EveryBody!

Heather Ault | Wallpaper Reproductions

Heather Ault is Midwest based artist and activist who combines her bold graphic style with feminist politics to create subversive imagery for reproductive health movements. Ault's piece, Wallpaper: Reproductions, like others in the exhibition, pays homage to Suzann Gage and her illustrations in A New View of a Woman's Body (Simon and Schuster, New York:1981). Gage's work with the Federation of Feminist Health Centers informed her work in the feminist health movements. The "Del-em" was a piece of medical technology developed by Gage's colleagues, Lorraine Rothman and Carol Downer, as a menstrual extraction device. The "Del-em," short for dirty, little machine, was used in self-help groups associated with the Federation of Feminist Health Centers in California to bring on menstruation. Gage's pencil illustration of the technology inspired Ault's motif for her wallpaper piece. Ault's piece plays on themes of subversive feminine power. Hiding the gynecological, self-help technology in pale, pink wallpaper, Ault comments on the ways in which activists in the Women's Health Movement took their gynecological health into their own hands, learning and sharing knowledge through underground networks.

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CureThis! | curethis.org

Curethis! is an online community devoted to creating dialogue around health justice, by shifting the focus from health policy experts to everyday people involved in health care, whether as providers, activists, or consumers. The question, "What does it mean to heal?' is a organizing principal for the website. The site's founders met in the Los Angeles activist community and at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007. They identified a common belief in the power of personal stories to build a movement. The organizer's believed, much like activists in the Women's Health Movement of the 1970s, that through sharing personal experiences around health care larger change can be effected. Anyone can join the website which is structured like a weblog. Users post their story by creating an account. Curethis! aims to bring together individuals, through social media formats, from around the United States and beyond to discuss health and health care issues that are happening in their communities. Curator Bonnie Fortune worked with founder Anjali Taneja to bring the website in as part of the EveryBody! exhibition.

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CWGC | Chicago Women's Graphics Collective Collection

Chicago Women's Graphics Collective Collection is housed at the Chicago Women's Health Center (CWHC), one of the longest running feminist health centers in the United States. The center was opened in 1975, "emphasizing self-examination and a peer-to-peer approach." The center is organized collectively stemming from its early beginnings in Chicago activism of the 1970s. Members of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) helped to start the CWHC. The arts working group of the CWLU was called the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective (CWGC). The group made screen printed images for different events and actions around the city of Chicago from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. They saw their artwork as a dialogical process in support of a larger movement. Often the CWGC would appropriate images from feminist movements elsewhere in the world as well as printing original designs. Their image aesthetic varied from poster to poster reflecting the collective process of the group, but all posters dealt with issues of feminist activism. Several original posters from the CWHC Collection are included in this exhibition.

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Melanie Cervantes | Young Mother's Bill of Rights Poster Project

Melanie Cervantes is a Xicana activist-artist based in Oakland, CA. She collaborates with Jesus Barazza as Dignidad Reblede, graphic artists and printmakers, the duo creates images that celebrate indigenous peoples stories and histories. Cervantes is a self-described 'artist of the people,' whose illustrations, prints and posters translate the hopes and dreams of justice movements into images that agitate and inspire. Cervantes includes the Young Mother's Bill of Rights poster in the EveryBody! exhibition. This poster was part of a project of the Center for Young Women's Development in San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that is led by and works with young and adult women whose lives are affected by the juvenile and criminal justice system in the Bay Area. The Young Mother's Bill of Rights project articulates the struggles of young men and women struggling to parent while dealing with being involved with the criminal justice system. Cervantes worked with the Center for Young Women's Development to create a striking graphic that would catch the public's attention. The project was produced as a poster and a series of postcards in 2005.

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Tee Corine | The Cunt Coloring Book

Tee Corinne (1943-2006) was a prominent lesbian, feminist artist. Her most celebrated work The Cunt Coloring Book (self-published in 1975, Re-print by Last Gasp, 1988) is included in the exhibition. It is, as the title suggests, a coloring book translating Corinne's detailed drawings of vulvas and labia into graphic, black and white images for coloring. She began creating the drawings as she was coming out as a lesbian and a feminist in the seventies. She created the drawings, first, in private using her own body and later attending consciousness-raising groups to sketch from life. Corinne's work reflects embodied knowledge, prevalent in the Women's Health Movement, which encouraged women to develop a personal understanding of their own bodies. She also wanted her work to be used as a tool for questioning power and how one gains access to information. Reflecting on the title of The Cunt Coloring Book, Corinne says, "I liked the idea of combining a street term for genitalia with a coloring book, because both are ways that, as children, we get to know the world." For her, the project was both about access to information and a celebration of women's bodies. The EveryBody! exhibition makes The Cunt Coloring Book accessible at a coloring station during the exhibition.

