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
Isis scarf in the DIVINES series in the Female Power Project
About the Isis Project
The Isis project is the newest contribution to a branching series in WEARABLES called DIVINES. I’ve already created three designs about divine females, and I always felt like they didn’t quite fit in with the mortals, especially after I started making perSISTERS prints. Some of the wearables people became perSISTERS people, but the divine people could never be. So I thought it would be interesting to make more scarves about divine females, because there is power in their stories too. The task: how to recalibrate a representation of a divine female power without being mired in the spiritual language crafted by patriarchy. This was a language that developed to define female power vis à vis, and subservient to, patriarchy.
Here I would like to establish my approach to spiritual beings and the impulse in feminist thought to look for an original matriarchy that we can all call home. First, although I am an atheist, I also believe that our understanding and perception is limited, so true explanations about how the universe works are likely to be beyond our ability to express. I believe that expressions of Absolute Truths are more about humans, and how we think, than about the world, let alone a “more real” world than ours. To me these expressions are aesthetic. Second, I don’t believe there was a primeval matriarchy (there is no clear record of this in the archeology) and I don’t believe that ancient thinking was truer than modern. I think it’s up to us to make something new and it can be legitimate without having to belong to an older and truer or purer time. What is true about the ancient symbols is the way they tap into our nervous systems to express powerful ideas. So I am trying to access that same power with fresh images that might be surprising and familiar at the same time.
The Isis Project is a collaboration with Rose Black, Queen of the Nihil (and my daughter). Besides being a photographer and digital artist—and a gifted writer—she has been building elaborate and beautiful earrings. She picked Isis. She did the research. She proposed the idea that Isis could be the goddess of emotional labor and unpaid work. She co-wrote the writing that follows. A post about the earrings and her design inspirations is coming soon. Please follow Rose Black on Instagram @sleepingci.ty and the web sleepingcity.online.
Isis repairs the world
The goddess Isis is always trying to repair things. Often seen as the most popular and enduring of the Egyptian deities, she evolved into The Universal Caretaker, according to her Egyptian worshippers, and her rituals spread throughout the mediterranean and Europe with the march of the Romans. Isis’s identity is fluid because she’s been popular for so long. At some times she is only one in a divine family of bickering sibling-spouses. At other times she absorbs many of these personalities into her self, becoming an all-goddess. In almost all her roles she is depicted as some sort of mother, or sister, or widow deep in mourning for a lost loved one. When she isn’t directly caring for one of her family, she is picking up the messes caused by the rash actions of her godly siblings. Or she is grieving the results of those siblings’ fiery, chaotic wills. Her grief is epic: it is emotional labor as divine engine.
In the Egyptian pantheon, the married siblings, Isis and Osiris, govern the human world as benevolent and wise rulers. The goddess gives power and legitimacy to human kings and queens (mostly kings). In fact, the most iconic image of Isis depicts her with a throne on her head: a right-angled, blocky shape. A man has power because a woman gave it to him.
In many of the stories, Isis is seen battling the chaotic tendencies of a particular brother, Set. The ultimate annoying brother, Set is a destructive trickster who hates Osiris in particular, and thrills at upsetting the order that was brought to the world by his authoritative siblings. Isis’s task is always, forever, to restore her beautiful order to the world, again and again and again. This pull and push between the trickster and the goddess of order is the fundamental engine powering the universe. When I think of the geography of ancient Egypt, this cosmogony makes a lot of sense. The Nile river flooded regularly, wreaking havoc on the human landscape, while providing an essential boost to the ecosystem. An orderly disorder was the engine of life in that place, with the river functioning like the unruly brother to the goddess of fertility.
A foundational story brings together all the themes behind Isis’s power. In it she is in turn the grieving widow, the magician, the mother, the caretaker of the Egyptian people, and the eternal defender against the forces of chaos. In almost every story, she appears as either mother, widow, or maiden, and here she is all three. This is how it goes: Through a series of elaborate tricks, Set finally manages to trap Osiris in a coffin and kill him. When Isis discovers her lover’s body, and is on the brink of reviving him, Set again seizes Osiris’s corpse. This time Set cuts Osiris into small pieces, scattering him up and down the Nile’s landscape. Isis has to start all over again. She finds the pieces and gathers them together and, taking the form of a bird, uses her wings to beat the air to force life back into Osiris’s body only long enough for her to draw his sperm into herself, thus ensuring an heir to the divine kingship of Egypt. Even in all her power as the divine caretaker—and her skilled arts as The Great Magician—Isis cannot sustain Osiris’s life beyond this point. Osiris leaves to rule as king of the underworld where the dead reside, and Isis is left alone to grieve, with only her ever-swelling belly as consolation. She has failed in her ultimate goal, but has gained enough in the process to keep the world alive through her love, her will, her fertility, and her grief.
What can Isis mean to us? What power does she embody with this failure to save her lover, this constant fixing-of-messes, this emotional laboring in the grief factory? When we do unpaid work we often console ourselves with the thought that it is fulfilling work. Is Isis fulfilled by this work, the way we think women can be fulfilled by similar work in their families and political or social causes? Fulfillment really implies an eventual perfect state of order or of justice, of fullness. How can we be fulfilled if we build something that just gets knocked over? How can we fill a vessel that is always leaking? I propose that the ideal of a perfect household or society is a trap, because failure is inevitable, and shame and blame the result. Your work is never enough and it never ends and you will never, ever, get paid.
Her lover dies, but still Isis produces offspring through her magical art, without even touching her undead mate. Her son, Horus, is the sun. Isis’s failure is inevitable because death is inevitable. Death is inevitable because Isis’s failure is inevitable. The order and perfection that Isis seeks is beautiful, yes, but isn’t the striving also beautiful? Is the order she would otherwise have imposed better than this dance of imperfection? In the affairs of humans, when we imagine the most orderly state, aren’t we imagining a controlling, fascist state in which only the dominant can flourish? Is the throne on the goddess’s head the throne of a despot? Isn’t it the natural order of things to fall apart in the end? Entropy is not misrule, it is the rule. Wouldn’t true power come from knowing this and still striving for beautiful but imperfect outcomes? I propose that a loving mess is infinitely better than an order based on control.
The Throne of Female Power
This is why I have depicted the throne of female power, displayed by our Isis, as a fancy comfy chair. It is a place to sit in love and comfort and it is wide enough to support you and your offspring. But, like the soft look of puffy clouds—which are really cold and wet mist—it is a throne of art and not of hard and certain order. It is beautiful and it does hold you up, as long as you keep beating your wings.
If you proceed with the knowledge that everything you try to set right will eventually deteriorate and need to be fixed again, and if you can still find motivation to keep fixing and caring and living your life—this living that is beautiful and messy, full of pleasures and grief—then you are pretty well fortified. One day you might find yourself among the few who can still pick themselves up and keep going, keep fixing or fighting or caring or loving, no matter the blow that’s been struck. While so many people are busy mourning the loss of the possibilityof a perfect world, you’ll be the reason the world we have keeps on turning.
This is the power that Isis can teach us. Because it takes an incredible amount of strength—yes, possibly even the strength of a goddess—to keep going whilst holding in one’s mind both the drive to fix and the certainty that all that is fixed will again be broken.
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