“I believe I am worth the time it takes to create whatever I feel called to create.”
Jan Phillips The Artist’s Creed

Do you feel stingy with yourself sometimes? That taking time for yourself is just too luxurious an act when there is so much more to be done in your day. Dinner to cook, clutter to clear, papers to grade, people to listen to…all these things that make up the pastiche of your home life, those things can soak up your hours like a fresh sponge takes up spilled wine. Completely.

And there you are at the end of the day, with your manuscript untouched for the fifth year, your paint drying in their tubes, the hat you started to felt a lump in the bottom of a forgotten basket. How could you possibly write a letter, it has been so long, the recipients have lost the threads of your connection and it is just too much to bear?

How?

I have felt this way. I have wept as I frosted cakes or washed the 75th cup of the day, shed tears over unwritten words. But there, in those acts, those quotidian acts of mothering, I began to feel the beauty of my life unfold when I began to take pleasure in and love the work I was doing. I began to see even doing laundry as an entry point to my creativity, as an expression of myself. Here is what my friend Beth Bornstein Dunnington wrote on her Face book page yesterday. Beth and I studied acting together in New York City with Deborah Hedwall at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Over the years of our friendship, we had no inkling that today, nearly thirty years later, having children and marriages and travels and our careers, we could share the inspiration wrought at a laundry line.

“Today hung clothes on a clothesline in my back yard (hidden to everyone by us, so no one has to look out their window in Hawaii and see our sheets when they’re trying to see the ocean) and I have to say how AMAZING everything smells and feels!!! More work to hang things up, but it doesn’t compare to a dryer. Memories of watching the old Jewish bubbie, my grandmother, and my aunt hanging clothes between buildings in back of their 3-decker house in Revere, MA. Clothespins in Bubbie’s mouth as she used the pulley thing to reel the clothes in and out. Everyone on top of everyone in those homes, but this amazing village of women! Not even sure where the men were back then, but they aren’t in these memories at all… Great to watch all of it when I was a kid. I thought about them today when I put a clothespin in my mouth. Especially my girl, Nana Anna. ♥” by Beth Bornstein Dunnington

Do you see how Beth allowed the act of hanging up her sheets to inspire a long string of memories that gave way to a story. The comment thread on her FB post bears witness to the communal experiences connected by a clothesline!

Then, last night, before the bat started sweeping low in our bedroom interrupting precious sleep, I read these words by another she-ro, Laurie Colwin.

“This made Nellie think of the thousands of things they did not know and would never know: that family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities- that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of.”

We, women, mothers, artists, are fabricating a new archeology by creating art from the immediacy of our daily lives. In celebrating these acts, by harnessing the massive power of women’s voices- muffled for centuries and strengthening daily, by telling just how it is for you and me telling just how it is for me, we construct something not meant to compost with the banana peels, but to reside in our collective memory and to be carried on. Beth’s memory of her Bubbie, mouth full of wooden clothespins, smiling in the sun, squinting to see across the glare of white sheets in to the next laundry maze where aproned woman and overalls and socks create a panorama of daily life- yes- this has value today because this life is vanishing quickly. More and more people are living in cities where the chance to hang laundry, to stand under a 250 year old maple and look at the sky, where the pace of life prevents us from taking these moments to pause and reflect and be inspired. I love city life, but if I still lived in NYC, I’d need to be vigilant about keeping connected to the natural and daily rhythms of life.

Laundry Line Divine came to be when I stood out at that line and knew it is mine as a full time mom to hang that wash and it is also mine to express myself, as a creative person, using the language and metaphor of my daily life. I could not deny who I was and pretend to be someone who did not have to be free by three o’clock to meet the bus or cancel an appointment because I have a sick child or need to help on the class play.
I am a woman, a rampantly alive woman, who is a wife and mother. I am also a woman who is vigorously determined to stand for my value and the value of others willing to tell their stories. Particularly women’s stories.

stories require listeners

And, so, the blog series goes on. Beth has given me a piece to open this next chapter of ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’. Leigh Strimbeck will be here. Jennifer Boire. Lori Landau. Karen Arp-Sandel. Miranda Hersey. Susan Hajec. I will keep you posted.

