In the Red Tent Conversation Series, I facilitate conversations with women to share their stories on trauma, ritual, artistic and spiritual practices, and experience with death, then create a printed archive of our discussions. This work is inspired by the novel The Red Tent, in which author Anita Diamant takes a fictional approach to the biblical story of Dinah from the tribe of Jacob. In the book, the red tent was a place where women could go to share their private and magical world once a month away from the suppressive patriarchal gaze, bonded by menstruation, childbirth and death.

 

For my creation of a modern-day conceptual red tent, I stage one-on-one conversations with women from all different walks of life and draw their portraits. Edited transcripts of the conversations and the portraits will be published in a book in 2021. The project acts to archive personal narratives and rituals that are being conducted in secret within The Red Tent.

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Participants: Dana Simmons, Halle Warren, Corine Frankland, Jamie Bastello, Snow Silverstein, Emma Duehr Mitchell, Georgia Rae Ostrowski, Alexis Powers