Primordial Egg 2 by Simone Clunie
Spiral by Helen Klebesadel
Auction Bidding Starts November 9th
Announcing Scholar Salon 14: Register for October 7th
Call Your "Mutha’": A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
with Jane Caputi
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight Time
Register for this live online event: scroll to the bottom of this post to login.
The Anthropocene is the term for our current geological era, during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Jane Caputi's new book examines two major "myths" of the Earth, one ancient and one contemporary, and uses them to devise a manifesto for the survival of nature--which includes human beings--in our current ecological crisis. The myth of Mother Earth personifies nature as a figure with the power to give life or death, and one who shares a communal destiny with all other living things. The Anthropocene myth sees humans as exceptional for exerting an implicitly sexual domination of Mother Earth through technological achievement, from the plow to synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.
"Much that we take for granted as inferior or taboo is based in a splitting apart of inherent unities: culture-nature; up-down, male-female; spirit-matter; mind-body; life-death; sacred-profane; reason-madness; human-beast; light-dark. The first is valued and the second reviled." This perspective provides the framework for any number of related injustices--sexual, racial, and ecological. Caputi resists this pattern, in part, by deliberately putting the "dirty" back into the mind, the obscene back into the sacred, and vice versa.
Jane Caputi, PhD is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons and Crones; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture. She has also made two educational documentaries: The Pornography of Everyday Life and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth. Jane is the winner of ASWM's Saga Award for Contributions to Women's History and Culture.
Save these dates for upcoming Salons
October 21 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
When the Moon and the Sun are Daughters of Mother Earth. Analysis of Basque Cosmic Reality
Idoia Arana-Beobide
November 4 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time
Beyond the Trees: Ecofeminism and Connections to Current Movements for Change
Jeannette Kiel
November 18 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time
Hieroglyphic Thinking
Normandi Ellis
December 2 at Noon Eastern Standard Time
The Modern Matriarchal Gift Economy
Genevieve Vaughan
The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. Continue reading for this Salon's Zoom Registration information.
Announcing Scholar Salon 12: Register for August 26th
The MASKS OF THE GODDESS Project
with Lauren Raine
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight Time
Register for this live online event: scroll to the bottom of this post to login.
"Myth comes alive as it enters the cauldron of evolution, drawing new life from storytellers who shape it." --Elizabeth Fuller, the Independent Eye Theatre
"I’ve always seen masks as "vessels for our stories". When I went to Bali to study mask arts I was privileged to produce collaborative masks with Balinese mask makers while there, and I returned inspired by their traditions of sacred Temple masks, masks that “belong to the gods”. In 1999 I was commissioned to create 30 multi-cultural masks of Goddesses for Reclaiming’s 20th annual Spiral Dance. As I researched worldwide feminine mythologies for the "Masks of the Goddess" collection, I found myself in a grand conversation that continually grew as colleagues and communities - dancers, storytellers, ritualists, psychologists and theologians, used the masks, each bringing new meaning to a universal heritage of sacred stories by “embodying” the many faces of the Goddess. The Collection travelled throughout the U.S. with many different communities and individuals for over 20 years, and is the subject of a self-published book. In 2019 the Masks of the Goddess Project was formally closed with a performance and an exhibit of the Collection at HerChurch in San Francisco." Learn more about the Masks of the Goddess Project here.
Lauren Raine. MFA, is an artist and writer known for her "Masks of the Goddess" Collection that traveled throughout the U.S. for over 20 years. In 2015 the Collection was presented at the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has also created the projects "Spider Woman's Hands" and "Our Lady of the Shards." She received the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center Fellowship and has been a resident artist at Henry Luce Center for the Arts Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C, Cherry Hill Seminary, and Coreopsis Journal of Myth and Theater. See more of her work on her website.
"Like the Spider Woman herself, Lauren has become one with the work of her hands. It is unusual to find a talented artist who is also sublimely articulate about her inspiration, her study, and her realization."
---Sarah Gorman, THE CREATIVE SPIRIT CENTER, Midland, MI
Save these dates for upcoming Salons
Sept 23 at 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time
Redeeming Ancient Agriculture from the Dustbin
Vicki Noble
October 7 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
Jane Caputi, PhD
October 21, 2020 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
When the Moon and the Sun are Daughters of Mother Earth:
Analysis of Basque Cosmic Reality
Idoia Arana-Beobide
Scholar Salon with Simone Clunie
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Wednesday July 29, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight time
The Representation of Goddess Imagery
in Feminist Art
For millennia, the goddess figure made its way through the mythologies of First Peoples and through women’s histories. In the Western traditions of major (masculinist) Abrahamic religions, the archetype of a/the goddess has become eclipsed by a solo male god head. In the rising of the Second Wave of the western feminist movement of the 60s in (New World) countries like the USA and the United Kingdom, female artists started looking at a female create-tress, inspire by various traditional goddess mythologies, as the first source of worship. The iconography of the goddess also became another way to peel away the layers of patriarchal thought (and religion) and to interpret female embodiment and energy as a priori site of/for creation. Artists began to pay reverence to the spirit/creation and its interconnectedness to/within nature. They introduce the goddess presence through re-confirming pagan based practices like Wicca and Dianic witchcraft, the calling on of the African traditions of Yoruba and Vodun, and reframing Christian tradition within a woman’s theology.
As a ceramic artist, my work has been influenced by this time and train of thought, and moving through a trajectory of the social influences of the 1960s and onwards that informed the feminist (art historical) thinking of various female artists, I will look at how goddess mythologies have informed individual/specific works of Ana Mendieta (Cuba/USA), AfraShe Asungi (USA), Monica Sjoo (Sweden/UK), Mary Beth Edelson (USA), Robyn Kahukiwa, (Aotearoa/New Zealand), Mayumi Oda (Japan/USA), Yolanda Lopez (Mexico/USA), Sutapa Biswas (India/UK), Nancy Spero (USA), and Vivian Lynn (Aotearoa/New Zealand).
Simone Clunie is an artist who works as a librarian and lives in Pennsylvania. Moving to the USA from Jamaica in the mid-eighties she found out she had an affinity for clay and earned a BFA in the Visual Arts from Florida International University in Miami. A feminist conceptual framework is the impetus for the work she focuses on, primarily using the female body as a metaphoric container for/of magic and women’s mythology.
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