Scamming the Patriarchy: A Youth Summit at New Museum

November 13 2016

As part of the Education Department’s R&D Season: DEMOCRACY, the New Museum will host a youth summit and celebration organized by an emerging generation of artists, writers, and activists, including BUFU, Brujas, Discwoman, and members of House of LaDosha. The summit will include numerous workshops organized around five guiding principles: healing, self-love, skill building, political education, and empowerment. The programming will look to the future of gender politics, focusing on methods for forging the worlds youth want to inhabit, while grounding this work in legacies of the past. Programming will center on confronting inequality and injustice, supporting spiritual and economic sustainability, and cultivating a space to turn up with women, femmes, “the dolls,” and all queer kinfolk at the forefront.

For the youth summit, I held a yarn workshop where participants were given materials and taught the technique of coiling. I was interested in the accessibility of traditional women's work techniques, and how these processes can be used in radical ways. An instructional video was made in collaboration with Minnie Bennett to be projected during the workshop.

Video stills courtesy of Minnie Bennett.