I am a Nasty Woman

Work from Nasty Women, NY. Artists - Naoko Tadotsu

In the reality TV show called, “The Debate” which aired back end of 2016. Starred orange face reality TV star, Donald Trump and the only hope for America, Hillary Clinton. In the final moments of the 3rd and final presidential debate, Trump interpreted Clinton as she was answering a question about social security. “Such a nasty woman”, he muttered into the microphone (trump has both called Ted Cruz and Clinton “nasty” in the past but never before had he so publicly paired the term with the word “woman”) The small but extremely offensive word started a movement of women and men proclaiming they are a nasty woman themselves. This word is a powerful callback to the misogynistic messaging of Trump's campaign, and a demonstration of solidarity among artists worldwide. Brooklyn based sculptor Roxanne Jackson posted a Facebook status that went viral, it read,

“Hello female artists/curators! Let's organise a NASTY WOMEN group show!! Who's interested? We need a venue!?”

700 pieces of work were displayed and sold all from the fact that people were pissed and wanted to make a difference and shows we ain't going to take it!

All there money went to Planned Parenthood, which is a brilliant organisation that helps a lot of women with birth control and practicing safe sex. The Republicans hate that women have choices with their bodies so they are planning to defund the organization.This exhibition was a huge success and all the work was sold. One of the works that was sold was Newcastle based artist and Nasty Women Newcastle curator,  Lady Kitt. Whose work was sold to a local politician in New York.  

People from around the world have started to organised their own Nasty Women exhibition. What's good enough for New York City is good enough for Newcastle! The exhibition is being organised by Byker Community Centre “maker in Residence” and Nasty Women “alumnus” Lady Kitt and artist and Byker Community Centre Development Manager Aly Smith. The little different for this exhibition is all work are welcome from artists and non artists. The profits for this exhibition will go to two charities. All profits from sale of artwork will be split 50/50 between LGBT campaigning group, The Fed and BCCs Women Group.

I am very proud and humble that these amazing women have let me help with this organisation. For me as a feminist curator, I am devoting my career to show the public that feminism is still as important as it was in the 1970s and shockingly not much had changed.

Women artists still do not get the same opportunities to display their work in solo exhibitions in such galleries like The Met and MOMA. Only last year Tate Modern had 50/50 women and male artists displayed together. Just this month, The Art Newspaper had an article about the Art Dealers Association of America Fair boasting about displaying more women artists than ever, even though dealers won't buy women artists because the price does not grow as much in time like male artists.

This project has just started and submissions are still coming in. One artist who has been selected, is local artist Juliet Fleming. Fleming recent work seeks to question stereotyping, particularly in class and genders often through wordplay.

Before starting this work Fleming encountered an article from the guardian looking into “3D-printed

clitoris model ... set to transform sex ed classes in France.” Since this article Flemings works has

been obsessed with this shape, and fervently draws it at every opportunity. Fleming says she sees

this work “as educational but also a positive affirmation, for removing taboos around female pleasure.

It is surprising how few people know the basics of this area of the female anatomy and that is still

shrouded in such mystery.” Fleming is interested in resent changes in the law which no longer allow

female ejaculation in pornography, and says “this seems like a backwards step towards true

enlightenment and acceptance of female pleasure”. This work seeks to empower, educate and

indulge in womanhood and female pleasure.

This is just one of many artists who have submitted their work to the Nasty Women Exhibition.


If you believe your a Nasty Women and would like to take part of this exhibition please email Lady_kitt@hotmail.co.uk deadline is 30th March.



Thanks For Reading
Michaela Wetherell
Founder of Finding Feminism

Finding Feminism: The Dirty Word!

Since finishing university I wanted to be a curator, not really knowing what it meant. I thought it was just putting pretty pictures on walls. Yes, that is apart of it but the preparation and the arrangements to get an exhibtion up and running is much harder. I graduated in 2011 and since then I have been building up my confidence in doing what I love. I have help other people with exhibitions, but never done it by myself. I knew from the start I wanted to do exhibitions focusing on women and women issues. This year I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and thinking a job is going to fall into my lap and just do what I wanted to do. I started finding feminism to find feminist in the north east and show how wonderful the north east art scene really is. I was lucky enough to get a space off a wonderful women I have known for a couple of years whilst volunteering in a space near her gallery space. I was over the moon when she said I could have the space. Over the passed few month I found artists and friends to help me out, as this was my first adventure I didn't know a lot of artists. I created this exhibtion with no money and I feel it came out great. Here is a little run down of the theme of the show and the artists involved. I did some pieces for the walls, to show how the movement of feminism has moved through time.  

