Oscar Blues 2012: More Support for Women Filmmakers Needed

The recent batch of Oscar nominations show the absolute necessity for groups like Chicken and Egg Pictures that support women filmmakers with mentorship and grants. The fact that two women-directed films supported by Chicken and Egg received Oscar nominations in the Documentary Short Subjects category is especially meaningful when you consider the otherwise bleak environment.

I have posted the WomenArts annual report on women Oscar nominees compiled by our resident film critic, Jan Lisa Huttner, and here is what she found:

“The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started with a list of more than 600 films released in the US in 2011, including many excellent films written and/or directed by women, but in the end, all 9 films nominated in the Best Picture Category were screenplays written and directed by men."

"Most of those films are also about men with predominantly male casts. In most cases, the women on screen (if any) are relegated to supporting roles (most of which are minor roles, peripheral to the film’s main action). Although two of the nine films were based on novels written by women (Kathryn Stockett's 'The Help' and Kaui Hart Hemmings' 'The Descendants'), their stories were shaped for film audiences by male screenwriters and directors."

"Once again, there are no female candidates in the Best Director category. In the Best Adapted Screenplay category, we have a woman, Bridget O'Connor, nominated as co-writer of a screenplay ('Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy') in which there are no lead actresses."

In the Best Original Screenplay category, there is one film written by two women, Bridesmaids by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. But an April article from the New York Times Magazine  talks about the male additions to the women’s script. I have added boldface to part of the second paragraph that provides a poignant specific example of the ways women are often pushed to change their scripts to please powerful male producers and directors:

“You can pretty much guess which scenes Apatow and Feig added to Wiig and Mumolo’s script, beginning with the opening shot: a loud, slapsticky sex scene between Wiig and a cad played by Jon Hamm. But for all its broad appeal, the film still has plenty of moments that feel quiet and dramatic. In one memorable scene, Wiig’s character painstakingly constructs an elaborate cupcake and contemplates it, her mouth twisted into a jagged, sad line, before taking a massive bite — an act of self-destructive defeat rather than of indulgence."

"If Apatow was going to make a movie with Kristen Wiig, he made it clear, he wanted to capture the outrageousness that had made her a television star. “No, we’re not going to sit and talk,” Mumolo remembers Apatow saying about one scene of sedentary dialogue. The two female writers were occasionally wary about some suggestions made by Apatow and Feig — like a scene in which the bride and most of the bridesmaids come down with violent food poisoning. What were Wiig’s reservations? She shot a look. “Just that it was a huge scene about women vomiting” and defecating in their pants. “We wrote the script, and we didn’t really have anything in that tone, and it seemed to be such a big statement,” she says. Apatow assured her that if it did not work, they could cut it. Wiig and Mumolo — a writing partner from her 'Groundlings' days — ultimately agreed that it did work."

Bridesmaids has grossed (no pun intended) $288 million worldwide, and is number 14 in Box Office Mojo’s list of Top Movies in the past 365 days. So millions of people worldwide have seen this film. I wish they could have seen the script the way the women wrote it.

SWAN Celebration in Carbondale, CO

I was in Carbondale, CO last night for the kick-off of a month of Support Women Artists Now/SWAN celebrations there.  A team of local artists led by visual artist and filmmaker Gayle Embrey did a terrific job and the kick-off was a completely sold-out/standing-room-only event.  The evening included a gallery show, a reception, and a performance of music, dance, and theatre.  This spectacular cake created by Christine Bergstrom and Donna Lilah was the highlight of the reception, and it tasted as good as it looked!

Introducing Harmony: The WomenArts Cultural Partnership Project

I am very excited about the announcement of The Harmony Project, the latest addition to WomenArts' ongoing efforts to bring the full power of women’s artistic creativity to the struggle for women’s rights and social justice.

This is an exciting time for women, since there are so many organizations that are advocating for our rights. What would happen if those groups started collaborating with women artists to advance their causes? Could we win the battle for women's equality faster by engaging people's hearts and minds through the arts?

