User:Ggaze/sandbox

Early Life and Career
Born in 1940, Betsy Damon is an American artist whose work has been influenced by her activism in women's, gay, and environmental rights. She received her masters degree from Columbia University in 1966. After receiving her degree, she traveled to Germany but returned to the United States in 1968 where she learned of the Women's Movement from American artist Joyce Kozloff. In 1972 Damon attended Womanhouse. After this visit, she began creating street art performances in New York City. Her performance, The 7000 Year Old Woman, addressed feminist themes of violence, oppression through a ritualistic performance.

She has participated in a number of exhibitions and performances and her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was a founding member of the Women's Caucus for Art and received the Mid-Life Career Award from the organization in 1989. She won the Arts and Healing Network Award in 2000. At the age of 50, Betsy Damon changed the focus of her art to center on water, the conservation and protection of water and how it impacts society. She is an international water artist who primarily focuses on ecological works. Her efforts in activist art influenced the annual San Antonio River clean up, as well as educated many people on the importance of water. Her work raised awareness in China as well, her best known project being The Living Water Garden in the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, China, the first water-themed ecological park in urban China. In 2009, Damon was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.

Non-profit and NGO Connections[ edit]
From 1980-2000 Damon founded and directed "No Limits for Women Artists," an organization that sought to improve female leadership and assist men in becoming strong independent allies. The organization worked to foster connections among its members who were required to participate in daily telephone calls with each other. These calls gave women the opportunity to talk about their art and their goals for the day; increasing personal motivation and productivity.

In 1991, Damon founded Keepers of the Waters, a nonprofit organization that serves as an international community to encourage "art, science and community projects for the understanding and remediation of living water systems." The nonprofit is run with a collaborative approach and was started with the support of the Hubert Humphrey Institute.

In 2006, Damon, alongside a group of artists, scientists, and funders, met in Vancouver and created a summary report for UNESCO titled "Art in Ecology – A Think Tank on Arts and Sustainability." UNESCO had commissioned a report in advance of this meeting titled "Mapping the Terrain of Contemporary EcoART Practice", of which the meeting and summary report were a result.

Performance Art[ edit]
In the 1970s, Damon began to work as a performance artist. Her work explored the connection between women and nature, often through covering herself with natural materials such as feathers and bark.

In 1977, she created a piece called 7,000 Year Old Woman. During the performance, she wore 420 tiny bags of colored flour, that she ritualistically punctured in a public ceremony on Wall Street. Removing them, Damon eventually formed a spiral/labyrinthine pattern on the ground. She slowly removed the bags, giving them to passersby, "creating an image of woman made both powerful and vulnerable through giving." Jennie Klein wrote that the imagery "referenced the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, associated with a Neolithic Goddess site in Turkey where [Damon] had lived as a child."

In a 1979 piece called Blind Beggarwoman and the Virgin Mary, Damon, as the central performer, dressed in rags and bags of dust, with gauze taped over her eyes. Crouching over a begging bowl filled with more pouches, she asked the spectators to whisper stories from their lives to her. The goal of the piece was to create a space where women's stories could be told. In Damon discussed the piece in an interview, saying "In that performance, I asked the question: who are the female Homers, the female storytellers, who were the containers of history and memory? On the street, I begged for stories from people’s lives, while my eyes were covered with these very obvious patches. I practiced with a friend of mine who was blind. People started saying that I was the multi-breasted female goddess and stuff like that, but that was not the origin of this piece. May Stevens got it right—she was the first to recognise that the work was also a mutilation image." The other performers either crouched low or sat on the floor, repeating "gestures -a woman endlessly reciting beads to the Virgin, another transferring sawdust from one bucket to another, a third, dressed in a mound of the small pouches filled with colored powder, systematically slitting them open with a knife until she was nude-were suggestive of women's endurance and of the cyclic nature of women's work."

As part of The Great American Lesbian Art Show in 1980, Damon performed Rape Memory. Against a chorus of voices trying to silence her, she attempted to share her own traumatic rape experience. After an hour, she was allowed to describe an assault she experienced when she was two and a half years old. Audience members were allowed to share their own experiences, and they did. Damon sought to heal through community.

Performances

 * 1985-90: The Shrine for Everywoman.
 * 1983-1989: A Mediation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet.
 * 1981-83: A Rape Memory.
 * 1979-81: Blind Beggar Woman.
 * 1977: 7,000 Year Old Woman, New York, N.Y.

Shows

 * 2019: Keepers of the Waters: Lhasa & Chengdu, Taipei Biennial.
 * 2012: Feminist, and..., Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA.
 * 1986-1991: A Memory of Clean Water, Everhart Museum.
 * 1990: An Homage to Rivers, Aspen Art Museum Biennial.
 * January 25 – March 22, 1987: Special Projects (Winter 1987), MoMA PS1.
 * January 17 – March 14, 1982: The Wild Art Show, MoMA PS1.

Articles[ edit]

 * Damon, Betsy. "The 7,000 Year Old Woman," Heresies 1, no.3 (Fall 1977)
 * Forney, Matt. "Environmentalism By Ordinary People is Perilous in China--U.S. Woman Makes Enemies But Perseveres to Help Clean Up Stinking River," The Wall Street Journal (Jul. 2000)
 * Carruthers, Beth. "Art, Sweet Art: Adaptive, Hybrid and Flexibe, EcoART Moves Hearts, Changes Minds and Ultimately Alters Behaviors," Alternatives Journal 32, no. 4-5 (Dec. 2006)
 * Jones, Diana. "Development Project Uses Art to Control Water Flow in Larimer," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Jan. 2015)

Books[ edit]

 * Moyer, Twylene and Glenn Harper [ed.s]. The New Earthwork: Art Action Agency, Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press (2012).

Web sources[ edit]

 * Keepers of the Waters, 2017.
 * An Interview with Betsy Damon: Living Water, 2009.