Artist Statement (current preoccupations)

The Female Power Project: Tributes to Transformative Women and Divine Females

The Female Power Project is an art project started in 2015 by word and digital artist, Leda Black. Physically, the project is made up of several series of objects: prints, ephemera, wearables, and mixed medium artworks. Phenomenologically, it is an interaction-based mechanism for producing and releasing messages toward an iterative understanding of women’s power and of human liberation. The interactive aspect takes place at markets and festivals within the context of human-scale commerce and exchange. Here I see the effects of the works on the public and gather and respond to their stories and experiences.

Women’s History: Messages, Research, and Writing

I identify the message or power in the stories of particular women and distill it into active, positive, and non-clichéd language. Mostly it is my words, only rarely is it a quote or an existing meme. These distillations can be displayed, held, and adopted by the viewers and wearers of the Female Power Project works. Those who daily do the work of human liberation then remind themselves to Take Up Space and Use Privilege to Sow Justice.

I sometimes do lengthy research about the person. For example, I travelled to the Eastern Shore to photograph the landscape when I was learning about Harriet Tubman for the FEARLESS Shawl design.
I toured the locations where important things happened in her life. Later I pulled apart the adjectival message to make a verb phrase, FEAR LESS, and incorporated this into a perSISTERS series print and related ephemera. Then I blended these two designs to produce tote bag and shirt designs.

Divine Females

An expanding portion of the Female Power Project is the DIVINES series of scarves, jackets, and assemblage objects. In these I identify females in spiritual practices and mythologies and tease apart their symbols and messages. I then apply them to present, non-religious contexts of women’s experience. In this way concepts like emotional labor are framed on the level of the archetype (as in the Isis Project). Powerful myths and their symbols, like social media memes, are keys into our individual and collective minds, spotlighting the repressed powers of the traditionally marginalized.

Here is a link to a short video from 2020 about the Female Power Project.

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Artist Bio

Born in New Mexico, Leda Black has always been a maker with words and images as material, with a particular passion for typography. She has an education in philosophy and the traditional arts of the book. After graduate school she started on an entrepreneur’s path by establishing a letterpress printing business in Oakland, California. While printing for clients and producing graphics with digital tools, Black self-published artists books under the Palabra Press imprint and undertook an art-by-mail subscription enterprise called the Physical Language Laboratory. In 2012 she sold her tons of letterpress equipment, moved to the Washington DC area, and converted her printing practice completely to digital. In 2013 she opened her public-facing studio in DC, called Black Lab. In 2015 she launched the Female Power Project with shawls and scarves, and since then this project has dominated Black’s output, expanding into many series and objects. She concentrates on selling in person, in dialogue with visitors.

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Posts Defining the Female Power Project

• Phenomenology of Message
  What the Female Power Project is meaning I am an artist and I have an art business. These are intertwining occupations, obviously. There is making, and there is making ABOUT making. Art is, among  other things, a mode of communication in itself. The object itself communicates. At the most fundamental level this is an interaction between ...
• Introducing Female Power Project Positive Protest Principles Posters
  I’ve made this series within a series, I suppose within TWO series. Isn’t everything connected anyway? After the devastating slap of the election, the Women’s March was a tonic. With so many people who came from all over—and the sister marches around the world—it is clear that progressive action is becoming more potent than ever. ...
• More About the Female Power Project
  Now I want to write about another design in this series. This one is for Maya Angelou. This woman was amazing, she did so many things in her life and made art out of nearly everything she did. Of course she is best known for being a writer of memoir and poetry. Her first book, ...
• New Work: The Female Power Shawls
    Up to now I have been thinking of my scarf and shawl designs as commercial work, not as fine art. In fact, I have several kinds of work I do, including graphic design, and I try to keep these things separated from the fine art in my promotions, because, you know, art is so much ...

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Interview with CollabCreateDC, April 2019

Describe your work or business. Tell us what you feel sets you apart from others in your industry.

