 My name is Nicole Schulman. I'm from Groundswell, formerly known as Groundswell Community Mural Project. We are an organization that uses art as a tool for social change. We recruit young people, mostly ages 14 through 21, to do afterschool and summer projects. We work on murals, mosaics, and occasionally poster projects. Groundswell formulates projects with a community partner. We are in our 16th year. It's our 16th anniversary. We're here to talk about The Voices Heard Project. Groundswell was founded by Amy Sanderman 16 years ago. It's an organization that has not only supported social justice issues, but feminist issues. We feel it's important to have projects that allow young women to discuss research and do large-scale mural projects about issues that affect their lives. Actually, for the first time in a while, we had a making history project as well. If you're interested in our work, we're going to have a mailing list you can sign up for. Our website is groundswellmural.org. And I'd like to introduce the young women. These are all youth artists from The Voices Heard Project this summer. We can start at the end. Please introduce yourselves. So your name, age, school, your artistic experience. Hi, my name is Jennifer Etienne. I'm 17 years old and I go to Brooklyn High School of the Arts downtown. I've been working with Groundswell for about a year now and it's been pretty interesting. It's been quite a journey and it's taught me what I'm really capable of as an artist. Hi, my name is Dakota Austin and I'm 17 years old and I too go to Brooklyn High School of the Arts. I've been with Groundswell for going on three years now. I've interned there and I've done a lot of murals and a lot of projects with Nicole. My experience with art is I go to college, high school for art. It's like four years now and so it's like my last year. It's really nice and working with Groundswell has really opened me up to different abilities that I'm able to do. I do public speaking, I talk around people. I do art and it's really opening up for me. It's like giving me a path to my future. I'm Ernie Mora. I'm 17. I go to Brooklyn Tech. This is my first summer in Groundswell and I love the experience. It opened me up a little bit more and I hope to be a graphic designer. That's why I'm interested in art at Groundswell. Hi, my name is Kai. Basically I went to school to be in Human Services and I interned with an elementary school called PS 15 in Red Hook. I worked with Underprivileged and basically I went back to SYP to reapply for the job and then I decided to just do something totally different. I like Groundswell's name so I was like, oh that sounds interesting. I started doing things more related to art and I changed my major to graphic designing and advertising. Basically I want to just be in the field of graphic designing for now. We have the best of the best here from our participants. We have a large amount of amazing, intelligent, talented young people who will just felling misconceptions about how teenagers today don't care about social issues. I'm going to begin with a brief history of voices heard murals in the PowerPoint. The original artist was Katie Yamasaki. Assistant artist Menchahat Abram. Menchahat was also a youth artist who became an assistant artist. These murals, the first voices for a project, you may have seen this. This is on Union Street and Fourth Avenue, 2004. It's called A Deal, A Dream I Do. All of those are faux painted bricks and each of the windows deals with different adversities. Young women have to overcome to face their dreams or to fight for their dreams. Again, this is another Katie Yamasaki mural. This is very close by, a new day. This is done in connection to the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Again, we have to thank Liz Sackler for all her support of Groundswell and the Brooklyn Museum's support of Groundswell. This is from 2005. This is an immigrant journey home. This is in a school in Sunset Park. There are actually two parts to this. I'm only showing you the voices heard section, which is the participants interviewed their own mothers and the mothers from children in this school to research their journey as immigrants coming to the United States from a woman's and mother's point of view. Around the corner, there is actually an all boys version, which describes the story of the fathers. This is also close by. This is on 19th Street and 3rd Avenue. Art builds community, community creates change. This is actually a detail of the mural. It's much larger. Sometimes it is quite difficult to photograph murals in their entirety. You'll see the one worked on this summer. Again, this deals with how the arts creates opportunities for young women and these portraits were actually, the women depicted here, are portraits of the actual artists themselves. This was one of the first projects for voices heard where the young women actually decided what topic they were going to do. Very often, Groundsville partners with a community organization such as Black Veterans for Social Justice or Transportation Alternatives, Department of Environmental Protection and they, in a way, request a mural to be done on a specific topic in a specific location. This was the first time where Groundsville was able to self fund a project. They had a partner of 5th Avenue Committee, a really cool organization that owns this building. They said you can do whatever topic you want. The young women spent a long time voting and researching the topics of poverty, women in prison, military. Many of the young women actually wanted to join the military. After doing a lot of research, this was during the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan were not over yet. They heard just too many nightmare stories about how women are treated in the military, women being raped by fellow GIs. This is visible from the BQE Brooklyn Queens Expressway. You see, we are not government-issued. It was a balance of being respectful to people who are veterans. They actually spoke to women who were in the military, women who had unfortunately suffered violence in the military. All of those, in the shadows of all