Where Art Meets Activism

Posted January 15, 2009

Virginia Woolf said, “A woman must have a room of her own” to create. When friends and artist-activists Doris Cacoilo and Amie Figueiredo discovered that Hudson County women did not have such a space, they started one.

“We were just out of college, working full-time, and had no time for art. So I invited a bunch of similar women over and we started making [art together],” Cacoilo says.

A year later, Cacoilo and Figueiredo moved their art activities to Hoboken’s Neumann Leather Building and co-founded _gaia studio, a collective of women working in interdisciplinary art fields and committed to environmental, social, and political activism.

“It was 2002. We were pretty angry,” Cacoilo jokes. “We needed to get our work out there.”

The ten current members of the collective each pay a nominal fee for access to the studio, now located at 315 3rd Street in Jersey City. Members have presented and performed at P.S. 1, Exit Art, Jersey City Art Museum, Loew’s Jersey Theatre, the Hudson County One-Acts Festival, and the Jersey City and Hoboken Artist Studio Tours.

The collective has produced the Eve Ensler play The Vagina Monologues in Hudson County for the last five years; in 2009, the group will produce a different Ensler work in celebration of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

This spring, _gaia will also present its fourth Wonder Woman residency for practicing artists. This year’s theme, “Money Money Money,” will explore the relationships between monetary matters and the practice of art. “We have a wonderful group in the program,” says Cacoilo. “During these stressful economic times, it is exciting to bring women together who use mediums like embroidery and sound to interpret the global economy, currency, and the stock market.”

To find out more about _gaia, visit gaiastudio.org.
 

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