Great discussion! I was moved by your personal stories and glad to be part of a team fostering creativity, respect, and appreciation via connection and empathy…  Hope you also enjoyed crossing interdisciplinary divides while trying to figure out how the relational-cultural model may be applied to your creative process. So much more to learn!

On that note: next week’s reading (The ’90s Culture of Xenophobia by Guillermo Gómez-Peña) was emailed to you. Please let me know if you didn’t receive it so I can resend, ok? And here’s the question for discussion:

Part 1. How does your work transcend borders and create new ideals of what it means to be “American/immigrant/mixed heritage” (whichever way you self identify)?

Part 2. Research one artist of a different ethnic/cultural background than yours – preferebly someone whose work you admire – and imagine a couple of questions you’d wish to ask her. How would she answer your questions?  

I’d suggest doing part 2 as a short “creative writing” piece. Have fun with it! I’ll be having an imaginary dialogue with Louise Bourgeois. She was born the same day as my mother. ”any interest in relational cultural models, louise?” 

ah! motherland.

“She is best known for her Cells, Spiders, and various drawings, books and sculptures. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them in symbolic terms with the main focus being “relationships” – considering an entity in relation to its surroundings. Louise Bourgeois finds inspiration for her works from her childhood: her adulterous father, who had an affair with her governess (who resided in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge it. She claims that she has been the “striking-image” of her father since birth. Bourgeois conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy, but with playfulness. In her sculpture, she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Her pieces consist of erotic and sexual images and also forms found in nature, such as her sculpture, Cumuls (referring to clouds in the sky) and Nature Study. Although she has worked with spider imagery since the 1940s, perhaps her most famous works are the spider sculptures from 1994 to 2003…”