_gaia's mission remains as a collective of women, for women, for the making of textiles, clothing, printmaking, painting, architecture, music, film, photography, science, the performing arts, writing, environmental, social and political activism: all things which color the lives of the women involved.
_gaia is active in the visual arts space. We run and sponsor shows, events, and residencies for our sisters to come and work on their art. We are always brewing up something new and looking for new ideas. Contact us if you are interested in participating or have an idea you would like to explore with _gaia.
_gaia is active in the performance space. We run and sponsor shows, events, and residencies for our sisters to come and work on their acting and voice. We are always brewing up something new and looking for new ideas. Contact us if you are interested in participating or have an idea you would like to explore with _gaia.
Activism was the fire that gave birth to _gaia. We continue in that tradition by supporting and promoting socially conscious movement and agendas that are important to our members. We are active in demonstrations and events that help bring issues of importance to light. _gaia's main issues include but are not limited too: stop violence against women, human rights, reproductive rights and promotion.
_gaia loves to meet new people and make new friends. We have many opportunities for you to join _gaia in our mission to provide a space for women in the arts. Come play with us through our internships and volunteer programs. You will learn, work and have fun while opening up a whole new world. If you don't have the time but got the dough, please consider a donation to _gaia. We appreciate you and love you!
_gaia loves you and we are fortunate to have those who love and support us. There are those who support us with their time and expertise to make so many of our programs happen and continue on in the future. The partners who are generous with their space and businesses to help us make so many events happen. Of course, like anyone else we love our fans who come to our events and workshops.
Workshop for Female Nonprofit Leaders and Facilitators at _gaia June 21
Register soon as space is limited!
Find our most recent adventures below. Exhibitions, calls for art, events and announcements.
Scroll down for more!
members
Doris Cacoilo[Artist :: activist :: co-founder/director of _gaia] With the organization, Doris has developed programs and events focused on the social, political and artistic lives of women. She most recently curated the a(d)dress and a(d)dress II group artist shows, showcasing the work of 40 women artists, and has organized the Wonder Women program, an annual group artist residency and exhibition.
Doris is currently an MFA student in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College. She is a Technology Fellow in the IMA program and has been working with Rhizome.org, an online platform for the global new media art community, and Tiltfactor, a socially oriented software group, researching and developing software and artwork which creates rewarding, compelling and socially-responsible interactions, with a particular focus on inventive game design for social change. Her work has been exhibited in NY and NJ.
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Amie Figueiredo
[Activist :: co-founder/director of _gaia Action] amie had been searching for a way to make really cool things with really cool people in a really cool place — and she has found it. _gaia has become her venue for doing things that she has always wanted to do but never had the time nor the place to. It is a network of wonderful women that do extraordinary things.
Coming from a strong science background with a masters in Environmental Policy Studies her place in _gaia is somewhat strange to some but it fits right in. She likes to keep the members of _gaia involved in many different aspects of activism (political, environmental, and social). It has become her platform for promoting awareness, acceptance and education.
She is also a designer for re- clothing line, a collaboration with _gaia’s other cofounder, artist and long-time friend doris cacoilo. Their designs embrace a variety of different ideas. Re-encompasses a redefinition of existing clothing as well as some original designs. This collaboration allows them experimentation and exploration of different fabrics, styles and ideas.
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Nancy Amirati Ghani
[Co-founding member of _gaia] By way of the only art history course in her college transcript, Nancy met and became friends with Doris Cacoilo, which led to her membership in _gaia. Although she wouldn’t define herself as a traditional artist, Nancy gets creative with writing, sewing and photography. Within _gaia, Nancy has developed into an activist by participating in various important environment, health and social causes. Most recently, she is the organizer for V-DAY Union City, which is a movement to prevent violence against women and girls through a benefit production of The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. Nancy considers herself blessed to be a member among such other equally dynamic women of _gaia.
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Lillian Ribeiro
[Co-founding member/director of _gaia Performing] Her friends call her Lilly Lips
Lillian Lips Ribeiro is “a woman who believes in vaginas, who really sees vaginas, who helps other women see their own vaginas by seeing other women’s vaginas.” Quote from Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues-The Vagina Workshop”.
Artistic Background BS in Marketing and Theatre Arts from Rutgers University . She is _gaia’s Director of Performance & Film, member of The Hudson County Theatre Alliance, and member of Cuchipinoy, a theatre company based out of New York City .
Artistic Love Photography, composition notebook cover making, mosaics, refurbishing antique furniture, sewng and silk-screening. Loves to watch others paint and draw.
Activist Involvement Performing arts and film as medium to social change, protecting the environment (no littering in her car! Often heard saying “Don’t litter, litter bug. Pick it up!”), beach cleanups, aids, lupus, and breast cancer walks, women’s marches and peace marches.
Artistic Passion Lillian organizes _gaia’s Lips Living Room reading series, _gaia Reel Fest, LUNAFEST HOBOKEN and LUNAFEST JERSEY CITY, a national film festival for, by, and about women - benefiting the Breast Cancer Fund. She also produces Eve Ensler’s Obie Award winning play, The Vagina Monologues as part of the V-Day Worldwide Campaign to help raise money and awareness to stop violence against women and girls.