If you have no idea where to start or what your own authentic voice sounds like, read my friend Regena’s post today about intuition. I will continue to share with you resources for tuning your ears to your own voice.

Until we meet again, look up Laurie Colwin’s cookbooks A Writer in the Kitchen and A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. They were just inducted in to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. Janet and I are thrilled. We are planning a Laurie Colwin event with our friend Alana. More on all this later.

Time to work on that yearbook.
All my best love to you and thanks for returning to the Laundry Line,

S

“The Mother’s Day that means something, the Mother’s Day that is not a duty but a real holiday, is about the perfect mother. It is about the mother before she becomes the human being, when she is still the center of our universe, when we are very young.
They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That’s why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a sheet of small handprints executed in finger paint.”

Anna Quindlen

There have been posts on Face book of the gifts women have received on Mother’s Day. My friend Nichole’s daughter drew her mother in anime. Another friend’s kids ordered in Chinese food. My daughter promised me an hour of her day in the garden, which she promptly delivered, then went inside to bake a cake. My son, well, his box of Whitman Chocolates came with a card he has yet to sign. But he enjoyed regaling us with the story of the CVS clerk who was berating every single guy in line with a card or box of candy on the morning of Mother’s Day. The few…the happy few…the “band of brothers” there in line with Hallmark in their hands.

I don’t have any actual gilded rigatoni, but I do have this.

Catherine has always liked to leave notes.

And until I get that card from Ben, I do have this.

This started as a flip book, but to do it right I would have had to start last year. And I am not so good at that kind of planning. Especially in July.

I have been dipping in to my friend, ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ author, Michelle Gillett’s book A Celebration of Motherhood and there, found this quote by Anna Quindlen, who herself has a new book out. You can read a lively interview of Anna written by her son, who is a writer for Barnes and Noble. This quote, about the coat of arms for mothers made of small handprints, highlights what I have been up to all spring.

My daughter is about to graduate the 8th grade from her Waldorf grade school. There, this step in a child’s educational journey is celebrated with more pomp and a bit more circumstance. Her class has been together since first grade, with the same class teacher, a unique quality of Waldorf education. The pomp comes with a recognition of the closing of this groups’ time together, and the circumstance celebrates their next steps.

I am on the yearbook committee. Pouring over the equivalent of ‘gilded rigatoni’, over discs of photos delivered by parents too busy to sort them, which means I get to see their versions of events, the back of their kids heads as they squirm away from their parent’s camera views. It is as Anna says, this ubiquitous and ordinary, universal and tender experience, which you memorialize by saving the random and intentional tributes made for you by your offspring. ( The more I write here, the more I am hoping Ben writes something in that Mother’s Day card.)

In the bigger world there have been some poignant tributes to mothers. Proctor and Gamble offer this one. President Obama, this one.

I espouse further gratitude for our mothers in an effort to stir appreciation for what the women around you are up to. Whether or not yourself are a parent, we are all sons and daughters and have the capacity to enrich our lives by appreciating what was or was not done for us by our mothers.

Don’t stop with your gratitudes. I promise, they will open a door for you.
Here are mine for today:

Gratitudes for my Mom:

1. I am grateful she sent me to a Lutheran grade school in Chicago where I could meet friends I still love to this day, with common affection for Fritos and for violets at Easter.
2. I am grateful that Mom read so much as an individual and to us.
3. I am grateful for the house she bought after being divorced from my Dad and all the effort she put in to creating a haven for my sisters and me.
4. I am grateful for all the things she saved of mine, like all my alphabet pages from Bethesda Lutheran School.
5. I am grateful for the miles she drove to bring us back to Chicago, after we’d moved north to the U.P., to visit our relatives.
6. I am grateful for the love she cultivated with my Dad’s family, especially my Aunts and Uncles.
7. I am grateful my Mom was so stylish as a young woman, that she had this sort of mysterious past of which we know little.
8. I am grateful for her preparations for us, when we arrived home from somewhere, she’d be in the kitchen preparing a meal.
9. I am grateful for the sound of her singing ‘Turaluralura”.
10. I am grateful for the way she set the table, with a centerpiece and candle, no matter where we were eating.