those parachutes, there are statistics on what happens to women when they enlist in the army. This was slightly controversial, but we do, part of our process is that we always have a community sharing. The youth begin their research process. This is part of the Summer Leadership Institute, which is seven weeks. The first three weeks, the youth research and design a rough mock-up of the mural. We share it with the community. The community gives us feedback, and then we continue on to the final product. This is one on a women's delta, informed in a power from 2009. Again, Kitty Yamsaki. And this is the first poster series. This begins my tenure, and Dakota actually worked on these series of posters. Dakota, you want to talk about this a little bit? Yeah, so, I can see it. Safe Love Shouldn't Be Science Fiction. We were doing a project for Voices for our Visionaries, and we were doing posters for Abuse and Domestic Violence, and this is one of them. If you loved me, you would respect my space. So, we kind of did it on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and it came out really good. We were kind of working with it. It was my first time working with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and I actually learned how to do it really quick, and it came out really nice. So, we had a lot of different posters, and we were partnering with Day One, so it was really cool. We had a really good community partner. Yeah, the community partner was Day One again, and they're one of the few organizations that advocate for safe relationships for teenagers. They provide counseling and legal services to teenagers who are in abusive relationships, and one of the obstacles they run into as an organization is that parents, teachers, principals don't take dating violence or different, more subtle, or kinds of abuse seriously in teenage relationships. Oh, they're just kids. They're just going through this. So, they requested of us. Again, we had pre-sessions. The young women decided to work with Day One after we had Joyce, a representative from Day One, come and talk about what they do, and they requested that we do a series of posters they could give to different schools for free. Small, accessible posters that dealt with the different kinds of abuse. That was quite difficult. Dakota, it was pretty hard to come up because there was a lot of different, sort of, harder topics. Yeah. This one, you worked on this one, which was, we should show what positive love should be. And can you talk about why the whole space thing came up in the robots? So, it took us a long time to get this whole subject in one form. So, we came up with a lot of different schemes, a lot of different mock-ups, and one, we came up with vegetables, and safe love should be healthy, like vegetables. But, it didn't come out too well, so we changed it around. I was working with two other people, and we flipped around and this and that, and finally we came up with this, and safe love shouldn't be science fiction. We're saying, like, safe love, it shouldn't be fake, you know? It should be real, you know? When you're in love with someone, it should be real, and it shouldn't be, you know, affecting you, like, it can be harming you. And, you know, love shouldn't harm anybody, it shouldn't hurt you. So, this one, that came up, and we have the communication, which is another way of safe love, is communication and having fun, and just, you know, bringing everything together, just, you know, just loving each other, but not, like, you know, physically hurting anybody. Yeah, there's you, I know you worked on, like, good communication with a little monster guy in the robot, having fun. Basically, things that should be common, you know, a common sense, that if you have a healthy relationship, it should be like this. You shouldn't have somebody, you know, you shouldn't have to worry about getting into your partner angry. You shouldn't have to walk on eggshells around them. You shouldn't have these cycles of getting into fights, making up, and then it happening all over again. They asked for a specific poster about the cycles of violence. This was actually rendered completely by young people in the program, in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. So, the one, love should be a breeze, not a storm. This was difficult because they asked for different kinds of abuse. There's physical abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, visualizing these in a way that was not triggering and not gratuitous, but in an accessible, but still powerful way is always a challenge. Cyber space, somebody texts you 50 times a day that's abuse. Heard full words, verbal abuse. Using money to control you. Let's say I pay for your cell phone, therefore, I'm in charge of it. And now we get to the project this summer, and originally, does any of you guys want to talk about our original partner and what happened with that? Okay, so I guess I'll talk about it. So, our original partner was Spoke the Hub, and it used to be a soap factory, and so we were going to do the mural in the parking lot of the Marriott, but we had some trouble because they didn't want us painting. They're on their driveway because you have the paint on the floor and all the cars going back and forth. It was a big deal. So, we changed our community partner and we worked over it on the mobile gas station on Flatbush and Johnson, and Mr. Sy was actually the person that worked there, and he was really cool, and we finally got work that out. We still incorporated everything from our old community partner to our mural, like the bubbles, and it came out really nice. We'll see it on the slides. I'm going to go through these. Our original partner was Elise, and one of the founders of the Spoke the Hub organization, which is a dance center, and she's also co-owner of the 295 Guadans building. So, we began with images of dance, posing for some of ourselves. I'll show you part of the process where we have our sketches. We have a mock-up of a mural design. We have our community partners. We have board members from Groundsville. This is about three weeks into the project and the summer begins in July