About this Event
ART + HEALING No.6
February 18, 2024
3:00 pm PST
Join us February 18 to hear eco feminist Fern Shaffer, (born 1944 and WEAD Seed artist), describe her art and healing journey.
Fern Shaffer is an American painter, performance artist, lecturer and environmental advocate. Her work arose in conjunction with an emerging Ecofeminism movement that brought together environmentalism, feminist values and spirituality to address shared concern for the Earth and all forms of life. She first gained widespread recognition for a four-part, shamanistic performance cycle, created in collaboration with photographer Othello Anderson in 1985. Writer and critic Suzi Gablik praised their work for its rejection of the technocratic, rationalizing mindset of modernity, in favor of communion with magic, the mysterious and primordial, and the soul. Gablik featured Shaffer's Winter Solstice (1985) as the cover art for her influential book, The Reenchantment of Art, and wrote that the ritual opened "a lost sense of oneness with nature and an acute awareness of ecosystem" that offered "a possible basis for reharmonizing our out-of-balance relationship with nature. Shaffer is also known for feminist and ecology-themed paintings that critics have described as romantic, dizzying and panoramic, spiritual, and capable of combining the scientific, personal and universal.
BIO
Fern Shaffer, born and raised in Chicago, received her BFA from the University of Illinois and MA from Columbia College. Shaffer has been a long-time activist for women in art through her involvement and leadership at the Chicago alternative art space Artemisia Gallery work with the national Women's Caucus for Art. In addition to exhibiting work throughout the U.S. and internationally, Shaffer has been active as an arts administrator, public lecturer, and educator. She has lectured all over the world and has published her writings. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in solo and group shows. She has been collected by national and international museums. Fern Shaffer has worked at the Selfhelp Home for 30 years as Director of Programs.
Fern’s image above is currently featured in Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at the Barbican in London. The exhibit, curated by Alona Pardo, is
“an unprecedented look at the relationship between women’s bodies, the Earth and the camera. Moving from the protest movements of the 1960s to today, this is staggering, multilayered research into the possibilities of photography as a form of activism, and it is as visually engaging as it is deep in knowledge.” Manchester Guardian, Dec. 25, 2023
Wikipedia
Image top: Nine Year Ritual of Healing by Fern Shaffer, Photograph: Othello Anderson/Courtesy of the artist.
Image middle: Fern Shaffer: Photograph #1 taken in Lockport, IL. Focus on the concern for the living conditions of plant life.
Image bottom: Fern Shaffer: Photograph Ritual #9 Cache River Basin, Illinoi. The focus was on the preservation of the wetlands.
Event Venue
Online
USD 0.00