A List, To Start
Update: Better organized list, with links and everything, is now live: A List of Women Speakers for Your Conference. Please post additions, errors and omissions in the comments over there.
Tokion Magazine’s upcoming Creativity Now conference claims to be bringing together the “top figures” across a variety of creative disciplines. Oddly none of the 20-some-odd figures are women. They said they tried but couldn’t find any. We say: try harder.
Brooklyn Vegan made a good point, which is that I have as yet not offered any solutions, just raised an issue . So, I just sat for a couple of minutes and put together a list of women who’d be potentially great speakers at the Creativity Now conference. I will track back and add links and/or affiliations later. In the near term, I wanted to get some suggestions out there.
I am personally not strong on music and screenwriting/film recommendations. If you have names you’d like to add, please comment below or email me: person AT personism DOT com
My list, so far (Apologies in advance for spelling errors, omissions and it’s general lack of orderliness):
Ellen Lupton
Jessica Helfland
Tina Roth Eisenberg (SwissMiss)
Julia Leach
Kate Spade
Alice Roy
Lisa Yuskavage
Mirabelle Marden (Rivington Arms)
Melissa Bent (Rivington Arms)
Alessandra Sanguinetti
Louise Fili
Xeni Jardin
Meg Hourihan
Caterina Fake
Heather Champ
Paddy Johnson
Jessica Coen
Youngna Park
Lauren Cerand
Emilia Fanjul
Dannielle Romano
Pavia Rosati
Janice Erlbaum
Jessica Vitkus
Susan + Katherine Hable (Hable Construction)
Mara Hoffman
danah boyd
Mena Trott
Zoe Strauss
Erika Hall (mule design)
Maya Hayuk
Eileen Gittins (ceo:blurb)
Jill Greenberg (photographer)
Portia Wells (designer)
Julie Taraska (editor)
Jane Pratt
Caroline Waxler (The Glasshouse)
Shoshanna Berger (ReadyMade)
Kate Bingaman (Obsessive Consumption)
Kathy Ryan
Jody Quan
Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective)
Patricia Field
Gina Trapiani
Janice Fraser
Farai Chideya
Lily Burana
Mikki Halpin
Kristen Williams
Elizabeth Spiers
Karen Sandler
Paige West
Jennifer Chung
Rachel Sklar
Maud Newton
Molly Steenson
Grace Bonney (design*sponge)
Eva Hagberg
Maira Kalman
Paula Scher
Paola Antonelli
Jayne Mayle
Tracy Reese
About this entry
You’re currently reading “A List, To Start,” an entry on Personism
- Published:
- 10.07.06 / 10pm
- Category:
- Art, Branding + Identity, Conferences, Film, Ideas, Magazines, Style, Web, Women
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[...] Read more here. (And Jessica, you’re on the list.) • • • [...]
Nobody suggested Paris Hilton?
what I’m finding most remarkable about this discussion is the imprimatur and credibility that everyone is giving Tokion in the first place. This is NOT the Tokion of east-west cross-pollination, or even the incestuous BAPE mafia mentioned above. It’s a totally new crew, brought together by a company who bought the assets and the brand at a 2-3x removed distance from all the cultural aura everyone is attributing to it. [marxy, a former editor, gives an extended account of the whole soap opera.]
While there’s definite value in putting the spotlight on the achievements of so many [female] creatives, if an organization is so demonstrably out of tune with creativity now [sic], doesn’t it make more sense to deem it marginal on its face and worry a bit less about them?
As a lot of the lists here demonstrate, the culture doesn’t need this Tokion to define or identify important creatives. And as their own kind of scattershot, star-flecked list inadvertently demonstrates, Tokion’s not exactly breaking any new creative ground itself.
It doesn’t look like they invite architects to speak, which seems like a mistake for a conference focused on “the people shaping today’s popular culture.”
If they did, I’d love to see Michelle Kaufmann, who is doing amazing work with modular, pre-fab, green dwellings. Her firm is michelle kaufmann designs.
A handful of people not mentioned yet:
Jenny Toomey
Gael Towey
Pamela Barsky
Kiki Smith
Neve Campbell
Christine Fugate
Andrea Zittel
Greg has a good point, though, I think why this is such a sore issue for the people/women posting here is that even though Tokion is just an ok mag, their actions and inconsideration of women and women’s art is an evidencing of the unspoken and underacknowledged attitudes that face women who are putting their art in the world. It gives a face and a tangible circumstance to what a lot of women face, in and out of the most liberal of art scenes.
Women street artists, a few have been mentioned, but there’s also:
C. Damage
Julia Gardner
Sunny Chapman aka Flower Face Killah
Lilly1975
Fly
Meeka
And probably many more that I don’t know. But I want to! Please list more women street artists that you know.
I don’t consider Tokion to be all that influential and their scene only slightly overlaps with my scene in that I’ve shown street art in the past.
The whole under-representation thing is an issue I’ve been gnashing my teeth over for a while, however, and they do make the claim that they’re putting on a conference of the top people in a variety of disciplines that I care deeply about.
Their response has been consistent with the responses that come from other sectors: We tried, it’s too hard, there aren’t enough people, tokenism is wrong, bla, bla, bla.
Whether it was intentional or not, Tokion felt comfortable making the claim that they are assembling the “top figures” in these fields with full knowledge that there was not one woman on the schedule.
a good point, and one that tells me they’re marginal and out of touch.
I wish I were creative enough to make a funny t-shirt play on Tokion and token, though…
this is late but these names need to be here:
Sylvia Kolbowski
Julia Loktev
Radhika Subramaniam +
I second Mary Flanagan
Kara Walker!!!
one of the best contemporaru artists out there, black, white, male or female.
[...] Many thanks to all the contributors to comment threads here on Personism, and over on design*sponge. Marc and Sara over at Wooster Collective also provided some excellent suggestions. [...]
[...] Many thanks to all the contributors to comment threads here on Personism, and over on design*sponge. Marc and Sara over at Wooster Collective also provided some excellent suggestions. [...]
thanks for doing this. i was quite disgusted to see the ad for “creativity now” without any women and lost any interest in attending. it’s amazing that people who profess to be not the mainstream are so lame and unoriginal. thanks for making noise about what a lot of us were probably thinking, quietly.
I’m happy to see that so many people are concerned about representing a diverse panel. I am a landscape architecture student, and I find that the general public does not understand what a landscape architect is and what we do. Some of the women that I hope to see honored for their contribution to creativity are:
kathryn gustafson
martha shwartz
christy ten eyck
some of the men I hope to see honored are:
ken smith
buro kiefer
laurie olin
Linda Zacks
http://www.extra-oomph.com
For the sake of organization, I’m closing comments on this post. If you have additions, please add them in comments in the main List of Women Speakers For Your Conference post, following these guidelines:
1- Scan the list the make sure that the woman you’re recommending isn’t already listed.
2- Please provide a link/website address if possible.
3- Give us a brief description of what the person’s specialty/field is.
Perfect suggestion:
Caterina Fake:
Entrepreneur, Designer, currently leading Yahoo’s Brickhouse division.
URLS:
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.caterina.net
Et Voila! Thanks for your input.