Last week, when Ben was feeling overwhelmed and tired, I knew it was time to stir up some pudding. My Mom was a stove-top pudding person and I have carried that forward. Alana Chernila’s recipe in The Homemade Pantry is where I started last week. In the middle of making dinner, this recipe keeps you at the stove stirring, which means everyone else has to set the table and wait while you serve it in ramekins.Please don’t be put off by those dark bits of unmelted cocoa. In the face of not having all the right ingredients, I always add my own flourishes to recipes, which sometimes yield less than photogenic results, but believe me this pudding is perfect.

It is worth the effort, every stir is a prayer for ease, confidence, integrity and joy.
May you be happy(Stir) May you be well(Stir) May you be safe. (Stir) May you be peaceful and at ease. (Stir) and there it is, ready for dessert.

If I can offer my teen agers anything these days, it is comfort.

How about you?
What is in your ‘gilded rigatoni’ stash about your mother?
xo,
S

Mixed Media Collage by SBB May 2012

It is an achingly beautiful day here in the Berkshires.
And, one that no matter what I do, I cannot soak up the sweetness enough…wake up early enough to do all I like to do before my family hops around me on one foot then the other, waiting for the fun to begin.

They have given me an hour of their time in the garden.
But first there is brunch.
And, then a performance at one.
So, the phlox a-thon will wait to three or so. (My garden is engulfed in phlox)

Today, I am listing things I love about my Mom.
And then some about me as a Mom.
Then, an invitation for you to do the same in the comment section here.
Tell me of a few moments when, like today, you could not scoop up all the goodness flowing in your life so it dribbled over like mango juice down your arm and in to your shirt sleeve.

Ten appreciations for my Mom, Joann Ruth Schauer Schmeling, who died on October 10, 2010.

1. I loved my Mom’s laugh.
2. I loved her hands, big and veined and strong.
3. I loved her gait. We walk the same way, fast and strong and long. We could wander too and lollygag…but same length of stride.
4. I love the baskets she made.
5. I love her slightly sharp singing voice singing hymns in church. She knew all the words.
6. I loved sitting with her in church as a little kid and playing the hand game with her, stacking our hands- hers, mine, hers, mine and pulling them out in order silently, waiting for the interminable sermon to be over and done with, Amen.
7. I love that she always wanted to say “ A-woman” instead, but only did that at home sometimes.
8. I love that she kept her paddle in the waters of her life, even when she was stymied, ill or upset.
9. I love that she found a great love in my stepfather later in her life.
10. I love that she took us out in to the woods often as little kids- picking berries or to find a beach or to get to the top of something.

This is from a camping trip my sister Becky and I took with Mom and Pa, our stepdad, in 1988.

Here are ten appreciations of me, as a Mom… that I embarked on 18 years ago.

1. I love that it was Jonathan and me that started this whole show.
2. I love that my pregnancies were easy.
3. I love that the miscarriages I had brought me to a deeper understanding of how rare and miraculous births are.
4. I love the voices of my kids calling to me in the house.
5. I love the sacred geometry of our bodies and the way then fit in to mine, even now.
6. I love watching them in plays or performances or out in public talking to other people…just a marvel to see them as people.
7. I love what they love about me which they are loath to admit now…I can’t imagine them making a gratitude list for me now, so steeped in detaching from me and all I am today. But one day, they will admit to the tiny things I notice that they do which tell me, we are of each other, no matter what.
8. I love hearing my girl whistle. We both love to whistle.
9. I love looking out over our backyard and having all the tracings of their feet running to and fro over that ground for 15 years in this place.
10. I love yearning for them to crawl in to bed with us in the morning like they used to do, just that sense of us all on the ship of life together, but feeling them building their own boats and really…we will likely never have that sense of tight togetherness in that way again. Our boat is bigger than our bed now…it has expanded to include the bigness of their lives and this…maybe this is why I keep dreaming about ocean liners, huge catamarans and other vessels that I never quite get to in my dreams, but am always moving towards?

Here is an interview I did with Jennifer Boire about Laundry Line Divine and mothering and my work.

Here is a link to a radio clip about mothering that I did with Melissa Rosati.

I am off to enjoy a salad-y brunch they are making for me.

I hope whatever your day brings, that you spend a moment appreciating your mom, either here on the Line or in your hearts.

