Emergency Update!

This is the reason that I’ve failed to post in almost a week:

Yes, the Apple Screen of Death.

And lo, I am without a laptop.

I’m not anti-technology. Obviously. I have a blog. I’ve written about this before, when I made the decision to get an iPhone, and when I introduced the concept of Rurality through Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Rurality has a way of checking my life when I get too stressed, too focused, too urban.

So of course the past week has been unusually warm and sunny, and of course a friend of mine lost her cell phone at the same moment that my laptop broke. This friend and I, we’ve have been remembering how to (gasp!) plan ahead when we’re going to see each other. More importantly, we’ve had to be accountable for those plans. No last-minute ditching– that’s an urban thing. That’s an immature thing. Rural living emphasizes accountability: you have to devote energy and time to your friendships with other people. A girl can’t facebook her way through life.

Lifting Belly is a Language

I’ve been bonding a bit with Gertrude Stein lately through a class that I’m taking. In the process, I stumbled across these drawings from Love Art Lab:

7 Love Letters

Sharing a link to 7 love letters, from various time periods and contexts. All beautiful: I love when love letters become ephemera and then resurface half a century later.

Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera

Gender Through Design

I’ve been swamped with work lately! Luckily, a lot of the work is art- and design-related, so I have things to post.

I haven’t explicitly mentioned this before, but please note that all of the work I post here is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative License. Which means that you can take and post these images elsewhere as long as my name/blog are credited and linked; you may not use them for commercial purposes; and you may not alter or edit the image in any way.

Over the past few years I’ve designed a few posters and t-shirts for the women’s center at my college. The media is one of the primary ways that we receive messages about gender– and this goes for both men and women. Sociological Images is a great blog that often has good examples of gender messages in the media. Dealing with gender and race when designing for the media is always a challenge: one has to be always conscious, always alert. And yet somehow, the creative process itself is always empowering.

I made this poster this weekend for 56%, a publication through the women’s center. The original tagline, when the mag was first founded, was “writing for, by, and about women.” It has since changed to “a gender-conscious publication,” and this year, “a magazine with a focus on gender and sexuality.” This piece was done in watercolor and india ink (except for the text at the bottom, which was added digitally). Below are some poster headers that I used the last two years.

And this (below) I made this a few years ago for a night of music by women:

I also have two t-shirt designs for Love Your Body Day, but that’s actually coming up soon so I’ll have a third design to post… perhaps they’ll get a post of their own.

More Pages from the Exacompta