An interview with Jessie Lehson
By Cara Ober
Photo: Laundrew Diamond

Cara Ober: You’ve become very well known for your installations made of dirt. What was your work like before the ‘dirt’? I know that you attended mica as an undergrad and graduated in 2002 - What kind of work were you making then?
Jessie Lehson: I came to mica in 1998 after a brief stint at another school (not an art school) and I was a painting major. I was doing a lot of natural plant and tree abstractions as well as these sort of mixed media pieces that were very political and often about the environment. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that I became a sculptor because even when I called myself a painter I used very little actual paint. I was using wood supports and making relief out of paper and sticks and mediums and textures. My painting teacher told me that I would end up a sculptor and I got annoyed at the time. I started working with dirt as a sophomore at mica I think although I initially was using it as paint. I have to say, for the record, though, that I don’t only use dirt—I make paper and spin wool and have been working a lot with sugar and even some metal recently—dirt just seems to be that thing that I always come back to.
CO: How did the first dirt pieces come about? ...More

By Jessica Gorman

In galleries and museums across the country, around the world, and in your backyard, feminist art has reclaimed the limelight.  In March, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited Global Feminisms, featuring recent works from 80 international feminist artists alongside Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a permanent addition to the museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.  During the same month in California, MOCA LA opened WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution and CalArts students celebrated the site of Womanhouse, a project of 1972 that irrevocably furthered the cause of women’s art on a national scale.  Exhibitions from Spain to Sweden are renewing the dialogue of feminist art in Europe.  This month in Washington, D.C., WACK! has just opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and in November the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts  Center will exhibit a complementary show, Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators.  The relevance of feminist art is no longer being questioned, instead people are asking “Where does one begin?”
As a viewer, understanding and interpreting any feminist artwork is challenging.  Despite being united in an amorphous category called feminism, implicit in each work are issues of cultural context, class, race, sexuality, and gender perception.  To read the work as commentary on those issues, when both the audience ...More

(post) Post Secret
A Lifetime of Secrets
An Interview with Frank Warren
By Stuart Greenwell
Photo Courtesy Frank Warren

Frank Warren is an affable guy, almost an anti-celebrity, who has an easy, caring manner about him. His “fame” was born out of an exhibition he created for the 2004 Artomatic art extravaganza. PostSecret, his new book, is a continuation of his art project where people divulge their darkest secrets by anonymously mailing them on homemade postcards. Warren was named by Forbes.com as one of 25 WebCelebs, a list of the biggest, brightest and most influential people on the Internet.” One can’t help but wish him all the success in the world. 

Stuart Greenwell: When you started out in 2004 with your postsecret project, could you have ever imagined that it would become what it has today?

Frank Warren: No Way! There is something inspiring about the technology of the internet where one person can create a website with over million hits. It allows artists to create these communities out there.

SG: You have called yourself “an accidental artist.” How did you stumble across this idea?

FW:  I was struggling with some secrets in my own life that I had been trying to keep hidden myself.

SG: Was the project born out of some desire to share your own secrets?
FW: It played into it.

SG: A Lifetime of Secrets is your third book, with potentially enough material, at least theoretically, to continue doing this ad infinitum. Where will this all end? Don’t all stories have to end somewhere?

FW: It could end with this book. I mean I don’t want them to become the Chicken Soup sort of series. I really want to preserve the purity and integrity of the project. I also think of these stories as an archives of peoples personal thoughts--also they’re part of several exhibitions, currently there’s an exhibition at the American Museum of Visionary Art.

SG: Can you tell me a little about this book, as opposed to your others.
FW: Well there are hundreds of never before seen postcards from people as young as eight and as old as eighty that trace how secrets change and how they stay the same

SG: Suicide has an important issue to you. I believe you’ve worked with the National Mental Health Association to raising awareness and funds for suicide, and perhaps I’ve heard that you worked for a hotline (is that accurate)? I imagine issues of self-harm come up often in your mailbag.

FW: Yes! I volunteer for two suicide organizations. Some of the postcards that I get are about crimes and that sort of thing, but most of what I get along those lines are about suicide, body image and eating disorders. Things that people don’t generally share with others.

SG: What have you discovered about the importance of secrets to people?

FW: I think that secrets are a human paradox where what we keep inside makes us feel different or alone, but as soon as we share those thoughts, we see the commonality of our thoughts.

SG: How about the diversity of secrets? Do most land within some catagorizable realm?
The range of emotions that are revealed in postsecrets  run the gamut, but there seems to be a overriding theme of sadness and desperation to a great degree. What do you believe this says about humanity? Other than that we’re sad and desperate?

FW: Well the good news is that while what we share with others often tends to be dark, --those things that we tend to stuff inside—they can also be diverse, or happy, or sexual, or funny! There are the full range of human emotions expressed.

SG: Have you learned anything different about the people submitting their secrets with the advent of each book being published, or are your lessons learned pretty much consistent?

FW: With each book I’ve learned to look at secrets through different lenses, each of us is affected by those secrets that tend to define us individually.

SG: Do you ever worry that you’re creating a culture of dependence in these folks out there sending you their secrets? I mean you may be receiving cards from folks until the day you die, and beyond?

FW: I don’t think about it. Again, I think more about trying to protect the purity, and the integrity of the project

SG: That brings me to the question, have you ever thought where this project might go beyond you?

FW: No I don’t think about it. I just try to make the day to day decisions and trust my instincts to do what’s best for the work.

SG: Thank you Frank! Good luck with your book and your book tour.