Yours,
S

“Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town – still, to have written your version is a honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won’t be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find…this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
Annie Lamott

This comforts me to no end.
I have been working through some snags with this site. My apologies to you, my trusted readers, for being silent and out of touch.
My friend Maria Sirois sends out inspirational quotes and this one aided me in keeping my paddle in the water.

Last week was our April break. I just had to let things go with my writing work and spend the days with fingers knit in to my daughters’ as we walked the streets of Manhattan, then explored a handful of college campuses with my son and husband. Catherine and I played with a new movie app, Super 8, on our phones. I will share the results, once I figure out the details on that one.
So, til things are no longer buggy, I give you Anne Lamott and this:

I am here being my note. Laundry Line Divine is becoming a place that I too turn to for solace, inspiration and insight. The very act of preparing posts for you to enjoy, of culling the jewels from these brilliant days and offering them to you urges me to stay open, loose and ready to express.

Be Your Note

Remember the lips where wind-breath
originated, and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.
Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes.

Sing loud!

Rumi

Whenever you don’t find me here on the Line, head over to my Face book page. I post things there daily. And, if you are feeling very adventurous, my Tumblr page or Pinterest page are places where I play visually on the web. Or, just look for me out back in my garden.

Love and doodles,
S

Oh, these days, pink clouds of petals settling in the new grass, are so inspiring.

So, why do I feel so blue?
The troubles I had on the Laundry Line these last few weeks put in to perspective just how dearly I hold the honor of writing here and more importantly, the gift you give me in taking in these posts. They are the pink petals sifting in to the newly greening grass of your life this spring.

Right at this moment, my house is quiet. The pot of beans that simmered and scented my studio all afternoon has been eaten, leftovers stowed for a friend in need of dinner tomorrow. My daughter is off rehearsing for her class play. My son is at the gym, doing whatever he can do without the complete use of one of his legs. That broken leg is slowly mending. My husband is out fetching butter and fruit. Quiet.
No side walk repair going on. No phone calls about campaigns or repair contracts from Sears.

Just me. And the cool breeze holds expectancy for the moon, who’s rising we have kept close watch on all weekend.

I am in need of a dose of forgiveness. Forgiving recipes for starters.

I bake beans every Monday now, due in thanks to my friend Janet, who posted this recipe so I will never lose track of it. Last week’s pot of beans was rendered in to soup because the flame went out about 2 hours too early and they never thickened up. The soup went well with the cornbread that I planned to make. I did over-bake it though because of a tiny issue with time. I had made the cornbread from Alana Chernila’s The Homemade Pantry. I was all motivated to post about how good it was, until I nearly burned it and it looked like this.

While I was mixing it up I got distracted and left out the melted butter until I’d slid the batter in to the pan. The recipe however, was forgiving enough to accept the butter late. The cornbread could barely withstand the heat though, but fair enough, as I’d put it through so much already. That morning, I had discovered my downstairs freezer in it’s own soupy state and had a profusion of strawberries to deal with, hence the cornbread, which is nice under a spoonful of red juicy berries stewed with freshly picked rhubarb and a touch of sugar.

It was an evening that, without the steep and pure love of my husband who sees so much of the good in me, no matter what I am serving, including firm cornbread and soupy beans, I could have crisped and dried like that bread. Instead, the cornbread, soup and I were salvaged in the big, round bowl of his love.

I need this kind of forgiveness, the kind that let’s me arrive at your door muddy, late and bearing no gifts in hand.

Why am I revisiting that soggy Monday at all? Wouldn’t I just like to sweep it under the rug and be done with it? Forgiveness is what I am about. And gratitude. I am grateful for forgiving recipes and husbands.

Mama says there’ll be days like this. So, I wade through the mud. I watch my daughter dance around the May Pole at her school’s May Day celebration wearing a hand-me-down prom dress my sister gave her when she was three. I never imagined my girl wearing that dress until this day. Her school turns out for May Day, we all have picnics and wear garlands of flowers and sing “Hi, Ho, Jolly Rumble Oh”. Forgiveness weaves around the May Pole when we are asked to hold a certain quality for the children dancing the ribbons round the tall wooden pole. Forgiveness for all future missteps and over baked corn bread.

