The ACLU and You

I received the following by email this morning...

"Christmas card idea

What a clever idea!
Yes, Christmas cards. This is coming early so that you can get ready to include an important address to your list..

Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD this year.

As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN card to brighten up their dark, sad, little world..

Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.

Here's the address, just don't be rude or crude. (It's not the Christian way, you know.)
ACLU
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York , NY 10004

Two tons of Christmas cards would freeze their operations because they wouldn't know if any were regular mail containing contributions. So spend 44 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone. Also tell them that there is no such thing as a " Holiday Tree". . . It's always been called a CHRISTMAS TREE!

And pass this on to your email lists. We really want to communicate with the ACLU! They really DESERVE us!!

For those of you who aren't aware of them, the ACLU, (the American Civil Liberties Union) is the one suing the U.S. Government to take God, Christmas or anything Christian away from us. They represent the atheists and others in this war. Help put Christ back in Christmas!"

Actually, for those who are uninformed - the ACLU is concerned with protecting the rights of the Individual from the encroachment of the State.

Do I like and support every cause that the ACLU takes up? Absolutely not. Do I think that we need the ACLU? Absolutely.

Without an organization guarding our constitutional rights we would soon become more powerless than we already are.

Some of the battles they fight for us:

Illegal wiretapping and spying on U.S. citizens - what if the government decided you were a suspect? Would you want to be spied upon, have cameras and microphones all over your house (your bathroom, your bedroom)?
Torture - do you think it's alright to torture people? If you do I think you've lost your soul.

Illegal internments - do you approve of locking people up without any proof they should be? without a fair trial? Think about it. What if your neighbors told the government you were a terrorist? What if you had to prove you weren't, instead of the government proving you were? How do you prove a negative? They could simply say, "well we haven't found the evidence yet, but we're keeping you locked up until we do."
Preventing government from having a say in religious worship - and you who claim Christian should realize that they also fight for you, they keep the government out of your churches, and only stipulate that your church needs to stay out of government. Would you want the government telling your priests and pastors what they could talk about?

I also feel the need to point out that decorating evergreen trees and bringing greenery into the home at or around the winter solstice did not originate with Christians and Christmas. It's a tradition much more ancient than that. In fact, the early Christian church prohibited the decoration of trees and bringing evergreen bough into the home.

And, my dear emailer, I AM one of the "atheists and others" that the ACLU represents, and so are YOU.

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Supreme Court Arguments Today

This is being argued in court today.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
Hopefully NPR will give have information on air later today.

Damn Ken Starr to the Deepest Hell

This breaks my heart.

I've signed the letter. I don't usually do this sort of thing. I don't know if things like this are effective. It often seems like just a feel good (like driving a hybrid) that really doesn't do what we need (like way less driving around).

This one I signed.

And I love the music.

Self-Reliance and Sustainability

I've been rereading Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance and sustainability. Foremost in my thoughts about it at this point is that I think Emerson loved words, or maybe more accurately loved himself using words - lots of words. However this may be a significant misjudgment on my part. Even though I resist it, I am as addicted to the sound-bite summary, the cliff notes version, the easy path to enlightenment, as anyone.

I also just read the Steampunk Magazine's A Steampunk's Guide to Surviving an Apocalypse.

There's some connection going on between these two documents - inside my head.

Emerson begins this essay with:
Ne te quaesiveris extra - Do not seek for anything outside of thyself.

He seems to be extolling the virtues of thinking for yourself,taking care of yourself, by yourself, experiencing yourself as potentate - at least of your own existence. He writes: It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town?

I am not sure.

I think that being self-reliant is knowing and accepting oneself. I think that this can happen whether I am standing alone or as part of a group, a tribe, or a movement.

If I know myself I should be able to recognize when I am not being true to my self. I should be able to know when I am off-kilter, so to speak. To be self-reliant is to be emotionally healthy, not needy, not seeking to verify who I am in another person's approval. However this does not mean that I should be distant or disconnected from others.

It seems that Emerson was reacting to social pressures as he created this essay. However, this is just the feeling lingering after my first reread in three years. I will have to read it again and see what I think.

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It's interesting the different meanings we attribute to words and concepts. Self-reliance has so many meanings.

Self-reliance in regard to sustainability

There are two areas in which one can be self-reliant – production and consumption – and both are needed for true sustainability.

