as radical praxis. In A. L. Swarr & R. Nagar (Eds.), Critical transnational feminist praxis (pp. 23-45). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bernardi, C. (2018). Digital dust and visual narratives of feminicidios. Visual Culture & Gender, 13, 6-16.

D’Ignazio, C. (a.k.a. kanarinka), & Klein, L. F. (2016). Feminist data visualization.

Friesinger, G., & Herwig, J. (Eds.). (2012). The art of reverse engineering: Open-Dissect-Rebuild. Vienna, Austria.

Gallagher, E. (2017). Data visualization of #MeToo tweets — October 16 to October 18, 2017

Walsh, C. (2020). MeToo founder discusses where do we go from here. The Harvard Gazette.

Sexism

Sexism: Exploring, Exploding, Expanding Expressions of Masculinities and Femininities

Sexism, the stereotyping and discrimination based on gender, is confronted in Linda Stein’s series SEXISM. Stories of women being told to put their legs together, to take up less space, and their defiant response to such narrow inscriptions of femininity are the content for the video and tapestry, Legs Together and Apart. 925 (2018). The top image on this page, titled “Gloria Steinem 1037,” is a tapestry created by Linda Stein in 2020, which is 64″x72″x3″.

Click here to see the art in this series

(en)COUNTERS with SEXISM

Tango

Tango is “an exchange of movement and touch, about a transnational negotiation of desire, of gender roles and communication” (Manning, 2006, p. x). As Horacio Ferrer writes, “before being an artistic expression, before tango came to light as such . . . tango was a certain attitude, a way of life adopted by those of diverse cultures” (1995, p. 11). Linda Stein asks: “In dancing tango does a women give and a man get?” Watch the 9-minute video of Stein discussing her tapestry in the sexism series titled “Loreen Arbus Says Tango is Egalitarian 974.”

Extinguish Gaslighting

Gaslighting is an abusive process of psychological manipulating a person into doubting self-worth, sensory knowing, and perceptions (Jackson, 2011). Once aware of gaslighting, you can extinguish its harmful psychological impact, although it is much more difficult to change the gaslighter. Artists, such as Linda Stein, in her sexism series, help us recognize gaslighting. Once recognized there are steps to extinguish. Begin by looking for gaslighting phrases in the tapestries of Stein’s sexism series.

Data Visualization Art

Zoom in on Linda Stein’s tapestry in the Sexism series titled, November 6, 2015, New York Times 865

What is the data? How is it presented in the tapestry? What is conveyed? When you look at the art section of the NYTimes, do you find artists promoted who share similar life experiences to you?

Data visualization art, documentation, methodology, and activism protect individuals from harassment while producing evidence of the massive scale of a problem such as is revealed in the hashtag movements of TimesUp, and MeToo, and the collection of signatures such as with the Not Surprised letter. Feminist theories and practices that have moved away from monolithic notions of women, engage difference by focusing on context-specific positionings of women in relation to other identities. Digital dust (Bernardi, 2018), webscraping, and reverse-engineer strategies can be used to gather data about issues important to you. 

Legs Apart

View the video Legs Together and Apart 925 Interview. Consider what gender expectations you have experienced. Draw or paint about your memory of gender expectations and how you navigated the expectations that seemed restrictive to your identity. Then look closely at Legs Together and Apart 925 and discuss the work in relation to how gender expectations are perpetuated and challenged.

Cosmetics

content

Double Standards

Gender is indeed complicated. It also is beautiful and inherently fluid. The ability to express gender identity, free from oppressive double standards imposed by unfair “rules” or “principles” on certain people, is paramount to thriving in a democracy. Double standards, or unjust application of different sets of principles for similar situations are seen, for example, in unfair expectations of behaviors deemed acceptable for men but not for women. Unequal treatment often results from biases, leading to unfair judgments, discrimination, and sexism. Justification for the double standard is missing, and when justification is provided, it is typically inappropriate. What does it mean to experience a “double standard,” especially a gendered one? This lesson deconstructs double standards students may have been a victim of or witnessed in their experience through open and honest conversation and artmaking in a safe space.