Third Annual ONE Queer Film Fest

Please join me tomorrow when the 3^rd Annual ONE Queer Film Fest will screen two short films that I executive produced that also happen to be by my daughters Marka and Xochi Maberry-Gaulke. “This PSA is Gay” was written by Marka and turned into a Claymation by students in my Harvard-Westlake Summer Film Program. “Love Our Families” is a public service announcement created by Xochi and her friend Anjoum Agrama during The Righteous Conversations Project, which brings together Holocaust survivors and teens to make PSAs about contemporary injustices. In addition, Marka and Xochi are featured as subjects in a documentary by Lisa Udelson and Catherine Opie called “Same Difference.” There’s a link to the trailer below.

There are screenings all day long and we are part of the HERE & NOW: Youth & Family Shorts Series from 1 – 2:30 PM at the REDCAT (under Disney Hall). Tickets are available at http://www.redcat.org/event/one-queer-film-festival and cost $13 in advance and $16 at the door.

The fest is a celebration of the rich cultures and diversity within our LGBT communities.  All proceeds benefit the great work of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the world’s largest LGBT history collection (based right here in LA)!

HERE & NOW: Youth & Family Shorts Series, 1 – 2:30 PM  

Screening followed by panel and Q&A with filmmakers including Cheri Gaulke, Marka and Xochi Maberry-Gaulke.  Panel moderated by James Gilliam, Deputy Director of ACLU Southern California.

Films include:

THIS PSA IS GAY (Miranda Kasher, George Khabbaz, Patric Verrone, Marka Maberry-Gaulke, Albert Zeng) – When a girl wears a rainbow button to school, she discovers that people’s words can sting!

THRESHOLDS (Yovani Flores) – An urban tale about pushing barriers in the moments lived between each breath.

TWO BOYS (Victor Bumbalo) – Two recently transplanted New Yorkers, a mother and her sixteen year-old-son, are lugging a Christmas tree through the streets of Los Angeles unaware of what Christmas has in store for them.

LOVE OUR FAMILIES (Anjoum Agrama, Xochi Maberry-Gaulke, Gabe Benjamin) – A Public Service Announcement that looks at the true meaning of family.

SPIRAL TRANSITION (Ewan Duarte) – A compelling, candid, and interwoven documentary exploring the filmmaker’s relationship with his mother as he transitions genders.

SAME DIFFERENCE (Lisa Udelson and Catherine Opie) – Among the cries of “What about the children?” during the debate over California’s Proposition 8, where were the voices of actual children?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylh234VWVYY&feature=youtu.be

-Cheri Gaulke

Breaking in Two: Visions of Motherhood closes April 14, 2012

Twin Diptych by Cheri Gaulke. Left: The Mamas Pose the Babies. Right: The Babies Pose the Mamas

Tomorrow (April 14) is your last chance to see the wonderful exhibition “Breaking in Two: Visions of Motherhood,” curated by Bruria Finkel, at Arena 1 Gallery, 3026 Airport Ave., Santa Monica. www.santamonicaartstudios.com The gallery opens at noon and there’s a closing reception from 6-9 pm which I plan on attending.

I am exhibiting a new photographic work called “Twin Diptych” as well as the video “Our Wedding” and the artists’ book “Marriage Matters.” There’s lots of strong and diverse work in the show and I highly recommend it. Here’s what the Los Angeles Times said about my work:

“One of the most engaging currents threading through the show has to do with reciprocity, the way that children, in effect, birth their parents, endowing them with new, utterly altered identities. In Cheri Gaulke’s poignant “Twin Diptych,” mothers and daughters each get a turn at representing the other. Gaulke and her wife, Sue, pose their teenage twins as winged, gossamer-draped angels, a tongue-in-cheek coda to the similarly staged baby picture the girls hold before them. The girls, in turn, picture their mothers with equally exaggerated grimness, unsmiling, in matching black, their colorful glasses and blue-streaked hair the only overt notes of subversion.” –Leah Ollman

The participating artists include: Kim Abeles, Lita Albuquerque, Eleanor Antin, Michele Asselin, Jo Ann Callis, Joyce Dallal, Bruria Finkel, Magaret Garcia, Cheri Gaulke, Tierney Gearon, Judithe Hernandez, Channa Horwitz, Katherine Jacobi, Mary Kelly, Margaret Lazzari, Andrea Liss, M.A .M. A., Kim McCarty, MaryLinda Moss, Mother Art, Sandra Mueller, Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence, Renee Petropoulos, Astrid Preston, Alison, Saar, Betye Saar, Sola Agustsson Saar, Lesley Saar, Reva Santo, Sylvia Sher, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Elena Mary Siff, Doni Silver Simons, Linda Vallejo, June Wayne, Ruth Weisberg, Kim Yasuda and Shuang Zhang.

