Arts and Activism

I offer this chapter as a contribution to these rich and exigent discourses on music and sound, nature and survival, a story unfolding about an old sailing ship of wood and steel, which has steered cross-cultural and cross-continental knowledge exchanges through music and spectacle for the sake of our spe- cies and all others. It is the story of Arka Kinari, a ship that sailed around the world and through a global pandemic, powered by the wind and the sun, and offered a floating, multisensory spectacle of music, video art, dance, and the- ater to coastal villagers on the remotest islands of Indonesia. Arka Kinari is a remarkable ship. It is also a radical reimagining of the band tour, the concert setting, and climate activism that recollects and activates old knowledge of the sea.

As the result of the 2020 global Covid-19 pandemic, many countries closed their borders to prevent spreading the coronavirus and protect their citizens. Many Indigenous peoples live across state boundaries and therefore, felt the border closures particularly deeply. The Sámi whose territories span across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia were among those peoples. At the same time, other Indigenous peoples, such as the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota set up checkpoints onto their lands in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus on their communities. Whereas the Lakota claim they have the right to do erect checkpoints on highways leading to their territory, the governor of South Dakota has deemed them illegal and ordered them to be taken down immediately. In this chapter, I examine the role of borders in enacting or eroding on Indigenous self-determination amid Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on the concept of the state of exception as a ‘space devoid of law’ (Agamben), I suggest that borders can either serve as a means of exercising or undermining Indigenous sovereignty, depending on the political status and context of an Indigenous people.

Due to their ambiguous and fluctuating nature, socio-cultural policies have played only a limited role in promoting national integration. This study examines how the substance of the policies has been forged from political, economic and social contexts. Under an ethnic-based political structure, the government has been compelled to balance the demands of various ethnic communities and hence to have ambiguous and fluctuating socio-cultural policies. Malaysia's economic growth strategies dependent on FDI also induce the government to implement vague and shifting policies since these policies result in stable political and social climate. Stability has been the most important comparative advantage for attracting FDI to Malaysia during its period of modern economic growth. Because Malay preferential policies are logically incompatible with the principles of assimilation and multiculturalism, policy ambiguity in government planning has ensued. KEY WORDS: マレーシア、国民統合、アイデンティティ、民族、民族政 治、...

Substantial improvement in civil society organizations’ [CSOs] management of communication and media endeavors requires a shift from business and marketing models to a development communication perspective. Acting beyond the platform driven model of the current conception of the media manager, the critical communicator will be guided by a rights-oriented, civil society-driven social change vision; critique of the corporatization and marketization of CSOs; lateral, holistic management strategies in facilitating the efforts of the communication - media team; use of multiple media including new media technologies, in particular Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, in order to advance audience-user participation in knowledge production and dissemination [participatory informatics]; and media campaigns that seek to maximize the CSO’s contributions to the advancement of justice, equality, democratization and civic engagement in governance and public policy debates.

EnglishThis article investigates the reminiscences of an absent mother as the genesis of poetics in visual arts. Its purpose is to analyze the approaches that are used in the process of figuring out the absent mother figure in poetic research during the completion of a master’s in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, UFSM (Federal University of Santa Maria, FUSM). The methods employed in this research include dig-ital and analogical techniques such as a mono-type associated with handmade paper. From an autoethnographic approach, I use as a research technique a visual diary to subsidize the devel-opment of figurative projects. The descriptive process which establishes the symbolism of an absent mother figure allows the understanding of the origins of the works, and the procedures that root from personal experiences of the miss-ing mother figure. portuguesO presente artigo trata das reminiscencias da mae ausente como a genese de uma poetica em Artes Visuais. Tem como ...

Arts-activism for young people: My PhD by Portfolio reflects on 25 years of project work with young people and the challenges that youth workers and artists face in creating the necessary foundations for inclusive and productive activity, in diverse settings ranging from working on the streets, painting murals, to developing a whole school approach for educational impact on selected themes. My research explores the question, What are the necessary foundations for facilitating authentic arts-based co-production with young people? with a particular interest in projects that are rooted in solution focused, social activism. The main themes of the research focus on:
 Power; determining the impact of stakeholder agendas, 
 Impact; including an exploration of the definition of a ‘solution focused’ approach,
 Authenticity; ensuring the values represented in the work are inherent to the individual and Safe Space, looking at how this can be facilitated and the importance of ensuring inclusion.