Self-reliance in production means that one can make much of what they need. This can be as simple as making a cake from scratch, or as complex as building a structure to live in shaping raw materials with the use of a few tools. Production by the self-reliant is gauged by its use value, rather than its market value. Self-reliance in production means that quality is the focus, not quantity. Quality can be sustainable, quantity often is not.

Self-reliance in consumption means that one doesn't really need a lot of things in order to exist contently – things like fancy toys or the latest style of clothing or a lavish home. A self-reliant identity does not come from the things one can buy and flaunt. A self-reliant lifestyle is unpretentious and grounded in thoughtful consumption. Considerate consumption is sustainable, conspicuous consumption never is.

Self-reliance and community

Generally one thinks of a self-reliant person being independent and unfettered by a need of others. The paradox is that self-reliance cannot truly exist without the community of trust.

"One can achieve everything in solitude - except character." ~ Henri Stendhal

Community is necessary in order to establish our identity. Without knowledge of the other there can be no knowledge of the self. Meaning is arrived at through distinctions.

Without a community of trust, an individual cannot come to know themselves fully. Without the ability to explore ideas in a safe atmosphere, the demanding, often frightening steps necessary to knowing oneself become exponentially more difficult. When thoughts and words have to be carefully guarded, when all energy is spent on simply maintaining one's existence in the seclusion of one's own mind – sanity, not growth, is the focus.

Without trust there is insecurity and an urge to hoard – both skills and things. Without trust I am not able to allow you to produce and consume in your natural patterns – I cannot trust that your intentions are towards quality, not quantity, and your consumption is considerate and not conspicuous.

Identity Again

A couple weeks ago we went to the Dakota Gathering here in Winona. It brought up the idea of identity and how we construct it again.

I am not trying to be critical, but how can american indians (as I was told they prefer to be called by a few of them) celebrate their heritage by selling plastic beaded trinkets? Perhaps it is a reverse of the way that europeans purchased their lands with shoddy bling centuries ago. If so, it is fitting. However I wish they got as much for the stuff as the whites did back then.

Returning to the idea of native theory and inspiration and the artist’s practice it seems to me that there is sort of a reverse colonization that often happens – a backdraft of appropriation of styles, artforms, and identity by the outsider – a disrespectful fascination with a culture that leads to exoticizing the “other,” trivializing and reducing individuals within those cultures to caricatures. We assume we are welcome within groups just because we like them, just because we want to be like them, wear clothes like them, talk like them or eat their food... How often is respect for the material or nonmaterial objects of a culture – manifested as a desire to have them – mistaken for a respect for the objects’ creators? Our engineered identities are made up from so many influences, so many “I love that!” feelings, that for the most part, it seems to me that authenticity may be a chimera.

How can we possibly know if what we are, what we do, is authentic?

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Perhaps A Foundling

Last Friday, Abelisto and I took the train from Winona to Indianapolis. We were going to visit with my mother and drive back in our Taurus station wagon (so we could be a bit more sustainable in our driving - it gets between 24 and 27 mpg, while the truck, well, I have been afraid to test it - I do not really want to know how bad it is...). We left the Taurus there back in November when we brought my dad's pick-up truck home with us. My brother had been checking over the Taurus for us - it had a few problems.

On Saturday, my brother stopped by to tell us about the things he found out about the car that needed our attention once we got it home. We ended up talking about politics, the environment, and some social justice issues. About halfway through the discussion, I asked my brother if he was libertarian. He said except for drugs and prostitution, he is one.

My sister and her husband are probably republican. My other brother, is definitely conservative, I do not know if he is more likely to be republican or libertarian and to the best of my knowledge my mother has always voted republican, although this time she may not - she is disgusted and disquieted about the condition of the world and our government's abuses. She, at 72, is probably far more liberal than my siblings, far more open to ideas and the views of "the other."

Where did I come from? Or maybe a better question is how did I get to where I am? I told my mother I felt like a foundling, like a misfit in my own family. She said that I have had a "larger life" than my siblings. I have lived more places, had more education, experienced more hardships, been abused, isolated, marginalized - and survived all of it, fairly intact and sane.

Maybe she is right. I think that I have not always been as liberal as I am now. In fact I know that I have not. For most of my life I did not even allow myself to express my thoughts or even know what I thought about a great many things - at least on the surface. I think that over time, I began to collect ideas and opinions which I hid away in compartments in my head, taking them out to study them when I could, when it was safe.