-Cheri Gaulke

Visual Art Source Editorial on Cheri Gaulke

Reprinted from Visual Art Source, Weekly Newsletter, January 20, 2012

Editor’s Note
by Marlena Donohue

The trouble with cliché’s, stereotypes and all such quick handled ways of seeing and being is they’re fixed – caught in historic, conceptual, ideological stop frames. We need them because to relearn everything at each encounter is evolutionarily untenable. But these hooks are limiting, subject to abuses of laziness and vast misuse. Nothing you needed me to tell you.

How does this relate to our cultural moment? Particularly in art we act on labels, move from brand after brand; the fertile, intricate, messy reality that art invariably points to gets trumped by the trope.

Case in point: For decades L.A. was by moniker a cultural backwater. In fact, during the late 1940s/early ’50s, in the run-down hooker district of turned-ever-so-hipster Venice, some of this city’s now fabled artists were composing detritus, colonizing vernacular spaces — coffee shops, garages – right alongside Rauschenberg’s New York combines and high theory’s institutional critique.

Pacific Standard Time argues persuasively that this nearly four decade “get thee to New York” business was more of a repeated word fiction than something accurately describing the creative reality here. As PST winds down, we find that through the miracle of Chiat Day’s ad men and the Getty gazillions, L.A. has overnight become another formulaic: “uncovered art Mecca.” Both the good and the ugly L.A. are simplistic abstractions that obscure the city’s lived experience, the actuality of art made here, the exhilaration and complete, serious bummer of a place we all plot to exit daily, but like a really screwed up but sexy lover, never can quite quit.

This applies to everything. For years and years, Feminism here was subsumed under the truly philistine rubric of “hysterical lesbians.” PST venues and the remarkable scholarship that those generous Getty funds allowed reveal the prescient conceptual sophistication of very early L.A. feminist thought and art. The late Arlene Raven was teaching that history was not unfolding destiny, but one of many permitted stories way back in the ’70s.

So in this spirit, I want to call attention to the career and current LACE PST entry by pioneering feminist Cheri Gaulke. Since its inception, Gaulke’s work has asked questions about margins and centers, about what exactly a lived body — female or other — means in an age of vastly constructed identities. Her classic “This is My Body” from the mid-70s featured the naked, model-gorgeous (and openly lesbian) Gaulke on a large cross reaching Eve-like for an apple, not because we gals and our wayward instincts simply cannot refuse the bad boys like Satan, but as a metaphor for choice. Gaulke went on to co-found the Feminist Art Workers, linking community work with artwork (anticipating the field of art now called “public practice”). Alongside discourses on the gendering of art history, she rode through Century City in a pick-up draped on the lap of fellow artist Nancy Angelo to reclaim for women Michelangelo’s “Pieta” and the notion of compassion.

Gaulke’s Metro Gold Line project reminded us about L.A.’s deeply indigenous origins (something else we just now “discovered” through the wonders of PST). Her book art is extensive — my favorite being a beautiful investigation of foot binding and the ‘torque’ on the female form and psyche when both of these are bent to fit some code. In Gaulke’s current installation at LACE, the foot/shoe metaphor returns. Viewers are invited to don shoes — men’s, women’s — while video projections record feet walking on differing terrain. That we fetishize and eroticize through clichés, that we can perform – in an act of choice – a variety of selves, that we are able to be inclusive rather than hierarchic, that unchecked abstractions are not lived reality – Gaulke creatively addresses all of  this and more.

Cheri Gaulke’s Twin Diptyych exhibited in Breaking in Two: Provocative Visions of Motherhood

Please join me this coming Saturday evening, Feb. 11, 6-9 pm, for an opening of the exhibition Breaking in Two: Provocative Visions of Motherhood. I got to see much of the show during installation this week and it’s really wonderful. I am exhibiting a new work called Twin Diptych. When I was invited to be a part of this show I knew I wanted to do something in collaboration with my partner, Sue Maberry, and our daughters, Xochi and Marka Maberry-Gaulke. We decided to explore portraiture and got to thinking about how parents pose their children when the kids are little and they have nothing to say about it. We have a portrait of Xochi and Marka as angels and everyone adores it. The truth is that the little darlings were absolutely miserable during the shoot and the photograph represents that one moment when they appeared to be happy. Sue and I decided to photograph them as angels again, but this time give them the opportunity to pose us any way they desired. We got off easy as they decided to pose us as American Gothic by Grant Wood. We chose to mimic William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s angels. Many of you saw a shot from the series on our holiday card. In addition I will be showing the artists’ book, Marriage Matters, and the video by Xochi and Marka called Our Wedding.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BREAKING IN TWO: PROVOCATIVE VISIONS OF MOTHERHOOD
FEBRUARY 11 – APRIL 14, 2012
(event schedule below)