When I make mistakes, I suffer the consequences. When my children make mistakes, as they did last week when they wrote in the fresh cement of the new sidewalks across the street from our house, I have to find room to forgive them and let them suffer the consequences. It is so hard for me, as a mother, to not suffer with them. The marks they made it the wet cement are far bigger and bolder than I would have ever hazarded. My son included his last initial! What a flagrant expression of self-confidence. Does my anger flair because I would never, ever own such disrespect of someone else’s work, even if it is sort of a community act, as he tried to justify it. Or because their bold claims of presence on this street, in this year, are way grander than I would make? When my kids made a formal apology to the construction crew, the men kindly dismissed the writing as no big deal. They were off the hook, but I am still thinking about it.

In this stew of forgiveness is a new found confidence of my own.

In April, I returned to the stage after a 17-year absence.
I had more fun than I have ever had acting in a play.

Partly because, like my children I suppose, I was without the artifice of who I am supposed to be. I boldly stepped out onstage in my garden boots and black dress, full of everything I am today. I am a woman, a mother, an artist and many other things including a theatre artist.
I hope for nothing less for my children, that they too would step in to their lives unfiltered by fear or small living.
Before this post becomes too unwieldy, I will leave you with the pink petals still blowing through the cool air, streaking across my winter woolies hanging on the laundry line, hopefully headed for the storage bin of out-of-season clothes.

As you stir the soup of you today, may the chunks of confidence floating around in there surprise you. Didn’t know you had them, did you?

I didn’t know I had some either. But, upon locating this confidence, I will go in search of more, because an unalloyed sense of my self, integrated and all under the roof of me is what I am after here.

Thank you for returning to the Laundry Line,
With love,
S

Jaq Belcher

Access Point 2012
hand cut paper, 5,071 cuts
42″ x 42″ framed

“The most regretful people on Earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Mary Oliver

I have quite a mouthful to say about time and being creative.

But, being Friday evening with dinner and all the rest is at bay, I give you this immensely beautiful creation by my friend Jaq Belcher.
Jaq is a paper sculptor. She does things with paper I never imagined.

Here is where you can find her work.

Here is where her work will be exhibited in New York City with an opening on May 10.

And here, on the Laundry Line is where you can be assured that whether a doodle or a paper cut like this, your individual expression is important in the world and worth the time it takes to create.

This is what my friend Lissa Rankin, who posts messages like this one from ‘Your Inner Pilot Light’ on Face book. Lissa is celebrating three years since a major career change and big shift in her life choices. You can see her blog post about the celebration here. Lissa’s ‘Out’ post is here.

Why is it that we so often prioritize work and trivialize creative expression? How long has it been since you’ve written in your journal, pulled out the watercolors, made candles out of beeswax, created jewelry, knitted a sweater, made a scrapbook, or decorated a table with fall leaves? When you create, you give me an opportunity to come out and play. And here’s the secret most don’t understand.When you let me come out and play, your work reflects how awesome I am and it all comes full circle. All work and no play makes me dim my light.

The planet is counting you shining your light. 
Brightly. 
I send you all my love for this coming weekend.
Now, about dinner, 
S

P.S. I retrieved this post from the jumble that happened when I switched servers. This was originally posted on April 27. Whatever we had for dinner must have been good or at least passable. Tonight we are having these beans from my dear Janet. They have become my Monday meal. I must tell you a funny story about Jonathan and those very beans. xo S

Just when I thought I could not wait for the snaggles to be worked out on this site, I waited a little longer.
And, here, on a Saturday morning, the day of the Super Moon, on Cinco de Mayo, on the day of the night when I get to dance with my Moon Sisters to the fine music of Sam Lardner, at this moment with my daughter’s music pounding out lyrics about being saved tonight and everything’s going to be okay, Ben is sitting at the proctored SAT test for four hours.
Everything takes it’s own time.

Including the Moon.
Stand close to her tonight wherever you are.
Wake up and let the moonlight keep your night thoughts company.

Looking forward to a week of new posts and restoring those lost in the shuffle last week, like the one about the Brooklyn Art Library or about Jaq Belcher.

