Photo By Jill Frank
Jill Frank's Bio
Jill Frank, co-curator of the Kentucky Girlhood Project, was born in 1978 in Georgia. At some point her family moved to Kentucky, and that is where she began her art career, in the early eighties. Early hand-print paintings and an unusual obsession with a blue plastic Fisher Price camera lead Jill to further investigate her artistic inclinations at Bard College, in upstate New York in 1997. She then lived in Providence, Brooklyn, Chicago and Louisville at for varying amounts of time. After many years of working in New York as a manager of a photo studio, Jill realized she should go back to school and get an MFA. The Art Institute of Chicago seemed like a good choice, so for the last two years Jill has been finishing her degree in Chicago, although still very much a permanent resident of Louisville, Kentucky. Her most recent finished work involves reenactments of pivotal moments in her immediate family history; some of the important memories that might otherwise be forgotten were acted out for the purpose of documentation. The series titled, The Franks focuses on the awkward, embarrassing and universal experience of adolescence. More recent projects are concerning the documentation of other people?s important recollections, please contact Jill if you are interested in re-enacting an important childhood memory.
Laura Parker's Bio
Laura Parker, co-curator of the Kentucky Girlhood Project, was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1979. She started oil painting when she was 11 years old, after being inspired by her older sister, who is also an artist. After high school Laura moved around the country for many years living in several states including Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington and New York. She spent four years living in New York City where she worked for art non-profits including the Art Directors Club and HOWL! Festival. Realizing that office life did not suit her soul she spent her last year in New York holding up welcome signs at airports and selling jewelry in street fairs for her friend's company, Lolabean. In 2005 she moved back to Kentucky to focus on her art career and began an experimental art project called Meet-A-Stranger. In Meet a Stranger, Laura introduces her audience to people doing interesting things based on impromptu interviews she conducts with random strangers.
Meet A Stranger
MEET ALEYDA
Aleyda, a seventeen-year-old recent high school graduate, works at a Mexican restaurant and grocery store in downtown Carrollton, Kentucky.
This week there have been few customers but she expects to be busy tomorrow for the soccer game. Mexico is playing in the World Cup and they have a television.
When Aleyda was six in Veracruz her father moved to Kentucky to make money. Six years later Aleyda and the rest of her family followed the father. Now in Carrollton, Aleyda enjoys watching movies with friends, reading celebrity magazines, and hanging out with her white boyfriend. Aleyda received a scholarship to attend the local two-year community college and plans to become a Chemical Engineer.
Aleyda enjoys the differences in people and has friends from many races and backgrounds. Her Hispanic friends in Kentucky often look at her strange because she has integrated more into the American culture. She explains “The Hispanic people here are always together in a corner at school. My brother and I talk to everyone pretty much. That is why they look at us weird. They are not racist or anything and I am still friends with them but they just like to stick together. I ask them, ‘How come you don’t talk to everyone?’ and they are like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Friday, March 2, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Submission Example, Ellen Hagan, Writer
It Was Me
Published in America! What's My Name?
By Ellen Hagan
Born in Bardstown, Kentucky
Body calling. For you. This is what they say. My body needs. What’s your desire? You want to be 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 and tight, one slick body calling you up, dialing.
At 13, I wanted to be kissed deep and long, not because MTV told me that’s what I wanted, not because of Jodeci’s ‘Forever My Lady’ or Naughty by Nature’s ‘Hip-Hop Hooray’, or the street corner or the pressure of my peers. Not because of anything other than wanting another mouth on mine. At 13, I was all legs and frizzy hair and nowhere to put all my longing. It wasn’t music videos, Madonna in a sprawl on a cross with a black Christ that made me want to slow grind on all the boys at the parties, throw my head back shooting tequila or vodka or bourbon and laugh high and loud.
It was me.
At 14, I lost my virginity at another 14- year old boy’s house, while his mother watched The Price is Right in the living room and his dog barked till he had to yell “Shut the fuck up,” while he was thinking of saying the same thing to me. And it was not Teen Beat, with Silk on the cover that had me wasted and naked from the hips down, not Seventeen or Beverly Hills 90210. It was not a zip code that made me buy a box of condoms on my way to his house because he said, “I don’t have none…could you?”
And I could. And I did.
At 15, I made out, put my tongue into warm mouths and kissed slow and deep in dark alleys, but I was terrible alone, and it wasn’t mass media that told me I was ugly. It was the mirror. “Sex me baby.” It was at 15 I learned other girls got breasts, not the girls in Snoop Dogg videos or on the covers of magazines, but my best friends. Got tits. And asses. And figures. And curves that went Bam! And touch me. I’m hot, kinda figures that said, “come and get it. come and get it. come and get it. come and get it.”
Like a looped record, full of Kentucky Southern.
Re-mix. “Turn off the lights cuz girl it’s on. Sex me.”
Re-mix. No matter how much I re-mixed it, I was still alone and there was no sex me in my future. And it wasn’t the supermodels on TV that told me I was ugly, or too skinny, or too stupid. It was the mirror. It was growing up.
It was me.
*Lyrics from R. Kelly’s Sex Me
Ellen's Bio
Ellen Hagan is a writer, actress and educator. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and can be seen in Failbetter, La Petite Zine, nervygirl, Monologues for Women by Women, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees and upcoming in Submerged: Tales from the Basin and America! What’s My Name? Her work has been featured on Kentucky Educational Television, New York’s WBAI and WNYE and produced by SpokenWorks for the New York International Fringe Festival, ROAR Theatre Festival and the American Living Room. She has had residencies at the Hopscotch House and The University of Kentucky and received grants from the KY Foundation for Women and the GSA Toyota Alumni Fund. Ellen recently performed for season five of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam and tours the state with her duo show Becoming Woman. She is also the co-founder of girlstory, a multi-generational, multi-cultural women’s collective based in New York City. girlstory was recently nominated as Vagina Warriors for V-Day at Adelphi University and performed for Eve Ensler’s Stop the Violence Campaign in the Y.Now Festival at HERE Theatre in summer 2006. Ellen holds an MFA in fiction from The New School University, and is working on a full-length novel entitled The Kentucky Notes.
www.ellenhagan.com
www.girlstory.org
www.becomingwoman.com
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