Ginger Wolfe-Suarez lecture

Having seen her exhibition at the Mills art museum, I expected Ginger Wolfe-Suarez to talk more about her own work than to spend the majority of her lecture discussing other artists whose work inspired her own. Her focus for this project is on the women's rights movement of the early twentieth century and she visited private collectors who have acquired some of the only remaining banners and sashes that were used in the actual marches and protests to fight for equal rights. She borrowed artifacts from these collectors for her exhibition, including the actual poles that were used to carry the banners in the marches since the poles are some of the only surviving artifacts from this movement since most of the banners were destroyed. I did find it interesting to hear about some of the stories behind the artifacts and what they have been up to since they were originally used; especially found it interesting how one woman lets her cats use one of the original flags as a bed when it is not being used in demonstrations today. She did spend the last few minutes of her lecture showing images of her actual exhibition, but she spent little time discussing it or what she meant to convey with her choices, such as the choice to connect each section of her exhibtion with telephone poles. An interesting tidbit, I think, is that she created the chairs that were a part of her exhibtion, which shows how much control she wanted in how her artwork was perceived, and yet she didn't seem to spend much time talking about it.