and ends in August. So, this is the last week of July. We get feedback before we actually go in the wall and paint it. Like all projects, things happen. Our original wall fell through, and we were fortunate that Downtown Brooklyn Partnership found us another wall to work on. And here we are. This is a Baker scaffolding. We start by priming the wall, and then we grit the wall by putting boxes. We have our small image, put boxes over the small image, and then blow it up the truck all back of kind Diana's heads. This is on the Longbrook wall. This is facing Flatbush Avenue and it's on Johnson Street. So, if you go around the corner, there's a mobile station there. So, if you're filling up your car tires or your bike, you're going to see it right there. These are two veterans, Casey and Rebecca, priming. These are the early stages of our mural, which we're going to discuss at length. It's another angle of us filling in, outlining. These are scaffolding. This mural is about 14 feet high. So, this is pretty low scaffolding for us. If you're 14 and up, you can go on rolling scaffolding. If you're 18 and up, you can go on the super bolted scaffolding that stays there and can go up to 40 feet. So, we work on some very large projects. These are pictures of our mural, which is a title for those who speak and have yet to speak. Which, who came up with that title again? So, ladies, Kai, would you like to talk a little bit about the topic of our mural? Okay, so the topic of our mural is about women connecting together, bridging communities across the world. So, with our mural, we try to incorporate different types of women from different types of parts of the world. So, we had Aung San Suu Kyi, we had King Peggy, we had Ben Darashiva, and we also used the Da Vinci code picture. I know you guys know the picture with the arms rotating and stuff like that. That painting was kind of incorporated with the lady, the brown-skinned lady, breaking out of the raindrop, trying to express that we could break boundaries and make a change to that. So, the Da Vinci code was actually pretty cool that she was glad to realize, and did some research on it. I mean, the Da Vinci became the truvius man, their counter proportions, which was the inspiration for the logo of Spoke the Hub. Right. So, I did some research, and then I found out that it was a very, how do I say this, a picture where a man is breaking out of his boundaries about gender roles, basically. I have a friend that's like into art and a lot of things, and he told me it was like a spiritual enlightenment for a man to break out of the stereotypical things, and that's maybe his way of interpreting it, but I interpreted it in a mural that way too. And we also tried to use the term bridging the communities together, literally. Our mural is right next to the Brooklyn Manhattan Bridge. So, I mean, it goes together very smoothly, and we chose colors that are very vibrant, and I looked up and did some research about most feminism. Our logo would be the purple ribbon. So, we try to use a lot of vibrant colors like purple and indigo and blue, you know, and we didn't want to make it look a little too depressing with blue colors and sadness, so we try to make it show the progression of going from darker colors to lighter colors and breaking free, and that's why we have like the orange part at the end with the bridge, you know. And ultimately our goal is to help younger women wake up and realize that, you know, you may not have a voice right now, but there are people that didn't have a voice and gained a voice to speak, and you could do that too, you know. So, we're skipping ahead a little bit, but since we have the mural up for those who speak which is from one of Jennifer's poems, do you guys want to describe the imagery where the bubbles came from, where the tears came from, viewing the mural it goes from? This is the beginning, and it goes towards the middle. This is part of our dedication where we have the tears and water and the break going through, then begins portraits of well-known women activists, and then this is the end where we have the bridge, bridging women of an international community. Go back a little bit around the corner to get that part, which is sort of our teaser. Well, the bubbles came about because it spoke the hub prior to it becoming spoke the hub. It was a soap company, and Elise, the lady in charge, she kind of wanted to incorporate its past into the mural when we're still working on her wall. The bubbles, they represent a lot more than just a soap factory, but they represent being whole and someone being trapped inside something, and being inside that image that society has put out for you, and you want to break out of the bubble, you want to break out of that image because you want to be yourself, you don't want to be confined to what everyone else is telling you to be. They expressed a lot of stuff. It's sad, it can be bright, it can pop and just ruin everything. But when you look at it, it's really our image, our whole reason behind it, which is to break out of that image that society has put on you and just to be yourself and be free. Would you like to add to that? I want to talk about the tears. In the tears, you see different issues that women face, and in one of them you see self-esteem issues. The people in grounds will give us each day we came in, they gave us a topic, and we had to draw what we thought. The first thing that came to mind when we saw that topic, and the woman standing in the mirror was one of the drawings that one of our workers did. Anyone could incorporate that. And the one with the woman with the lock over her mouth was incorporated from the Comadres of El Salvador, I think. The Comadres of El Salvador is a group of all women where at a time the government was keeping all women silent, and they were taking their family members away. Anyone who tried to revolt against them was taken away, and any woman that tried to revolt against them was tortured and raped. They just kept silent for so long and you wanted to incorporate that in the mural. So basically each tear shows the struggles that they went through. The mural goes this