ART WORK
My practice is heavily text-based and takes multiple forms including screen prints and digital prints, visual essays, installations, neon signs, and textile banners. Since 2011 I've been creating work under the larger title, New Demands? New Demands? draws on historical demands and slogans from historical movements for labor and social justice in the USA — and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) in particular. Culled from union publications, calls for strikes, pickets, and protests, and union organizing drives, the various demands and slogans are reinserted into public spaces to emphasize their contemporary resonance and relevance. The series emphasizes gains by organized labor in the garment and textile industries in the first half of the 20th century, and their deliberate erosion by anti-union politicians and corporations in the larger context of late capitalism, corporate greed, racialized labor exploitation, and massive wealth inequality. My interests in labor justice are rooted in family histories of garment labor and cultural histories of Jewish immigrant labor activism in the garment and textile industries.