This summer, with a collective of Black Canadian artists, critics and curators, I attended the opening of the 10th Berlin Biennale, curated by four people of African descent. Being in Berlin, the art city, in art spaces whose audiences were responsive to new stewardship, was a unique experience. In other words, it was really nice to be around so many Black people, from across Europe and all over the world, who work in the arts. It is rare to come together in this way to look, and to celebrate. The challenges of inclusion, of negotiating institutional support, and of working toward equitable practices of representation, seemed to be shared by by Yaniya Lee many of these art workers; from our respective contexts we had similar stories. Being there gave me renewed energy to both witness, and support, the immense sea change that has been happening for Black artists in Canada in the recent past. I've been writing about art for half a decade, and I've seen a dramatic change in the past year. Black artists are invited to show more, they are written about more frequently, and their efforts are demonstrably recognized. Looking back at the interviews, essays, videos and features Canadian Art has commissioned and published this year, one finds Black writers and artists and curators addressing the activities and concerns of Black arts in Canada, and in the diaspora at large. Though Black art in Canada is not new, the critical discourses around it are still in formation. We are negotiating how to speak about these practices, and how to give ethical, and nuanced, attention to its practitioners.

El artículo analiza las relaciones entre el racismo del bienestar, las
políticas migratorias y las políticas sociales; el impacto del racismo
del bienestar en las políticas de inmigración y las políticas sociales; el
uso de este racismo en las políticas con respecto a la
inclusión/exclusión de los inmigrantes; el carácter estructural del
racismo del bienestar en Europa, mostrando de qué manera los
sistemas de bienestar lo utilizan a modo de filtro para seleccionar o
precarizar a los inmigrantes; en qué sentido las políticas migratorias
han dificultado el uso de las prestaciones sociales; el discurso
racializado sobre el Estado de bienestar como dimensión ideológica
que alimenta y legitima medidas restrictivas en las políticas
migratorias y sociales; y el debilitamiento del Estado de bienestar.

This article discusses the Authors' Protest, organised by a group of Dutch literary writers in 1962-1963 to emphasize the need for governmental support for literature, and relates this protest to the debate on literary autonomy. The article follows Gisèle Sapiro's proposal to distinguish between autonomy as a feature of the literary field and autonomy as the institutional recognition of professional authorship. This distinction is linked to the analysis of so-called polities or value regimes, a methodology introduced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. This methodology is a useful tool for analyzing value shifts and discussions about values in a domain such as the literary world. After a reconstruction of the wider debate about fair remuneration of authors (1955-1963), the analysis zooms in on the political as well as poetical debates about governmental support that writers were engaged in during the winter of 1962-1963. While the largest group of writers regarded government subsidies for literature as a means to gain more professional autonomy, a smaller group of writers feared that subsidies would let them lose their moral freedom. This debate was intertwined with a more fundamentally political discussion about the power that the state should exercise over the cultural field.

This article describes the labour conditions of asylum seekers and other precarious migrant workers before and during the pandemic. Although this group's labour conditions were already precarious prior to the pandemic, we show how those conditions worsened during the COVID crisis because of their racialized condition and precarious migratory status. We also discuss the systemic impacts these negative conditions had on their personal lives, families and communities in spite of measures implemented by the provincial and federal governments. The article describes the resilience and resistance shown through the actions of grassroots community organizations, with immigrant and migrant members denouncing the hardships in their working environments and their community life. A mixedmethods research approach was used to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. The discussion and conclusions recognize the crucial social contributions of precarious immigrants, highlighting both their individual and political and collective resistance to their racialized condition and the negative effects they suffered during the pandemic.

Creating a Palette-able Planet. Professional artist, curator, and art historian Jeremy Caniglia discusses creative expression through narrative storytelling using art as a powerful platform for fighting oppression, climate change and breaking through indifference. Few artists are willing to go against the grain and use their compositions to interrogate the darkest parts of human nature. Attempts are made to silence social activism and only a handful of artists take a stand in voice and visual commentary. Caniglia is one of the few who uses his paintings as art activism. His works have been influenced and inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. If we are going to save the next generations from the devastation of famine, disease, climate change and wars we must help the world wake up through education and awareness.

