Be Like Bees (2022 to the present)
This is an ongoing series of collages, mostly made for my own joy.
Trouble the Water/Tide Us Over (2019 to the present)
This meditation on grief, beauty and the unexpected is a work-in-progress with a socially engaged art component involving postcards that ask participants in caring professions to reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Suffragist Tea Parties (2020)
“Politics is housekeeping on a grand scale.”—Jane Addams
“The home” has always been a site of political organizing. The first women's rights convention in the U.S. was planned over tea, and later feminists sold tea to raise funds for the suffrage movement and used tea parties both as fundraisers and to politically organize other women in a time when it was rare for women to congregate in public. Suffragist Tea Parties is an interactive installation that asks participants to think about and discuss their relationship to voting today, and confront in a major election year both the ways in which voting rights remain vulnerable and how American democracy has always been incomplete. This installation was on exhibit at the Euphrat Museum of Art from January 23 through March 12 in the Women Pathmakers show. Visitors to the museum were offered tea and cookies during public events, and had conversations about voting prompted by the placecards at each seat. In addition, whole classes visited the museum for tea parties about people’s relationships to voting and democracy.
I conceived and designed this socially engaged art installation with production assistance by Diana Argabrite, Purba Fernandez, Johanna Foster, Sophie Foster-Palmer, Marlene Larson, Christine Myhre, Robert Myhre and Stephin Palmer. Wallpaper designed by Francesca Besso. It also featured:
Ida Wells-Barnett (b. 1862 d. 1931), oil painting and collage by Johanna Foster
Charlane Oliver (b. 1983), oil painting and collage by Johanna Foster & Sophie Foster-Palmer
Fannie Lou Hamer (b. 1917 d. 1977), oil painting and collage by Johanna Foster & Sophie Foster-Palmer
Johanna Foster is an Associate Professor of Sociology, the Helen McMurray Bennett Endowed Chair in Social Ethics at Monmouth University, and student of portraiture at the Yard School of Art in Montclair, New Jersey. Sophie Foster-Palmer is a Global Public Health/Sociology major and double minor in Fine Arts and Spanish at New York University.
Notes on elements in the installation:
The wallpaper is a reference to sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 feminist short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” In that story, the writer protagonist’s physician husband has diagnosed her with a nervous depression and forbids her to work until she is well again. She writes that “he hates to have me write a word.” Her husband confines her to a nursery with barred windows and fading yellow wallpaper. Having nothing else to do or occupy her mind, the protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with the wallpaper which comes to symbolize her confinement. “There are things inside that paper that nobody knows but me or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern…The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, as if she wanted to get out.”
The Votes for Women tea set is a replica of the original set commissioned by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont in 1913 to raise funds for the women’s suffrage movement. Not only did suffragists like Belmont hold tea parties as fundraisers and organizing meetings but there were two brands of tea itself, Equality Tea and Votes for Women tea, that were sold by suffragists to raise funds for activism, and to convey the idea that voting could be as ordinary as drinking tea.
The three portraits remind us that the suffrage amendment in 1920 granted the vote primarily to white women, since both laws and practices were in place that made it very difficult for people of color to exercise their right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, many white feminists upheld white supremacy and supported voting rights only for white women.
Journalist, social scientist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett founded the first African-American women’s suffrage organization in the U.S., the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago. White organizers of the national march for suffrage in Washington in 1913 demanded that black women march at the end of the procession. Ida Wells-Barnett refused to be segregated into a black contingent at the end of the march and insisted in marching with the Illinois contingent, flanked by two white allies. Wells-Barnett’s organizing bloc of black women in Chicago helped to elect the city’s first black alderman and successfully derailed state level segregation and anti-miscegenation bills.
Fannie Lou Hamer worked with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee to register black voters in Mississippi and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in response to the state’s all-white Democratic delegation to the national convention in 1964. Hamer registered black voters in a time when doing so was risking one’s life, and in the course of her activist she was shot at, beaten and arrested. Her speech at the Democratic National Convention, memorialized in this portrait, was televised across the nation, despite President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to supercede it with a press conference. In her speech, she shared her experiences with racist violence as a result of her attempts to register to vote and ended with these lines: “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” Hamer continued to organize for civil rights until her death. You can listen to her testimony here.
Contemporary voting rights activist Charlane Oliver co-founded the Equity Alliance in Tennessee, an organization whose goal is to increase civic participation. After the Equity Alliance in partnership with the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered over 90,000 new voters, the Tennessee state legislature passed a law in 2019 designed to undermine mass voter registration drives by imposing criminal and financial penalties if organizations do not undergo training by the state or collect registration forms that are incomplete. The Equity Alliance has joined a lawsuit against the voter suppression bill and Oliver continues to fight: “No one should have to go to jail for registering people to vote, but I will if I have to.” Oliver’s portrait joins those of Wells-Barnett and Hamer as a symbol of continued voter suppression among traditionally marginalized groups in the U.S. You can learn more about Oliver’s story in her TEDx talk entitled “I like my TEA with Lemon.”
Finally, the installation makes small acknowledgment of the colonialist legacy of sugar and tea. The tablecloth is a textile from India (donated for the installation by a friend of the artist) intended to recognize the racist and violent past that led to the globalization of tea. The pyramid-shaped sugar is an homage to artist Kara Walker’s massive Sugar Sphinx (2014) installation in an old Domino Sugar Factory, which engaged the relationship between sugar, slavery, gender and white supremacy.
To learn more about how to protect voting rights, visit the websites below.
