Roots are also Branches. When we look at these roots that we come from, of where we’ve been, we can draw a new water sources, we can build new branches, and we can change.
“I believed in meritocracy. When you perform better you got a better grade you could really by merit earn your way to success and it was only entering the adult world and also becoming a mother and realizing that there are very different social expectations on myself than there were on my husband. Just in November I was asked by one of the organizers sponsors of the event who was quite involved in the 1970s feminist movement, ‘Do your children resent you that you work all the time?’ It’s very unfair question and it’s not a question she asked to the male peer that was sitting next to me. It’s unfair that those pressures or unevenly distributed. What I hope for for all of us in this new decade and what I want the world to be. A world of marginalization and nativism that is rampant and racism that just seems so pervasive and I don’t want that for him I don’t want that for my daughters and I don’t want that for any of us and I don’t want that for myself. And so 2020 for me is this marker of change.
About the speaker
We are excited to have Laura Allred Hurtado, the Executive Director of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, speak for this month’s theme of ROOTS and to tell us about UMoCA’s upcoming “Guerilla Girls” exhibition and the roots of feminism in art.
Their upcoming exhibit will represent the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1984 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, “[M]ainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work.”
Laura will speak on the importance of the Guerrilla Girls as we enter a new decade. Her comments will discuss the upcoming retrospective of Guerrilla Girls work at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art as well as the legacy of the group, which opens to the public on February 7th at 7PM and how exhibitions and film can be used for inclusion and advocacy.
Laura’s recent projects include Angels Don’t Cry, Demons Don’t Cry at Nox Contemporary and two books, “Immediate Present” and “A 15-Year Expanse”. She has worked and/or curated exhibitions in New York City, San Francisco, and throughout Utah, at such places as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Nox Contemporary, The Granary Art Center, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, CUAC Contemporary, Riverside Church, the Rio Gallery, Columbia University, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.
Favorite quotes from this talk