Does one need to experience injustice, poverty, abuse, and conflict in order to understand its impact? I think some people may be able to intuit the magnitude of these violences. But I was an extremely self-centered child/adolescent/young adult. I guess I had to live in it before I realized the weight of violence and abuse and how it pressed me down, made me tired and weak and powerless.

And I had to feel all of that personally, deep down in my bones, before I could develop any empathy for others, any understanding of privilege and lack, any passion for social justice and critical thinking. Before I could learn to be kind or to stand up to violence and injustice.

Of course, I am still working on it.

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Identity As A Construct - Part IV: Fashion & Scottish Highland Dress

Identity As A Construct - Part III: Las Vegas
Identity As A Construct - Part II-b: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part II: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part I

One of the best examples of the peculiarities of garment and identity is the Scottish Tartan and the Kilt. There are two interesting parts to this topic. The first is the creation of the national dress of Scotland; kilt, fitted jacket, large hairy sporran, knee socks with garter flashes, sgian dubh (skeen dhu) – the black knife – and tam o’shanter. The second aspect is the idea of clan specific tartan setts (the particular thread patterns used to weave the cloth) as tradition passed down from antiquity.

Originally the Highland Scots wore the same clothing as the Irish they were descended from. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the Highland Scots began wearing what was later called the fheilidh mor (felie more), the great kilt. This garment was a wide piece of fabric, four to six yards long, folded into pleats and belted around the waist, with about one third of the width hanging below the waist and two-thirds of the width gathered up around the shoulders. History has it that an English Quaker ironmaster invented the feileadh beag (felie beg), or small kilt in or around 1727, hiring a tailor to modify the great kilts of the Scotsmen working in his foundries. The resulting kilt was easier to wear and to work in and was quickly adopted by the workers. However, textile historian Dorothy Burnham writes in Cut My Cote that it is more likely that the change results from a move away from use of the slow and awkward upright loom to a more modern version of floor loom which produced narrower widths of fabric, but enabled the weaver to work much faster.

The Diskilting Act, created immediately after the defeat of the Jacobite Uprising in 1745, was an important step in the creation of the national dress of Scotland. The law forbade the use of tartan fabrics (even though at this time there was no association of specific tartans with specific Highland clans) and the wearing of either the great or small kilt. This law was meant to eradicate any traces of Highland culture and independence. When it was repealed in 1782 “neither the kilt nor tartan was seen any longer as symbolic of Jacobite threat.”

Even during the time of the Diskilting Act, kilts were allowed in the military for the newly established Highland regiment. Some have stated that the regiment’s use of the kilt led to the later standardization of the different tartan patterns as clan symbols and costume. Manufacturers of fabric for the military encouraged the use of different patterns for the different companies of the regiment.

The fascination for all things Scottish began to take root in Great Britain, first encouraged by King George IV and then by Queen Victoria. This enthrallment helped firmly establish the notion of the Highlander as “noble savage,” where once he was despised by all as an often ruthless, primitive rogue. Amidst the royal fervor for Scottish garb and the fashion craze it created, a manufacturer who up until this point had been making tartans for the various brigades within the Highland regiment realized that he could assign clan identities to the various patterns of tartan fabric. This ended up being a very successful business strategy and the manufacturer became the historical authority on Highland attire.

This historical revision took root and for over one hundred years people have believed that this “fashion” has ancient roots. During the last decade or so the kilt has been become more than a national costume. Lou Taylor writes in The History of Dress, “…after nearly two hundred years, a reclamation of the wearing of the kilt is taking place.” The kilt is being worn by Scots and non-Scots alike, and contributes to a fashion statement that is part of a number of identities – gay, straight, working class, upper class – a statement of ultra-masculinity that challenges non-wearers’ perceptions of the kilt-wearers and of themselves. My son Eli, and my partner Wes, wear both the feileadh mor, or great kilt, and the feileadh beag, or small kilt. They wear them for several reasons – heritage (both have Scottish ancestry, either a grandparent or great-grandparent), comfort, distinction, and rebellion. Their rebellion is against the expectations placed on them – a pushy, playful sort of rebellion that often opens the way for conversation.

Just don't ask either of them what's worn under the kilt....


Source: The Invention of Tradition ~ Eric Hobsbawm (Editor), Terence Ranger (Editor)

Identity As A Construct - Part III: Las Vegas

Identity As A Construct - Part II-b: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part II: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part I

I sometimes like to just sit and watch people as they move about in time and space.

