Research - Daycare Documentation Darkside

Heads up from a social media friend:  "Have you guys seen this Tumblr?" 

http://bootleg-daycare.tumblr.com/

Research - Tornado Rainbow Imagery

No, it is impossible....but in the turbulent world of metaphorical childhood, this could happen. In the world of the internet, this was explained as Photoshop manipulation.

Tornado Rainbow

Child Care - Homelessness and Immigration

Post election, we are all wondering about immediate deportation and the erection of walls. In the meantime, a recent headline in the Texas Observer went beyond our call for affortable, safe and educational child care:

Child Careless  -  Texas doesn't want to take migrant children out of prison-like detention centers, so it found a way to classify the facilities as child care outfits.

Highlights from the article:

Licensing detention centers as child care facilities in order to circumvent rules banning the government from locking up kids and babies in cells. These places aren’t technically prisons; they’re just run by private prison contractors. You can’t just walk in, and the people inside sure as hell can’t just walk out. Just like in a jail or prison, journalists have to get permission to go inside, where they’re likely to be tailed by officials and flacks. Over the last year and a half, according to the Austin American-Statesman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recommended docking the prison contractors hundreds of thousands of dollars for various violations inside these facilities. Stuff most parents probably wouldn’t cotton to in a day care. Think “nonfunctioning security cameras,” “running out of baby formula” and “unsanitary food service.”
Compliance with basic standards seems particularly important in light of the history of abuse and mistreatment at the T. Don Hutto facility, where officials stopped housing kids back in 2009 after human rights advocates took them to task over prison-like conditions.
And yet Texas health officials have announced plans to license these kinds of places as child care centers, because doing so will let the authorities skirt judicial rulings that prevent law enforcement from throwing kids in unlicensed facilities willy-nilly, seeing as how it’s sort of, you know, un-American to throw abused children in prisons.

See for yourself:

Exhibition - Playtime at Perspectives

Perspective Fine Art Photography Gallery
1310 1/2B Chicago Avenue, Evanston IL
November 3 - 27, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5, 5:00 - 7:00pm

Perspective on Photography Lecture
On Collaboration: One Thing Leads to Another
Sunday, November 20, 4:30pm

About Playtime
The sticky, colorful, in-your-face relentlessness; the shopping, meals, and laundry; the ever-present detritus on the counters and floor: this is daily life when raising children. We turned our cameras to this overlooked realm and embraced the chaos that humbles and exasperates, but ultimately enriches us.  

When we were in the thick of child-rearing and holding down jobs, it was difficult to maintain our previous collaborative photographic working methods. We put aside the large format camera and tripod, loaded 35mm cameras with Kodak Gold 200 film and positioned them in easy reach. We abandoned the road trips and journeyed into our children's world. Hours in the darkroom were replaced with quick trips to Walgreen's to drop off film, returning in an hour for a stack of 4 x 6 prints to critique. The amped up color palette of  “snapshot” film and the impressionistic grain of a shallow depth of field disassembled reality and yielded surprises. We stopped telling the children to clean up and delighted instead in the unfolding landscapes of their play, rich with transformation and wonder. By surrendering to the process, the mundane became the marvelous.
                           
Ciurej and Lochman have been collaborating on photographic narratives since they met as students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. For nearly four decades they have chronicled the physical and psychological landscapes in which they travel.

Thanks to Bob Tanner and Perspectives Gallery for inviting us to revisit this work from 2002, and to our children who played so diligently. Special thanks to those who know that bringing children into light is critical to evolved thinking about women and work.

Exhibition - I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement Politics

Exhibition - I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement PoliticS

Curated by Krista Wojrtendyke and Margaret Le Jeune

Heuser Art Center and Hartmann Center Gallery, 

Bradley University,  Peoria, Illinois

August 8 – September 23.

Selections from Watch Me Grow included in this exhibition of artists whose work addresses issues of social justice and political engagement to create a platform for discussion through the visual arts.