Here at Black Lab art studio you will find The Female Power Outlet, a creative laboratory and emporium. In Brookland DC since 2014, Black Lab is the “In Real Life” public shopping experience and workspace of word and digital artist, Leda Black (Creatrix).
This year, 2024, I have rearranged and reimagined this space to emphasize the Wearables in the Female Power Project, but also show the other things as they come into being. I have made so many things and I can’t lug all of them to markets anymore so I’m putting more energy and creativity into making this space into a transformative female power situation.
Going forward I am placing less energy into bringing my art to the markets (with smaller targeted product offerings) and instead will be bringing the market inside the art. It will be changing all the time. Every one of these things is a message. These phrases are open. Come see them and let’s see where this goes.
Black Lab is at 716 Monroe St NE, Studio 16, Washington DC. It is one of 27 creative spaces on the pedestrian Arts Walk that is park of the Monroe Street Market development at the border of the Edgewood/Brookland neighborhoods.
The Female Power Outlet is open to the public many Fridays (1:00–7:00) and Saturdays (10:00–4:00), also by appointment or chance (I make work here). Only Female Power Project works are sold here, there is no reselling. A visitor called it a “singular vision.”
The Arts Walk hosts a vibrant farmers market on Saturdays year round and many studios are open to the public then. We also put on events about five times a year. Here is the link to the events calendar.
You can check the Black Lab art studio Facebook page for the weekly schedule at facebook.com/BlackLab or scroll down to see the facebook widget at the bottom of this page. I always post weekend plans on Instagram posts and stories and on the facebook pages.
(Next I will revamp the pathetic Wearables page on this blog, I promise.)
The Female Power Outlet right now. Pictured… Coat of Many Colors cardigan duster, perSISTERS banners, message pouches, shirts, scarves, artwork from “The Woman Who Gave Birth to Herself” shawl for Frida Kahlo The Female Power Outlet right now. Pictured… perSISTERS prints on canvas and paper, framed literary lionesses bookmarks, DIVINES kimono jackets in crushed velour: Dove and La Guadalupana The Female Power Outlet right now. Pictured… Anarchist onesies, hand beaded Ruby Bridges shirt. I’ve been experimenting with embellishing the shirts. The Female Power Outlet right now. Pictured… Chairubs, Queen of Flower World Clock, DIVINES kimono jacket in crushed velour for the goddess Isis.
MOTHER for Marsha P. Johnson. You can purchase this print at THIS LINK.
Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 6, 1992)
“I may be crazy but that don’t make me wrong.”1
In 2022 I decided I wanted to make a perSISTERS print for an out trans person. I knew a little about Marsha P. Johnson and so started some research on her. Through Marsha’s story I learned about Sylvia Rivera. Here were two BFF trans people, active and well-known and key to the beginning of the gay rights movement in the U.S. I decided in 2022 to do a piece on Sylvia instead. Although she was an activist and famous in her community, Marsha’s story was so sad and I couldn’t figure out a message. From my research, Sylvia appeared to have been much more active and effective in the gay liberation movement, which is a movement for justice, even though her story is also sad.
But I kept thinking about Marsha, I knew there was a message there for me to find, and also she just kept coming up. Marsha’s name and picture continue to be used for many, many things. She is an icon. I’ve realized that Sylvia’s power comes from what she did and Marsha’s power comes from who she was. There are just some people that enter the imagination of the culture, are adopted/adapted, and live on in many of us, and Marsha is one of those people. (Another example is Frida Kahlo, see Queer Trickster Medicine, Making My Peace with Frida Kahlo).
First, a note on terminology. Both Marsha and Sylvia called themselves transvestites and drag queens, and they used feminine pronouns. I don’t think Marsha called herself a woman. Transgender was not a term when they were young and still forming their identities. Marsha would probably say when referring to precise terms for her particular kind of gender-non-conformity: “Pay It No Mind”. She just knew who she was, she chose her name, she chose her fam.
Pay it no mind is what the “P.” is for in the name, Marsha P. Johnson
“Because I try and pay a lot of those little things that happen to me in life, absolutely no mind.”2 On the one hand, this might sound like adaptive dissociation. (There was trauma in her early life.) On the other hand, this could be spiritual detachment. Without a doubt it is humorous. There is a story about when Marsha had to appear before a judge and when she told him what the P. stands for, he laughed and dismissed the case against her.