It’s more interesting to go to a larger city, sit in some unobtrusive place and watch people parading past me. Las Vegas is wonderful for people watching. It seems that a great majority of people in Vegas feel free to express facets of their identity in their clothing choices. Some of them become walking caricatures of packaged identities.

In Vegas you expect to see scantily clad women, show girls, street girls, and girls who want to look like show girls or street girls. You expect to see tourists from the boondocks ogling the sights and visitors from other countries snapping photographs. You might, depending on the television you watch, expect to see “high rollers” or movie stars. Vegas always gives you both more and less than you expect.

The first person that caught my eye, and the one I remember best from that first trip to Vegas nearly ten years ago, was a man who was perhaps in his mid-thirties. He had the slight pot belly of a heavy beer drinker, but he hadn’t gone too far yet towards the beer gut that makes men look like extremely malnourished pregnant women (skinny arms and legs, big belly). He’d been out in the sun enough that he was starting to have that tanned leather look to his skin. On his head was a well-worn black cowboy hat. It had a wide snakeskin hat band that held a small fluff of brightly colored feathers on one side of the hat. He wore a sleeveless men’s undershirt – the same sort of shirts that I now see printed and decorated and sold for women’s shirts – stretched tightly across his slightly bulging belly. His was a dingy white, not pink, mint green, or tan, and not decorated with lace or sequins or printed with this band or that band’s name. His pants were tight, peg-legged, black jeans, fairly new, but not so clean, tucked into fancy cowboy boots. The boots were also black, or mostly black. They had engraved silver toe caps (probably not real silver – silver would be too soft to serve as toe caps) to guard against scuffs and scrapes. The upper sections of the boots were immaculately polished – spit-shined I would say - and tall, hugging his thin legs snugly, coming nearly to the knees, decorated with turquoise and red leather, sporting a large oval turquoise cabochon set in silver near the top on the front of the boots.

It was very hard not to stare openly – something nearly as dangerous in Vegas as in any other big city. He was standing in a convenience store feeding coins to the ubiquitous slot machines, just killing time, or perhaps, hoping to hit the jackpot and change his fate.

One has to wonder, if he hit it big, would his wardrobe change along with his identity?

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Identity As A Construct - Part II-b: Fashion & Identity

Identity As A Construct - Part II: Fashion & Identity
Identity As A Construct - Part I

For much of its history, fashion was an indicator of class, with styles sharply delineated by social status and financial position. It seems to me that since the mid-1900s, age has replaced class as the leading fashion signifier in western society.

Quality (and name brands) of clothing is still somewhat restricted to economic status, but styles are available in almost all price ranges – the same style of jeans is available for $25.00, $250.00 or more – making fashion more democratic than it has been in the past.

Today people tend to dress in age-appropriate clothing and those who attempt to cross the barriers in too obvious a manner are often considered spectacles of fashion awkwardness. There are also hazards in falling too far out of step with current fashions. In What We Wore, fashion historian Ellen Melinkoff describes “the pompadour ladies,” women who are a decade or more out of fashion, women who “get so fixated on the aesthetic of their early years” that they continue to dress for their entire adult lives in styles that are strongly influenced by what they wore during their own youth (16). My mother tells a story of being so afraid her mother would wear one particular turquoise dress, a dress she thought was hopelessly out of style, to a school function that she actually hid the dress in the back of her mother’s closet.

I remember also being embarrassed by the clothes my mother wore. I thought she was so un-hip. But I think I would have been more embarrassed if she, like some of my friends’ mothers, had dressed in the bell-bottom jeans, tie-dyed pullovers, peace signs, chain-link belts and platform shoes that I wore.

It’s funny, but if I go to my daughter’s closets today I find the very same sorts of styles. The re-cycling of fashion is a curious thing to me. The fashion styles I see in my daughters’ closets are not my fashions, even though the actual garments would be quite similar, almost interchangeable, in fact. My clothing had an entirely different “meaning” and were viewed as signifiers of a counter-culture identity that was focused on more than just the rebellion, drugs and free sex that most people now associate with it. It was an identity that embraced a new vision of the world aptly described by the now cliché “peace, love and understanding.” Today the self-same clothes that I wore as an outsider, clothes that I had to scrounge and modify and make by hand, now fill rack after rack in the department stores. Tie-dyes, ethnic prints, beads, bells, patches, all have become a ready-made style to be marketed to a youth that has no idea of what it meant, personally and politically, to dress in those garments a generation ago.