Non-partisan organizations protecting voting rights and sharing info about how to vote and how to register others to vote:
https://www.rockthevote.org/
https://www.projectvote.org/
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote
https://www.fairvote.org/
https://866ourvote.org/
https://www.whenweallvote.org/
https://www.fairelectionscenter.org/
https://www.vote.org/
https://www.democracy.works/
Civil rights-based organizations protecting voting rights:
https://votolatino.org/
http://www.fourdirectionsvote.com/
https://www.aapd.com/advocacy/voting/voter-resource-center/
https://advancingjustice-aajc.org/voting-rights
https://vote.narf.org/
https://www.naacpldf.org/our-impact/political-participation
http://votingrightstoday.org/ncvr/home
http://reclaimtheamericandream.org/brief-vote/
https://www.demos.org/
https://www.letamericavote.org/
https://www.votingrightslab.org/
https://www.spreadthevote.org/
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights
Contact me at jennifer.r.myhre@gmail.com if you would like to hold your own Suffragist Tea Parties, and I will send you pdfs of the Democracy in Peril broadsheet and conversation prompts.
1893
Exhibited during Fall 2019 in the San Mateo City Hall and San Mateo Public Library as part of the Art in Public Places program, 1893 is an ongoing project that explores the joys and sorrows of modernity. Sociologists like Anthony Giddens describe modernity as a set of historical transformations in both social structure and culture that include the rise of the nation-state, industrialization, the spread of capitalism, mass democracy as well as a cultural orientation toward the future and a belief in "progress." Other sociologists add urbanization, mechanization, bureaucratization and the increased movement of people, things and information as key elements of modernity. Max Weber saw rationalization as the central process of modernity. In a rationalized world, efficiency, predictability and quantification are highly valued. Weber warned that rationalization across all sectors of society would lead to the "disenchantment" of the world.
1893 explores the co-existence of rationalization and enchantment. In 1893, the first ferris wheel debuted at the World's Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. Chicago in the 1890s was the eye of the storm of modernity, knee deep in industrialization, labor disputes, immigration waves, and the rise of the social sciences. Consider also these events that occurred in 1893: the U.S. imperialist takeover of Hawaii, a stock market crash that precipitated the depression of the 1890s, the first open heart surgery, the writing of the song "America the Beautiful," the first car built on U.S. soil, Gandhi committing his first act of civil disobedience, New Zealand becoming the first nation to grant women the right to vote, Thomas Edison's building of the first motion picture studio, and Georgia's becoming the first state to pass anti-lynching legislation. The ferris wheel has always been a personal symbol of enchantment to me and in this series it points to the joys of modernity. In the images, it is superimposed upon more ambivalent symbols of modernity. The medium I chose for this first round of images is cyanotype. One of the earliest forms of photography, cyanotype is something that I can do in my own kitchen as I make dinner. Yet, before that very hands-on low-fi process can begin, the images start life as digital files which can be taken in large quantities and handled with rational efficiency through software. 1893 is a work in progress, as I plan to explore many other symbols of modernity.
#allworkhasdignity (2018)
Exhibited at the Euphrat Museum of Art, Fall 2018
Medium: Digital photographs on rice paper, mounted on acrylic with fiberglass and polyester resin
#allworkhasdignity is a collaboration between Sal Breiter and Jennifer Myhre, along with contributing photographer-students from De Anza College: Zoe Weitzman, Karina Corona, Gaurav Kumar, Vianney Sanchez, Karen Martinez, Estephan Tumamao, Lucia Martinez, Kimberly Mckenzie, Melissa Favorite, Lucia Martinez, and Diana Rueda. We make art because we love making things. We make art because we are brokenhearted about the state of the world and making art is how we alchemize that. As consumers of art, we believe in the power of art and stories to generate questions, challenge thinking, and produce empathy or new insights. #allworkhasdignity is an ongoing series that is part of the 1500 Stories project. 1500 Stories is a large scale collaborative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. You can learn more about the project at 1500stories.org. Volunteer storygatherers from Silicon Valley, Wisconsin and New Jersey have already contributed nearly 600 interviews about the lived experience of economic inequality using the 1500 Stories question bank. Similarly volunteer photographers have also contributed hundreds of documentary photographs to the project. Twelve of those photographs that focus on work are featured here. Inspired by a data visualization of economic inequality in the U.S. that would need to reach 1500 stories tall--that’s roughly five miles--to capture the richest 1%, the 1500 Stories project uses windows as medium and metaphor. These windows ask us to consider, in a political and economic context marked by extreme inequality in income, wealth, working conditions and respect that maps along racial and gender lines, the notion that all work has dignity. In ongoing collaboration with volunteers and community groups, the 1500 Stories project will continue to create new windows beyond these original twelve.
Who(se) Shares?
On exhibit in the Justice for All? show
February 1 through March 23 2017 at the Euphrat Museum of Art.
Who(se) Shares? is a collaborative piece that incorporates documentary photographs taken by students at De Anza College that visualize economic inequality in the U.S. The shape of the image is meant to evoke the distribution of population and wealth in the U.S. This piece is part of a larger public art and digital storytelling project I direct about economic inequality in the U.S. called 1500 Stories. To read more about the Justice for All? exhibit, please see:
http://www.metroactive.com/arts/Art-vs-Injustice-De-Anza-Justice-For-All-Exhibit-Art.html
The Shape of Things
Despite my training as a sociologist and my love for documentary forms, I find myself surprisingly attracted to formalism. This series explores the literal shape of things. I love this line from New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham: "I eat with my eyes." I keep a gratitude journal and one of the unintended consequences of keeping such a journal is that you find yourself looking for things to be grateful for. This series operates in a similar way for me--it asks me to be more mindful about what I'm seeing, to pay attention to the shape of things.
Political Graphics
I make a lot of political graphics in my organizing around racial and economic justice. For samples of that work, which includes relief printing, screenprinting, graphic design, infographics and zinemaking, click here.