UNL Womanhouse

We’re more than a little excited to announce the house has four walls and doors and you can be INSIDE the house! It’s amazing to look around and know we built it. So, all you feminists, come out and celebrate tonight with us! It’s a potluck, BYOB party with dancing, a photo booth, games and lots of fun. 7 – 10pm at Parallax Space. We hope to see you there! (It comes down Sunday… you need to come tonight.)

We can’t believe it’s near the end! Come out to Parallax today from 1 – 4pm to help with the last bit of sewing up the house. At 4 pm we’re hosting Les Femmes Folles: The Women, 2011 book reading. Here’s some info on the book and the readers joining us today:

Creator and editor of Les Femmes Folles, the blog, Sally Deskins composed a catalog of images, excerpts and quotes of a selection of the creative women featured in the first year of the blog for the book Les Femmes Folles: The Women, 2011.

At the reading event on March 25, to celebrate Women’s History Month and in conjunction with the UNL Womanhouse exhibition: The House That Feminism Built, at Parallax Space, Sally will read a from her introduction about why she started the blog, along with readings by poets Lucy Adkins, Jaime Brunton, Megan Gannon, Natasha Kessler, Marianne Kunkel, Marjorie Saiser, Laura Madeline Wiseman and Felicia Webster.

LFF Books will be available along with books by the authors. The LFF book is also available for purchase on blurb.com; more information femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/book.

Bios:

LUCY ADKINS grew up on a farm in Nance County, Nebraska, attended country schools, the University of Nebraska, and received her bachelors degree at Auburn University in Alabama. Her poetry has been published in journals which include Owen Wister Review, Nebraska Territory, Plainsongs, Potpourri, Northeast, South Dakota Review, and the anthologies Woven on the Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Times of Sorrow/Times of Grace (The Backwaters Press, 2002), The Poets Against the War, edited by Sam Hamill (2003), and Crazy Woman Creek. Lucy lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she works at an insurance company and besides writing, spends a great deal of time on hands and knees in her garden.

Jaime Brunton has an MFA in poetry from the University of Illinois and teaches English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work appears in Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Poet Lore, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and other journals. She has been a finalist for the Four Way Books Levis Prize and Intro Prize and a semifinalist for the Walt Whitman Award.

Sally Deskins is a writer, artist, events curator and arts activist living in Omaha with her husband and two children. Keep up with her blog at facebook.com/femmesfolles.

Megan Gannon graduated from Vassar College (BA), the University of Montana (MFA), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (PhD). Poems from her full-length mauscript, White Nightgown, have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, and Best American Poetry 2006. Her chapbook, The Witch’s Index, was recently published by Sweet Publications, and her novel, Cumberland, is under representation with Susan Ginsburg at Writer’s House LLC.

Natasha Kessler is a poet living in Omaha, Nebraska. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA program. She currently co-curates The Strange Machine Reading Series in addition to co-editing Strange Machine Poetry/Books. Her work has been published in various journals including iO Poetry, SpringGun, Parcel, and is forthcoming in The South Dakota Review.

Marianne Kunkel is Managing Editor at Prairie Schooner and a
third-year Ph.D. student in poetry at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, with a specialization in women’s and gender studies. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, River Styx, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Laughing Game, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Marjorie Saiser’s most recent book is BESIDE YOU AT THE STOPLIGHT
(Backwaters Press, 2010), winner of the Little Bluestem Award. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Field, burntdistrict, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and other journals.

Laura Madeline Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of five chapbooks including, Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her writings have appeared in Margie, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Arts & Letters, Blackbird, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. www.lauramadelinewiseman.com

Felicia Webster, aka WithLove
Felicia, is a teaching artist, visual artist, poet and live performer and co-founder/host of VerBAL GUMbo, a spoken word event that promotes our rich diversity of culture and style. Bring your spoon to the House of LOOM every 3rd Thursday. She performed original spoken word poetry at the Feb. 29 event. Facebook.com/withlove.felicia

Have a great Spring Break and happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Remember fun begins with safety!

Visitors and artists at the Little Waves reception.  Many thanks to everyone who participated and helped put this show together!

UNL Womanhouse is really two-timing it starting tomorrow when we install Little Waves at the Rotunda Gallery in the City Campus Union. We’re celebrating Women’s Week in a big way! For more information and events happening this week check this out.

SUNDAY, March 11th is Sunday Funday at Parallax, 1 -4pm. Come help us piece together, sew and build the house. You do not need to know how to sew and if you just want to come in to hang out, you can do that, too! The address is 1746 ‘N’ Street, enter the painted white door on the garage door side (18th St.).

