In 1992 I opened an artist studio, gallery and maker space in Hudson MA. We offered shared studio space and exhibition opportunities, classes and workshops for students of all ages and abilities including figure drawing and a performance space where we led drumming circles and workshops and poetry slams, for example. In addition to running the art center; organizing the teachers and workshops, marketing to create a student base, hanging exhibits etc and single parenting 2 boys, I painted. I love to paint, to move it around, to watch it dry. It was during one of our workshops offered by Jim Eng, art prof from Framingham State College, that my world suddenly expanded. In collage I found a medium that offered a way to express what I’d struggled to do with painting.

In 2020 I graduated from VT College of Fine Art. In VCFA I discovered a path that incorporated my love of research and social and political activism with a studio practice. I also took the opportunity to explore new mediums such as projection and video and to think more expansively, such as creating a “billboard” and political signs that were placed throughout my community. I was able to intentionally research the subject that had interested me for decades, the social ramifications of our American patriarchal culture. Informed by my lived experiences with homelessness, economic inequality, gender discrimination and cultural policing, my final thesis, Misogynistic Sign Posts in American Culture, explores the history of patriarchy and the effects on contemporary politics and American society.

In August of 2021 I attended Centre Pompadour, a feminist research center in Ercourt France, as an artist in residence. I used the opportunity to research and consider my own familial Civil War mythology. This experience once again reiterated the urgency of the work to dismantle structural inequity inherent in a heteropatriarchal system. My recent series, Predators and Pray, looks at this system through the lens of the 19th c., connecting contemporary experiences with the titans and myth makers of the 19th c. who benefited from a system that privileged white men. My most recent review was in Art New England, Nov and Dec 2022, can be read here: https://artnewengland.com/amendment-xxix-right-to-privacy/