ARENA 1 A project of Santa Monica Art Studios
3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405
Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 pm
www.santamonicaartstudios.com
310/ 397-7456

Curated by Bruria Finkel, filmed by Sabine Sighicelli
Contact information: Tel: 310 251 4299, Bruriaart@roadrunner.com

BREAKING IN TWO is the first comprehensive exhibition of work by women artists who are mothers where the work itself integrates the maternal experience, the relationship to the body, the child, the family, and the society at large. The exhibition, which is part of Pacific Standard Time, will feature a multi‐cultural group of four generations of nationally and internationally recognized artist‐mothers selected to represent the multi‐faceted and changing realities of motherhood. The exhibition includes painting, drawing, sculpture, collage and assemblage, installation, photography, film/video, poetry/writing and performance. Curator Bruria Finkel, herself an artist, asserts that “the subject of motherhood was taboo in the art world in the 70s; women artists were advised not to disclose their motherhood status for it might interfere with their ability to progress in the art world.”

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Kim Abeles, Lita Albuquerque, Eleanor Antin, Michele Asselin, Jo Ann Callis, Joyce Dallal, Bruria Finkel, Magaret Garcia, Cheri Gaulke, Tierney Gearon, Judithe Hernandez, Channa Horwitz, Katherine Jacobi, Mary Kelly, Margaret Lazzari, Andrea Liss, M. A. M. A., Kim McCarty, MaryLinda Moss, Mother Art, Sandra Mueller, Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence, Renee Petropoulos, Astrid Preston, Alison, Saar, Betye Saar, Sola Augustsson Saar, Lezley Saar, Reva Santo, Sylvia Sher, Amy Shimshon‐Santo, Elena Mary Siff, Doni Silver Simons, Linda Vallejo, June Wayne, Ruth Weisberg, Miriam Wosk, Kim Yasuda, and Stella Zhang.

EVENT SCHEDULE

February 11, 2012, 5–6 pm VIP opening, 6–9 pm Public opening

February 26, 2012, 12–3 pm Walk-through curator and artists

March 17, 2012, 3–5 pm Mothers on Motherhood: Dance and Spoken Word Performance

March 31, 2012, 2–5 pm Panel discussion, the social and aesthetic implications of Motherhood, a scholarly interaction

April 14, 2012, 6–10 pm Exhibition closing celebration

-Cheri Gaulke

Feminist Art Workers lead tour of Pacific Standard Time exhibition

“This Ain’t No Heavy Breathing, performance by Feminist Art Workers, 1978

On Saturday, January 14, at 11 am, I will be leading a special tour of the exhibition Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building at Otis College of Art and Design. The exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an initiative of the Getty that explores the birth of the LA art scene. I moved to Los Angeles in 1975 as a young artist to be a part of the feminist art movement and the experience and the times were life-changing. I have two installations at the Otis exhibition representing two collective performance art groups I cofounded – Feminist Art Workers (1976-) and Sisters Of Survival (1981-). Saturday’s tour features Feminist Art Workers and I will be joined by my collaborator Laurel Klick.

Emerging from the educational programs at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, Feminist Art Workers incorporated techniques of feminist education into participatory performance structures. We addressed issues of community (Heaven or Hell?), violence against women (This Ain’t No Heavy Breathing and Traffic in Women: A Feminist Vehicle), and equal pay for equal work (Bills of Rights). Our performances took place in locations as varied as city streets (Pieta, Afloat), during protest rallies (Draw Your Own Conclusions: Know on 13), in coffee houses, art galleries and museums.

Klick and I will offer insight into this historic art work, the time period, and the Woman’s Building, an organization that has had a huge impact on the form and content of contemporary art. We will also have a sneak preview copy of our new 230-page book, Feminist Art Workers: A History, as well as the book, Sisters Of Survival, about the anti-nuclear performance group that I cofounded. Both books will be available for purchase at $20 (SOS) and $25 (FAW) – cash or check only. This is an excellent opportunity to see one of the most interesting Pacific Standard Time exhibitions and hear personal stories from two artists who lived the history.

I hope to see you on Saturday at 11 am at Otis College of Art and Design Gallery, 4500 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045. For more info, go to the gallery website: http://otis.edu/public_programs/ben_maltz_gallery/womansbuilding.html. There are all kinds of video interviews and other interesting stuff that can be found there. And it’s all free!

Also stay tuned for notice of a private tour of my other Pacific Standard Time installation at LACE in Hollywood, which closes January 29. You can always check my blog for information about what I’m up to and if you sign up you’ll receive occasional notices.

Thanks and I hope to see you Saturday!

- Cheri Gaulke

“Pieta, Afloat,” performance by Feminist Art Workers, 1978