el es frida kahlo in the Jewish Women's Archive Blog

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlMPoFXRT18]el es frida kahlo featured on Jewesses with Attitude in honor of Frida Kahlo's 104th birthday.

A Latina "Jewess with attitude," Maya Escobar plays with the web as a platform for engaging in community dialogue around identity and multiple identities--how they are socially and culturally constructed. She often assumes multiple identities in her performances, drawing from various existing representations.

About "el es frida kahlo," she writes:

Frida Kahlo played with the identity that she wanted to project and the identity that was placed on her by others. Kahlo used her clothing, political affiliations, sexual escapades, and personal traumas, to create a character that informed her body of work. She inscribed her identity, painting her image over and over, constructing a mythology around her persona.In el es frida kahlo I confront the ambivalence I experience as a result of my simultaneous obsession with Frida Kahlo and weariness towards her commodification.

What is your reaction to this confrontational piece? Do you identify with Escobar's ambivalence towards Kahlo, her work, and her commodification in our culture?

AMerican MEdia Output in New Jersey

You saw Escobar-Morales as promo models in TX, "promoting" Arizona Tourism...And here we are as marketing executives in NJ.Andria was live at Gallery Aferro and I skyped in from Chicago.Stay tuned for more details on the performance and the results from AMerican MEdia Output's #targetaudiencesurvey.

AMerican MEdia Output in Texas

[youtube=http://youtu.be/CMDhowuCwDE]AMericanMEdiaOutput.com

Negotiating Latina Identity through Performance Art on the Web

Andria and I will be presenting  Are You My Other? next week at the 2011 National Popular Culture Association Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Negotiating Latina Identity through Performance Art on the Webwith Maya Escobar and Andria Morales

Challenging mainstream and academic representations of Latina identity, performance artists Maya Escobar and Andria Morales publicly negate, deconstruct, and reconstruct their individual histories, identities, and conceptions of self. In their current project Are You My Other? a self-portrait dialog exchange blog, Escobar and Morales draw from popular culture, Latino/a cultural iconography, and their lived experiences to create and virtually perform conflicting representations of Latina selves. From devoted homemaker to hockey player, reggaetonera to construction worker, conceptual artist to human corn on the cob, the artists model the multiplicity of identity.

Due to their shared physical similarities, followers of their online exchange often mistake Escobar and Morales for one another. The merging of their identities is further perpetuated through their activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By locating these performances within the space of the web, where they are free from restrictions of time and place, the artists are able to concurrently enact multiple personas while simultaneously forming a unified (Latina) hybrid self.

Going Public.

The latest from AMerican MEdia Output's Public Airways Campaign.AMerican MEdia Output is an online marketing and brand design agency with a focus on AMerican travel and tourism. AMerican MEdia Output specializes in creative consulting, web design and development, promotional image and video campaigns, and social media integration and instruction.BEHIND EVERY IMAGE IS A MESSAGE.

The Way Is Made By Walking: Cesar Chavez

¡Feliz Cumpleaños Cesar Chavez!Cesar Chavez Coloring Page, from The Way Is Made By WalkingThe Way Is Made by Walking is a free popular education coloring book available at TheWayIsMadeByWalking.comEventually I would like TheWayIsMadeByWalking.com to become an active webportal for artists/activists/educators/students/parents/HUMANS. A place that will facilitate critical conversations and the exchange of resources: ideas, images, videos, lesson plans, projects, student work, etc.  A sort of ongoing People's History, meant to be continually analyzed, expanded upon, revisited and challenged. (read more) 

it's official: Escobar-Morales has arrived

visit us now at http://escobar-morales.com

Puerto Rican Taxidermy Funeral pt 2

Will you be attending?

Andria Bibiloni, 28, of New York, ceased to exist on Mar. 23, 2011 in Philadelphia, where she lived since 2000.  A visual artist and educator, she strove through her work to facilitate a dialogue about sociopolitical and interpersonal issues. Known for riding her Blasterbike, 2007, in the streets of Philadelphia, her departing wish was to be displayed riding a bigger, louder, and heavier soundblasting vehicle.  Beth Beverly of Diamond Tooth Taxidermy will be handling the preparations for the viewing, which takes place at the Rotunda in University City on Sunday March 27 from 3-5 pm.  Guests are invited to stay for refreshments.

Kickstart the Wonder Women

So what's the deal with the recent AMerican MEdia Output - "Welcome to Arizona" and "Go Public" campaigns?It all started with Escobar-Morales's participation in the Wonder Woman Residency New News is Old News, which I blogged about a few months ago.

As a follow up to Are You My Other? our current Internet based self-portrait dialogue exchange project, Escobar-Morales is establishing an online marketing agency. Acting as designers, distributors, and promo models, we plan to produce a series of advertisements addressing contentious topics in the news, such as Arizona’s SB-1070 and the Dream Act.

There are currently three scheduled New News is Old News exhibitions:The first NNION exhibition opens on May 7th, 2011 at Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey. The second exhibition will be in Cyprus! The third exhibition will be in Brooklyn at the WAH Center and opens in mid-July, 2011.Please visit the Women Woman Residency KICKSTARTER ProjectWe ask you...

