Artist mothers

Oh, this workshop series will be so fun, even just the time spent with the delightfully non-linear Amy Karlinsky. And it will be so lovely to talk mothering and art and writing and pregnancy and children and process...

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Readings and Creative Writing for Artist Mothers
with Amy Karlinsky and Ariel Gordon at MAWA

Dates: Monday, September 12, 6-9 pm; Sunday, October 23, 1-3 pm; Monday, November 21, 6-9 pm; and one date in January TBD

Registration deadline: Friday, September 9, 2011, at 4 pm

$30 for MAWA members. Email your intention to attend to programs@mawa.ca and put “Mothers” in the subject heading. If you are not already a member, please also submit a MAWA membership form and payment. MAWA membership costs $15 for underwaged persons and $30 for others.

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Amy Karlinsky and Ariel Gordon will lead a four-session reading and writing workshop for artist mothers.

The sessions will focus on texts by artist mothers that encompass poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as “mothering” images from art history and contemporary art. Participants will identify themes, patterns and issues; share their own writings and imagery; and develop ideas. This is an opportunity for artist mothers to discuss and theorize experiences, to examine the objective/subjective, social/cultural/economic position of the artist-mother in art and literature, and to create out of the experience of being an artist-mother. It is a forum for play and collaboration, and may be an opportunity to expand the use of text in your visual arts practice.

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Amy Karlinsky is a writer and curator with experience in galleries and museums in New York State, Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia and Nunavut. She has taught sessionally for the departments of film, women’s studies and native studies, and at the school of art at the U of M; has facilitated workshops for Aqua Books, Manitoba Association of Art Educators, Early Childhood Education Council, and Limmud; and has mentored for MAWA. Her art criticism has appeared in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, the Winnipeg Free Press, etc., and her writing has been short listed for the Manitoba Book Awards. She has taught mothers, babies and children at Villa Rosa and Osborne House and she currently teaches art at TEC VOC High School in Winnipeg.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. In spring 2010, Palimpsest Press published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump, which focuses on pregnancy and mothering. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press, 2011), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, will be launched this fall. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.