Sandberg’s advice to women:
Sit at the table.
Make your partner a real partner.
Don’t leave before you leave.

(photos by Claudio Gaete-Tapia)

Your favorite fame whore Elotita aka The Fat Free Elotera is back…  and this time she has taken it to a new level…  she has faked her own death… and has returned as CALAVERA ELOTERA.

Calavera Elotera in Illuminations: Día de los Muertos 2011
Curated by Rene and Rio Yañez
SOMArts Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tues–Fri, 12–7PM, Sat 11–5PM, Sun 11–3PM.

Opening Reception
Friday, October 7, 2011, 6–9PM
Opening will feature music, interactive performance and the unveiling of over 30 altars and installations. The evening includes a special performance by Herbert Siguenza, of Culture Clash fame. Siguenza will perform and live paint as renowned artist, Pablo Picasso.

The exhibition continues to examine the ways technology shapes the celebration of Day of the Dead. Once again, a Flickr group enables the exhibition’s curators to accept digital photos as offerings to those who people want to honor. The public can upload their digital contributions here. Selected images will be printed and displayed as part of the exhibit.

Dear Friends, as many of you know I have a brand new job as the Creative Director for an awesome new Chicago-based startup. I love my job and everything I am doing, but I am working INSANE hours and have sadly been neglecting my facebook and twitter peeps. But this is changing. Today I am committing to the extreme multitasking experience:

ART + WORK + SOCIAL MEDIA.

The date is 8/21/11.
The goal is 1,000 FB likes by 1/1/12.

If you aren’t following me on either site, whaddya waiting for?

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mayaescobar.on.fb
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mayaescobar

My papi and I have a brand new BILINGUAL radio show on WLUW 88.7 FM, Poco a Poco Radio. The show airs every Sunday from 1:30-2:00PM CST and can be listened to live on the radio or online at http://wluw.org.

If you missed last week’s show (the first episode) you can listen here:

And today tune in, to hear our LIVE interview with the incredibly talented, hilarious, and inspiring Elma Placeres Dieppa (@mzelma), Director of Latism Chicago.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Latism… you should be… #LATISM stands for Latinos in Social Media.

For more updates follow Poco a Poco Radio on Facebook & Twitter

el es frida kahlo featured on Jewesses with Attitude in honor of Frida Kahlo’s 104th birthday.

A Latina “Jewess with attitude,” Maya Escobar plays with the web as a platform for engaging in community dialogue around identity and multiple identities–how they are socially and culturally constructed. She often assumes multiple identities in her performances, drawing from various existing representations.

About “el es frida kahlo,” she writes:

Frida Kahlo played with the identity that she wanted to project and the identity that was placed on her by others. Kahlo used her clothing, political affiliations, sexual escapades, and personal traumas, to create a character that informed her body of work. She inscribed her identity, painting her image over and over, constructing a mythology around her persona.

In el es frida kahlo I confront the ambivalence I experience as a result of my simultaneous obsession with Frida Kahlo and weariness towards her commodification.

What is your reaction to this confrontational piece? Do you identify with Escobar’s ambivalence towards Kahlo, her work, and her commodification in our culture?

And here we are as marketing executives in NJ.

Andria was live at Gallery Aferro and I skyped in from Chicago.

Stay tuned for more details on the performance and the results from AMerican MEdia Output‘s #targetaudiencesurvey.

AMericanMEdiaOutput.com

Negotiating Latina Identity through Performance Art on the Web
with Maya Escobar and Andria Morales

Challenging mainstream and academic representations of Latina identity, performance artists Maya Escobar and Andria Morales publicly negate, deconstruct, and reconstruct their individual histories, identities, and conceptions of self. In their current project Are You My Other? a self-portrait dialog exchange blog, Escobar and Morales draw from popular culture, Latino/a cultural iconography, and their lived experiences to create and virtually perform conflicting representations of Latina selves. From devoted homemaker to hockey player, reggaetonera to construction worker, conceptual artist to human corn on the cob, the artists model the multiplicity of identity.

Due to their shared physical similarities, followers of their online exchange often mistake Escobar and Morales for one another. The merging of their identities is further perpetuated through their activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By locating these performances within the space of the web, where they are free from restrictions of time and place, the artists are able to concurrently enact multiple personas while simultaneously forming a unified (Latina) hybrid self.

The latest from AMerican MEdia Output‘s Public Airways Campaign.

AMerican MEdia Output is an online marketing and brand design agency with a focus on AMerican travel and tourism. AMerican MEdia Output specializes in creative consulting, web design and development, promotional image and video campaigns, and social media integration and instruction.

BEHIND EVERY IMAGE IS A MESSAGE.