Este artículo toma como punto de partida el análisis de tres series fotográficas realizadas por la artista griego-brasileña Gretta Sarfaty en los años 1970 para reflexionar sobre las narrativas de la subjetividad del sujeto colectivo mujer en las artes, abordando las problemáticas de la representación y sus respectivos regímenes visuales. El objetivo es elucidar algunas de las posibles enunciaciones de las mujeres artistas en la escena contemporánea desde la perspectiva de los estudios de género, con énfasis en las cuestiones corporales y de identidad. También son estudiadas las posibilidades y límites de los procesos de subjetivación desde la perspectiva de las confrontaciones y subversiones de género. Así siendo, se propone presentar otra posible narrativa en las artes visuales, desde el estudio y registro de procesos que apuntan a perspectivas no hegemónicas de la cultura.

El presente texto aborda dos orientaciones analíticas que se conjugan: una perspectiva exploratoria apunta al sector económico primario desde la agroindustria cannábica canadiense; la otra desde la alimentaria, lo cual se robustece con hallazgos relativos a los servicios de limpieza urbanos en Canadá. Ambos panoramas se problematizan en términos cualitativos evidenciando algunas de las características que organizan a la mano de obra en los sectores citados, dejando ver las vulnerabilidades y precarizaciones que se construyen en torno a la migración laboral transnacional. La parte final de este texto incluye lo relativo a la crisis sanitaria por la pandemia de COVID-19.

Hong Kong’s story is difficult to tell, commented Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) in consideration of the city’s complicated historical configuration as well as of the aesthetic reflection on the same by the writers and artists that have come to shape and promote the colonial city’s unique culture. Confronting the post-handover government’s suppression of democratic decision-making with massive street protests, the next generation of cultural producers continues to critically interrogate, contest, and subvert the official genealogy and nationalist master narrative. In response to the various factors contributing to the ongoing silencing of the city’s critical voices, many artists, directors, and writers have turned to (absent) sound as the aesthetic signifier of the sociopolitical turn from hope and reconciliation to despair. Their performative silence simultaneously protests and mourns the denunciation, suppression, and erasure of oppositional groups. In this paper, I apply a methodolo...

La technologie, tout comme n’importe quel autre médium, est un matériau flexible. En la modifiant, jusqu’à la rupture parfois, les artistes tendent à rendre perceptibles les enjeux qui sous-tendent son utilisation, à réaffecter ses fonctionnalités ou à modifier ses buts. Ils créent des espaces de liminalité dans notre tissu techno-social, des “états entre les états”, propices à la remise en question.

Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders fiercely demarcates the coastline of Australia as a closed border to any outsiders – boasted loudly and clearly through “NO WAY YOU WILL MAKE AUSTRALIA HOME” campaign posters. Such hostility unashamedly communicates the limits of the Australian Government’s care for those seeking refuge.

What is most puzzling about such vehement exclusion is that Australia is a nation created by colonisers who have perpetually asserted that they have a privileged right to exclusively claim it as their own. Borders are designed and constructed by a privileged few to exclude and disadvantage many. Through the enactment of borders, they define people, place and activity.

Through clever utilisation of metaphor and analogy, arts activist Scotia Monkivitch devised walked performances and installations to poetically engage the public in dialogue on border politics during the G20 Brisbane 2014, titled Walking Borders: Arts activism for refugee rights.

El presente texto aborda dos orientaciones analíticas que se conjugan: una perspectiva exploratoria apunta al sector económico primario desde la agroindustria cannábica canadiense; la otra desde la alimentaria, lo cual se robustece con hallazgos relativos a los servicios de limpieza urbanos en Canadá. Ambos panoramas se problematizan en términos cualitativos evidenciando algunas de las características que organizan a la mano de obra en los sectores citados, dejando ver las vulnerabilidades y precarizaciones que se construyen en torno a la migración laboral transnacional. La parte final de este texto incluye lo relativo a la crisis sanitaria por la pandemia de COVID-19.

