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• New exhibit at the I Space shows feminist health movements

Bonnie Fortune, a third-year MFA student at UIUC’s School of Art & Design, has organized an exhibit that will be taking place at the I Space Gallery in Chicago until Oct. 10. Entitled “EveryBody!: Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009,” the exhibit includes a combination of historical images and documents from feminist health movements of the past decades with the work of present day artists and activists. Fortune said the title reflects the idea of “expanding care to include more bodies and more people and more holistic discussions of what healthcare means.”

Fortune’s interest in this subject was influenced by a History of Sexuality class she took at UIUC with Dr. Leslie Reagan. Fortune feels lucky to have been in the class and explained that her curatorial process was inspired by the paper she wrote on visual resistance in the women’s health movement.

“The show sort of evolved out of [the paper] and I wanted to see what people were doing today and see how this movement has changed and evolved,” she said.

For Fortune, this expansion is very important.

“I wanted to include work that represented women of color and transgendered people,” she said. “That wasn’t necessarily always represented in the Women’s Health Movement in the Seventies.”

The work of the women of the Boston Women’s Health Collective was the impetus for the movement, explained Fortune. Their book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” came out of a process of women researching about the female body, and getting together to write, create art and posters, as well as their own medical illustrations. “It was really a process rooted in visual culture ... all around the country there was this uprising in the movement of women learning together and making imagery,” Fortune said.

The media in the exhibit is very diverse including print, zines and multimedia. Many of the print images come from posters and images in gynecological books created during the Women’s Health Movement. One featured web blog, Curethis.org, is based out of LA and is a forum for people to talk about health justice. There is also a more personal online journal about a young transgendered man dealing with his life post-op.

Another online piece comes from Heather Ault, a UIUC MFA student and can be found at ttp://www.wallpaperreproductions.com. Ault’s piece, “Wallpaper Reproductions and Signature Choices,” mimics a website that would sell wallpaper by the roll, but each wallpaper image subtly depicts images of contraceptive measures, such as an herb used the 8th century BCE. Ault emphasized that the idea of women controlling their own reproduction is not something new. “Instead of the stigmatization that women’s reproductive health services lives within, these boutique wallpapers present the practice of controlling one’s own reproduction as a normal part of society,” wrote Ault in an email.

Internationally-featured artist, Christa Donner created a new piece for the exhibit.

“She did a wall mural for the show; it’s incredible,” said Fortune. “It’s huge and very colorful. She combines media imagery, biology and her own comic book style to create this hybrid.”

Donner explained that she has always focused her work around the female body.

“More recently, I’ve been making work that examines the fantastical and sometimes frightening consequences of confronting one’s own reproductive power,” Donner said.

Christa’s wall drawing is called “Inheritance” and she described it as “a sort of sex education class in some alternate universe, where girls with a very different sort of reproductive system are taught about their bodies through this giant visible speech bubble.” Donner explained that the title “is about the passing on of both biology and information from one generation to the next, and implies the value in that exchange.”

Christa will be giving a public lecture in Champaign on Oct. 5 at the Krannert Art Museum. The exhibit also includes other events on campus such as a multimedia exhibit at the Spurlock Museum on Sept. 23 and an ongoing feature of historical posters at the Women’s Resource Center.

“To me, it seems like this show couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Fortune as she references the current national healthcare debate. “It just shows that healthcare and issues surrounding healthcare — who is served, how they’re served, how they’re treated when they’re served — even today is a continually relevant discussion.”

For more information about the exhibit visit www.bonniefortune.info/everybody.html