I get a fair amount of pink bras, so subject matters that vibe with the color pink will always have materials to make them. P!nk rose in popularity when I was in high school so she will always be the voice of rebellious youth to me on some level. When I watched her documentary, I knew she was gunna be on the brart list. I wanted to try a very different color combination for P!nk that focused on her name sake color.
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Community Art Base - 2024
I don’t like country music, but I love Dolly. I didn’t understand Dolly growing up, I can’t quite articulate why, but I never remember liking her music as a kid. As an adult, I always get excited when a Dolly song comes on. I watch a lot of documentaries, so I say this a lot, I really learned to love Dolly after watching some of her documentaries and also watching 9 to 5. In one of Dolly’s documentaries, Jane Fonda describes Dolly as the consummate professional. She is always on, and she is always on pointe. Yellow bras are hard to come by. I had Dolly drawn out on a piano board for a few months, waiting for the right yellow bra to come along. When the bra did come along, I had to refocus and find the ambition to take on this icon. When this mug with a Dolly quote came along, I knew it was time to get this piece going. She came out pretty much how I had envisioned her, and was proud how she turned out. I typically post my brart in a few different upcycling and textile Facebook groups. I normally get a variety of positive comments on brart for a few days and then the internet generates more content and we all move on. When I posted Dolly, I had never read such a range of responses to a subject of brart. I had people saying this didn’t look like Dolly at all, that I aged her terribly, and a whole slew of general thoughts about Dolly positive and negative. I try not to take criticism personally, so I tried to sit back and wonder why is this piece of brart was getting such a wide range of criticism and negative commentary. At first I was questioning how good the piece was and if I had some how missed the focus of the piece. But then I realized, people weren’t commenting on my art, they were commenting with the emotions they already had tied to Dolly, about Dolly. I thought that this was an interesting realization. Dolly is such a level of recognition, that having a thought or opinion about Dolly is almost a universal American experience. Few people can so effortless work so hard and make it look easy to be as recognizable as Dolly. This is the second piece I've created in relation to a Theatre Pro Rata. If you scroll back to Margaret Thatcher, you can see that piece as lobby art. My background is in theatre, so its second nature to me to work with theatres. Quite a few of my materials to create panels also come from theatres. Eleanor has been on my To Do list for awhile, so when Theatre Pro Rata was doing 46 Plays for First Ladies, I knew this would be a great opportunity to create Eleanor. My cousin has always liked Eleanor, so after the production was over, Eleanor went to hang in my cousin’s house.
Theatre had been on hold in the pandemic. I didn’t do theatre for two years. 2022 is the first year where I’ve had to balance theatre and brart. I like both art forms for different reasons. Theatre is collaborative art, and you build comradery within production teams. Theatre always has a hard and fast deadline of opening night. Brart is solitary, in a good way, I can do pieces as I want and whichever subject matter I choose. I can push and define boundaries of the art as I like. I had been creating brart at a consistent pace in 2020 and 2021. I created Eleanor after a fourth month break from brart because I was working on theatre productions. I really didn’t enjoy not working on brart for that long of a period of time. My main challenge is that brart is best done with uninterrupted periods of time. I can always tell when I’ve rushed a piece, and I don’t like looking at a piece knowing I could have done better. I’m trying to work my schedule so I don’t have such long periods without brart. I love the Marvel Universe, so some of this is straight up fan art, but I really love the background I created, and the level of detail in this piece.
Theatre in the Round - Trailblazing Women - March 2024
Sylvia Earle (1935-Present) was born in Gibbstown, New Jersey, and grew up in Florida and was an avid swimmer as a child. She is the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH). When she left NOAH, she founded Deep Ocean Exploration, which designs, builds and operates equipment for deep ocean environments. She also has an excellent documentary, Mission Blue, where you can hear her speak directly on her activism for the ocean. It's on Netflix, go watch it. It's good. When people ask me who Sylvia Earle is, I always say, ’She is the Jane Goodall of the ocean.’ She has a really excellent documentary called Mission Blue. I don’t mean to imply that Jane Goodall is more important than Sylvia Earle, it’s just that more people have probably heard of Jane Goodall, but each of their contributions to the environment are commendable. I also think it’s interesting that Jane Goodall was born in in 1934 and Sylvia Earle was born in 1935. Both of these women are into their 80s and don’t slow down because they are so driven to help the environment as much as they can. I don't believe in regurgitating info you can find on Wikipedia, but Sylvia has a huge list of accomplishments that I recommend reading up on. |
AuthorMinnesota native, Sadie started making brart (bra-art) in 2019. Archives
February 2024
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