way. You see the brighter colors and then breaking out of their bubbles and bringing out of their tears and showing the positive things that women can do. Again, to elaborate on that, we often have expert speakers, women activists come in and talk to us as part of our research about different topics. Our beginning loose topic was women as an international community. The Comadres of El Salvador came in to talk to us about the continuing struggles of the mothers of the disappeared and assassinated from El Salvador. One was Mara Kamaskar who's an activist who's been to El Salvador many times and her partner Eleazar Castillo whose father was disappeared. They're talking about how these women in El Salvador are still fighting to find out what happened to their families years after finding for justice, finding out you may have heard of Oscar Romero who was assassinated. They want to reopen that case. They came and talked to us about their struggles and the necessity of international solidarity. When you see a lot of images of women with a white hit scarf and black dress and even a loudspeaker, that is inspired by Comadres El Salvador. Anybody want to talk about some images? I have too many great pictures of them of some of the women depicting the mural, some of the women activists. One or two. I'm trying to remember. I'll talk about King Peggy. King Peggy, this is a really interesting case for me. She is from Ghana originally and her family had what we would call royalty tied to her and she didn't know. She was actually living here in Washington DC and I believe she worked at the Embassy of Ghana. What is it? She got to call from Ghana here in the United States like you're a king. Come back, you know. Basically, when royalty and African traditions like say a king or queen dies the next child or the next generation takes that role and there was this little town in Ghana and basically she decided to go back and she's the king and she's helping her people out and doing a lot of good things for that town and the thing I liked about it best is that it's a woman, she's a king a woman could take up roles that mostly men fulfill and do it just as great and that's very inspiring to me and I didn't know anything about her I never even knew that a woman could be a king so I think when we got questions from people passing by in a street looking at the mural like who's that and we told them about it some didn't even believe us like they were so surprised and that's how I felt so with this mural it helps create a lot of knowledge for people that didn't know about these women so. Excellent. So maybe we could tell us some of the challenges and successes we had while working on this mural inside, outside, designing coming up with a concept from this really huge topic women as an international community working outside and so on Okay so we had many challenges but we overcame them obviously our first challenge was moving the mural from Marriott to, well actually that was the first challenge but our first challenge was when we came in there were certain things we had to draw pictures about and if you look at the pictures that we drew in the sketches you wouldn't think it would turn into that mural like we did flags, we did sketches of people stick figures, you know but we were all coming and formulating together to this one mural into a woman whose people were to speak and yet to speak and so it was really difficult coming up with the whole topic behind it and the colors and so we used the color purple because purple is the feminist color and we used a lot of different people Alice Elise her braid because she was working for the spoke the hub she was our community partner so we used her inside the mural we used her long braid to go throughout the whole mural and the bubbles to show freedom and it was kind of hot outside all the time it was really hot and so building the scaffolding and the heat it was like an all girls group and that's what made it so cool that we came together as girls as females as one and we built that scaffold and we worked hard and we painted and we sketched and we marked the whole wall primed the wall and to see when we come together it's like really cool and the heat was very bad but we had our community partner Mr. Sai he came out and gave us a cooler full of water and water bottles and ice and he was really cool Mr. Sai is the owner of the gas station the owner of the gas station Mr. Sai and it came out we pulled through there's a lot of troubles actually to work with a bunch of girls you would think that maybe there would be drama going on but it wasn't we all worked together as one and we came together and we did it and we pulled through for me I kind of like a challenge that's what I like so challenges to me weren't that challenging I would just say the rain the summer we had a lot of rain every time it would rain we would have to wrap up and we were still painting even if it was drizzling that's not a problem but there was a time where it was like a monsoon and just rain just came down out of nowhere and all this stuff got wet so we had the next day and do it over again fix whatever got messed up and paint spills I was underneath the scaffolding one time paint fell in my clothes that to me was all fun that was part of the experience and like she said the scaffolding that was pretty heavy and trying to break down for me I'm a very small person having girls come together and work to lift up heavy materials and things like that the scaffolding a bunch of you guys came to volunteer to help build this and it was all girls building this and this is low scaffolding we're very fortunate our community partner let us just roll around the corner lock it up sometimes you have to break it down so do you guys remember the reactions of people we had in the streets when we were all building this like the person came with all the bars for the scaffolding and people were passing by as we were building it and they were just like oh my gosh it looks so heavy so we were all working I think 14 people and we were all putting it together and some people got scrapes but we didn't really care about it but it took us so long