Join the artists of Cute Rage Press for a pop-up installation of banners from the Protest Banner Lending Library and public workshops at The Luminary on Friday, May 18, 7–10pm. The Luminary is located at 2701 Cherokee Street, St. Louis, and we recommend visitors to arrive at 7pm to be able to complete banners.
Aram Han Sifuentes, Ishita Dharap, and Tabitha Anne Kunkes will lead simultaneous workshops where people can create protest banners, fill out pages of Taking Receipts: A Log of Aggression for People of Color, and make their own Put It On Blast: Call It Out and Label It! stickers. Banners created at the pop-up event can be for personal use or added to the Protest Banner Lending Library, an ongoing project on view through August 11, 2018 at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The sticker creation coincides with Put It On Blast: Call It Out and Label It!, a project that invites people to label discriminatory behavior with unique stickers. Put It On Blast is part of Taking Receipts: A Log of Aggression for People of Color, a book aimed to empower people of color to take detailed logs of their daily encounters of aggression and discrimination.
Aram Han Sifuentes is the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s artist-in-residence through August 2018. Sifuentes is a fiber, social practice, and performance artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City, NY), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum (Seoul, South Korea), Centro de Textiles del Mundo Maya (Chiapas, Mexico), and the Design Museum (London, UK). She is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, a 2016 3Arts Awardee, and a 2017 Sustainable Arts Foundation Awardee. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ishita Dharap is a visual artist, designer, and art educator. She studied interdisciplinary design at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore, India) and experiential education at the Kaveri College of Arts, Science and Commerce (Pune, India). Dharap’s art practice spans drawing, installations, and objects through which she engages with themes of play and meaning-making, which she views as a link to explore how learning occurs in formal and informal environments. She lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Tabitha Anne Kunkes is a Chicago based visual artist who focused on the process of art making, seeing it as a catalyst for conversations with family and community. Kunkes views her art as an evolving exploration into discovering how processes become, change, and grow. She earned her BFA in Studio Art, and is currently a MA candidate in Art Therapy and Counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Cute Rage Press is a collaborative project by Aram Han Sifuentes and Ishita Dharap, who are dedicated to empower femmes of color to call out racism and discrimination experienced in everyday life.