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Identity As A Construct -Part II: Garment & Identity

Identity As A Construct - Part I

In her article, “Three Dresses, Tailored to the Times,” (published in Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles) Renee Baert describes the link between clothing and identity as part of our repertoire of cultural signifiers, part of our cultural wardrobe that we take out when we want to express a specific identity - “Clothing is a remarkably versatile and exact instrument of cultural expression. Formalized through dress codes that may extend as far as legislative decree – or that may be radically overturned by the more mobile decrees of fashion or by sub-cultural challenges to a culture’s given mores – clothing constitutes a part of the social fabric at both its most general and most personal levels.”

The exploration of garment as an expression of identity is a study fraught with cliché. Fashion is such a manufactured thing. How does one decide if it is a product of a profit-driven capitalist society, or if it is an effort to relieve boredom and monotony? These are questions that Fred Davis asks in Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Davis claims that fashion is a little of both – a profit-driven enterprise and a way that people satisfy an urge for things new and different – and that it often becomes the voice for expressing the shared experiences and conditions that help form our identities.

I read some fashion news - not as much as when I was doing my graduate studies, but enough to know that it is an incredibly strange and perhaps vicious world. Last November I was in Las Vegas for a week or so. My daughter has television (with TIVO) and I experienced a short fixation with Project Runway. It is a good thing that I do not have a television - I would probably watch Project Runway and the Discovery and History channels and lose lots of time and maybe my creative edge (if I have one...). Anyway, I think in another life I would have liked to be a garment designer. Maybe. It does not, after all, fit into a sustainable living lifestyle.

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Robert Rauschenberg

Oh no.

Robert Rauschenberg has died.

As an interdisciplinary artist who works in a number of media, often combining media, materials and techniques in a single piece, I have always been rather awed and inspired by Rauschenberg. He was one of the first to tell me that I did not have to be just a painter, just a sculpture, just a fiberist.

He did Art Cars.

I like combinations, integrations, adulterations. I like experimentation. I like coming face-to-face with the unexpected. In art and in life. I suppose I like being shocked (at least a bit).

I love the way Rauschenberg was constantly re-inventing both himself and his practice, and thereby, the world - at least as far as art is concerned...

Rauschenberg's Bed and Satellite (both done in 1955) and numerous other pieces of his work (especially those using fabric, yarns & cords, feathers, rocks to express memory and identity) have informed my practice and my context as a fiberist and sculptor in significant and meaningful ways. One of my current works-in-progress is directly inspired by Rauschenberg's work.

Identity As A Construct

The process of self-discovery is fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose ourselves, moment-to-moment, like the fleeting recognizable shapes seen in the clouds. The process of discovering our godhood is likewise fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose our divinity constantly. This is our mystery.

It seems to me that identity is a made thing, like art, like music, like a spinach soufflé. It’s part performance, done for an audience, often involving improvisation – even plagiarism – and part self-discovery, a continual self-re-creation.

I cannot speak to how everyone does it, but I pick and choose between all the possible choices I can imagine and sculpt an identity for myself. Actually I have several identities – the work identity, the home identity, the mom identity, the lover/partner identity, the artist identity. These days all my identities are more similar to each other than they have ever been in my life. I think I am achieving balance.

Finally.

Postmodern society allows for each of us to keep a closet full of identities which we pull out and try on, wearing when and as we see fit. It seems to me that this is both a personal choice and a tendency based on cultural norms. Sociologist Victoria Alexander, in Sociology of the Arts, seems to agree, stating “…because people are more geographically mobile and can choose among a wide variety of consumer items, their identities have become fragmented and based on their consuming choices and lifestyles.” Did my grandmother have more than one identity? Perhaps she did, living with an unstable man, balancing a work life and home life, walking carefully on whatever eggshells the moment laid before her. I know that when I was living with a violent and unstable person, I had very compartmentalized identities. It was a very stressful way to live, trying to keep the segments of my world from intersecting - I must have been fairly successful, I survived. Others did not, or at least did not with any level of stability or sanity. I feel pretty good.

Perhaps the need for multiple identities – or multifaceted identities – comes from having large numbers of people to interact with. Could it be that we need to be one person with that group, another person in this situation, and still another when we’re all alone?