Thanks to a generous grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, arts activist Arlene Goldbard and I are investigating these questions. To start the conversation, Arlene has interviewed ten amazing women artists about their collaborations with women's organizations, and she will be writing about them for us in the coming months. She will be sharing advice and wisdom about how to get started, what to consider as you enter into partnership, what makes the work strongest, and much, much more.

Meanwhile, I have been working on some model partnerships here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and will post periodic reports on my progress.

If you would like more information about the Harmony Project or our model partnerships, please visit www.WomenArts.org/harmony.

San Francisco's WomenROCK Collective Celebrates Four Years of Empowering Female Artists in the Music Industry

San Francisco, CA, June 16, 2010

On Wednesday, June 16th, 2010, San Franciscans will pack The Independent to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the WomenROCK Collective, a group that has contributed to making the city by the bay a great place for women musicians and their fans.

Founded in San Francisco in 2006, the collective strives to empower female artists in the music industry at the local, national, and international level while raising awareness and money for important causes.

Women make up less than ten percent of the music industry and less than six percent in executive, producer or engineer roles. Women who do achieve commercial success are often over-sexualized and objectified, leaving women who don’t fit the mold out in the cold. WomenROCK was created in response to this situation by a group of talented and motivated women musicians, producers, and promoters (including *bernadette*, Valerie Orth, Lisa Sniderman, Sylvia Roberts, Kristin Hathaway, Zarah Gamaldi, Jessie Woletz, Melissa Rapp, Nomi Adiv, Nkechi Live, Vanessa Verlee, Eva Jo Meyers, Marianne Barlow, Abigail Picache and others) who decided to work together to raise visibility and opportunity for themselves and the other women artists in their community.

“We are organizing ourselves to work together to showcase our creative endeavors, talents, intellect, business savvy and penchant for community-building and activism,” says the celebration’s organizer and WomenROCK visionary *bernadette*, who is also one of the artists being showcased at The Independent.

Since its inception, WomenROCK has presented monthly showcase performances and special one-off shows in San Francisco, and has raised money for Bay Area and national organizations, including IMPACT Bay Area, Breast Cancer Action, Blue Bear School of Music, Women’s Community Clinic, and more.

Wednesday’s performers will include:

Stripmall Architecture (http://www.stripmallarchitecture.com/)

As members of San Francisco’s celebrated Halou, Ryan and Rebecca Coseboom built up a remarkable body of material and worked with a wide range of iconoclastic artists including DJ Shadow (on his infamous Radiohead remix), Low, Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie, and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. When Halou came to an end after a US tour with indie legend Bob Mould, they regrouped quickly and launched their new project, Stripmall Architecture with guitarist Tim Hingston and drummer Patrick Harte. Now, in 2010, Stripmall Architecture have released their second album, Feathersongs for Factory Girls, entirely funded by their dedicated fanbase across the US and the globe.

Conspiracy of Venus (http://www.conspiracyofvenus.com/)

Conspiracy of Venus is a groundbreaking women's community activist a cappella choir based in San Francisco. Under the artistic direction of Joyce Todd McBride, the ensemble’s 40 singers perform McBride's daring and inventive arrangements of songs ranging from the classic (Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi”) to the cutting-edge (Bjork's “Possibly Maybe”). Their repertoire also includes works by Bill Withers, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Roger Miller. Conspiracy of Venus has performed to sold-out crowds in venues around the Bay area ranging from The Palace of Fine Arts to the Dublin Women’s Prison.

ZIVA (http://www.zivamusic.com/)

Israeli-born, Ziva grew up on a small kibbutz, where she began her musical journey playing the cello, saxophone, and singing in the local choir. Becoming increasingly drawn to jazz and R&B music of the United States, she soon found herself as lead singer in a funk band, becoming a local sensation. After serving in the military and attending the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, she relocated to sunny California where her American dreaming is becoming a thriving phenomenon not only in her musical performance but also her organizational skills with WomenROCK and her new endeavor as producer and promoter of the newly formed Bay Vibes.