but we worked through it it was great it was hard it was very hard agonizing but we all did it and we did one scaffolding we had to do another one everybody was like why but we did it anyway and all the guys passing by were like you sure you don't need help and said we're fine we got this it was really an interesting experience there was a I don't know if this is a challenge or not but we had a couple of really people passing by that a couple of men had said some offensive things to us about the mural or some people may have questioned why isn't there no men in this mural and when you try to explain to them it's about having pride in women and appreciating what we have in the film mural making history so this is our little thing and getting those questions sometimes is very annoying a little bit of harassing but I got past that we all did and we all learned how to deal with it appropriately without letting it get to arise with us no negative energy was getting to us working together like a couple of little things that weren't that big but affected us in a way the same grade over and over and trying to get it just right that was really annoying or remixing paints that ran out it was how but it was fun yeah she's right mixing the paint was really hard and keeping the paint this way when we first came to the job I think we started at nine o'clock and we had to pull the scaffolding out unchain it take out all the supplies set everything up and then that gives like an armor we had to do all that stuff the caps for this paint this paint spills and what is this way and it was like it was really hectic but we kind of pulled through and every day we had to put the same stuff away and like it was really cool we were working together it was really cool to do we had a lot of positive feedback from people on the street you guys remember people walking past and shouting and stuff any any anecdotes about that of the positive feedback definitely who wants to go first I remember there was this one lady a single day and she would just come in every day and like just overwhelming compliments and um this lady she was a little bit and you know that kind of a little crazy guy but it was cool I liked the appreciation I liked feeling like I was making a positive change it was um there was these three kids that came by one day and um I was painting by myself in the corner like towards the closer to the project side and this boy comes and he was like what is this like what are you guys doing and we were like yeah this is our project we work for a groundswell community and I said I said that he was like oh you guys do paintings in the projects and I'm like no um we do it everywhere you know you could be a part of this too like our mural is for you guys is for anyone that passes by and sees it you know and he was like that's so cool that's so interesting he started asking questions about who are the people in the mural and like he learned something new through that and I learned something from him too you know like he's I like seeing different people pass by different questions and networking and meeting with different people you know and instilling them with something inspiring yeah and a lot of people they had a lot of good things to say about it and they were like wow you guys are painting this mural for our community you know they bless the oh my god God bless you it's so nice and actually we had a this place called the gold street eatery across the street from us they gave us 50% off on anything inside the place because they were like so happy that we built this mural like when you look out the window of the gold street eatery in front of it and it's like it came out so nice and people just complimenting walking back and forth taking pictures asking oh gosh how did you do this how did you come up with the idea for this it's all girls group it's like a lot of women a lot of men they kind of put a lot of positive energy into it and I felt really good about it we felt really good about it yeah we owe a huge thanks to the gold street eatery which is directly across the street from a mural thanks to Carl one of these sort of proprietor manager because A they gave us 50% off on food they let the girls sit in there when because we transferred to this site it's interesting because we mentioned there was a making history project the girls we got the gas station so we walked through the there was a gas station and garage so we walked under the cars that were up there was gas there's all this stuff and then the old boys had theirs in a community garden with flowers and trees pink and purple and pretty stuff so we didn't really have an indoor place so this restaurant basically let us hang out in there when it would start pouring and at at one point I'm sure you guys remember it was a Wednesday where the girls have half day but a lot of you guys volunteered to stay poured we were working on the blue up there before there was orange and it just the her face was done and it just started to run they take a hose or hosing it down so we're kind of completely soaking what covered with paint walking into the restaurant so they were just totally nice to us it's awesome so any any other comments about the making of this mural? weird people on the streets like I want to give you props cause like it was raining hard and like she was still outside through the pouring rain drenched in water and like we were inside like you sure you want to come inside like no we have to finish it so she's outside and she was doing that whole part right there and that's my thanks to you but basically working on the whole project it was really agonizing and I think that it was really good that we did the project right side of the eatery because since we did it outside the eatery it attracted more attention to their eatery so just like oh my gosh we should go to that eatery across from the really pretty mural that he did so now it's our thanks to them for helping us so yeah yeah like that diner was great because every time we had lunch we would all just go and sit in a circle and talk and eat and chat like we had two I guess we would say intervals like first lunch