• who mediates the news?
• how is social media changing your foundation of news?
• can technology keep up with history?
• when was the last time you read the paper?
• is journalism dead?

The Project:The Wonder Women residency has selected ten NYC area artists to create work addressing these questions for New News is Old News (NNION). In this eight week residency, curators and artists construct and deconstruct: their understanding and experience of media; the different perspectives of journalism online vs. print; the future of news. Given the changing landscape of news and media, artists have new opportunity to engage and to create work addressing these intersections. The residency culminates with an exhibition of the artists projects (details below).If you think that is exciting....It gets even better. In June, the curators and three selected NYC artists will travel to Nicosia, Cyprus to continue the dialogue with eight Cypriot artists. In an intensive two-week workshop, the artists will focus on international relations, local policies and news. The projects created will be exhibited in Cyrus and then in NYC.Help _gaia fund the artists, the projects, and the exhibitions!The History:_gaia is a collective of women artists and activists creating art, events and opportunities in the visual and media arts, performance and design. Its members actively promote and support the work of local women artists while developing programs that encourage collaboration and create community to help emerging artists in need of studio space, facilities and resources. In pursuit of raising awareness _gaia concentrates on activism, from issues in the local community and the art world to global issues affecting the lives of women.Wonder Women (WW) is a residency program in its sixth year presented by_gaia, an artist collective. The WW mission is to engage practicing, yet underrepresented artists who are eager to participate in a collective dialogue about the art world and feminism today. See the project blog for information about previous Wonder Women residencies.The NNION Wonder Women:Christine DaCruz: the obituaries. Christine has been threading portraits of deceased women.Mairikke Dau: painting the news. Rikke has created a large still life painting in response to the Arizona shooting, and the various controversies which have risen from the event.Sharon de la Cruz: Crooked Images. Sharon has created a feature news segment about Aunt Jemima discovering her sexuality.Melissa MacAlpin: vows and love. Melissa has created a series of comics in response to the Sunday vows section of the NY Times.Escobar-Morales: American Media Output. Andria Morales and Maya Escobar created an ad agency that is currently focusing on two campaigns around immigration, and Arizona.Lindsey Muscato: spills from the NY Times. Focusing on the experience of reading the newspaper, Lindsey is drawing segments of the broadsheet, selected from organic spills.Larysa Myers: extinct technology. Laryssa is creating a casket sized sculpture from discarded video tape.Cristine Posner: the big oil spill (forgotten). Cristine has collected news articles addressing the June oil spill, and is creating a series of weekly cyanotypes based on the press.Sharone Vendriger: wikileaks. Sharone is creating a large mobius sculpture referencing transparency in public information.Nicole Wilson: agency and the news. Nicole has created a video, that looks to the three graces as examples and agents of 21st century news.The Cypriot artists will be selected in April in collaboration with our partners in Cyprus: Cyprus Community Media Centre, Rooftop Theatre Group and European-Mediterranean Art AssociationCurated and Organized by Maya Joseph-Goteiner, Doris Caçoilo, and Alana Kakoyiannis.

Somos Ana

“Please die Ana, for as long as you’re here we’re not.”-AM on  Are You My Other?

LAST RIDE: Andria Morales formerly Andria Bibiloni

UPDATE: visit AreYouMyOther.com to see Bibiloni's mass card.Have you ever Googled Puerto Rican funeral? If you haven't then I suggest you do.  And if you live in Philadelphia or in the surrounding area, you should attend Andria Morales and Beth Beverly's collaborative performance Last Ride.

LAST RIDE: collaborative performance-based artwork by Andria Morales & Beth Beverly. Inspired by Puerto Rican funeral celebrations & taxidermy traditions - 03/27/2011 @ The Rotunda @ 3:00pm-5:00pm

LAST RIDEPerformance and receptionSunday March 27, 20113-5pmThe Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., PhiladelphiaLAST RIDE is a collaborative performance-based artwork by Andria Morales and Beth Beverly.  Inspired by Puerto Rican funeral celebrations and taxidermy traditions respectively, the artists have found a common interest in death.  Using the Rotunda’s church-like interior as a backdrop, the artist’s work will invite viewers to experience mourning as a celebration.Andria Morales (formerly Andria Bibiloni) explores the divide between art representative of culture, and art produced from within a cultural community. By immersing herself in situations where cultural identity is consequential, she aims to provoke viewers into a confrontation and analysis of their own preconceptions. The resulting work is multidisciplinary, consisting of mixed media sculptures, self-portraits, performance based videos, and site-specific installations.  Andria Morales’s work has been exhibited at Labor K1 in Berlin, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Projects Gallery in Philadelphia, the Ice Box in Philadelphia, and the CUE Art Foundation in New York. In 2008 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant for her work in mixed media sculpture and installation. Andria is currently a resident in the 40th St. Artist in Residence Program, and teaches at Tyler School of Art.Beth Beverly is a State- and Federally-licensed taxidermist who has a BFA from Tyler School of Art and graduated from the Pocono Institute of Taxidermy with high marks. Ms. Beverly is passionate about using every part of an animal and being thankful for the ultimate sacrifice each creature makes to land both in her studio and on her plate. She has won numerous awards for her taxidermy creations, including Best in Show at the fifth annual Carnivorous Nights taxidermy contest in New York.  Beth’s work has been exhibited at Bahdee Bahdu Gallery, James Oliver Gallery, Wilbur Vintage Boutique and has been featured in a plethora of fashion & art blogs.Admission is FREE

