Keywords

Enter a program, idea, office, or department into the field above and click go

At this year's symposium the Women's and Gender Studies Program honored the memory of

Tillie K. Lubin (1908-2006)

A native of Iowa, Tillie Kulp married Charles Lubin in the late 1930s soon after he had purchased a chain of neighborhood bakeries in Chicago.  After the birth of their daughter Sara Lee, the Lubins renamed their company the Kitchens of Sara Lee.  The company’s great success allowed the Lubins to engage in many philanthropic projects.  Among their major gifts, they established the Charles Lubin Family Chair for Women in Science at Skidmore College and the Charles W. and Tillie K. Lubin Center for Plant Biotechnology and Lubin Chair of Hormone Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science.  Tillie Lubin also had a lifelong passion for the arts and a particular affinity for Spanish culture.  At the time of her death on August 30, 2006, she had four grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren. Her daughter Sara Lee Schupf served on the Women's Studies Program Board in the 1990s and endowed the Lubin Symposium in her mother's honor.

FOR ART'S SAKE, 'ENGAGED IN SURVIVAL'

Women talk of confronting major challenges in creative process

by Carrie Simmons (originally published in the March 2007 Brandeis Reporter), photos by Mike Lovett
Yu-Hui Chang
Susan Wyner
Brandeis faculty, scholars and distinguished guest artists gathered in Rapaporte Treasure Hall on March 1 for “Women Making Arts,” the 12th annual Tillie K. Lubin Symposium sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Spanning visual and verbal art, theater, music, film and dance, the artists’ conversation about their creative processes and the challenges they face was both timely and necessary, according to James Mandrell, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and chair of the event.

“There’s every reason to look carefully at the role and status of women in the world not just of the visual arts, but the many art forms being practiced today,” he said. “There’s a reason that the Guerrilla Girls are still active, still out there, as their Web site points out, ‘fighting discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur’ as well as ‘reinventing the f word: feminism.’ There is quite simply a lot left to talk about.”

The symposium opened with a powerful music and dance performance by Amazones: The Women Master Drummers of Guinea, the first women’s drum ensemble to emerge from West Africa. The group visited Brandeis as part of MusicUnitesUS. Mamoudou Conde founded the Amazones in 2000 to break cultural taboos in Guinea, where women were historically forbidden to even touch the head of the djembe drum. He recruited brave women – Amazones was the name given to the warrior women of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey – since their communities, including their own families, would almost certainly shun them for playing the instrument.

Mamoudou Conde, Mariama Bailo Diallo, Fatoumata Kouyate

When they began their training, the mother of drummer Mariama Bailo Diallo burned her costumes and disowned her. Fatoumata Kouyate’s family told her that she would never marry because a man’s family wouldn’t want her if she played the balaphone, another sacred instrument forbidden to women.

“They want to empower African women,” Conde said of the women. “They want to be a role model, to teach other African women that they can do the same thing”

Several of the artists also discussed enduring gender and ethnic stereotypes in the United States, along with the frustrations of being placed in a particular genre or niche market.

Yu-Hui Chang, an assistant professor of composition at Brandeis, said the lack of female composition students in the United States was surprising. But what she found even more challenging was finding her own identity as a composer. Many people have preconceived ideas about what music by Asian composers should sound like, she said.

Most of the artists participating in the symposium said they spend at least half of their time on the business of their art.

María Agui Carter, an independent filmmaker and Women’s Studies Research Center scholar, had to raise $500,000 just to begin her upcoming documentary “Rebel” about a woman soldier of the American Civil War.

“We’re engaged in survival, almost at the expense of the art,” said Susan Davenny Wyner, music director and conductor of the Warren Philharmonic Orchestra and the Opera Western Reserve.

Ann
Anne Gottlieb
Diane Arvanites-Noya
e Gottlieb, artistic director of an upcoming theatrical work based on the life and writings of a young Dutch woman during the Nazi occupation of Holland, spoke of the mentoring between women on collaborative projects like hers, but also the challenges of balancing multiple viewpoints on a creative project.

“Part of the process of collaboration is learning how to listen to people without going into a place of constriction and without backing down from my own strong ideas,” said Gottlieb, a Women’s Studies Research Center scholar.

Barbara Neely

Other artists participating in the symposium included Diane Arvanites-Noya, dancer, choreographer and dance educator; Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, visual artist and scholar; and author Barbara Neely. Assistant Professor of Theater Arts Adrianne Krstansky and Associate Professor of Fine Arts Susan Lichtman moderated the panel discussions.

The “Women Making Arts” symposium was co-sponsored by the Cultural Production Program, the Department of Romance and Comparative Literature, MusicUnitesUS, the Office of the Arts, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Rose Art Museum, the WSRC Feminist Art Project and the WSRC Scholars Program.



Footer