In The Power of Feminist Art, editors Norma Broud and Mary Garrard, spent some time discussing identity with Judy Chicago. Chicago stated “Identity is multiple… when I started looking at Jewish experience people would say ‘Oh, you’ve stopped being a feminist?’ It’s because they had a very narrow concept of identity… one can be both a woman and a person of color, an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class.”

One’s identity is larger than singular.

My identity is indeed multiple. I self-identify as a member of a number of overlapping groups. In regards to ethnicity I see myself as predominantly western European (Irish, Scottish, and my most recent heritage discovery - Hungarian); in regards to sexual orientation, bisexual; class – this one is a bit fluid – I consider myself upper-middle class because I feel I am very fortunate in life, but I’m not sure if that’s how I’d be placed based on income.

I place myself as an artist, a mother, a partnered individual, and a reluctant and somewhat anarchistic American. I have a work identity that oozes capability and responsibility, but I’d really like to chuck it all and be more bohemian (perhaps even *gasp* hedonistic), taking up an eclectic gypsy persona as my primary identity.

The clothes would be so much more fun.

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Bird Art

Heron, 2008, encaustic on driftwood, 12" x 4" x 28", views of both sides of sculpture

The Flock, 2008, encaustic on paper, approx 17 x 22", mostly handmade encaustic paints. Work-in-process.

Don't have much time for posting right now. I am teaching an advanced graphic design class in a few minutes. Just wanted to get these two images up of the most recent work I have been doing.

The Flock is a painting I have been trying to actualize for months. I wanted to speak to diversity in community and this image (out of all the images inside my head) seemed to keep coming to the front of the stack...

Heron was a more spontaneous creation. Months ago - before the world here was covered in ice and snow - Abelisto and I went beach combing at a park along the Mississippi River. I picked up one particularly gnarly piece of driftwood (probably a root section) thinking that some creature was present in the wood. After months of laying around in my studio it finally decided to let me know what it was and that I was holding it upside down when I would pick it up. Initially I thought the thicker part was the head/top part and the long skinny part was the tail... shows you how wrong you can be when you make unsupported assumptions...

more later

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Identity

The process of self-discovery is fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose ourselves, moment-to-moment, like the fleeting recognizable shapes seen in the clouds. The process of discovering our godhood is likewise fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose our divinity constantly. This is our mystery.

It seems to me that identity is a made thing, like art, like music, like a spinach soufflé. It’s part performance, done for an audience, often involving improvisation – even plagiarism – and part self-discovery, a continual self-recreation.

I cannot speak to how everyone does it, but I pick and choose between all the possible choices I can imagine and sculpt an identity for myself. Actually I have several identities – the work identity, the home identity, the mom identity, the lover/partner identity, the artist identity. These days all my identities are more similar to each other than they have ever been in my life. I think I am achieving balance.

Finally.

Postmodern society allows for each of us to keep a closet full of identities which we pull out and try on, wearing when and as we see fit. It seems to me that this is both a personal choice and a tendency based on cultural norms. Sociologist Victoria Alexander, in Sociology of the Arts, seems to agree, stating “…because people are more geographically mobile and can choose among a wide variety of consumer items, their identities have become fragmented and based on their consuming choices and lifestyles” (13). Did my grandmother have more than one identity? Perhaps she did, living with an unstable man, balancing a work life and home life, walking carefully on whatever eggshells the moment laid before her. Perhaps the need for multiple identities – or multifaceted identities – comes from having large numbers of people to interact with. Could it be that we need to be one person with that group, another person in this situation, and still another when we’re all alone?

In The Power of Feminist Art, editors Norma Broud and Mary Garrard, discussed identity with Judy Chicago. Chicago stated that, "Identity is multiple… when I started looking at Jewish experience people would say ‘Oh, you’ve stopped being a feminist?’ It’s because they had a very narrow concept of identity… one can be both a woman and a person of color, an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class. One’s identity is larger than singular (72)."

My identity is indeed multiple. I self-identify as a member of a number of overlapping groups. In regards to ethnicity I see myself as predominantly western European (Irish, Scottish); class – this one is a bit fluid – I consider myself upper-middle class because I feel I am very fortunate in life, but I’m not sure if that’s how I’d be placed based on income. I place myself as an artist, a mother, a partnered individual, and a reluctant and somewhat anarchistic American. I have a work identity that oozes capability and responsibility, but I’d really like to chuck it all and be more bohemian, taking up an eclectic gypsy persona as my primary identity.

