^ the Co-Op I used to live at

Named Zami, after a book by Audre Lorde

Stencil made by myself and two amazing friends

Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider

In September 30, 1979, Audre Lorde took the stage as part of New York Institute for the Humanities' conference on Simone de Beauvoir called “The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later.” As she looked over the audience of over 800 women, mostly white, straight and middle class, she exclaimed: “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Audre Lorde, born in Harlem to immigrants from Grenada, found in poetry her first tool to “dismantle the master's house.” After writing her first poem at age 8, she created a powerful legacy of work that continually re-imagines her multiple identities as, in her words, a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” But also, as the title of her essay collection, Sister Outsider, expresses, she is a woman apart. For her poetry activism were one and the same. She explained to Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, "I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest." In her poem, “A Litany for Survival” (included in her 1978 anthology The Black Unicorn: Poems) Audre Lorde writes:

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

from: http://focusfeatures.com/slideshow/the_power_of_pariah

THIS is the kind of story that . . .

NEEDS TO BE TOLD

http://www.focusfeatures.com/video/pariah_trailer

Thoughts?

Occupy Occupy Occupy

TWANAS

UCSC's Third World and Native American Student Press Collective

My first published illustration, for an article on Occupy Wall St. !!!

Writing of a Space

Kitchen appliances and pages of all topics line the walls from the tightest edge of the carpet to the highest crack in the ceiling. The tik and the tok repeat, over and over again. It takes my mind out to sea, like the ‘heave and the ho’ that pirates would repeat on a ship that sails across mountainous waters. A low hum of man-made mechanicals stays at a constant pushing my thoughts further. As the captain of this ship I sit and wait for those who dare to cross my path, ready with the answers to any battle brought forth to me. Past the screen the phone, the clipboard, paint and drywall, a herd of feet run down stairs and like a surprise attack the subdued orange door becomes a flag swung round to attract the animalistic creatures in the direction of my dormant world. Recklessly, the room is filled and my thoughts are bombarded with monotonous wonderment. To break the repetition I glide to the coffee pot and make twelve cups. The drip tangos with the tik and the tok for far too long. I set out sweet treats and the mixture of the two attracts more and more of these curious bodies. I glide back to my post and wait for more problems to solve. “Do you know where the Red Room is?” “When will she be back?” “My partner and I just broke up, I’m having a hard time with. . .“

An hour has gone by. The faucet sings a high-strung song that clashes with the melody I had forgotten about for just sixty minutes. It is silent again but that really means nothing. I move to the edge of my cushy chair with wheels and push back. As I reject the floor beneath the rubber bottoms of my shoes I am thrown back to sea. Though my mind seems to wander, I am still physically here; I stomp with great force to stop myself from knocking over a shelf filled with color-coded flyers. Each letter so homogenous, boxy and, unnatural. This place is nothing like the sea.

The buttons underneath my caramel fingertips can be pushed with such ease. My ten batons swirl their way across the keyboard and marry into an unusual symphony. Not static like the hum, it’s a beat all their own. The lamp is overheating, and it melts my caramel fingers to the plastic that lies beneath them, one finger up and the caramel spills over, forcing it to go down again while the next in line rises; in a uniformed march, the ten batons that are fingers become soldiers in an army, they do not stop their task until they are told by the commander of their fleet. A person walks in. My fingers abruptly halt their march and attend to the new issue presented.

Now as the room has filled. In order to not awaken the sleeping, annoy the reading, and disrupt the writing, I tip toe lightly up to the door. At first brush the knob is frigid and my hand flexes tightly in anticipation of the rush to come. I pull gently, allowing for the air to seep through pockets of nothing. The hairs on my arm stand tall and become still. The piercing air pushes with great might yearning to come inside; I lean in softly to pinch the door shut, and a fly burst through terminating the even flow of air. I push forcefully and cause an abrupt disturbance. Agitated that the single opportune moment for a quick step into a re-energized self has passed, I hastily search to spot the small intruder; the fly is my new task.

Study of a Space

(Primarily Vertical)

(Abstraction of Subject; Decontextualizing)

(Frame within a Frame; Change in Frame's Aspect Ratio)

(Uses Focus/ D.O.F to attract Attention to Object)

As Seen on Television

My friend Ashley Lloyd hooked it up! Here are some photographs from mua, documenting her surf teaching skillz and music notes - shown on TV in Fresno! Pretty epic if you ask mee!

http://www.ksee24.com/features/central-valley-today/Ashley-Lloyd-Surf-Instructor--128080198.html

By KSEE CVT

Check out some Ashley Lloyd music @ Ashleylloydmusic.com

My Future Child?