*bernadette* (http://www.bernadettelovesyou.com/)

*bernadette* is taking the stage by storm with her vibrant musical presence and unique vocal sound. She writes heartfelt, sultry songs that encapsulate the essence of San Francisco's timeless sound with a 60's sensibility and authentic purity. Hailing from San Francisco, *bernadette* has played the Grand Rooms of San Francisco - The Fillmore, Great American Music Hall, The Independent, Slim's, Bottom of the Hill, Café Du Nord and festivals around the Bay, playing across the United States as well as touring Europe. Backed by co-conspirator Garrin Benfield on guitar, the two harmonize and play together akin to Gillian Welch & David Rawlings in a brutally honest, soul-baring live performance. *bernadette* is the visionary and one of the co-founders of WomenROCK as well as running the thriving Box Factory art, community and culture space and a co-producer of one of the largest festivals in San Francisco, Power to the Peaceful.

The celebration will also include a burlesque performance by the Cheese Puffs, spoken word by Scorpio Blues, SHEketch comedy from PianoFight’s Monday Night ForePlays, and a dance party with DJ Kipp Glass.

ASL Interpretation of each performance will be provided, and the show will be broadcast live at: http://realize2actualize.ning.com/.

If you live in the Bay Area, come support the power and potential created by women artists who work hard – and play hard – together.

WHEN: Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 7:30PM

WHERE: THE INDEPENDENT 628 Divisidero Street, San Francisco, CA 94110.

http://www.theindependentsf.com/ , (415) 771-1421

The Independent is a 21+ venue and is wheelchair accessible.

TICKETS: $12 Advance/$14 at the door.

http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=1912905

WPA Artist Mary Perry Stone Honored for SWAN Day

Dayton, OH -
On Friday, February 5, 2010, 70 people, including Dayton’s mayor, braved a snowstorm to attend the opening reception of “Art Makes Us Human,” an exhibit of work by Mary Perry Stone (1909-2007), a WPA artist who focused on social justice and civil rights. The exhibit inaugurates “The Mary Perry Stone Women’s Art Gallery” at the Missing Peace Art Space, which will house a permanent collection of works by Stone and showcase work by women artists from around the world whose art is dedicated to peace. The gallery will hold a SWAN Day event the weekend of March 5-7, 2010 in conjunction with the exhibit.

Mary Perry Stone was one of 40 women employed by the New York City Federal Arts Project as part of the WPA during the 1930’s as a sculptor and teacher. It was during this period that her work became focused on social protest, her lifelong subject. After working in the shipyards during World War II, Stone moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she continued to sculpt and paint. Much of her work during the 1960’s opposed the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. She moved to Ashland, Oregon, in the 1990’s, where she continued to sculpt, paint, and exhibit her work until her death in 2007. Stone’s art was shown in numerous group and solo exhibits at museums and galleries in New York, California, and Oregon, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, and Rockefeller Center.

Over the course of her career, Stone made over 50 social-protest canvas murals on subjects ranging from the struggle for civil rights to the exploitation of labor. Her work “was all grounded in her belief that an artist… has a responsibility to work for a more humane world,” said Ramie Streng, Stone’s daughter. According to Streng, her mother’s lifelong commitment to social justice was largely influenced by the Great Depression and her involvement in the WPA. Wanting to remain true to the anti-commercial, progressive spirit of her mother’s work, Streng created a website where visitors can view Stone’s social protest murals for free. With a new gallery home at the Missing Peace Art Space, Stone’s colorful, dynamic, deeply humanistic art will continue to inspire generations to come.

WomenArts is delighted to celebrate the life and work of Mary Perry Stone as part of our WPA 75^th anniversary retrospective for SWAN Day 2010. Special thanks to Ramie Streng for getting in touch with us about her mother’s work, and to Steve Fryburg and Gabriella Pickett of the Missing Peace Art Space for planning the SWAN Day event in Dayton.