The clothes would be so much more fun.


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Growing up inspired

Perhaps I had the ideal childhood. I do not know. All I can tell you is that I was surrounded by a collection of caring adults that provided discipline, guidance and inspiration; adults that encouraged me to discover who and what I was. I could, and in fact, should do the unexpected and rare things that I was inspired to do. My childhood was one of empowerment – power and ability.

I was given the power of knowledge – the knowledge of how to fix things, make things, do things for myself, by myself. I was shown that I had a potential given by grace, and that I had a responsibility, perhaps even a duty, to develop it to its fullest, to fearlessly explore my self. I have not always lived up to that responsibility, but I try...

For as long as I can remember we had motorcycles. My father and mother rode together and sometimes took extended trips with my aunts and uncle. One of my aunts owned, rode and fixed her own motorcycle.

I think I was four or five when I first rode with my father, sitting in front of him on the motorcycle while he carefully rode along. It was not too long after that that I started riding a motorcycle on my own – a step-through Yamaha 50cc similar to the scooters that are popular today. I rode in our large backyard and on trails in the wooded areas of our rural neighborhood.

During much of my childhood my father worked out of town and was gone during the week. Because he was only home on weekends it meant that my siblings and I quickly learned to maintain our own motorcycles, and later our cars. He was usually too busy with other projects when he was home to fix our motorcycles as swiftly as we wanted. As children we acquired mechanical and technical skills that far exceeded those of our age-mates.

Initially, when my father worked on various projects around the house I was the one that helped. My brother, the next one in line, is 16 months younger than I am; when I was four or five and ready to help, he was only two or three and far too young to do much. I helped with all sorts of projects - carpentry and remodeling, plumbing and electrical, fencing and landscaping, auto repair and auto bodywork. I was using power-tools, levels, t-squares, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers and pliers while in grade school. One of my earliest memories is tactile in nature. I remember the pleasant feeling of automotive grease on my fingers. It was both gritty and slippery and the contradiction fascinated me. I think that being able to legitimately get quite dirty was intriguing also. I can remember purposely getting dirtier than necessary as I ran back and forth between the tool rack and my father’s outstretched hand as he worked under whatever car needed fixing.

Working with my father taught me how to follow directions. He taught me how to bracket my choices with alternatives, to plan for exigency; if I was not sure if the nut, bolt or wrench was the correct one, I would also take him ones that were the next sizes smaller and larger. He taught me how to plan ahead, how to deduce the next step. From him I learned how to improvise and find creative solutions to problems.

From my mother I learned independence and strength. Since my father was not home most of the time, I learned how to handle emergencies, how to stay level-headed in a crisis and to be reliable and competent. She showed me how to cook and bake; we raised some of our own food, canning and preserving it ourselves. She taught me how to sew and embroider; she made most of our clothing.

My father is a patient man that never begrudged us an explanation of not only the how of what we were doing, but also the why behind it. He demonstrated daily that only reasonable behavior would be accepted, but what he determined reasonable was solely taught with kindness and honesty and responsibility. I did not have to wear skirts and lace and behave in a “feminine” manner, but I did have to do what I said I would do, not cheat or lie, and treat everyone as I wanted them to treat me.

My mother is a playful, artistic person who, by her very nature, teaches kindness, acceptance and gentleness. As children and young adults, she encouraged us to explore ourselves and the world around us with abandon, never placing unnecessary limits on us. We were encouraged to discipline ourselves and recognize that work, any work, could be tolerable, and even pleasant if we chose to make it so; the right attitude would be instrumental in finding and keeping the mental balance that makes life meaningful.

Although the work they do is gender segregated – my mother does not fix cars and my father does not cook and bake – they instilled in me a belief that I could do whatever I set out to do. We were not allowed to say “I cannot” until we had made a serious effort to do the task at hand. I grew up knowing that I did not have to accept the limits others wanted to place on me. I did not have to fit anyone’s expectations of being female. I could do whatever I chose to do in the manner I chose to do it and when confronted with the walls that others built up to confine me, it was within my rights to find ways around them, it was in fact, expected of me that I find ways to dismantle the walls. Although it is not a word that my parents would use to describe themselves, I suppose my family was revolutionary. This was in a time when women’s liberation and feminism were not yet part of mainstream vocabulary. They gave me the confidence to tackle many tasks and jobs that I might not have had the self-assurance to take on if I had not had the experiences that I had as a child.