Disponible en: https://www.upo.es/revistas/index.php/atrio/article/view/5678

Resumen: Nuestra herencia femenina se ha visto afectada por el ojo del hombre y sus consecuentes intenciones. De hecho, la mujer parece haberse creado a imagen y semejanza del varón, del esposo, del novio, etc., “alzándose” como un constructo del imaginario masculino. Las artistas contemporáneas españolas Carmela García y Marina Núñez proyectan a través de sus obras los malestares que hemos sufrido a lo largo de nuestra vida por el simple hecho de haber nacido mujer y que, prácticamente, nos han obligado a padecer. La capacidad de acción de sus trabajos debilita y trasforma las fronteras de lo hegemónico hacia otras posibles ficciones preparadas para subvertir el sesgado modelo androcentrista. A través de un estudio sobre la identidad, la imagen y, sobre todo, del cuerpo femenino, comprenderemos que el arte ha sido capaz de crear nuevas voces y miradas.

Abstract: Our feminine heritage has been affected by the male gaze and his consequent intentions. In fact, women seem to have been created in the image and likeness of a male: husband, boyfriend, etc. – “rising” as a construct of the masculine imaginary. Through their work, contemporary Spanish artists Carmela García and Marina Núñez project
the discomforts that we have suffered throughout our lives for the simple fact of being born a woman. The capacity for action of their works weakens and transforms frontiers of the hegemonic towards other possible fictions prepared to subvert the biased androcentric model. Through a study of identity, image, and, above all, the female body, we will understand that art has been able to create new voices and new gazes.

Editors's introduction to the papers collected from Watershed: Art, Science, and Elemental Politics, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 10–21 September 2018,. The Conference brought together art and science concerns around knowledge systems, water insecurity and threats to human survival. The program included work from India, the U.S., Peru and South Africa: installations and exhibitions, walks and performances, poetry and book readings across the university campus.

Watershed was an art/science program held in Johannesburg September 10-21, 2018, and involved academics from across the sciences and humanities, policy makers, NGO actors and art practitioners. The program focused on questions of the regulated supply, governance and access to water, water as a human right, and the unpredictability of rainfall and the precarity of water. Participating artists straddled the boundaries of art and science, contributing to debates on public policy, political economy and science projects. As the authors in this issue illustrate, art work was conceptualized and executed in ways that interrogated theory, methods and data, as well as knowledge practice and translation. In this introduction, the editors introduce the articles and describe some of the other works in Watershed.

Protests and riots in Hong Kong in 2019-2020 have occurred over concerns about perceived increasing threats to political freedoms, especially surrounding the proposed extradition bill. Underpinning the protests are broader issues of social and economic grievances. In short, there is a sense of increasing disempowerment. However, one’s sense of power can also be framed internally, as the capacity to control one’s thoughts and feelings, as well as one’s relationship to the world. Most social justice narratives today lack this internal perspective. The paper thus introduces the concept of responsible active citizenship, which is in turn founded upon the ideas of embodied presence and cognitive responsibility. This paper makes the argument that the development of a greater internal sense of agency may form part of the long-term response to the shift in power balance between the citizens of Hong Kong and the governments of the SAR and Beijing; not as a replacement for activism, but as a ...

In dit artikel worden de verschillende literatuurpolitieke visies tijdens het Tweede Schrijversprotest (Nederland, 1970) geanalyseerd. Dit protest, bedoeld om de financiële en artistieke positie van literaire auteurs te verbeteren, zette de verhoudingen tussen schrijvers, overheid en uitgevers onder spanning. Maar ook onder auteurs zelf was er grote onenigheid over hun doelen en de manieren waarop ze actie wilden voeren.

