Persimmon Blackbridge

Last updated
Persimmon Blackbridge
Born1951 (age 72–73)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
NationalityCanadian
Known forwriter, performance artist, installation artist, sculptor
AwardsFerro-Grumley Award
1997 Lesbian Fiction
VIVA Award
1991

Persimmon Blackbridge (born 1951) [1] is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues. She identifies herself as a lesbian, a person with a disability and a feminist. Her work explores these intersections through her sculptures, writing, curation and performance. Her novels follow characters that are very similar to Blackbridge's own life experiences, allowing her to write honestly about her perspective. Blackbridge's struggle with her mental health has become a large part of her practice, and she uses her experience with mental health institutions to address her perspective on them. Blackbridge is involved in the film, SHAMELESS: The Art of Disability [2] exploring the complexity of living with a disability. Her contributions to projects like this help destigmatize the attitudes towards people with disabilities. Blackbridge has won many awards for her work exploring her identity and the complexities that come with it. [3]

Contents

Life and career

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Blackbridge moved to British Columbia with her family as a teenager, and has worked and resided in Canada ever since. [4] Along with artists Susan Stewart and Lizard Jones, she has been a member of the Vancouver-based Kiss and Tell collective. [5]

A portrait of Blackbridge, by her Kiss and Tell colleague Susan Stewart, is held by The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives' National Portrait Collection, in honour of her role as a significant builder of LGBT culture and history in Canada. [1] She is also featured in the 2006 National Film Board of Canada documentary film Shameless: The Art of Disability .

Blackbridge's work as an artist has been in a variety of domains, including performance art, installation art, video art and sculpture. [5] In 1991 she was the recipient of the VIVA Award for her sculptural installations. [6]

Major exhibitions

Doing Time was Blackbridge's 1989 exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery, created in collaboration with ex-prison inmates Geri Ferguson, Michelle Kanashiro-Christensen, Lyn MacDonald and Bea Walkus. [7] Incorporating twenty-five life-sized cast-paper figures of the four women, the installation also included texts written by the participants. This marked the first exhibition where Blackbridge worked with large-scale multi-media assemblage. [8]

Still Sane was her 1984 exhibit in collaboration with Sheila Gilhooly at Women in Focus gallery. This exhibition focused on Gilhooly's experiences of being institutionalized for being a lesbian. To create this exhibition, Gilhooly and Blackbridge spent 36 months creating a sculptural and written record of Gilhooly's time incarcerated in the hospital. [9]

Both Still Sane and Doing Time were cited in the awarding of the 1991 VIVA award to Blackbridge. [10]

In 2016, her exhibition Constructed Identities was the first to open Tangled Art Gallery, a fully accessible gallery dedicated to art focused on disability issues. The Constructed Identities exhibition aims to disrupt the current aesthetic of disability in society. It addresses intersections of race, sexuality, ability and gender constructs. The content of the exhibition and gallery it was shown in, Tangled art Gallery in Toronto, highlighted the importance of the shift in perspective about people with disabilities. The collection of works is made up of mixed, found materials to create bodies that explore the variety of disability and what people look like when their bodies do not conform. [11]

Disability in the arts

(See more at Disability in the arts)

Blackbridge was diagnosed with a learning disability in her youth. Her art work explores the diversity of disabilities and other intersections of peoples identities. By attending Emily Carr University of Art and Design, what was then known as the Vancouver School of Art she was able to obtain a degree despite her learning disability.

The film includes many artists all living with disabilities. It highlights the importance of art as a way to express yourself in an empowering sense, and in this way has the transformative power to shift culture. [2]

Alison Kafer defines the term "crip" in her book Feminist Queer Crip [12] as a term that intends to be confrontational and jarring. The purpose of the term is to reappropriate the word to mean something that benefits the community and those that identify as part of it, not as the derogatory term, cripple, from which it originated. [13] The term "crip" and "crip aesthetics" both describe the intersections of identities. Rather than just focusing on a person's disabilities, this distinction attempts to acknowledge a person's diverse intersections of their ability and identity. "Crip aesthetics" consider both the outsiders view of disabled bodies as other in both social and political realms as well as the intersectional aspects of that individual's identity. [12] Blackbridge's sculptures in her Constructed Identities exhibition explores her own intersections as a lesbian woman with a learning disability. The sculptures from this work negate the idea of a normative body in a celebratory way. [13]