She recently directed in the Hudson County One-Act Festival, the Strawberry One-Act Festival, the Midtown International Theatre Festival, and brought together locally recognized dance and theatre performers for the Jersey City Studio Artist Tour and Hoboken Studio Artist Tour.
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Danielle Fotopolous
A NYC childrens’ wear designer by day, but at night this _gaia member spends the wee hours embracing all areas of art & design. Combining fashion design with art to create a wearable art project has been the focus recently. With her project Tampon Couture she combines feminine hygiene products (tampons, pads & pantiliners) to create a beautiful, wearable dress. Danielle also designs unique, one of a kind jewelry. Danielle recently organized Threads a wearable art fashion show at the Jersey City Museum.
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Carolina Lavin
Born in Quito, Ecuador, she has resided in various countries before landing in Jersey City. Carolina has been practicing Graphic Arts and Painting since her childhood. Her work involves mixed media, found objects, at times fire as her paintbrush, wax and candle soot as her paint. Her experience in design has brought her to weave graphic images to her more organic paint marks. Carolina works experimentally, basing her paintings on dreams and sensorial impressions of images and color. She is heavily influenced by her nomadic lifestyle which is a recurring aspect in her work. Carolina Lavín currently works in NYC as a graphic designer. She is a proud member of _gaia, which as she, is passionate about the creative process.
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Agnes Wszolkowski
Agnieszka Wszolkowski was born in Poland and has been in the United States since she was a teen. She went to Rutgers University where she discovered her passion for art and earned a BA with a concentration in painting and a minor in Anthropology. Agnieszka is attenting Seton Hall University to earn a masters degree in education. She teaches at the Main Street School in Orange, NJ and is also an art educator at The Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.
Since 2002, Agnieszka her work has taken a new direction. Agnieszka began working with fabrics of different textures, designs and colors. Instead of using canvas Agnieszka uses wood panels and mixed media that include acrylic, latex paint, different fabrics, wire and staples, she calls these “Quilting Paintings.”
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Pollie Barden
Pollie Barden is an artist who has been working in variety of mediums over the past ten years. Her background is in book arts, documentary, and photography. Since 2005, she has moved into interactive art and wearable. Her educational background begins with being born with the desire to play that she insists on pursuing this day. Institutional education of note are a BFA from East Carolina University, North Carolina; Certificate of Documentary Studies from the Duke Center of Documentary Studies, North Carolina and MSP from the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University, New York.
For book arts she has studied under Ken Botnick, Dolph Smith and Dan Essig. She was awarded a work study scholarship to Penland School of Crafts in 1999, where she continued her work in book arts. In the summer of 2001, she participated in the Book and the Body. A two-week workshop on yoga and bookbinding that explores the connections between the body and books.
In the documentary realm, Pollie has completed several short videos the capture small slices of life around her home state of North Carolina. Her documentary work includes photo essays of her hometown of Roanoke Rapids, NC, the making of an independent film and community projects.
Currently, Pollie has been experimenting with wearable art. She worked on Remember Me Jacket is a piece that using technology embedded in a Jacket to comment on our dependent on electronic devices and our vulnerability. Recently, she is moving into using materials in unique ways and playing with the façade we cultivate with clothing and style. Questions she is exploring: Are we presenting who we are or whom we want to be or who we are expected to be?
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Rachael Serbinski
Rachael Serbinski was born in a tiny town in northern Michigan and eventually found her way to Jersey City, NJ where she joined Gaia. Rachael studied literature and studio arts at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and then went on to pursue a master’s degree in Drawing at the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been shown in galleries in Honolulu, Jersey City and New York city; most recently her work appeared in “The Feminine Mystique” at the Jersey City Museum.
In her work Rachael combines her intricate line drawings with the needle arts that have been a part of her life since early childhood. Her work is centered on the female body, and on the inseparability of sex from flesh. Working with themes of seduction, innocence, eroticism and self-exposure, many of her images are mined from online dating profiles and stock photos. Each portrait is meant to represent a discrete baring of the soul, a provocative gaze that invites the viewer to gaze back, with the subject in control of how much of herself she hides or reveals.
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Sherrard Bostwick
Sherrard Bostwick comes to Gaia with training in painting, printmaking, stitchery, and community development through the arts. Her interests lie in the impact of creative gestures on the shaping of both individual identity and culture. Sherrard sees art making as a spontaneous conversation between artists and their surroundings that determines how we see our collective experience and ourselves. Her current projects explore drawing in performance and extend the traditional visual arts of drawing, painting and sculpture into color, video, sound, installation, humor, puppetry, movement, and performance. Although taking many elaborate forms, she always strives in her art to offer a simple invitation to participate, a journey of discovery, and an openness to change. Her art is a practice of social interaction that continuously questions who benefits from cultural exchanges, and who is included or excluded, and why.
Sherrard is currently completing a MFA in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts Program at Brooklyn College, the educator for the Hoboken Historical Museum, and an education associate for PERFORMA, a New York based non-profit interdisciplinary arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world. Sherrard has shown in work in Ohio, California, Washington, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and Vancouver, Canada.