ActFreeStudio

Visit the artist's blog at LedaBlack.com to see the most comprehensive collection of my designs. You can contact me and ask me to put your favorite stuff up in this shop, if it's not here already.

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.

"If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine?"
– Mary Beard, "Women and Power, A Manifesto"

“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.”

The textiles in this shop are designed, printed, and finished in the USA. Prints are made in the studio on my high resolution Epson printer. 5x7 small prints, cards, calendars, stickers, and magnets are printed in the USA.

You can follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/FemalePowerProject and on Instagram @TheFemalePowerProject. Also, check out my artist's blog at LedaBlack.com. You can read about amazing females there: Malala Yousafzai, Maya Angelou, Harriet Tubman, Erzulie, Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo, and all the perSISTERS.