MONDAY, March 12th, 7pm: Guerrilla Girls On Tour! performing “Feminists Are Funny” at the Sheldon Museum of Art. Should be a packed house, come early!

MONDAY – FRIDAY, 12th – 16th, 9am – 5pm: Little Waves show at the Rotunda Gallery. In addition to the art on the walls, there will be volunteers from United By Yarn, the Women’s Center and UNL Womanhouse to talk feminism, art and knit/crochet with. We also hope we can collect some more voices for the Listen and See interview project.

WEDNESDAY, 14th- it’s a full evening of events!

5 – 7pm: Little Waves reception, Rotunda Gallery

6pm: Lily Yeh speaks at UNL Richards Hall, rm 15

7:30pm: Miss Representation screening at the Ross Media Arts Center. Panel to follow. (We had nothing to do with organizing this, we’re just excited about it.)

We hope to see you at one or more of these events- happy Women’s Week!

March 2nd was a fabulous night of performance. We were so happy to have Joan Stone from Lawrence, Kansas start us off with Mrs. Live Alone, an incredible dance and story based on native Nebraskan Tillie Olson’s work. At 71, Stone showed us what “old” dance moves can look like– just beautiful:

Next up was the entertaining Charley Friedman- well, not him exactly, but one of his extracted glands, the Adenoid. The Adenoid gave a performance lecture and got everyone into the mix– the audience turned into an Adenoid family and Marina Abramovics and became part of the show. Here’s the Adenoid himself:

And, finally, we ended the night with performances from the original Womanhouse of 1972. The Birth Trilogy turned the house into a space of total female creation as the women pushed, nurtured and cried out. Heidi Bartlett followed up by calling the audience closer to her and performing a moving rendition of Faith Wilding’s Waiting. Many people had never seen or heard of these performances before and we were glad to pay homage to the Womanhouse women in such an intimate way.

Photos of the house, Joan Stone first Charley shot by Emma Nishimura

Photos of the second Charley shot and the Birth Trilogy by Angeles Cossio

Photo of Heidi by Alison Van Volkenburgh

UNLWomanhouse is proud to present a night of performance this Friday, March 2nd from 7-10pm at Parallax Space. The first piece is interactive, so be sure to come and join in- no prior experience necessary. Lineup as follows:

7:15 pm
Charley Friedman
Performance 101 with The Adenoid and Friends

A brief introduction to Performance Art.  What is it and how do you make it? Group participation requested. Work study and credit is validated.

8:15pm
Joan Stone
Mrs. Live Alone

This performance was adapted from Tillie Olsen’s novella, “Tell Me A Riddle” (1962). In words and gestures, Stone enacts the central character, a Jewish immigrant, who participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and has never lost her idealism. She raised seven children, while constantly battling with poverty, and is finally claiming the right “to live within and not move to the rhythms of others.”Joan Stone has been performing Mrs. Live Alone since the 1970′s and, as she says, it has “aged with her.” Stone is joining us from Lawrence, Kansas and we’re pleased to have her.

9:15pm
Heidi Bartlett
UNLWomanhousers
Waiting and The Birth Trilogy

Both performances were part of the Womanhouse (1972) exhibition done by members of the feminist art program from CalArts. Put into a new context, how do the performances resonate today, forty years later?

Hope to see you Friday!

UNLWomanhouse presents…  “The House That Feminism Built”
February 3 – March 31, 2012
parallaxspace.com

Hi Everyone!

Thank you so much for coming to our first discussion two weeks ago. It was wonderful having over twenty voices from UNL, Nebraska-Wesleyan, and the community of Lincoln come together under one pink roof! Please join us for the second of this three-part meeting this Wednesday, February 29th.

This time around, we’re meeting in smaller groups to make more room for everyone to talk. Lesley Bartlett, PhD student in English and Women and Gender Studies at UNL, will kick-start the conversation with some info from her own research on identity, performance, and activism in feminist communities. You can make your thoughts a part of the installation by writing them on fabric that will be sewn into the house. Your voice will form the House that Feminism Built!

See you there!

Join us this Sunday from 1-4pm to help build the house! We have one back wall and are beginning to creep the length of the longest (20′) walls. You don’t need to know how to sew to come help! Parallax Space is located at 1746 ‘N’ Street in Lincoln. See you there!

Emma and Regina putting up the back wall.