Union Chapbooks
As part of the first contract campaign for adjunct faculty at the California College of the Arts, we made Job Insecurity 101: The Precarious Lives of CCA Faculty where 20 faculty wrote stories while I worked with SEIU to design the cover using a mural made by faculty and students on campus. Then we held “Bind-in’s” where we bound the chapbook together and distributed it. We also sent it to the Administration and Board of Trustees.
At the California Faculty Association, we created an Art Organizing Committee that produced a chapbook. Union members, student interns, and union staff all contributed. The Chapbook was handed out to elected officials on Lobby Days, at contract campaign events, and during new member orientations.
No Justice No Service
“No Justice No Service: Bay Area Art, Education & Justice Festival” was held at The Lab in San Francisco, in 2015. An exploration of union aesthetics in the 21st century, we were using art as a concrete organizing tool and not only for banners and placards. Artists, performers, writers, educators and professors, labor and community activists came together in support of the adjunct union movement, highlighting the intersections of income inequality, racial injustice, gentrification, and housing displacement.
Random Notes
Feeling ripped apart by the deaths of three friends as my teaching career was crashing, I tore up the weekly arts paper and then glued the bits back together into nonsensical word combinations. The palm-sized pieces became a roadmap out of grief and the outline for my memoir. More recently, I’ve turned them into large-scale digital prints.
Snow Poems
A line from a Random Note was included in the Snow Poems project in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Curated by The Cut + Paste Society in collaboration with the Santa Fe Art Institute, lines of poetry were sprayed onto storefront windows with non-toxic temporary spray snow. Appropriately, mine was on the window of Labor Ready.
School’s Out for Fever
Three weeks into sheltering in place, in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, learning to make sourdough bread wasn’t the thing that quited my anxiety, On the weekly family zoom with relatives across the country, we decided to have a video-making contest. When my mother-in-law came to stay wth us, she and my partner went for it with me and COVID-19 Aesthetics were born!
Past Present Future
To capture changing ideas of feminism, queer femininity, and community organizing, I set up self-defense skill share sessions that included getting into femme drag and performing for the camera. During a five-month period in Los Angeles, forty artists and activists of different races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations, came together to create videos, performances, public interventions, video installations and a ‘zine. Our goal was to build community through the process of making art.
Debris: Notes from Outside the Surface
Debris Installation
The installation of Debris continued to be our institutional critique of the formal LA art world, looking at who was assumed to belong and who was assumed to be an outsider – even in a gallery space in south central LA where Wil and his Black artist friends were born and raised.. Wil and I invited our friends to drink beer and play domnios together in the middle of an art exhibit intended to showcase MFA students’ work to elite gallery owners and curators. This video documents the process of making the installation.
Memory Remnants
Memory Remnants of Two Existing Acts of Violence examines the impact of trauma on memories of violence. The violence referenced is two horrific events that occurred within three months of each other. On was a relationship I was in that ended in gunfire and the other was brutal rape and murder of a beloved friend. I blend archival materials, documentary, and constructed images into a fragmented non-linear montage that imitates the operation of memory as defined through psychoanalytic theory. The video is choreographed to move across two monitors when installed.
Unhung Heroes
Unhung Heroes is a short comedy where five trans guys dream about having a flesh penis after finding an internet article about the first penis transplant, The guys dream up a scheme to get the more than one million dollars needed for surgery. Unhung Heroes is a time capsule that showcases Southern and Northern California trans and queer activist artists who were central to forging trans community building in the 1990s and 2000s. Look for cameos by once well-known individuals who are (mostly) still kicking around. I shot and edited the video that was written and directed by Lazlo (Ilya) Pearlman and includes fantastic choreography by Cid Pearlman.
Jessica Lawless 