In the documentary, “Pay It No Mind—The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”, many people describe Marsha as a kind of saint, a holy fool, or a bodhisattva. In the first place, she was exceedingly nurturing to the other street queens and sex workers, and immensely kind to everyone, and she radiated joy and humor, and seemed to do whatever she pleased. Usually, that is, unless she was in a dark and violent funk (interesting that at these times she would present more as a man). She lived so far outside the norms of respectability, as an unhoused, HIV-positive, be-sparkled and be-ribboned and be-flowered, gender non-conforming, occasionally psychotic person when not on meds, drag performer, sex worker, and Black person. She was so “othered” that she fell into this kind of beyond-category/hyper-marginalized personhood seen as divine by some people, because she was also charismatically kind and loving. She was a neighborhood character, someone that people recognized. She was at all the gay rights protests, all the marches, all the sit-ins, all the parades. “I want my gay rights now” she shouted into the microphones held to her face. She sat with and nursed the people who were dying from AIDS so they would not die alone. She prostrated herself before altars in churches. She described herself as a bride of Jesus.
Sylvia said that Marsha saved her life. Sylvia was only 11 in 1962 when she came to New York and turned to survival sex work. It was illegal to “cross dress” in New York and AMAB people3 were regularly arrested just for wearing makeup. Marsha was six years older and hadn’t been on the streets much longer, but she was a mother to the queer street kids around her. She would protect them, teach them, show them love. It was Sylvia’s idea to create STAR with Marsha (Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries) which was mostly a way to house these kids in run down buildings. It was also a banner and group identity for protests and parades. It was tough to get funding and housing so it didn’t last very long. Many of the young people didn’t survive after STAR fell apart.
When I began this series of prints, the perSISTERS, I had to refine the purpose I was aiming toward. When I was doing a piece about Sophie Scholl I realized clearly that I am not talking about “role models.” For example, I didn’t want to encourage people to have their heads chopped off while resisting fascist tyranny. I am talking about exceptional people, sometimes in extraordinary circumstances, in whose stories I could find messages that might give us courage. Because they were women’s stories, they might be particularly encouraging to women, and tell us something about women. Also I hope the build up of all these power messages might lead iteratively to a working definition of what Female Power is. I think these stories should be interesting to EVERYONE and I say to men who hesitate to enter the Female Power situations, “Female Power is for everyone.”
“If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine?” —Mary Beard, Women & Power, A Manifesto
It’s been forever that women have been hearing that their highest calling is being a mother. Here I am showing that “mother” is also a verb that can be conjugated for all pronouns. Language shows us how our minds work or can work, how what we thought were rules can be flouted, and meaning can still be preserved, and maybe subcultures and poets show us how to make language into a bio-engine of justice. In which case I proclaim this piece (the print, I mean) to be a work of concrete poetry.
“She was a good queen,” a cop smiled and said when he helped close off the street to traffic so the funeral procession of hundreds could make it to the river to scatter Marsha’s ashes.
There is much more to Marsha’s story, many more funny, charming, inspiring and sad details. You can look it up on Wikipedia. You should watch the documentary, “Pay It No Mind” on YouTube. You can look at the resources I mention below. You can Google her name and see the artworks and institutes and programs inspired by Marsha P. Johnson.
1. Marsha quoted in “Pay It No Mind—The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”, a documentary by Michael Kasino on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN9W2KstqE
Suzanne Kulperger Photography made some amazing photos for me of the first object I ever made in the Female Power Project. So I am taking this opportunity to finally post the text I finally wrote for this piece in 2022. You can order the shawl and scarf for La Guadalupana on my Etsy site at this link.
Copyright 2023 Suzanne Kulperger Photography, all rights reserved.
Her attention reminds us that we are human.
Let me explain how this design for the Virgin of Guadalupe was the beginning of the Female Power Project.
In 2015 the Pope came to Washington D.C. and celebrated mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, near my studio. I wanted to make some shawls that people might buy when they came to see him. As usually happens for me, the project took longer than I thought, and the pieces I created were not ready in time! Still, I pressed ahead with production.
The Catholic Church considers the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe imprinted on the cloak of Juan Diego as a picture of supernatural origin.
Why did I choose the Virgin of Guadalupe for the project? Primarily, she was part of where I grew up, literally part of my geography, because the street where I grew up in New Mexico was a dead end road that came off a road called Guadalupe Trail. She was everywhere I looked in the Spanish culture of New Mexico and the Latinx culture around me in California and Texas, places I lived later. So when I wanted a Catholic image that was meaningful to me, the Virgin of Guadalupe came first to mind.