Theme

This exhibition explores the power of language and feminism. Language has had an amazing effect on feminism, from The Suffragette storming the streets with their protest signs to standing on their soapbox to address the crowds. Feminism in the 1970s, where art and writing moved the way for women's rights. Feminist writer have created iconic work challenging the roles of women in society, from Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to modern writers, Naomi Wolf and Caitlin Moran. Now, Social Media is having a huge impact on the next wave of feminism, everyday women are expressing the wrongs in the world by simply sending a tweet. Group such as Everyday Sexism and No More Page Three have done some amazing protesting online. With any movement, there is always a backlash and feminism is arguable (to some people) one of the most hated words. Over the years the word has become an insult, a dirty word. Searching through social media you can explore the variety of hashtags and groups that are just there to focus on hatred towards feminists. Feminism is Cancer is a popular hashtag on twitter and there are many anti feminism groups. This exhibition explore the power of the dirty word! Creating the work is three local artists who have explored language and feminism in their work.

The Artists

Carol Sommer  

Sommer uses film found objects, installation and text in attempts to engage with the discourses of literature and library criticism.

“I am intrigued by the roles that the female characters play in the 26 novels written by Dame Iris and published between 1954 and 95 and to see what results re framing her fictional depictions of their experiences can yield.”

Cosmic Order I

Cosmic Order I responds to the depiction of female experience in the novels of Iris Murdoch. Whilst there are many ways of thinking about what might constitute female experience, in this instance, and reacting initially to the author’s warnings about the dangers of classification, the strategy used to make the work was to apply Iris Murdoch’s philosophical thinking to her particular fictional depictions of female experience. The author’s incorporation of Plato’s myth of the cave, his picturing of human life as a “pilgrimage from appearance to reality”  into her writing (both fictional and philosophical), prompted the collation of text relating to women and fire sourced from the 26 novels which is set to the rhythm of an extended edit of Jimi Hendrix's 1968 Burning of the Midnight Lamp.  Plato, Iris Murdoch suggests, “often uses musical metaphors, and treats audible harmony as an edifying aspect of cosmic order”. The chair responds both to the seated position of the prisoners in the cave, and to the drawing room settings in which much of the action in the novels takes place. The computer monitor and headphones provide an interface through which viewers are invited to consider the relationship between Murdochian fictional females and fire, - a source of energy and power yet also the element so central to the myth of the cave and the shadowy world of illusion…

Nicola Stokoe

Poet Nicola Stokoe explores through her poetry, what the issues are like for women today and the pressures society puts on women.  

Modern Identity

They live in your adverts

Your media and phone,

Convince you to buy all

The things that you own.

To keep mouths shut and minds full of cotton,

Keeping real troubles buried, forgotten.

Your brain remains focused on meaningless shit,

on Apple’s designs and Kardashian tits.  

Rebecca Simpson

Sunderland based artist and curator. Her work focuses on the obsession with self image and make up. Creating a youtube makeup tutorial, putting on her makeup and expressing the words of Naomi Wolf in her book, The Beauty Myth.   

RESURFACING pt.2

Through the embodiment of her online persona of the YouTube Beauty Guru, an alternative perspective of the ‘beauty industry’ is both explored and questioned. Not only the photographer, Rebecca utilizes herself as a case study representative of the wider beauty cult following furthermore as part of the audience. Discussing on the surface shared interests within the online beauty community in comparison to her own conflicting thoughts and those of feminists such as Naomi Wolf and Caitlin Moran.

The use of social media including Instagram and Facebook alongside her personal beauty blog coincides with her online YouTube video series. Accessible to a worldwide on-screen audience, the use of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tool enabled the placement of her videos within the online beauty and skincare circle despite their interlinking yet contradictory content.  The gallery subtracts her YouTube videos from the usual home environment allowing the prospect of her debated thoughts to be considered and absorbed further.

Mean Tweet Wall

With any sort of movement there are groups and individual who will hate what you are trying to say. Feminists get abused daily online with uneducated comments to death threats. The Mean Tweet Wall is to show words have power and even when feminist are making a difference, they we always be hate lurking in the background.