Adios mi amigos,
S

This blog post first appeared as part of the FeMail online museum exhibit at the MUSEUM OF MOTHERHOOD and MamaBlogger365 during the early part of 2011

Women, Work, and Seductive Subversion with FeMail by Suzi Banks Baum and Karen Arp-Sandel

How many times during the day do you have to make the choice about how to spend the next 45 minutes? Whether you have a long list glaring at you from your computer screen or piles of laundry to navigate around, the moments when you choose to do something creative or restorative that pleases no one but yourself may be few and far between.

As Artist Moms, Karen and I are constantly in the act of choosing how to stay in the moment, no matter if that moment finds us in our studios making art or elbow deep in macaroni and cheese preparations. Who doesn’t balance numerous responsibilities that feel at times distracting from our primary spiritual aims? Business development can often feel like an imposition, doing things that don’t necessarily seem to further our careers feel like a chore, and anything that diverts us from caring and nurturing our selves, our families and art making can make us downright mad!

This dilemma is as perennial as the seasons and as heart-breaking as the greatest losses because while our work is the expression of our souls, so is our mothering — how can we weigh one against the other?

Karen and I lead a workshop for women, The Daily-Ness of Art, which introduces art techniques using simple immediate materials like labels, a glue stick, and magazine images to create mail art and basic book forms. In this workshop we teach easy yoga practices to center the body, mind, and spirit. We introduce poetry and basic journaling practices that invite creativity. These techniques are inroads that can be done over the course of 30 to 60 minutes, providing an “art break” during any given day. We offer ways to awaken the artist’s eye and begin to see possibility for greater self-expression in daily living. We unearth the inner substrate of creativity.

Full Snow Moon, front; © Karen Arp-Sandel, all rights reserved

Full Snow Moon, back by © Karen Arp-Sandel, all rights reserved

Sometimes I paint my watercolor post cards ahead of time and keep them ready to use for collage substrate. Substrate means the surface upon which a collage is built or glued. One technique to jumpstart collage creativity is to make the foundational background first. This post card invites remembrance. The Full Snow Moon in February 2011 is when Suzi and I gather with our circle of women to be wild in the dark wintery night. This mixed media collage captures the moonlight stillness with watercolor paint, opalescent paper, a deep blue dot mesh and prismatic silver. On the back my message refers to viewing the MC Escher exhibit called Seeing the Unseen at the Berkshire Museum. Upcycling is another technique I often employ. See how the museum post card becomes the motif? I added this Rumi poem: “Love is the Mother, we are her children, she shines inside us visible-invisible” which celebrates the mother artist who is ever present inside our experience of creativity.

We FeMail artists hunger for community with other women. We discovered a movie that speaks to this topic with such passion and vigor that we use it as a discussion tool in our daylong workshops.
Who Does She Think She Is? asks these soul-searching questions of five mothers who are professional artists. The struggle to balance motherhood with artistic expression or any professional calling causes a level of self-examination that can quickly devolve to grief or soul numbing frustration.

Recently, we attended a viewing of Who Does She Think She Is? with the filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Pamela spoke about the passion of women artists to do their work and lead their families in a culture that does not support women artists, and just barely, historically speaking, supports women as fully empowered members of our society. This is the United States of America, people! The job of childcare is the most important role for our nation’s future, yet it is expected that women will do this job regardless of any other factors and often for no pay.

The movie takes on the art world and its totally skewed representation of women artists. The Guerrilla Girls are featured, asking their questions with fierce gorilla masks on, decrying the under-representation of women artists in our nation’s art institutions.

These are crucial topics for discussion because the trickle-down effect plays to our most basic questions — how do I raise my family and do my work at the same time? Does my country support me in my expression of my self if that expression goes beyond raising children?

The Threshold of Greatness, front; © Suzi Banks Baum, all rights reserved

The Threshold of Greatness, back; © Suzi Banks Baum, all rights reserved

Here is my card to Karen from just last year. I use the strip collage technique with painted papers I made in our Daily-Ness of Art workshop. That naked woman climbing the steps appears in my work often; the combination of seduction and work intrigue me. The reverse side holds my pledge to keep working within Rilke’s lines.