At that time I hadn’t made work with religious imagery. Since then I have made more such works, enough that I named a series for them: the Divines. I am fascinated by religious images, symbols, and stories because they seem to have a direct access into our brains, more than other images. Since La Guadalupana was at the beginning of the Project, at the time I hadn’t developed a method for making or writing about divine females. I now understand better what I am doing in the Divines Series: I don’t retell the stories or depict the deities, I interpret aspects of the stories in reworked images and reinterpret their messages in the context of my point of view as a non-religious feminist, living here and now.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is Mexico’s Virgin Mary. There is an important story for the Mexican and Mexican-American people about Mary appearing to and communicating with a local man, Juan Diego. This is a true story to the people, but it is not corroborated in the historic records of the time. The story involves local prelates, in the upper hierarchy, but there is no church record of the events, and there should be if the story is historical. It looks like the story was published later to help legitimize a legend and a cult that had developed over time. According to my research, the Church resisted acknowledging Mary’s visit to Mexico, and the cult of the Virgin that arose in Tepeyac, until it was impossible to deny for political and social reasons. The visitation, which was supposed to have taken place in the 1550s, cannot be separated from the complicated politics of the Mexican Church 100 years later, when the story was published and later accepted by the Church.
A more recent Guadalupana story is that her cult at Tepeyac arose on the site of a shrine sacred to an Aztec goddess called Tonanzin. The implication is that somehow Guadalupana worship was really Tonanzin worship, or a mash-up of the two. But this also should be questioned. As Rosemary Radford Ruether writes in Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, A Western Religious History, “Tonanzin was a title for the maternal aspect of any Aztec goddess, not the name of a particular goddess.” Therefore, a local person referring to the Virgin as “Tonanzin” was saying she is a holy mother, which is not unchristian. The locals calling Mary “Tonantzin” did worry the priests. They were very anxious about the purity of the object of worship of the native people. This anxiety was behind the institutional resistance to the Guadalupana cult. Any native-derived worship must be demonic, they thought.
So these cherished stories about the Virgin of Guadalupe are … complicated. But I maintain that powerful stories are meaningful even if they are not true in a literal or historic sense. I like to ask how they are meaningful, and, in this case, why is this design meaningful to me: an artist, an atheist, feminist, Jew?
Why might La Guadalupana be so important to Mexican identity? I think I may have found at least part of an answer recently in the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (pub. 2020). She writes that Christian colonizers did not consider the non-Christians they met to be human. The colonizers were allowed by their laws and customs to treat these people like animals, or like any other exploitable natural resource. Once the colonized people became Christians, they and their mixed-blood descendants did gain some human dignity in the eyes of the colonizers, and were absorbed into the caste system, although they were considered to be lower caste, or even “untouchable.” When I read this I immediately thought of the native Nahuas having their own Virgin Mary speaking to them. She even required a native man to carry a message to a member of the Church hierarchy, and when the Church man doubted Juan Diego, the Virgin produced a miracle to prove Juan Diego was worthy of her (and his) attention. This was proof that the people in Mexico must be real Christians, that is, human beings. This was proof that Mexico is a place in Christendom, and not a place outside of civilization. The place of worship of La Guadalupana was established by her, and that place is Mexico.
Although I created the La Guadalupana shawl in 2015, I am writing this now in 2022. It’s taken me till now to think of ways to frame this design, and talk about its message in the context of the Female Power Project. It is very easy for me to get lost in historical detail, so I had to let my researches settle for a while, to let the details fade and the edges get rounded, so I could find a figure in the noise.
La Guadalupana Shawl for the Virgin of GuadalupeLa Guadalupana Scarf for the Virgin of Guadalupe
The shawl references parts of the divine image of La Guadalupana at her shrine in Mexico: the mantle of stars she wears (I especially love this idea of wearing the sky); the flames representing rays of light; and the clouds around the flames. The roses, out of season and of a different region, are a miracle that proves the divine message to the sceptical curate. These things depict Mary’s situation, but not her self.
It is amazing that a divine mother has persisted even in a patriarchal faith. It often seems to me that female power pushes through fissures in history, because our species needs it. Here is the message as I understand it: Mary did not forsake her child, and her power is mercy. Her cult is of devotion, more than worship, and the emotion she embodies is love without fear. Her attention makes us human, as she had made human her son, and she mediates between humans and the non-female divine. People who wear the shawl will have their own meanings, of course.
Back in 2015, I remember standing in front of a mirror in my studio, near that Basilica, trying on the shawl I had just finished, and something seemed to happen, because I felt like I was putting on the power of someone else, like in a ritual. I found it remarkable and meaningful, in a quiet way. (No fireworks!) My very next thought was, I wonder what other women I can make a shawl for, so that I can put on their power, too?
And that, dear reader, was the beginning of the Female Power Project: my explorations of the stories of transformative women and divine females made into images, words, and objects—messages that we can try on, powers that can fit us, or situations we can inhabit.
I think if I were Catholic, I might feel like the Virgin had sent me a message.
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