Join Chicago-based artists Angela Davis Fegan and Lisa Vinebaum for a conversation about engaging with, interpreting, and animating archival materials though the processes of print, book works, installation, performance, public interventions, and community engagement and participation. Each artist rworks with archival materials produced by activist organizations — Fegan with the 1970s radical lesbian feminist group Lavender Menace, and Vinebaum with materials produced by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union — creating works that revive and reinsert archival materials and their associated political demands and protest slogans back into public spaces, thereby also giving new visibility to histories that have been marginalized or forgotten. How do these artistic re-presentations of the past serve to value and uplift marginalized pasts and marginalized identities and subjectivities? What can they contribute to a greater understanding of the past? Can they help democratize and allowing greater access to the archive? What is the artist’s responsibility to the past and to the artifacts and histories they are working with? How do their works resonate in a larger, neoliberal, neofascist, toxic, political context in which attacks on LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, and unions are increasingly normalized and legislated?

Discussion between the artist followed by a larger discussion with the audience.

About the participants:
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parson’s School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book (NY) and the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been selected for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes, The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall and the upcoming All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her work has been written about in The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye and the Chicago Reader.

Lisa Vinebaum is an interdisciplinary artist, critical writer, and educator. Working across art and theory, her practice explores collectivity and intersubjective relationships, working conditions and workers’ rights, and the value of artistic labor. Her art practice incorporates performance, text-based installations, textiles, print, neon, video, photography and protest tactics. Her work has been included in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, Performance Studies International 19, Open Engagement: Art & Social Practice, La Centrale, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Lincoln Center, and in conjunction with Grace Exhibition and Performance Space, and Articule Gallery. Her scholarly work has been commissioned and published in edited anthologies, academic journals and exhibition catalogues, including Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm 1930-present, Danica Maier: Grafting Propriety from Stitch to Drawn Line, More Caught in the Act: Performance by Canadian Women, The Handbook of Textile Culture, the Journal of Modern Craft online, and Textile: Cloth and Culture. Lisa Vinebaum holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiber and Material Studies, and affiliated faculty in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

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Tags: Angela Davis Fegan, Chicago, Lisa Vinebaum, Protest Archives, Sector 2337, West Town