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Christa Donner | Inheritance wall mural

Christa Donner is a Chicago based, internationally exhibited artist and educator who works in multiple medias. She makes comic books, public projects, paper installations and wall paintings. Donner's work focuses on the "misinterpretation or mis-imagining" of the body in an attempt to transform anxiety into empowerment. She uses art and image making as a research tool to understand the confusion of illness, injury and the female reproductive system by creating alternate realities where bodies are extended and empowered. Donner's illustrative style communicates fantastic narratives compelling viewers to confront difficult physical realities. She works with the public to collect stories about reproductive health and body image, the personal narratives she collects later inform the work she produces. Donner is inspired by illness, malaise, pain and confusion surrounding our physical bodies. Her large-scale installations magnify and expand on these themes.

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Docs Populi Archive | Political Poster Archive

The Docs Populi Archive is a project of archivist Lincoln Cushing. Cushing collects and preserves graphic art from activist history. Cushing states, "I am committed to documenting, cataloging, and disseminating socially and politically significant graphic material which otherwise might be left behind in the digital revolution." He considers the Docs Populi project both an artistic and a political endeavor. Curator Bonnie Fortune worked with Mr. Cushing to select political posters from the Docs Populi Archive that reflect the concerns of the Women's Health Movement (WHM) and more recent feminist health movements. The posters represent, in bright colors with bold messages, topics from the self-organization of early women's health clinics in California to environmental concerns that directly effect women to messages about positive body image. The Docs Populi Archive has collected a broad selection of political posters reflecting generations of national and international political fervor.

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Suzann Gage | Archival Illustrations from New View of A Woman's Body

Suzann Gage does not consider herself an artist. The former art student became a nurse practitioner and now runs Progressive Health Services in California. The Women's Health Movement had a profound influence on her life when she encountered it for the first time while studying art in the Midwestern United States in the early seventies. She left college and moved to Los Angeles where she played a pivotal role in the Federation of Feminist Health Centers as a volunteer lay health worker and later as the lead illustrator on their publication A New View of a Woman's Body (Simon and Schuster, New York: 1981). The book was collectively researched and written over several years. Gage was responsible for making drawings from life, basing her illustrations on clinic volunteers. She also made drawings based on the groups' research in libraries and archives. The book covers topics like abortion, self-education and a feminist understanding of female reproductive anatomy. The book, and especially Gage's earnest illustrative style, influenced several generations of scholars and activists, including Terri Kapsalis, Heather Ault and Laura Szumowski, who are included in the exhibition. EveryBody! presents Gage's original archival illustrations.

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Terri Kapsalis | The Hysterical Alphabet

Hysteria’s four-thousand-year history deeply inflects our ideas about gender and illness. The ancient Greek myth of the traveling uterus, Freud's Dora, and the French-Victorian vibrator all reveal hysteria as a cultural symptom. This multi-media production offers a history of hysteria with humor, playfulness, and critical insight. Terri Kapsalis reports episodes from medical lore in a "hysterical" version of the alphabet backed by Danny Thompson's disquieting film collages and John Corbett's musical manipulations.

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Suzanne Lacy | Rape is...

Suzanne Lacy is a U.S.-based writer, multi-media artist, and activist who works collaboratively among diverse communities around the globe on issues ranging from promoting indigenous knowledge to opposing violence against women. The artist's book, Rape Is, was created in May 1972, a time of heightened and significant anti-rape organizing, as well as theorizing about sexual violence. To open the book one had to break the red seal, and inside, with blood red covers, were 42 statements about rape, articulating a continuum of "numerous and interrelated forms of sexual abuse." Lacy credits Sheila de Bretteville with helping on the graphic design and Deena Metzger with framing the texts. De Bretteville and Metzger, leaders in California feminism and the arts, were Lacy's teachers in the early seventies at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. All three women were then involved in The Woman's Building in Los Angeles, which opened in 1973. (written by Sharon Irish.)