My mediums are digital art and distilled messages. The Female Power Project (FPP) is an art project I started in 2015 with wearable messages distilled from the stories of powerful females. Physically, the FPP is a multifaceted collection of series of objects including prints, ephemera, wearables, and mixed medium fine art. Phenomenologically, the FPP is an interaction-based mechanism for creating and delivering messages designed to expand our understanding of—and to promote—the capabilities of women. There is power in our stories, the stories we keep forgetting. Lots of people do artwork about powerful women lately. I think my work is more selective, for one thing. I don’t do work about many “celebrities” and I concentrate on social justice. I’m trying to show how the women are leaders. I identify the message or power of the particular female, in active and non-clichéd language. Mostly it is my words, sometimes it is quotes or memes. I sometimes do very deep research about the person. For example, I travelled to the Eastern Shore to photograph the landscape when I was learning about Harriet Tubman. I followed a tour of the locations where important things happened in her life. I am looking for a woman’s power. I write an essay on my blog about each person. I include the info in the package with the print. It has to do with remembering. It has to do with quality. And it’s my coping mechanism, frankly, my way of handling the social decay we are seeing with the collapse of late capitalism and the growing wave of authoritarianism. These are the stunted fruit of malignant patriarchy. Something tells me that female power could be our last best hope of saving our species and our habitable planet.

How did you get started as a creative or small biz in DC?

I’ve been a creative all my life! I’ve very rarely had (what we used to call in ((small liberal arts)) college) a “straight job.” I keep making stuff up based on my passion for ideas and type and words and photography and printing. As for the DC part, through some fluke I was able to get studio space in Brookland as part of an “arts district” development. Something about having this space, with a public retail-like face, has allowed me to be enormously productive creatively. I got a small biz neighborhood-based grant from DC that allowed me to acquire the best digital tools and my artistic passions flowered and bore fruit.

Tell us a little bit about your history with Femme Fatale—when did you join? how did you find out about it?

I found FFDC on instagram (of course!) For some reason I was following the founder, Yasmin Radbod. I almost decided to apply for the first call, but it was too expensive for me then. I had started selling the FPP shawls and scarves but it was before the women’s march and I hadn’t started the perSISTERS series yet. That’s when the work took off. So by the time of the second pop-up I had sales picking up and could manage it. I’ve done all of them since the second. My project is so obviously congruent with the mission of FFDC. FFDC gave me a way to connect to a very diverse and outrageously creative female-centric community. It’s just been so wild and fun and I’ve been able to learn and to mentor as well. And to make money! I don’t generally work well in groups, but FFDC doesn’t get all group-think-y. We’re like a multi-star solar system and we each have our own atmospheres, temperatures, and orbits. I don’t know how else to describe it.

What’s your favorite thing about what you do? Or what’s your favorite thing about Femme Fatale? 

My favorite thing about FFDC I think I answered in the previous question. About what I do, though… A lot of what I do is sell directly to people. I think the first really intense direct selling experience I had with FPP was at the street festival in Takoma, in 2017. It was my first such presentation of the Female Power Project. People just connected to the work so powerfully, and to me through the work. You can’t imagine all the personal stories I was gifted with. If you meet me I am this sort of awkward, aspergers person (my camouflage is pretty good, so maybe that’s just the way I see myself). But the messages in the work mediate the interaction for me and we just jump over all that fuzzy small talk into the good stuff. So that is the social component to this elaborate commerce-based art performance. It’s gratifying but also enormously draining. I’ve started selling many weekends at Eastern Market and that’s given me more regular interactions.

Who’s on your collaboration dream list? 

Everyone who has been inspired by a powerful woman! Let me know who they are and I just might make something about them.

What’s your go-to spot in DC for some fun? Self care, shopping, eating, hobbies—anything you want to share that isn’t work-related!

I really like to walk through urban places with my dog and my camera. Places like flood drainage areas. I like underpasses. Weird places where the graffiti artists find their canvases. I also like to walk my dog through different residential neighborhoods. Especially now, in spring, when everything around me is in bloom. I like patterns and textures in the city. I like to photograph this stuff. This is my idea of fun!

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Here is my story so far
(as published on Artists Tell Their Stories, a blog by Brenda Smoak, April 23, 2018)

I have always had two main concerns: the limitations of rigid mental categories (subject/object, female/male), and language, or more broadly, communication. It seemed like studying philosophy would be the way to find out about this stuff, so that’s what I did in college, concentrating on the philosophy of language. I wasn’t very good at the academic mode and it was hostile to women. Later I thought I was abandoning philosophy to do creative work but I now consider my art practice to be the performance of philosophy. I started out wanting to stretch language to allow meaning to expand, so that our understanding would be less limited by the rules of language. I made physical texts as a book artist while honing my craft skills: letterpress printing, hand bookbinding, typography, printmaking. At that time digital tools were just beginning to be used for graphics, and I have used them since as a graphic designer.