Protest Signs  

Every feminist movement have had a protest, in recent years groups such as, Slut Walks, No More Page Three and Femen have been protesting around the world. These are just a few groups that protest to inform the world that issues have to change and these words get exposed all over the world to get the messages across.

Where are the Women?

What is the percentage of women artist displayed in galleries and museums? Is a question that has been done to death, why? Well it's STILL a huge problem in galleries and museums around the world that women are underrepresented.

In this country alone, Saatchi Gallery decided just this year to hold its first all female show, (no theme, no connection just the fact that they have a vagina, think a little harder Saatchi!!) Tate Modern's new director Frances Morris has also promised more exhibitions from women. Why haven't they been doing this years before?

Champagne Life exhibited this year at the Saatchi Gallery. 

The Guerrilla Girls have been campaigning for women in the arts for years, this is what inspires me. When I leave my room in the morning the last image I see is one of their posters saying, THE ADVANTAGE OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST. This is just one little thing that has made me want to focus my career on women artists and feminism.

My political door. 

Galleries in the North East are quite balanced, not saying they are perfect. But there has been some great women artists displayed in big Institutes like Baltic in Gateshead and MIMA in Middlesbrough and far more in little independent galleries. This does not happen all the time though and things still need to change.

Margaret Harrison:Accumulations (2015)

Yoko Ono, Between the Sky and my Head (2008)

On my social media I have been posting pictures of women artists, old and new. Using the hashtag, Where are the Women I go around north east galleries and research museums collections online to find what women are exhibiting around the region. Some galleries I am pleasantly surprised at the amount of women artist they are displaying, others not so much.

Why I am doing this?

I want to highlight the good work that galleries do for more diversity and the ones that do not.  Of course woman are just one group, where are all the people of colour, gays, trans. I am only one woman, one group at a time!

PRAISE - Laing Art Gallery

It never used to be like this, it used to be very “old fashion” exhibitions and the permanent collection which is full (and still is) of men. However they have expanded their exhibition spaces and are using more of their collection in different exhibitions.  This includes using the women artists in the collection. Back in March, I went to visit Laing and saw the, Drawing from the collection exhibition and was pleasantly surprised that they had more than one women showing, (0nly three, but I have seen worse). I even expressed my surprise to one of the employees (he didn't care) I also mentioned in a post the abstract exhibition and they had some incredible women artists in there too.

Fail - The Winter Gardens

Now, I have a big problem with this one and it actually break my little feminist heart. The Winter Garden Museum in Sunderland, are very supportive of local art groups and artist and have had women displayed in the other rotating gallery space. In their permanent collection they have NO WOMEN ARTIST! WHY? They have plenty talented women in their collection so why isn't there a women in the gallery. I emailed the keeper of the arts (who is a woman)and she just bypassed the question saying there are other exhibition with women in them. But what about the collection that has been there for years the one I went to see as a child and saw no one like me. There is more unknown artist in there than known, so hopefully one of those unknown maybe a woman artist, (I doubt it). We the public are sick of Lowry, he isn't even our artist he belongs to Salford. By some way I want to show these women artist in Sunderland somewhere!

Most people I know in the arts are women, with amazing talent who do not get the time of day. Let's change this by educating the younger on women's rights, women of the past and women of the future. Using social media I can show the world what the north east has to offer even though it might not be on display. I am very proud of coming from the north east and want to show anyone who's interested in what we have to offer.

If any artist wants to promote themselves or have an exhibition they want to promote please contact me here -

michaela.wetherell@hotmail.co.uk  

Many Thanks,
MAW

WHERE ARE THE FEMINIST!

HELLO!!

My name is Michaela, I am a curator in the making from Sunderland. Throughout my early 20’s I found my passion, learning about incredible female artists. Supporting and educating myself in feminist activism and the mission of the feminist movement today. I am proud to say I am a feminist and with my passion of feminism and the arts I want to start my career in finding some amazing talents. I have been trying to find these feminist online and seeing what groups are around, truthfully I could not find much that was up to date. So, WHERE ARE THE FEMINIST!?

With my career in the arts, I want to make a dint in the art world in my beautiful region of the North East of England. So I ask, are you out there? I want to find artist, writers, poets, anyone who have creative minds and let's create something wonderful.

I want to use this blog to show what amazing feminist are out there and any exhibitions, talks, debates about feminism in the north east. Hopefully very soon I have more news and can get this movement moving!

Many Thanks,

Michaela Wetherell