November 2020
Website: https://www.call-your-mom.com
How long have you been doing art pieces and performances like this? What originally drove you to start your career in art?
I’ve always made art, but I transitioned from a fully 2D practice to a 4D practice in 2014. I had felt a distance between my art and my body my whole life, and then all of a sudden it felt vitally important for my body to be the source of my work. Unlocking the power, difficulty, and joy of performance has allowed me to show up more authentically for others as a collaborator, and more diligently for myself. Although my career titles oscillate from being art-focused to not, I know that I center myself as an artist in every piece of my professional life. There is always room for heightened creativity.
Who is your target audience?
My target audience is amorphous and constantly changing! Most of the time, my target audience is people who are interested in emotional conversations, affective content, shifting vulnerability, and unexpected connections. The content of my work has spanned sexual violence and survivorship, constructions of family, intimacies between strangers, and forgiveness and redemption - I recognize that any of these topics can be revealing, unnerving, anxiety-provoking. My “target audience” is curious about healing, curious about discomfort and where it could lead.
What is the overall theme of the messages you try to send to the public?
What a question! I am unsure if there is a single theme, but if I had to sum it up I would say this:
The meaning that we build together is more important than any single message I could send.
All of my work involves audience interaction and collaboration. Together with my collective, Call Your Mom, I author the setting, the tools, but together with the audience we make the meaning. I usually have some hypotheses about what is going to happen, and that hypothesis is usually proved wrong, because a larger, important, group-crafted message emerges.
Is there anything about the crazy times we are in now that motivate you to get your messages out there faster, in specific places, for specific audiences?
The racial revolution made me realize that for a white person with lots of tools of inquiry, for anti-racist learning and movement-building, I was not sharing. I was building curriculums and artwork for the people who hire me, not for my direct community, and especially not for the white people I am close with. So a major shift coming from the mixture of pandemic and racial revolution was the decision to create an anti-racist curriculum for white artists, intervening in white supremacy in their work and their spheres of influence. I facilitated the first Disrupt Your Practice session in June and have had three cohorts since - a much faster clip than my previous work. My work as an anti-oppression facilitator has become much more grounded in what I see around me and the insidious racism, classism, imperialism that is part of day to day life, versus creating curriculum tailored to clients.
After a performance do you stay and answer questions from the audiences or do you believe the message you’re sending through your work is clear enough to understand?
I prefer to stick around and gauge people’s reactions after a piece! I would not say my work is always “clear,” so I love to know how people felt about their engagement, and what meaning they took from other audience member’s interaction. Also, I work in a collective, so I love to hear my collaborators talk about the piece after! They always frame things in ways I would not have, and it is beautiful to hear.
When you were younger and in primary school, did you have any idea you would be delivering messages through art to such large audiences?
I, hilariously, wrote a “book” in first grade called “How to be An Artist.” So yes, I think I knew from a young age that creating art was unavoidable for me. But I never dreamed that I would be a part of artwork, or author art, that reached such huge audiences. The Monument Quilt on the National Mall for example, it was breathtaking. Standing with my collective members and trying to take stock of what we made was astounding. It surpassed any of my projections of what I was capable of.
Where did you think of the name for your art group “Call your mom”?
I went to school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived with a friend of mine all four years. One day my friend was walking and a group of men drove by and catcalled her, really lewd stuff. She flipped them off. Then they came around the block again, rolled down windows, and yelled gross things at her. This time she yelled at them, “Call your mom!!”
When it came time to choose a name for our first show, we didn’t have a title for it yet, so we decided to call it Call Your Mom. The show ended with a rousing chant of those three words. People started calling us Call Your Mom, and it stuck.
Since your first performance in 2014 have you found ways that may work better/worse for delivering your messages from the stage?
Since the first Call Your Mom show, we have grown immensely as performers and collaborators, and have definitely become more skilled in our messaging. We consider audience consent a lot more, and are more purposeful in the mediums we blend together to create an impactful piece. An example is a recent piece we created in Cotacachi, Ecuador, called “Forgive or Forget/Perdonar u Olvidar.” We had a studio open to the street where we performed every day, and encouraged passersby to add to a collaborative sculpture. We are much more flexible as performers than we used to be, so we were able to oscillate between “performing” the piece and engaging audiences directly, helping them carve and paint their additions. As a result, our message was strong but it did not come at the cost of being unwelcoming, which is quite common for performance art.
Have you found time during COVID to send messages through art even while “social distanced”
Yes! Call Your Mom created the Say You’re Sorry workbook instead of our summer tour. We created an interactive pdf that showcased some of the work we would have shown on a tour, and tried to translate the interactive elements to google surveys, videos, and prompts.
Is there anything I have missed that may be important to you and your group that you may want to share?
Fascism’s favorite tools are state-sanctioned violence and censorship of cultural organizers. Resistance through art is paramount. In the moment, it may not seem so serious, a performance here, a protest there, but culture is cumulative. Resistance is cumulative. So what I’d like to say is that there is no holy grail, right way to resist through art. We need all of the tactics, all of the vantage points we can get. We need the ugly art and the severe art and the uplifting art. We need it all.