In my dissertation, I examine risk in relation to HIV/AIDS and queer art and sex; and the problem that industrial mitigations of risk pose to sexually active queer men living with HIV, the kinds of sex they want, and the people they fuck in the era of AIDS industry. I explore this problem through four themes that emerged during my interviews with artists whose practices respond to AIDS and/or queer sex: 1) risking the personal; 2) (radical, ludic, and risky) sexual ecologies; 3) AIDS, its intersections and risky representations; and 4) the role of risk in art and artistic practice. I also use methods of participant comprehension, sensory ethnography, participant sensing, and artistic practice. The role of the interviews in helping me select the themes shaped my theoretical conversation and the three interventions that comprise my dissertation: audio, video, and written. Industrial mitigations of risk fetishize HIV status and HIV criminalization in ways that stigmatize queer and HIV-positive sexual practices, communities, and cultures. Risk—
as idea and practice—is multidimensional and has been important in HIV/AIDS art/activism since long before AIDS industrialization. I talk about biopolitics and respond to disciplinary- and biopower through Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and his politics of aesthetic self-creation. I understand (and use) risk as a response to hetero- and homo-normative codes, laws, and imperatives.
As a ludic counternarrative to homonormativity, I explore constellations of risky sexual
and artistic practices as sites of self-creation through the concept of a dynamic continuum of risk that documents, across four decades of AIDS, the outlaw risky sex practices (anonymous, bathhouses, cruising, public sex) that have thrived in every era. I use this concept as a way to understand a collection of practices that argue against industrial mitigations of risk and the normative and gentrifying impacts these mitigations produce: communities of banality and compliance. Through examination and material production of art that responds to risk in AIDS and queer creative and sexual practices, I conclude that practices and processes of making and responding to art create an escape from the precarity of sexual marginalization, homonormativity, and gentrification.

With Paul Routledge and Alex Sutherland
This Arts Activism Toolkit can be used to stimulate thinking, reframe dominant stories and issues, understand the places in which you live and work and build creative relationships and practices across campaigns. It contains workshop activities, case studies and discussion tasks in order to share some of what is inspiring us in our own campaigns and endeavours across the globe. We believe that there is a need for us to engage with our oppressions, and work to understand what stories have been told that have shaped our existence; but then, in order to move beyond just naming injustice, we need to imagine a world yet-to-come.

The three of us have collaborated since 2018, with Alex and Ally working together in South Africa since 2001. We’ve built up a range of experiences in organising, building collectives, and generating arts activities in communities such as prisons and secure hospitals as well as with young people living on the streets in South Africa and also in landless people’s movements in Asia and climate justice in the U.K., amongst others. Throughout our work, separately and together, is a commitment to co-producing creative forms of resistance and imagination of alternatives.

This toolkit emerges from our participatory arts project that was located in Cape Town, South Africa, with partners Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education. Our work in #ImaginingOtherwise reminded us of the value of sharing capacity building activities in arts-based approaches.

La propaganda de las instituciones migratorias canadienses se basa en la política del multiculturalismo para proyectar el estereotipo de Canadá como un país en el que diversas culturas coexisten sin conflicto, así como el de un actor internacional magnánimo. De este modo se busca atraer mano de obra calificada para fomentar la competitividad del país en un mercado globalizado sin comprometer la seguridad nacional. En el presente trabajo, se contrasta esta imagen estereotipada con el discurso que emerge de los testimonios de Helena Martín Franco, una artista visual colombiana establecida en la ciudad de Montreal, y su personaje Fritta Caro. Se parte de la hipótesis según la cual sus obras y testimonios ofrecen elementos de información incompatibles con los de la propaganda migratoria canadiense, por lo cual constituyen un acervo de disonancias que tiene un potencial para contribuir a desarmar los estereotipos que ésta difunde

This thesis explores a pedagogical enquiry that has transformed the way I think and the way I teach. I used a variety of critical and theatre theories to frame my enquiry and for four years consecutively, visited a non-government organization (NGO) in India that uses theatre as an alternate pedagogical tool. I reflected upon the methodological differences between the theatre practices of the NGO and my practices. I then turned my enquiry inward to consider how my learning informed my teaching practices. I then created an alternate theatre project for some students in the American Midwest with Ashok, an artist from India. Ashok spent twelve days training the students in what I refer to as action theatre, while I coordinated, observed and reflected. This theatre is a form of social activism; it is designed to provide a forum for the students to express their sociopolitical views and raise individual and collective social awareness in the process. After the training period, the student...

