Songs For The Struggling Artist

At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some of its feminist underpinnings. How quickly I discovered that I had misread the room! Immediately, I got pushback about an underlying conceit in The Dragoning. (A show, by the way, that while it IS feminist in its mission, I’ve never explicitly labeled it as such.) The next thing I knew I was trying to explain that yes, men do kill women. And at absolutely terrifying rates. (How I wish I’d had numbers right then – but now I know that, globally, it’s six women every hour.) All night long, I’d been hearing feminist, feminist, feminist but as soon as an actual feminist issue came up, the room seemed very different. How d