Sweatshop Exhibition
Welcome Sign
This sign was originally used to advertise the
exhibition. I used red and white poster board since both SUNY Cortland
and Cornell use a red and white color scheme. Black vertical lines suggest
sweatshop workers behind bars, like in a prison. The sign was used for
both prior advertising and at the exhibition itself to provide information on
the dates and opening reception.
Overall View
This photograph of the overall exhibition gives some
idea of its general appearance and provides views of the hanging
exhibits. These exhibits were of clothes made in sweatshops in various
areas of the world. For at least a month and half I collected used
clothes for this project. The central ceiling is open; a mobile of
shirts hangs from a bar that goes up to other bars where the ropes are tied.
In the background of this photograph, you can see hanging shirts with letters
that spell out the words "End Sweatshops."
"Stop Signs"
Hanging between the shirts spelling out "End
Sweatshops" are various large wooden "Stop Signs" painted with
acrylics. These call for people to stop sweatshops, This one is stop
"Low Wages" Since these signs are large they are very eye catching in
the exhibition.
Nike Sculpture
The conceptual sculpture is a Nike soccer ball put in
a wooden cage with vertical prison-like bars. A Nike soccer shoe is placed on
top.
Soccer Ball Poster
This poster shows the "dark side of the soccer
ball". The text reads "In Pakistan, where 80 percent of the world's
soccer balls are made, there are 11 to 12 million working children. At least
half of them will die of starvation or disease before they reach their 12th
birthday. Scores of children, most of them aged five to ten, produce soccer
balls by hand for about $1.20 a day. The children work 80 hours a week in near
total darkness and total silence." The image of the ball was inverted from
mainly white to mainly black to suggest the misery of the child workers.
I was inspired to make my practicum a community project
supporting efforts against sweatshops after attending a lecture by Charles
Kernaghan, "The Fight to End Child Labor,” at State University of New York
College at Cortland (SUNY Cortland). I was stunned to realize how many
American multinational companies had established sweatshops overseas to make
tremendous profits without paying workers adequate incomes to survive. I
felt the sweatshop issue would be an excellent one to work on as an
artist. My interest lay in issues concerning women and their status, and
the lecture made me understand how much discrimination and exploitation women
as well as children had to face in relation to sweatshops.
After being inspired by the lecture, I saw an advertisement
of the New York Public Interest Research Group, NYPIRG, at SUNY Cortland for a
meeting of the Sweatshop Project, a group dedicated to making SUNY Cortland a
"sweat-free" campus. At the first meeting I attended, I told
participants of my interest in their activities and my art work on the
Depression. I volunteered to do any art work they might need, since involvement
with them could become my community project for my program at Goddard. Somehow,
the idea of an exhibition against sweatshops came up and I happily volunteered
to organize it. I was especially happy to work with economics professor Howard
Botwinick, who was the advisor to activists on the Workers' Rights Consortium.
From then on, I attended all the autumn 2000 meetings.
Though I organized the exhibition and developed the final exhibits and their
display, this was a collaborative project. The SUNY Cortland people involved
included four faculty members who wrote most of the texts used for the
exhibits. I provided the group with preliminary sketches to get feedback on my
plans. Students who were regular sweatshop activists provided publicity in
campus papers, passed out flyers, sent emails, painted the display pedestals
and carried them to the location for the exhibition.
The exhibition objective was to document and display the
current situations of sweatshops - to communicate what a sweatshop is, who the
workers are, and why this is an issue of importance. My idea was to walk
viewers through the reality of a sweatshop was so I spent the majority of time
on the panels with written material. Because information about an image
increases the information that the image communicates, I carefully laid out the
texts in relationship with the images. This was a tedious, time-consuming
task. I made everything attractive and easily legible so that viewers
would want to read the materials.
Altogether, I built exhibits for 15 exhibition sections, most of them
related to particular companies or areas of the world. For this task, I used a
studio space at the university. There was a great deal of work and time
involved, so often I spent my nights in the studio and actually lived there.
This "Sweatshop Exhibition" was held at SUNY
Cortland (State University of New York College at Cortland) in the Old Main
Building on April 4-18, 2001. The exhibits were numbered so that people would
have a sequential experience, leading from a global map of sweatshop
production, to posters drawn by some New York school children, to protest sweatshops.
This same exhibition was also shown at Cornell University.
There was a large turnout at SUNY Cortland. Though I do not exact
numbers, I am sure over 400 people came. When I was there, I listened to
comments and noticed viewers' actions; they were sincerely appreciative and
spent time looking at the exhibits. Many people signed in the guest book, but
the location in the hall easily drew many more people passing by. There were a
lot of written responses, many long or thoughtful, all of them appreciative.
This indicated that people read at least some of the material and thought about
it. Some responses in the book commented on others' responses there; they were
drawn into a kind of dialogue on the issues.
Though the main gallery curator at the school saw and
praised the exhibition, there were more people from the social sciences and
humanities than the arts. One reason might be that a "Sweatshop
Exhibition" is not the kind of event that regularly draws faculty members
and students in the arts. Moreover, there were no faculty members or students
from the arts in the group except me.
The fact that people at Cornell University asked to
have the same exhibition is significant evidence of success. Additionally
several months after the exhibition, a woman from a church group contacted me.
She had seen the exhibition and wanted to borrow my Disney sculpture, one of the
two best pieces in my opinion. It no longer existed, since to make it I had
borrowed the expensive Plexiglas container, which had to be returned, and the
church women were quite disappointed. I realized that real art, art that could
satisfy the artist beyond the purpose of protest, was also the art that moved
people the most in support of the social cause.
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