- Friday, April 7, 2017
- 12:00pm – 1:00pm
- MAWA, 611 Main Street
This talk traces Myrel Chernick’s history and development as a visual artist, mother, curator, editor, thinker, researcher and writer. It describes her realization that the art world wasn’t welcoming to mothers, and her subsequent engagement with visual art and the maternal, which has included artistic encounters, exhibitions, curation, editing, conferences and presentations. It has been an endeavour bracketed by frustration but also satisfaction and excitement with the now burgeoning field. Currently she is posing questions about our relationship to the dominant issue of our time: climate change and the destruction of the environment.
Free admission, everyone welcome!
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In the late 1970s Chernick began creating text-based multi-media installations in New York that were exhibited nationally and internationally. After the birth of her twins and the curtailment of her peripatetic existence she began concentrating on texts, which grew from short poetic statements to essays and short stories that were published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Mother Reader, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and Video Pool’s Poolside. In 1999 she began researching and developing the exhibition Maternal Metaphors, which was subsequently presented twice and included a catalog with an introduction by Chernick and an essay by Jennie Klein. This grew into the first comprehensive anthology on art and the maternal, The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, organized and edited with Klein over five years and published by Demeter Press.