"Neo-Liberal Judaization: State’s Ethnic Gentrification in Neo-Liberal Era – Review of Yael Shmaryahu Yeshurun’s Ph. Dissertation – Settlement Policy in the Israeli Peripheral and Mixed Cities- Between Nationalism and Neoliberalism, Ph. Dissertation, Ben-Gurion University, 2020 (Hebrew),” The Israeli Affairs Quarterly Journal (Qadayya Israelieh) 83 (Autumn 2021), 70-83 (Arabic)

A mediados de 2020, Jesús Antuña, Verónica Giordano y Eduardo Molinari organizaron el ciclo Comunidad, Territorio, Futuro. Este libro compila buena parte de las intervenciones que tuvieron lugar en ese marco. A partir de unos encuentros iniciales, en plena vigencia del Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio implementado por el gobierno nacional para contener la emergencia por COVID19, tomó forma la idea de organizar un ciclo de encuentros entre artistas y científicos sociales que coincidieran en un aspecto crucial: la práctica de la investigación situada en la convergencia de arte, política y ciencias sociales. Comunidad, territorio, futuro, son tres tópicos a partir de los cuales construir una reflexión colectiva. ¿Qué significa investigar en territorio? ¿Qué significa investigar con y junto a otrxs? ¿Qué significa investigar atentos a las temporalidades, sus ritmos y sus marcas?


Hong Kong’s story is difficult to tell, commented Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) in consideration of the city’s complicated historical configuration as well as the aesthetic reflection on the same by the writers and artists that have come to shape and promote the colonial city’s unique culture. Confronting the post-handover government’s suppression of democratic decision-making with massive street protests, the next generation of cultural producers continues to critically interrogate, contest, and subvert the official genealogy and nationalist master narrative. In response to the various factors contributing to the ongoing silencing of the city’s critical voices, many artists, directors, and writers have turned to (absent) sound as the aesthetic signifier of the sociopolitical turn from hope and reconciliation to despair. Their performative silence simultaneously protests and mourns the denunciation, suppression, and erasure of oppositional groups. In this paper, I apply a methodological cluster comprising concepts from ecocriticism, microhistorical-discourse analysis, social anthropology, and other disciplinary fields to address the ramifications of Hong Kong’s story as inscribed within protest-related literary and visual and multimedia art productions. Street art performance, handover-themed art exhibitions, Wong King Fai’s video “Umbrella Dance for Hong Kong,” and Samson Young’s sonic multimedia installations appositely illustrate the conundrum addressed.

The pandemic showed that theatres will be adapting, re-positioning and re-focusing their work through digital means and by using diverse social media tools, in order to stay present and active during the period which will be limiting their models of traditional production and existence. The research explores the rationale behind so called "pandemic production", digital narratives and main approaches of managers and leaders in the public theatres during the pandemic phase, while noting the lack of cultural policy leadership. Institutions managers role was of most importance and the pace of adaptation depended on their skills. For all stakeholders, new reality caused by the pandemic opened the horizons of ethics and aesthetics of solidarity, care and critical reflections within theatres, while cultural policy makers choose to act as bureaucrats, missing the opportunity to step in with more vision and leadership, which lead to downgrading their role to pure administration.

Ante la siempre actual y urgente necesidad de otorgar visibilidad a las mujeres creadoras, este libro busca conceder un espacio para el análisis de la obra de mujeres artistas, escritoras, divulgadoras y transformadoras sociales en el contexto contemporáneo iberoamericano. Partiendo de ejemplos de mujeres cuya labor creativa ha significado la dura apertura de un camino por el que también ellas deben transitar, en este libro se añade un lugar especial para la experimentación crítica, en el que a través de la voz de las artistas es posible acceder al análisis académico, procesual y conceptual de su propia actividad de creación.

Women Exposed is an annual art exhibit by women, for women. Its mission is two-fold: to create an opportunity for women artists, and to empower victims of domestic violence through education and financial donations. The money raised by the show is given to the local domestic abuse shelter Middle Way House and its long-term affiliate, The Rise.

On April 29, artists and volunteers from all over the world will gather for WE’s 6th annual opening at Lodge 101. This year’s theme is “Every Body: Form, Formlessness and Transfiguration.”WE was started by a group headed by Margaret Belton, former IU art student and Middle Way House volunteer. It was in her capacity as a barista at Soma Cafe that she recruited me as an artist. At the time I was deeply involved in my Inscribing Tradition on Female Body project, which dealt with women in religion, particularly in Islam. It seemed like a perfect fit for my work, not to mention a good cause and an opportunity to meet local artists. I gave her a piece and went to the opening at Gallery North. There I met fellow local women artists—strong, kind and talented women, beautiful both inside and out. We had a blast!