Women's Mobile Museum

Visit Women's Mobile Museum at the Corcoran

September 13 - October 29, 2021 & November 22, 2021 - March 11, 2022
Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
South Atrium and Hallway
The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design
500 17th Street NW

This exhibition is by appointment to the public. To see this show and shows at the Brady Art Gallery, email [email protected]. For the GW community (students, staff and faculty), you can use your GWID card at E Street or New York Avenue to enter.

About the Exhibition

“Whose makes the art shown in museums and galleries?” and “Who are those spaces for?” “Who is an artist?” These are the central questions behind the work of the Women’s Mobile Museum and which drove the year-long collaboration between Philadelphia artists Afaq, Shasta Bady, Davelle Barnes, Tash Billington, Iris Maldonado, Danielle Morris, Shana-Adina Roberts, Carrie Anne Shimborski, Muffy Ashley Torres, and Andrea Walls and South African artists Zanele Muholi and Lindeka Qampi.  Each of the Philadelphia artists was selected through an in-depth application and interview process for a year-long funded opportunity to explore and develop new work. Collectively, the work of the Women’s Mobile Museum interrogates access to the arts, and challenges who is educated by and represented in arts institutions. Compelling imagery asks us to question the gaze, housing, urban social infrastructure, memory, racism, and even what it means to make a photographic portrait.

Read the work of the artists, interviews with artists, designers and curators in this edition of the Women’s Mobile Museum Magazine.

 

Women’s Mobile Museum Magazine (Online)

Women’s Mobile Museum Magazine (Download PDF)

 


 

Past conversation with the artists of the Women’s Mobile Museum:

 

Women’s Mobile Museum Documentary

Women’s Mobile Museum Documentary Film Screening + Panel Discussion with Shasta Bady, Danielle Morris, Andrea Walls, Tash Billington and Lori Waselchuk

Wednesday, September 30, 2020
6:30 – 9 p.m. Eastern

“Whose makes the art shown in museums and galleries?” and “Who are those spaces for?” “Who is an artist?” These are the central questions behind the work of the Women’s Mobile Museum and which drove the year-long collaboration between Philadelphia artists Afaq, Shasta Bady, Davelle Barnes, Tash Billington, Iris Maldonado, Danielle Morris, Shana-Adina Roberts, Carrie Anne Shimborski, Muffy Ashley Torres, and Andrea Walls and South African artists Zanele Muholi and Lindeka Qampi.

 

 

 

 


Artist Talk with Women’s Mobile Museum artists Shasta Bady and Danielle Morris

 

Wednesday, September 23, 2020.

 

WOMEN'S MOBILE MUSEUM BIOS

 

Shasta Bady, a born and raised Philadelphian, is an aspiring scientist, visual artist and sporadic papermaker. Through her art, she aims to celebrate the depth of our connectedness and commonalities. Her influences include Lyndsey Addario, Sebastiao Salgado and Malick Sidibe. She enjoys exploring the subtleties of light and color and staying available to visual spontaneity.

 

Tash Billington is a Philadelphia native who uses art as a way to heal, motivate and give back to the world. She specializes in photography, painting and community engagement. Best known for assisting on large scale public mural projects and being a part of the Women's Mobile Museum Collective, Tash currently works with Philadelphia Mural Arts, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Amber Art and Design. In 2019, Tash was one of 180 selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review out of 3,500 applicants worldwide.

 

Danielle Morris is a self-taught photographer who mainly works in street and self portraiture. With a conceptual approach, Morris absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. Her works are often about the contact between urban architecture and the living elements of feminism. Morris focuses on the idea of the feminine in “public space,” or more specifically, on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment. This includes the non-private space, the non-privately owned space and space that is expressed through proximity to her subjects and their otherness to her sense of femininity. Morris is an advanced photography instructor at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center who received a curatorial internship at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and was a teaching artist in Drexel University’s Writers Room residency and a contributing artist in the 2018-19 Women’s Mobile Museum residency led by South African visual activist Zanele Muholi. She has exhibited in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the Works on Paper Gallery and the Colored Girls Museum’s 2019 “In Search of the Colored Girl” exhibition. Morris was also a contributing artist in the 2018 SPACES Residency "Home Court," led by visual artist Shawn Theodore. She has exhibited at the Barnes Foundation through “Let's Connect Philly,” where she placed in the top 20 of the participating artists. Commercially, she has worked with Apple, Bulgari, Louboutin, Roc Nation and Tiffany and Co. 

 

Andrea Walls feels brutalized by stories of global injustice, including poverty, human displacement and violence against the environment. She makes art across genres as an act of resistance. She is grateful to the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, the Hedgebrook Community for Women Authoring Change and the Women’s Mobile Museum for their ongoing support and sustenance. She is pleased that her poetry and visual art have found homes in publications she admires, including Callaloo, Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters; Solstice Literary Magazine; Tidal Basin Review; Kweli; The Fourth River; bozalta: Arts, Activism & Scholarship, and HEArt (human equity through art) online journal. She lives and makes art in Philadelphia and continues to seek creative ways to disengage with capitalist structures, racist institutions and all systems of oppression. 

 

Lori Waselchuk is a visual storyteller whose work is a simultaneous inquiry into the lived experiences and poetic bodies of humans and the systems they inhabit, contest and construct. Waselchuk creates novel forms of collaboration, drawing from many disciplines and resources, to create experiences that describe and convene community. Her work is exhibited internationally and is part of many collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art and South African National Gallery. Waselchuk also curates and coordinates exhibitions and special projects that prioritize creative social engagement. Most notable is Grace Before Dying (2007-17), a collaborative photographic documentary about a hospice program in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Most recently, Waselchuk developed and coordinated PPAC’s Women’s Mobile Museum (2018-20) with South African artist Zanele Muholi and ten Philadelphia women and femmes. Waselchuk is a recipient the following grants and awards: 2014 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award, 2012 Pew Fellowship for the Arts, 2010 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities grant, 2009 Aaron Siskind Foundation’s Fellowship, 2008 Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Project grant, 2007 PhotoNOLA Review Prize and the 2004 Southern African Gender and Media Award.