The conversation around accessibility in the arts typically revolves around how the audience can view and access the art, while this mentality is important it should also be noted that accessibility as a creator in the art world must be achieved. [14] Blackbridge's art work bridges this gap, the content of her Constructed Identities sculptures embraces the aesthetics of disability and various types of bodies while placing this exhibition in a fully accessible gallery.

Mental health

Blackbridge had her first mental breakdown when she was nineteen years old, after a realization about her sexuality and thus her struggle with what society was telling her about how to be a woman. [15] Blackbridge's work helped her to process the conditions of Canadian mental health institutions. She has collaborated with another artist, Sheila Gilhooly, a woman who was institutionalized for her sexuality, to create Still Sane. [16] This collaborative experience between the two women allowed Blackbridge to open up about both her sexuality and her disability. [16]

Writing

Although predominantly a non-fiction writer, Blackbridge has also published two novels. [5] Her novel Sunnybrook won a Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1997, and her novel Prozac Highway was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award in 1998. She was also a frequent contributor to Rites , one of the major Canadian LGBT publications of the late 1980s.

Novels

Non-fiction

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Scott (artist)</span> American fiber sculptor

Judith Scott was an American fiber sculptor. She was deaf and had Down Syndrome. She was internationally renowned for her art. In 1987, Judith was enrolled at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, which supports people with developmental disabilities. There, Judith discovered her passion and talent for abstract fiber art, and she was able to communicate in a new form. An account of Scott's life, Entwined: Sisters and Secrets in the Silent World of Artist Judith Scott, was written by her twin sister, Joyce Wallace Scott, and was published in 2016.

Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability", where impairment was an impairment of an individual's mind or body, while disability was considered a social construct. This premise gave rise to two distinct models of disability: the social and medical models of disability. In 1999 the social model was universally accepted as the model preferred by the field.

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, Mutu now splits her time between her studio there in Nairobi and her studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked for over 20 years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.

Bonnie Sherr Klein is a feminist filmmaker, author and disability rights activist.

Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. "Drawing the Line" was made in response to the "porn wars" of the late 80's-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell's work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are "cause for alarm" and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. This show was about desensitizing the view of queer sex and relationships. It intended to make lesbian relationships just as visible as straight relationships. Through the intimate exploration of queer bodies, The Kiss and Tell collective gave space for lesbians to perform and share their experiences. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition "Drawing the Line." This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work's 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.

Sarindar Dhaliwal is a multi-media artist, born in India, raised in England, and based in Toronto.

Martha Wilson is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.

Carrie Moyer is an American painter and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Moyer's paintings and public art projects have been exhibited both in the US and Europe since the early 1990s, and she is best known for her 17-year agitprop project, Dyke Action Machine! with photographer Sue Schaffner. Moyer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Tang Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She serves as the director of the graduate MFA program at Hunter College, and has contributed writing to anthologies and publications like The Brooklyn Rail and Artforum.

Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as "Laura" – a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism" for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.

Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. Her work is multidisciplinary in nature, and deals with notions of identity, representation and memory; centering Black presence in Canada.

The VIVA Awards are $15,000 prizes, granted annually to British Columbian mid-career artists chosen for "outstanding achievement and commitment" by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation. The awards are presented by the Shadbolt Foundation in conjunction with the Alvin Balkind Curator's Prize.

Xiaojing Yan is a contemporary Chinese Canadian artist known for her work in sculpture, installation and public art.

Lorna Boschman (1955) is a Canadian Queer media artist, film maker, curator, educator, editor, and camera operator working with themes such as sexual identity, body image, social justice, (dis)ability, cancer, abuse, health, and self-advocacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Zvonar</span> Canadian artist

Elizabeth Zvonar is a Canadian contemporary artist who works primarily with mixed-media collage and sculpture based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is currently represented by Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Evelyn Roth is a Canadian born interdisciplinary artist who has worked across the arts in textiles, sculpture, performance, dance and interactive fabric arts. Specialising in environmentally sensitive events, festivals, school programs and art gallery exhibits. Roth is based in the town of Maslin Beach, on South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula.