Entrevista en Sí Se Puede

an example of my Internet ArtLast week I had the on honor of being interviewed by my papi on Sí Se Puede. We talked about Internet art, the implications of growing up online, linguistic performances on twitter, public vs private, and more.If you missed it you can listen here:[audio http://mayaescobar.com/Maya%20Escobar%20-%203-6-2011.mp3]

"Wondering if our girls are legal?"

Wondering if our girls are legal? Imagine an Arizona where cold spring water is in abundance, and everyone is free, especially the women. Enjoy the breathtaking natural terrain and spiritual landmarks revered by American ancestors. Come for the women in hot summer fashions. Stay because you're welcome.

when physical appearance equals reasonable suspicion

Public Airways is an artwork that aims to help viewers imagine the consequences of proposed immigration laws that inevitably lead to increased racial profiling.  Arizona's SB 1070 would make it legal for law officers to use someone’s physical appearance as a form of “reasonable suspicion” to demand proof of citizenship.  Similar laws have been proposed in South Carolina, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Mississippi.  Perhaps rightful citizens and casual world travelers subject to profiling will soon seek to avoid such destinations altogether: a 21st century "Non-White Flight."

follow @PublicAirways 

WE GUARANTEE YOU'LL KEEP YOUR CARD IN YOUR WALLET FOR GOOD

visit: www.AMericanMEdiaOutput.com/PA.html

women and water... what else are you looking for?

In the heat of the desert...women and water... what else are you looking for?visit http://americanmediaoutput.com/arizonawelcome.html

The 1st Arizona Welcome Pics Are Here

please feel free to share and re-post...visit: http://americanmediaoutput.com/arizonawelcome.html

TAKE ACTION AGAINST ANTI-IMMIGRATION ARIZONA LAWS

visit: AMericanMEdiaOutput.com/arizonawelcome.htmlclick hashtags #SB1611 and #SB1070

embeddable images of the Arizona Welcome Promo Girls will be avaliable soon...

Andria, The Fat Free Elotera, and I are featured in JEWCY

Jewcy Art: Maya Escobarby Margarita Korol, February 24, 2011

In 2007 we dubbed her the Anti-Feminist Feminist Jewish Latina. We stumbled upon performance artist/ Internet curator/ editor Maya Escobar again at the GA in New Orleans where her video installations were making a Marina Abramovich-style scene near Jewcy’s booth. She uses the web as a platform for engaging in critical community dialogues that concern processes by which identities are socially and culturally constructed. She performs multiple identities, sampling widely from online representations of existing cultural discourses.

click here for full text

Miguel del Valle Inspires Supporters to Keep Fighting for Reform, Declaring, “This is Chicago!”

repost of press release from www.delvalleformayor.comDel Valle envisions new youth leaders emerging from campaignFebruary 22, 2011 (CHICAGO)-- After an impassioned campaign on behalf of Chicago’s neighborhoods, Miguel del Valle pledged to keep fighting for a citywide progressive agenda.“What will be your role?” del Valle asked a crowd of supporters at his campaign’s Election Night party at Revolution Brewing restaurant. “We’ve started something here. All the young people in this room--there are future leaders here, I know that.”State Senator Iris Martinez and State Representative Cynthia Soto introduced del Valle who welcomed his wife, daughter, and three sons to the stage. The entire family worked on the campaign, from recruiting and organizing volunteers to shooting YouTube videos.“This was a grassroots effort,” Sen. Martinez said. “And it was a victory for everyone in this room.”Del Valle led citywide conversations on issues ranging from neighborhood schools to the parking meter contract. “We set the agenda,” del Valle said. “An agenda that means progress for all, not for some.” A diverse coalition rallied behind that agenda, including seniors, veterans, and high school students.Del Valle has always said that time, not his opponents, was his worst enemy during the race. Tonight, he encouraged his supporters to keep believing in the city they envisioned during the campaign.“Give it time,” he said. “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I have been inspired by the number of people who want change in this city. And we’re not going to get that change without organizing our neighborhoods.”Huddled around tables and on staircases, volunteers continued to discuss a citywide organizing vision for Chicago’s communities. They batted around ideas for new models to improve neighborhoods, formed new relationships, and continued to build the coalition started during del Valle’s campaign.“Chicago is ready for reform,” del Valle said. “I know that because a lot of people did not vote in this election. They feel disgusted about Chicago politics. And we have to give ‘em hope.”