Women's History Month is an important moment to honor the struggles women face in carving a path toward a more equitable and just world. While acknowledging their sacrifices, this is also a time to celebrate the achievements and contributions of women; namely, the many ways in which women have fought for equal and fair representation.
Women play a critical role in inspiring, shaping, and transforming the Brooklyn cultural sector we know and love today. Despite facing significant barriers in the art world, women remain at the forefront of innovation, experimentation, and activism. They have enriched and expanded our community’s creative landscape, bringing forth unique perspectives that inform our understanding of gender identity, roles, and societal expectations.
Here at Brooklyn Arts Council, we believe uplifting the voices of women and empowering their creativity is essential to the ongoing evolution of the art world and the larger cultural conversation. Keep scrolling to learn about a few of the trailblazing women in our 2022 Grantee Cohort including: Carolyn A. Butts-Schmalenberger, Salomé Egas, Brydie O’Connor, Asia Stewart, and Victoria-Idongeist Udondian.
CAROLYN A. BUTTS-SCHMALENBERGER
Carolyn A. Butts-Schmalenberger is a Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee.
Carolyn A. Butts-Schmalenberger has increased the visibility of Black and Latino artists in literature, film and art. Carolyn is the founder of the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival & Lecture Series, the first Academy-qualifying film festival for shorts devoted to women filmmakers. In honor of the organization’s 25th anniversary in 2022, Reel Sisters presented a film retrospective celebrating the festival’s diverse collection of films produced, directed, and written by women of color.
Carolyn is also the publisher and founder of African Voices, a leading arts magazine devoted to publishing fine art and literature by artists of color. The magazine continues to be an outlet for emerging artists to publish fiction, poetry and visual art. She was featured in Black Enterprise for her business acumen and spotlighting the importance of hiring women behind the camera in the film industry.
SALOMÉ EGAS
Salomé Egas, Creative Equations Fund grantee.
Salomé Egas is a proudly Ecuadorian interdisciplinary artist, educator, and bilingual children’s book author who questions her identity through the use of multiple mediums including dance, theater, film and textile arts. She also founded By Salo Books and published her first bilingual book highlighting self-love in mixed-race characters.
Her recent multidisciplinary performance and workshop series, Más que un pétalo, is a deconstruction of the immigrant experience in the United States that aims to bring audiences on a journey of radical love and empowerment of immigrant narratives. Using dance, theater, textile arts, music, and video, the performance invites the audience to see the immigration experience through the eyes of a taxo flower, “Tauzhu Sisa”, an Ecuadorian native plant. By looking at our cultural contributions and economic impact, Egas calls immigrants to reclaim their intrinsic value.
Brydie O’Connor
Brydie O’Connor, Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Photo by Marisa Chafetz.
Brydie O’Connor is an award-winning filmmaker whose documentary work focuses on women-driven and queer stories. Brydie’s most recent film Love, Barbara won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Documentary at Outfest 2022 and was nominated for an IDA award. Love, Barbara is a short documentary about the iconic legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, through the lens and love of her partner of over 30 years, Florrie Burke.
Alongside Brooklyn Arts Council, Brydie’s work has been supported by The Future of Film Is Female, Women Make Movies, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and ArtsKC, and has screened at places such as The Museum of Modern Art and DOC NYC.
Asia stewart
Fabric Softener performance by Asia Stewart, Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, Stewart has sought ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality and routinely questions how she can best document her performances and represent movement and physicality across mediums.
Asia’s project, Fabric Softener is an interdisciplinary performance that combines song, movement, and painting to meditate on intergenerational trauma and the perverse inheritance(s) passed down by Black mothers. Using words of advice from her late grandmother, Asia Stewart crafted a narrative that focuses on the survival strategies she learned to navigate the world. Throughout the performance, Stewart’s gestures, movement, and voice enact the “litany of growing up” as a Black woman in the United States.
VICTORIA-IDONGESIT UDONDIAN
Victoria-Idongeist Udondian is a Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee.
Victoria-Idongeist Udondian is a visual artist whose work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. She creates work that questions notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions in relation to her experiences growing up in Nigeria.
How can I be Nobody? is a site-specific solo exhibition combining elements from Udondian’s recent collaborative projects that include woven textiles, sculptures, and sound. This project is also the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York City. Continuing her recent exploration into the links between bodies and transit within global labor economies, the installation connects Smack Mellon’s Dumbo gallery, a former industrial site, to the foundational role of immigrant labor in capitalist production.
Cover Image: Fabric Softener rehearsal at NARS Foundation. Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Photo Jas Lampkin, 2021.