Katherine Boyer is a Métis artist, whose multidisciplinary practice focuses primarily on the mediums of sculpture, printmaking and beadwork. She was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, but currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba—a location that has had a direct influence on her current artistic practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TJ Cuthand</span> Canadian (Cree) filmmaker

TJ Cuthand, also credited as Theo Cuthand and Thirza Cuthand, is a filmmaker and performance artist, writer and curator of Plains Cree as well as Scottish and Irish descent. He is credited with coining the term Indigiqueer, for modern Indigenous LGBTQ people. In May 2022, he changed his name to TJ Cuthand and came out as a trans man.

Cindy Mochizuki is a multimedia Japanese Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. In her drawings, installations, performance, and video works created through community-engaged and location-specific research projects, Mochizuki explores how historical and family memories are passed down in the form of narratives, folktales, rituals and archives. Mochizuki's works have been exhibited in multiple countries including Japan, the United States, and Canada. Mochizuki received MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2006. She received Vancouver's Mayor's Arts Award in New Media and Film in 2015 and the VIVA and Max Wyman awards in 2020.

Mari Katayama is a Japanese multimedia artist known for her sculpture and photography work. Her work focuses on themes such as body image, identity, and her experience as an amputee.

Eli Clare is an American writer, activist, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on queer, transgender, and disability issues. Clare was one of the first scholars to popularize the bodymind concept.

References

  1. 1 2 Inductee: Persimmon Blackbridge. The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives.
  2. 1 2 SHAMELESS: The ART of Disability, National Film Board of Canada, retrieved 2021-04-05
  3. ↑ "Persimmon Blackbridge – BODIES IN TRANSLATION". 5 July 2020. Retrieved 2022-03-12.
  4. ↑ "20 Questions: Persimmon Blackbridge" Archived 2013-02-21 at archive.today . Philadelphia City Paper , December 18, 1997.
  5. 1 2 3 "Persimmon Blackbridge". section15.ca, May 30, 2008.
  6. ↑ "The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation For the Visual Arts :: VIVA Award Winners". www.shadboltfoundation.org. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 21 September 2016.
  7. ↑ "Doing Time | City of Surrey". www.surrey.ca. 2019-12-11. Retrieved 2023-04-29.
  8. ↑ Hasselfelt, Karen, ed. (1989). Doing Time. Surrey, BC: Surrey Art Gallery.
  9. ↑ Diamond, Sara (Fall 1984). "Still Sane". Fuse: 30–35.
  10. ↑ Rosenberg, Ann (30 May 1991). "Drawing out city's finest". Vancouver Sun.
  11. ↑ "Constructed Identities at Âjagemô". Canada Council for the Arts. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
  12. 1 2 Alison, Kafer (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press. ISBN   978-0-253-00941-8. OCLC   1136415788.
  13. 1 2 Millett-Gallant, Ann (2019), "Crip aesthetics in the work of Persimmon Blackbridge", The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media, Routledge international handbooks (1st ed.), New York: Routledge, pp. 218–226, doi:10.4324/9781351254687-17, ISBN   978-1-351-25468-7, S2CID   192872286 , retrieved 2021-04-05
  14. ↑ "8 Things Everyone Needs to Know About Art and Disability". canadianart.ca. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
  15. ↑ "Emily Carr University Federated Login - Stale Request". idp.ecuad.ca. Retrieved 2021-03-31.
  16. 1 2 art (2019-09-20). "Art and Activism: Q&A with Persimmon Blackbridge". AGGV magazine. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
  17. ↑ "Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies…". Quill and Quire. 2004-03-05. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  18. ↑ "Prozac Highway". Metapsychology Online Reviews. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
  19. ↑ "Persimmon Blackbridge – BODIES IN TRANSLATION". 5 July 2020. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.