If you’re in or near Dayton, be sure to visit The Mary Perry Stone Women’s Art Gallery at the Missing Peace Art Space, 234 S. Dutoit St., Dayton, OH 45402-2215, T: (937) 241-4353. Read more about the exhibit and see a video at: http://www.missingpeaceart.org/missing_peace_art_space_upcoming.htm.

Visit http://maryperrystone.com/ to learn more about the life and work of Mary Perry Stone.

Sixty Years of Stubborn Creativity

Since I will turn 60 on Monday, December 14, I have been reflecting on the creative impulse that has been central to my life and work for so many years.

Like many of you, I do this work because I feel compelled by some inner force. Earlier this year, when I interviewed Isabel Allende for SWAN Day, I asked her how she came to write her first novel, and she said, "I was desperate - there was this stuff that I needed to get out of my soul somehow - to give birth."

I have heard similar statements from hundreds of artists over the years, and it's how I feel about my own work. When I started WomenArts, many well-intentioned people told me it was crazy, and yet, here we are 15 years later. I started at my kitchen table with a few friends, and today women all over the world use our services.

I believe that these stubborn creative instincts are our greatest source of power, especially when we work together. As I think about my next decade, I want to find ways to honor that perseverance in each of us and to build a community where we can cheer each other on.

My mother grew up on a farm, and I was actually named after her favorite mule. My mother often told me that I was as stubborn as my namesake, but since she was strong-willed herself, it was always clear that she loved my independent spirit and wanted me to succeed. Perhaps this is why I feel such a deep connection with other obstinate dreamers. I recognize the energy that feels like home.

People always told me that as you get older you cherish your friendships more than anything else and I am finding that to be true. I want to thank all of you for being such wonderful colleagues and friends for all these years. Keep the faith - the world needs our passionate voices, and I am rooting for all of us to be heard!

Much love, Martha Richards

P.S. I have loved getting so many birthday notes, poems, songs, and other samples of your art. Please feel free to keep sending those all year long!

Send Martha a Birthday Greeting!
Make a Birthday Donation to WomenArts 
See Martha's Birthday Wish on Facebook

Being Thankful for the Arts

WomenArts asked one of our favorite novelists, Susan Stinson, to write about why she persists in the arts in spite of the financial hardships. We loved her response below, and hope you do too.

Like Susan, we feel blessed to have the arts as a central focus in our lives and to have the opportunity to work with so many thoughtful and talented people. We are grateful for these precious gifts at Thanksgiving and all year round.    Happy Thanksgiving to everyone from the WomenArts Team!!!!

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Art in Hard Times
by Susan Stinson

Twenty-five years ago, when I was in college, my father warned me that a livelihood as an artist would be hard to come by, especially for a woman. I spent the next couple of decades throwing everything I had into making the strongest art I could, working around practical constraints – like jobs—as necessary. Now, four published books and one wandering manuscript later, during a year in which individual, national and global economies are all shaky, I’m facing the unpleasantly specific realities of being close to fifty and far from financial stability. My father was right.

He was right, but so was I. I persist in keeping art central to my daily life, no matter how badly it pays, both because I have a strong sense of vocation and because having a regular practice of making and seeking out art generates relationships, skills and experiences that get me through hard times. Attending to the work – in whatever fractured, imperfect way I can – saves me. This has happened again and again. It is happening right now.

Today I’m working in a coffee shop with another novelist, who is wearing earphones and a serious look. I feel the pulse of her typing as it shakes the table. There’s a whirr from the juicer drowning out a song by Ella Fitzgerald. Yesterday, when I had just received a rejection from a publisher with my name misspelled (petty signs of inattention gain sting at such moments), I worked here with a different friend, who is a novelist, too. Before we sat down and started writing, she consoled me with an ice cream cone, extravagant with chocolate sprinkles.

