General Sisters
Curator: Risa Puleo
In Movement Transmissions, General Sisters collaborators Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Dana Bishop-Root invite visitors to explore open pathways constructed of words that suggest, but do not designate, routes. These pathways were designated in collaboration with four artists active in St. Louis’s justice movements—Dail Chambers, Dustin Gibson, Basmin Nadra, and Xochi Plancarte—and repopulate public spaces along Jefferson Avenue with memories of people, buildings, and actions that are no longer present. General Sisters also considers the plants that occupy those places: plants that also have stories to tell. Together, plants and people highlighted in Movement Transmissions co-narrate histories of displacement, carcerality, and environmental racism as well as joys found in communities and solidarity-building.
Visitors are invited to a series of tours and performances on various exhibition days (see the Counterpublic calendar for details). Additionally, audio tours and written transcriptions are available on the Counterpublic website (see the QR code above) where a drawing maps General Sisters’s process and locates the connections between the individual sites for visitors choosing to explore on their own. Lastly, Counterpublic 2023’s wayfinding signage offers prompts that translate the stories plants tell along these sites into opportunities to reflect on the landscape.
About the artist
General Sisters is an art collective based in North Braddock, Pennsylvania, founded in 2009 by Dana Bishop-Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. Dana and Ginger have shared work as General Sisters at John Michael Kohler Art Center; The Jewish Museum, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown and Japanese American Museum of San Jose. They have participated as collaborators in art, conversation, growing, food production, and commerce in their shared garden and building in North Braddock, PA; the Whitney Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
ARTISTS LINKS
Collaborators
Dail Chambers is an ethnographic artist, grower, mother, and educator. She's the founder of Yeyo Arts Collective, and a Mississippi Mermaid. She is a member of Sibyls Shrine, Civic Arts Development, and Women's Earth Alliance. Chambers works in communities to develop authentic organizing and art practices for the public, through nativity, ancient civilization, and Afrofuturism. Chambers stewards an educational homestead, farm, and orchard in North Saint Louis.
Dustin Gibson is the Director of Access, Disability, and Language Justice at PeoplesHub. He's a peer support trainer with Disability Link in Georgia and a board member with Straight Ahead and HEARD. He's also a founding member of the Harriet Tubman Collective, Us Protecting Us in Atlanta, GA, and the Policing in Allegheny County Committee. He's worked on the ground with Centers for Independent Living (CIL) in Southwest Pennsylvania, with a focus on deinstitutionalization and youth self-determination. His work in the national CIL networks supported youth peer support networks and abolition policing and prisons. He teaches courses about abolition and disability justice in communities, high schools, universities, and law schools.
Basmin Nadra is a daughter of all relations extending her life practice as a generous art practice into streets, rivers, nightclubs, and homes. Nadra brings her lived experience as a native St. Louisan of diverse experience and versatile expression in all of her offerings; performance for film, stage, music, or theater productions; administration in media; as an activist for social justice, food sovereignty, the environment or caregiving and advocacy for Elders. As a character innovator and vocalist, her unique and memorable presence has been commissioned by writers, directors, and producers to illuminate and activate visions.
Xochitl Plancarte weaves lineage, migration, present tense locations, and the capacity to expand into garments of celebration and everyday being. Plancarte's practice invites and enters gatherings of differences with shared glances and tender time. Xochi has made home growing up in St. Louis venturing through the city's parks, bookstores, and performance spaces.
program documentation for movement Transmissions
Please gather on a blanket with colors made from avocados and black beans, woven on a four harness loom. Carnegie Park, or more so a park that holds histories and fantasies of what we will make together. An invitation to soften a surface and inhabit this park. Where do we go to be seen? Where is the scene? How do we cultivate these spaces while also holding space for safety/nurturing/self-preservation/protection? Are there public spaces in St. Louis that resonate or are this for you? If these public spaces and languages for connection don't fully exist, let's talk about what they might be.
Dail Chambers + General Sisters, "There Once Was A Billboard Here"
Please join us for a guided public gathering of collective remembering at the site of a former billboard which claimed "The Most Dangerous Place for a Black Child is in a Womb." Dail and her friends repeatedly wheatpasted over it, took it down, and the Catholic Workers Movement billboard continued to be replaced over and over again. Here, we are surrounded by the memories of the Pruitt-Igoe housing, as well as a new health center named for the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the only public hospital to treat Black residents during segregation. Ailanthus trees, yellow dock, thistle and dandelions are growing here.
Basmin Nadra + General Sisters, "Sonata For St. Louis"
Daughter of all relations, Basmin Nadra weaves songs to sing as blessing and transcendence from here to there, above and below, melodies that hold the memory of the ways generations of her family have lived in St. Louis, been up and down Jefferson Avenue, been firsts here; her songs locate ancestors both within and out of bloodlines whose knowledges of this place provide directions to share in the chorus for how to find what you are looking for but also how to find yourself, all while keeping the Mississippi River close.
Video by Emma Bright