Cesar Chavez Coloring Page, from The Way Is Made By Walking

The Way Is Made by Walking is a free popular education coloring book available at TheWayIsMadeByWalking.com

Eventually I would like TheWayIsMadeByWalking.com to become an active webportal for artists/activists/educators/students/parents/HUMANS. A place that will facilitate critical conversations and the exchange of resources: ideas, images, videos, lesson plans, projects, student work, etc.  A sort of ongoing People’s History, meant to be continually analyzed, expanded upon, revisited and challenged. (read more) 

visit us now at http://escobar-morales.com

Andria Bibiloni, 28, of New York, ceased to exist on Mar. 23, 2011 in Philadelphia, where she lived since 2000.  A visual artist and educator, she strove through her work to facilitate a dialogue about sociopolitical and interpersonal issues. Known for riding her Blasterbike, 2007, in the streets of Philadelphia, her departing wish was to be displayed riding a bigger, louder, and heavier soundblasting vehicle.  Beth Beverly of Diamond Tooth Taxidermy will be handling the preparations for the viewing, which takes place at the Rotunda in University City on Sunday March 27 from 3-5 pm.  Guests are invited to stay for refreshments.

It all started with Escobar-Morales’s participation in the Wonder Woman Residency New News is Old News, which I blogged about a few months ago.

As a follow up to Are You My Other? our current Internet based self-portrait dialogue exchange project, Escobar-Morales is establishing an online marketing agency. Acting as designers, distributors, and promo models, we plan to produce a series of advertisements addressing contentious topics in the news, such as Arizona’s SB-1070 and the Dream Act.

There are currently three scheduled New News is Old News exhibitions:

The first NNION exhibition opens on May 7th, 2011 at Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey. The second exhibition will be in Cyprus! The third exhibition will be in Brooklyn at the WAH Center and opens in mid-July, 2011.

Please visit the Women Woman Residency KICKSTARTER Project

We ask you…

• who mediates the news?
• how is social media changing your foundation of news?
• can technology keep up with history?
• when was the last time you read the paper?
• is journalism dead?

The Project:

The Wonder Women residency has selected ten NYC area artists to create work addressing these questions for New News is Old News (NNION). In this eight week residency, curators and artists construct and deconstruct: their understanding and experience of media; the different perspectives of journalism online vs. print; the future of news. Given the changing landscape of news and media, artists have new opportunity to engage and to create work addressing these intersections. The residency culminates with an exhibition of the artists projects (details below).

If you think that is exciting….It gets even better. In June, the curators and three selected NYC artists will travel to Nicosia, Cyprus to continue the dialogue with eight Cypriot artists. In an intensive two-week workshop, the artists will focus on international relations, local policies and news. The projects created will be exhibited in Cyrus and then in NYC.

Help _gaia fund the artists, the projects, and the exhibitions!

The History:

_gaia is a collective of women artists and activists creating art, events and opportunities in the visual and media arts, performance and design. Its members actively promote and support the work of local women artists while developing programs that encourage collaboration and create community to help emerging artists in need of studio space, facilities and resources. In pursuit of raising awareness _gaia concentrates on activism, from issues in the local community and the art world to global issues affecting the lives of women.

Wonder Women (WW) is a residency program in its sixth year presented by_gaia, an artist collective. The WW mission is to engage practicing, yet underrepresented artists who are eager to participate in a collective dialogue about the art world and feminism today. See the project blog for information about previous Wonder Women residencies.

The NNION Wonder Women:

Christine DaCruz: the obituaries. Christine has been threading portraits of deceased women.

Mairikke Dau: painting the news. Rikke has created a large still life painting in response to the Arizona shooting, and the various controversies which have risen from the event.

Sharon de la Cruz: Crooked Images. Sharon has created a feature news segment about Aunt Jemima discovering her sexuality.

Melissa MacAlpin: vows and love. Melissa has created a series of comics in response to the Sunday vows section of the NY Times.

Escobar-Morales: American Media Output. Andria Morales and Maya Escobar created an ad agency that is currently focusing on two campaigns around immigration, and Arizona.

Lindsey Muscato: spills from the NY Times. Focusing on the experience of reading the newspaper, Lindsey is drawing segments of the broadsheet, selected from organic spills.

Larysa Myers: extinct technology. Laryssa is creating a casket sized sculpture from discarded video tape.

Cristine Posner: the big oil spill (forgotten). Cristine has collected news articles addressing the June oil spill, and is creating a series of weekly cyanotypes based on the press.

Sharone Vendriger: wikileaks. Sharone is creating a large mobius sculpture referencing transparency in public information.

Nicole Wilson: agency and the news. Nicole has created a video, that looks to the three graces as examples and agents of 21st century news.

The Cypriot artists will be selected in April in collaboration with our partners in Cyprus: Cyprus Community Media Centre, Rooftop Theatre Group and European-Mediterranean Art Association

Curated and Organized by Maya Joseph-Goteiner, Doris Caçoilo, and Alana Kakoyiannis.