Both friends read my work again and again. One of them and I have been critiquing each other’s writing since the eighties. These are friendships with staying power and active depths, built on the fact that we are writers. That’s not to say that there are never challenges. Sometimes I’ve been jealous when a writer I know achieves something that I’ve been thwarted in. Figuring out how to move through that is uncomfortable but intensely rewarding. The relationships I have with other writers and artists are not dependent on material success, but on shared commitments to doing the work. They make my life larger.

Even without the companionship of someone working on another story across the table, the practice of writing (and, I think, of doing art in any form) cultivates skills that are useful for negotiating tough circumstances. For instance, as a novelist, I have to be able to offer sensory details in order to evoke convincing worlds for my characters to inhabit. This forces me to pay attention to small moments of bodily experience. The novel I’ve been working on is set in the eighteenth century, so I’ve had to figure out which parts of my sensory knowledge might translate across time. If a flying bug hits my shoulder with a thud like a hollow acorn, it gives me an experience that might have been shared with someone who sat at this spot in a previous century.

The imperative I have as a novelist to accurately reproduce the minutiae of physical sensation has the effect of forcing me into intense observation of ordinary moments. The concentration calms and empties me, like dance or meditation. At the same time, I employ my worry, grief, and confusion in the inner lives of my characters. Capturing moments of awkwardness and clumsiness goes a long way towards depicting convincing human lives. Giving a book shape, movement and meaning in the form of a plot is an extended exercise in discovering what I think matters most, both to me and to the readers I want to pull and hold. If I am under strain, writing becomes difficult, but I know that finding my way back to it will let me use even my most harrowing experiences and vaguest fears as elements in creating a story that is compelling and meaningful to others.

In addition to nurturing useful habits of mind, being a writer surrounds me with opportunities to experience art made by others. My friends and I lend each other books, and then talk with heat and collaborative excitement about what we think of them. We get up at four-thirty in the morning to travel to another city to see a play by someone we know, offering each other paper fans, band aids and little boxes of animal crackers if exhaustion kicks in. We organize readings and conferences to create outlets for each other’s work. We comment on each other’s blogs and click each other’s links. We know we need each other.

Beyond that, exploring art made by others leads me to insights I could not have found on my own. I have unforgettable surges of change and witness with art by people I will never meet. I try to stay with work that scares me, to let it help me discover my own secrets. Art leads to more art, to cultivating a willingness to be startled, to be nervous and also open, to ride out discomfort in service of discovery. I turn to art to get through small changes, such as the involuntary realignment of ambitions for a book, and also big ones, such as aging, illness, and mourning.

Now, there’s a click as my friend puts down her earphones. She’s got a look of abstraction on her dear, familiar face, but she’s gazing at me. Still absorbed in the very different stories we are each telling, we don’t speak for a few moments. A counter worker wearing pointy glasses comes up the stairs with a bin full of carrots. I can see through the glass door to the lights coming on in the sign for the bank across the street. A woman on the sidewalk, shaved bald, looks alertly behind her. It’s time for my friend and I to leave the coffee shop and go different ways. I need to buy dental floss before I head home. It is an ordinary evening. I haven’t finished a novel or found the next publisher, but I feel changed by the process of working, prepared to move or wait, to do the things I need to do. This may not be a livelihood, but it’s a life. My friend is ready to talk, and so, packing up our computers, gathering the cups, shifting our common world in tiny increments of art closer to the one of our fiercest desires, we do.

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About Susan Stinson

Susan Stinson's novels are Venus of Chalk (2004), Fat Girl Dances with Rocks(1994) and Martha Moody(1995). Spider In A Tree is her novel in progress. Belly Songs, a collection of poetry and lyric essays, was published in 1993.

Her work -- which has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Book Report and The Women's Review of Books -- has received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. She was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, MA.

For more information, please visit SusanStinson.net. You can also read a WomenArts interview with Susan Stinson from 2005 at: www.WomenArts.org/news_archives/June2005Interviews.htm#Stinson