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Madsen Minax | theawkwardkid.com, online journal of a transman

Madsen Minax is a Chicago based digital media artist, filmmaker and musician. He directed the critically acclaimed documentary Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance (2009), which has screened in North and South America and Europe. He contributes his online journal, the awkward kid: a record of parting, and the accompanying 'zine to the exhibition. The online journal is a document of his own chest surgery experience and his interpretation of a personal transgender experience. In his introduction to the website, he acknowledges his own indebtedness to other online diaries of transpersons going through similar experiences, describing the awkward kid: a record of parting as an entry into the larger conversation that helped him think more complexly about bodies and decisions. His online journal shows how contemporary feminist health movements, like their counterparts in the seventies, can still rely on the personal support networks of shared experience to empower people to know, understand and feel comfortable in their bodies, sexualities, and gender expressions.

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Pink Bloque | Pink Bloque Archives

Pink Bloque was a Chicago based group of artists and activists who used street theatre to update radical leftist politics. No longer active, the group began in 2002 evolving out of artist, activist and organizing communities. Dressed in pink and performing choreographed dance routines, the group sought to counteract, what they saw as the predominantly male culture of direct action politics associated with the anti-globalization movement of the late-1990s. The Pink Bloque was committed to using tactical media and visual culture to their advantage, staging engaging public performances while handing out fliers and leaflets on topics from date rape, reproductive health rights for women and the war in Iraq. The group used popular culture and feminine aesthetics to update feminist politics and issues to a new generation of activists. Garnering recognition for their efforts from national media outlets such as The Washington Post and National Public Radio.

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Lee Relvas | You Make Me Feel Plenty series

Lee Relvas (Formerly Dewayne Slightweight) is a multidisciplinary artist who combines drawing, composition and performance to explore human relationships. She contributes recent drawings from her series 'You Make Me Feel Plenty,' which is supported in part by a Critical Fierceness Grant. The series seeks to 'forge new modes of coexistence amongst humans and their shifting environments.' Relvas's tightly controlled, illustrative style incorporating multiple patterns belies a deeply emotional investigation of heartbreak, aging, and sexuality. This work reflects the various strategies that image making can elucidate our understanding of bodies in the world, an important part of feminist health movements.

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Favianna Rodriguez | Printed Works

Favianna Rodriquez is an artist and activist based in Oakland, California. Her high-contrast, figurative printmaking work deals with themes of identity, race, global community, immigration and sexual politics. Rodriguez is a celebrated solo-artist who also works collaboratively with the Just Seeds Artist Collective. With Just Seeds she distributes print media, such as her posters and several books including, Reproduce and Revolt (Softskull Press, 2008). Rodriguez's graphic and colorful imagery refocuses the conversation surrounding the sexual health and empowerment of women to one of celebration. Employing a broad choice of subject matter, her visual work moves from matrilineal strength to positive sexuality, creating diverse and engaging ways of understanding health activism.

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subRosa | Vulva de Reconstructa

subRosa describes themselves as a 'mutable (cyber)feminist art collective combining art, social activism and politics.' The group focuses their research on the 'the intersections of information and bio technologies on women's bodies, lives and work.' They have exhibited internationally in Spain, Britain, Holland, Germany, Croatia, and Singapore, among other locations. Founded in 1998, the group produces research-based work that is often performative and discursive, aiming to engage the audience through interaction. Constucta/Vulva, was first exhibited at Carnegie Mellon's Miller Gallery in 2000. The piece allows viewers to attach brightly colored labia, cervix, or clitori to create their 'ideal vulva.' Members of subRosa dressed as speculums lead viewers through the amusing and educational experience. With this piece, the group acknowledges an homage to the history of feminist health movements that encourage liberation through knowledge about the body and sexuality.

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Laura Szumowski | Printed Works

Laura Szumowski is a Chicago based artist and illustrator. Szumowski's background in illustration for graphic novels influences her fluid drawing style. She approaches topics of reproductive health and sexuality with a sharp wit and playful illustrative style. Szumowski paid homage to EveryBody! artist Suzann Gage with her 2007 graphic book, Tip of the Iceberg (2007), about the clitoris. Basing her research and illustrations on Gage's work in A New View of a Woman's Body (Simon and Schuster, New York,1981) she updated women's health activism for a new generation interested in feminist health issues. Szumowski turns her attention to misconceptions surrounding menstruation in her poster Menotoxins, illustrating historical myths and fears surrounding the menstrual cycle. She builds on this research for her new graphic book Cycling (2010), also dealing with the topic of menstruation. Cycling combines fears with facts in a neat hand-lettered publication. Szumowski's detailed drawings from unicycles to "moon huts" offer humorous visuals to change popular perceptions about the menstrual cycle.

