The 2015 installation was paired with a weekend of five public roundtable discussions on women and self-expression. The original project was funded in part with a grant from the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, as well as many generous donors.
In creating ‘Finding Our Way, made visible with a camera’, Mary Margaret Hansen and Patsy Cravens pulled images from a trove of nude photographs taken of one another in the early 1980s and used them in assemblages and tableaus that conveyed confinement, flight, freedom and moving on.
The goals of their photographic installation were to use their images to provoke conversations on 1) women made visible through photography and 2) women’s issues in Texas during two junctures in time.
The 1980s, when the photographs were taken, reflected the vast cultural upheaval of the second wave of feminism. Women had ‘the pill’ and new opportunities. Houston, Texas, was in the forefront on women’s issues and in 1977, hosted the federally funded National Women’s Conference that drew the wives of three presidents. However, thirty-nine years later, the ‘pill’ is under siege and women still do not receive equal pay for equal work. Texas is again in the lead, though this time, by denying women health care and reproductive rights. The timing could not be better for introducing ‘Finding Our Way’s to new audiences.
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