About
This series began with an invitation from a Yellow Rose Project to contribute work responding to the 100 year anniversary of the 19th amendment which federally outlawed voting discrimination based on sex in 1920.
The conflict between those for and against suffrage became known as the war of the roses, with pro women’s vote supporters wearing yellow roses and opponents wearing red roses.
For this work, I combined references to the historical artifacts and symbolism of the suffrage movement with photographs made by pioneering professional photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston around 1899.
I chose to work with scans of Johnston’s photographs because I found them both visually striking and representative of the strength, aspirations and limitations of late 19th century women with various class and ethnic backgrounds.
By looking at work made by Johnston two decades before the 19th amendment passed, I realized how that particular moment sits in a historical continuum: women worked to become self-realized, equal members of society long before suffrage, and imperfection and struggle toward that ideal continue as the rights of women in America today are eroded in a way not seen in generations—bringing us uncomfortably closer to the women of Johnston’s era.
Process and Edition
Each piece in Growing Pains is a handmade transfer print onto an antique envelope, resulting in a unique work. Some pieces have additional hand painting with watercolor, pastel and charcoal following the transfer process.
The images are a combination of those made recently by Phillips, and works by Frances Benjamin Johnston in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s which now reside in her archive at the Library of Congress. Images are reused and combined in various ways without limitation, as the process and substrate makes each piece truly singular.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Self-Portrait (as “New Woman”), 1896
Coda
Dobbs. V. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
Dissenting, Red thread, Supreme Court Opinion, Frances Benjamin Johnston Photograph, 2023
At the end of 2022, I found myself struggling to make a piece of art for this project. Our remit was to use a selection of pages from the dissenting minority opinion opposing the ruling in Dobbs. V. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but my eyes glazed over as I tried to read. What a weight of jumbled words, powerless to legally protect women from the somehow greater legal weight of other words. I looked at these thin pages of dissent, and felt buried by their scribbles, their footnotes and citations, their reasoned arguments. Turning to my sewing machine, I began to zig-zag stitch each line under crisp strands of red thread. “Thwack, thwack, thwack,” went the needle of the machine as it pierced the paper.
Working with the pages later, the red stripes of the American flag emerged from the zig-zag lines. I was reluctant. The flag really doesn’t do much for me from a point of pride or protest—it’s been used to death by all sides. Yet maybe that was actually the point. Skipping the 50 stars, those pointy symbols of state lines that were just too much for me to take in my current mood, instead I included a rectangular crop of a Frances Benjamin Johnston cyanotype from 1899 depicting three girls sitting behind bars in a gymnasium. Living in the era of the New Women at the turn of the last century—a time of aspirational women’s rights within a dominant political patriarchy—I look at them now and think with chagrin, you and me are closer than I’d like, sister. I left only one word uncovered, the word that best encapsulates the weary defiance I feel about this entire nasty mess: Dissenting…
Huq : I seek no favor is a response to the misogynistic malfeasance that is the abortion ban. Conceived of and organized by Ashima Yadava, it brings together artists and thinkers who believe in collective political action! Each collaborator is assigned four distinct pages from the 213 page legal document and this series is a response to those pages. In an act of defiance, we speak back to the system which uses our bodies as a tool for our oppression and perpetuates historical inequality.
Huq is an Urdu word for rights. I seek no favor originates from an Audre Lorde poem ‘a woman speaks’ The bilingual title articulates the multiple identities, cultures and diverse voices this abortion ban affects.