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Video Works in the EveryBody! Exhibition

Video Data Bank

Women's Lib Demonstration NYC, 00:23:30 1970

On August 26, 1970 ten thousand women marched through New York City as part of the “Women’s Strike for Equality,” organized by Betty Freidan. This video includes “on the street” style interviews with women and men who attended the march. The video is included in the EveryBody! exhibition for its historical relevance in capturing the passionate feelings of those active in feminist movements and the opposition they faced from the larger public.

(In)Visible Women Ellen Spiro, 00:26:00 1991

Ellen Spiro is a critically acclaimed documentarian with a background in activism and experimental film. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other granting organizations. (In)Visible Women follows three women living with AIDS and their experiences. The women discuss how the women moved from diagnosis to speaking out about how women with the disease are overlooked for treatments, services and support. This video is included in the EveryBody! exhibition because it shows how women’s health concerns are a continued issue in health care activism.

Cambridge Documentary Films

Taking Our Bodies Back: The Women’s Health Movement, 00:33:00 1974

This is the first film by Cambridge Documentary Films and an important educational tool. It documents the critical concerns of the Women’s Health Movement (WHM) including abortion, breast cancer, sex education and health care for women of color. The film’s thesis is also the organizing cry of the WHM, that women should be in control of their bodies and their health care. The film includes an interview with Barbara Seaman, author of the The Doctor's Case Against the Pill (1969, which started a consumer rights movement in women’s health care.

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Sara Welch | Stating My Needs prints

Sarah Welch is a Chicago based artist whose prints and drawings deal with affect and the body. Her piece, 'Stating My Needs…' is based on original research on the history of the Riot Grrrl movement, a cultural and activist feminist movement from the early to mid 1990s that some scholars associate with ushering in the Third Wave of feminist discourse. The movement was characterized by punk rock aesthetics, self-publishing 'zines and activism against sexual agression, such as rape and other forms of sexual assault. 'If by stating my needs I am dissing you, I am dissing you and I am not afraid,' is a statement that Welch culled from archival Riot Grrl fanzines about representing one's self-worth in a public context. Welch places the statement over an image of Chicago's public transit system alluding to the fraught gender politics of women traveling in public space. In juxtaposing these images for her print, Welch calls into question which bodies are threatened and which are comfortable in public. Her prints take on the bravado in the face of agressoin associated with Riot Grrl history.

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Women on Waves | Women on Waves Archives

Women On Waves is a non – profit organization based in the Netherlands. Rebecca Gomperts a doctor, artist and pro-choice activist founded the organization in 1999. Together with a nurse, a gynecologist and several volunteers, Women on Waves is best known for their sea voyages to countries that restrict access to women's reproductive services, such as Poland, Ireland and Chile. Boat travel allowed the organization to operate in a gray area of international border governance and abortion law. Most recently Women on Waves participated in launching a hotline for information about misoprostol, a medicine that can be used for the induction of miscarriage and to prevent postpartum hemorrhage in Pakistan. The group uses art, media, and design to raise global awareness about the rights of women. Gomperts has been acknowledged for her work with several awards including, Global Women's Rights Awards and the Margaret Sanger Woman of Valor Award.

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Faith Wilding | Flesh Petals

Faith Wilding is an internationally exhibited multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses aspects of the "somatic, psychic, and sociopolitical history of the body." Her piece, Flesh Petals, is an important image for its historical significance. Drawn in graphite on paper it is one of many "cunt" images made at the Fresno Feminist Art Program in the early seventies. Wilding was a member of the first class of students under Judy Chicago in 1970 who were part of creating and defining feminist art making and education for a generation. A consciousness-raising, or group discussion, about the lived experience of womanhood, was a significant part of the pedagogical process in the program. Wilding says that the group discussions helped the women contend with larger manifestations of power from the political to the social. Unpacking gender hierarchies, collaborating and creating distinctly feminine images were part of the group's strategies for creating a new visual vocabulary.

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EveryBody!

Visual resistance in feminist health movements, 1969-2009

Artists, Projects + Videos

Projects + Artists

Women's Lib Demonstration NYC, 00:23:30 1970

(In)Visible Women Ellen Spiro, 00:26:00 1991

Taking Our Bodies Back: The Women’s Health Movement, 00:33:00 1974

Heather Ault	CureThis!	CWGC	Melanie Cervantes
Tee Corine	Christa Donner	Docs Populi Archive	Suzann Gage
Terri Kapsalis	Suzanne Lacy	Madsen Minax	Pink Bloque
Lee Relvas	Favianna Rodriguez	subRosa	Laura Szumowski
Video Work	Sara Welch	Women on Waves	Faith Wilding