During the two-day Guerrilla Girls workshop, students and the visiting artists were joined by artist Laura Anderson-Barbata as they utilized hand paper making in the service of feminism and activism.

Using handmade banana-leaf paper, letterpress, and collage, they incorporated material symbolic to the Guerrilla Girls group (the banana) into the content and design of individual and collaborative activist project works.

Artwork generated will be displayed in a Fall 2012 student activist exhibition curated by Columbia College student Sharon Sanchez in association with the Guerrilla Girl’s exhibition Not Ready to Make Nice, which will include a new commissioned public work, catalogue publication, and a series of public programs.

“This workshop was intense and inspiring. The visiting artists definitely pushed us to consider new ways of presenting our ideas,” said workshop participant Trisha Martin. “They make use of more attention-grabbing and flashy text and images to get their messages across, so we had to think outside of the box.”

The workshop and exhibition are part of a college-wide initiative led by the Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces (DEPS) and the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts & Media, with support from the 2011-2012 CCC Critical Encounters year-long initiative Rights, Radicals, + Revolutions.