While we were on the road trip to meet Pamela and view the movie with her, we stopped at the Tufts University Art Gallery to take in the Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 exhibit. What a fascinating view of important women artists, so many voices speaking to the explosive political and social changes of that time! From record album covers to huge oil paintings to mixed media collages, needle worked rugs and large sculptures, this installation vibrates with the passion of these women artists who asked the very same questions we at FeMail are asking today, the same questions that the movie Who Does She Think She Is? asks. Many of the artists struggled with galleries, seeking to be represented alongside their peers like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, but the larger art market spurned them. Some women created careers as working artists, but others faded from the popular view and continued working in their studios, answering that soul call to express the world in their own voice without public acclaim or remuneration.

Karen and I were stunned at the similarities of the frustration of women artists in the 1960s to today. The questions are the same; the world has come a far way along, but really not so far. Can you name 10 women artists, whether you like their work or not? Next time you are in a museum, any museum (except the NMWA), count the number of women artists whose work you see.

All of this ire fuels the activism of women all over the world to speak up, to join the discussion at the table where men seem to be so welcomed, but women not so warmly. Our FeMail post cards speak boldly as we find our way through this topic, which is at the very heart of our lives. You could select almost any card from our exhibit and find in it the moment where my soul speaks to Karen of the act of choosing. From Karen’s mantra “Art is not separate” to our Daily-Ness of Art workshops we urge women to access their authentic voice while exploring creative ways to reach out and touch someone.

FeMail is Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzi Banks Baum

Karen and I are about to lead our day long workshop The Dailyness of Art at the Alchemy Initiative in Pittsfield, MA on Saturday April 28, 2012 from 10:00 to 5:00 pm. At 6pm the public is invited to join us to watch Who Does She Think She Is?, a moving documentary about women artists who are mothers. It is political, personal and deeply touching to watch 5 different women make choices to serve their creative passion and raise families.

Author Bios:

Suzi Banks Baum is an Heirloom Variety Mom living in the hills of western Massachusetts. She is a writer and artist, raising 2 teen-agers with her husband.
As she writes her book Laundry Line Divine: A Wild Soul Book for Mothers, she blogs on the sacred in daily life at www.laundrylinedivine.com.

Karen Arp-Sandel is a woman who wears many hats: artist, educator, yoga teacher, workshop presenter, Mother, wife, aunt, daughter and sister. In her role as a collage artist, she makes art in her home studio and teaches classes at IS183 Art School of the Berkshires, where she is on the faculty of the Painting, Drawing and Collage department. When she is not in her studio or instructing adults, she implements an exciting Learning through Arts programs in the public elementary schools using the skills in her “visual artist toolbox”. You can learn more about her in her professional capacity by visiting KarenArpSandel.com.

Come to FeMailArt.com to view an online gallery and discussion of the mail art collaboration between Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzi Banks Baum. You can also see more about this exhibit at MotherhoodMuseum.org.

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
~Viktor Frankl

I am slowly putting this page back together again after a bumpy few days.
Life is good and full to the brim. This website it under a bit of reconstruction.
If you would like to subscribe, to keep up with Laundry Line news, please fill out the tiny box up there on the right.

I will doing dancing to this song while you do. If all you see is a blank space here, hit your ‘refresh’ button up there on your navigation bar and a YouTube video will appear.

Here are the much awaited winners of the ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ blog drawing:

Corey Sprague and Lynn Amaral won a copy of my Rice Pudding recipe.
Lisa Millen and Angela Vuagniaux won a copy of Janet Elsbach’s brownie recipe.
Lorrin Krouss won an original letterpress print, first edition on archival paper, by me at PRESS as part of
the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers events.
And Peggy Barrett won Alana Chernila‘s The Homemade Pantry.

Congratulations people!
I am so honored to get to mail you these gifts.

Here is Peggy with hers. She is a long time reader of LLD. Thank you Peggy!

Look forward to more here on the Laundry Line. I have some new friends here, Jennifer Boire- who’s poem was posted here the other day and Miranda Hersey Helin, who’s Studio Mothers site feels like my home away from home here on the internet. And I still have some wonderful photos of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. I do have a new persona of ‘girl journalist’. Without the training, but armed with my camera and tiny notebook, I love to document events I am part of, which give me results like these.

Thank you for being here.
Love,
S

Do what you love today.
I am waiting for this web site host to have room for me.
I will make lots of new and wonderful posts once that has occurred.
Until that point, I am this little Buddha, from Jan Yourist, in the gentle hands of the Universe.

Love, S