Finding my “home” medium—printed digital art—had to wait until the tools developed in sophistication and affordability. In the early 2000’s I embraced photography as a central mode of image making, maybe because I had a small child then and needed to work fast. Soon after, I sold my letterpress equipment before moving to the DC area and converting to (mostly) digital tools. This is when I started to really find my artistic voice. I found the “veracity” of the photographic image useful for playing with the idea of reality, and the digital manipulation tools I had learned as a graphics professional helped me mess with mental categories by making visual mashups.

As for my interest in communication, I continue to use the visual embodiment of words for artistic and political effect. This is a rhetorical tool I use in my current and biggest project, the Female Power Project (FPP), to express the time period, urgency, message, or the character of a person. I try to distill a message into as few fresh words as possible.

I started the FPP in 2015, integrating words and images into complex digital designs on shawls to embody the attributes of remarkable females. These messages can be worn on the body and incorporated into an individual’s life. Two years later, smooshed in the crowd at the DC Women’s March, I knew I have to work faster because of the speed of events, so I began making digital prints. First I made a series of complaint graphics. Then I went back to the Female Power idea and focused on POSITIVE actions. I pluck messages out of the rushing flow of events and solidify them in my pieces. The messages are general, but most prints are about specific women or specific events. Sometimes I take current memes and relate them to past events. An example is “Nevertheless She Persisted” applied to Ruby Bridges on the steps of William Frantz elementary school in 1960. “Ruby Bridges Persisting” therefore becomes an archetype AND a demonstration of what is at stake politically. Nasty RZY (“Rosie”) works use an image based on a well known “Rosie the Riveter” graphic to express something traditionally problematic in women: anger. I use embroidery as a medium expressing “femininity.” I’ve discovered that I really really like to embroider letters. I love type so much. Also, embroidery turns out to be a lot about stabbing with a sharp object.

The FPP is connected to the place I am (the DC area) and where I directly sell my work (my retail studio, Black Lab, and art/craft fairs). Interacting with the public about the works is part of a social practice that feeds the development of the objects and performs a service to the viewer. When people see my work they are moved to tell me their stories (e.g. a Katrina refugee from New Orleans) or stories about women they know (e.g. a man who works at the National Archives and knows about many interesting important women most people don’t know about). Workers at DOJ crowd my booth needing prints about Ruby Bridges to reinforce their commitment to educational justice—Ruby’s story is part of their origin story. In the Female Power Project, commercial exchange is a social practice and messages about women as leaders are absorbed into the lives of my “customers.”

The Female Power Project is about the creation, dissemination, and amplification of feminist messages using techniques of visual, verbal, and performative rhetoric. I started using the tagline “Imagination is the Seed of Power” because it is what I believed, but I felt like maybe it was a bit goofy or moon-glow. But then I heard about implicit bias research which I refer to in the next paragraph. It is cognitive SCIENCE, y’all!

“One of the less intuitive revelations of recent work in cognitive science is that a failure of imagination can actually produce a failure of vision.”*
*Lili Loofbourow, referencing the work of Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in her article, “The Male Glance.” Read it!

My goal with the Female Power Project is to expand our imaginations so that we can see that women are leaders. Female Power Project objects remind us that women are strong and capable and have always been taking action to improve all of our lives, including the action of expressing anger. Because of the history of women’s oppression, these actions are often heroic and are messages we should celebrate. Women’s experience is human experience. Our species and our self knowledge can ONLY be ENRICHED by the inclusion and validation of the experiences and viewpoints of previously marginalized humans. Our arbitrary categories are holding us back and we need to enlist the creativity of everyone to face our planet’s problems.

You can read about all of my FPP designs elsewhere on this blog, including the deep research I did on particular powerful females for the shawl designs. Here is the account of my journey to FEARLESS honoring Harriet Tubman. And here is the page that is visited the most on my blog, about the Vodou spirit of love, Erzulie.