break group of girls second lunch break group of girls but it wasn't like clicks like everybody rotated and sat together and ate together and it was like a little family thing kind of basically and now it's like the best part it was really hilarious some crazy jokes insiders and funny things you know and sitting in the restaurant feeling like stars because people passing by saying we like your mural you know yeah another cool thing about the community was the fact that a lot of people who were passing by would like given their feedback like behind her head the sunrise kind of yeah like an artist who was passing by so just we put it in because it looked a little too green so just brighten it up yeah it's hard that's thank you for reminding me to give feedback on the street from passersby that actually changes the mural sometimes originally it's this is all the way on the right side then you go left and it connects and originally it was just blue through here and a gentleman who lived in the building across the street whose name was Bazaar who was an artist as well said you need to carry that orange into the rest of the piece so we did and I've worked on other projects where we've had not necessarily professional artists but just like you know in all due respect I know you guys designed this and you thought about this but here's my suggestion take it or leave it so that's how this kind of glow ended up and it really connects it down there as well so also this is an interesting neighborhood in transition those of you guys who know the former decal market which is now gone it's an area where it's near Long Island University there's a lot of fancy luxury high-rises and there's NYCHA housing so we're literally between NYCHA and you know public housing there was a little lady with the wigs it's from a women's shelter down there there's a bunch of high schools so it's a very diverse and interesting neighborhood so we got a lot of feedback also there's a police station right down the street which was interesting any other anecdotes about this project dumping out the water I guess after cleaning up we had to wash out all the brushes and then pour the water out in a place where it won't get on the street because then if it was on the street the police would be like why are you doing that and they give us a ticket and we didn't want that so we had to go into the gas station so we would have problems with Mr. Asai's mom and he was just like what are you doing you're going to mess up the sink so we had to pour it into the sink or pour it into the drain and then make sure that it was nice and it was filled with spills so we'd have to get the power hose and blast it off but aside from that so we have some other questions just discussing feminism and feminist art that we can talk about we have some time and then we're going to open up for questions from the audience so we started in the very beginning talking about the word feminism and the term feminism so what do you think the term feminism means to young women of your generation and how would you define or redefine the idea of feminism for me as a young woman the term feminism means a strong appreciation and pride for women for a woman to have pride in herself as well and having appreciations for all things that women could do and what we have done because we live in such a patriarchal western society and you don't see a lot of appreciation for what women could do unless it's with her exposing herself or doing something so I mean there's a lot of positive things that we could do and that we should be exposing and we could do it through art that's for me what feminism is yeah for me feminism I think is women representing women and giving other women a voice because not everybody has the voice like you want to say something but you can because no one's going to listen to you but when you have a group of women helping other women to get out there and expose themselves and show the world and society that they're not what you think we are we're not this, we're not that we're breaking out of that bubble as a mural we're showing you who we are and they're standing up for all women not just for yourself but just standing up for all women because women know each other and better than anybody else so we just want to give them that props in my opinion feminism is equality and respect for all women and feminism to other women of my generation I won't say all but I'll say some women automatically assume that it's like angry she women who like want to be superior to men and like that's really not the case and I I didn't think that before the project but it was like along the lines of that but after this project I really came to understand what feminism was yeah a man could be a feminist too as well like a lot of people don't realize that it's not about us being better than men it's not about us trying to be superior or like beat down on them or make them shameful you know it's about having appreciation for what women could do since we do have so much appreciation for what men do as well you know it's about equality within each other and not knocking each other down because we don't have enough women enough of us lifting each other up you know to me the term feminism to young women of our generation is a term that isn't really understood when women hear the word feminist it's taken offensively because that's how society has forced us to look at it it is looked at as a man hating women therefore it is natural for us young women to be taken offense to it I that's how I really really feel about it because till this when I started with the program the first question that asked us was what do you think feminism is and the whole time everybody was telling us their explanations and I still did not have a concrete definition for the word feminist because to me one person can look at it positively and the other person can look at it negatively but at the end of the day you can't convert people to think the same way so to me I don't think there is a solid meaning for the word feminism it's how you incorporate the word excellent why do you think it's important to have separate gender projects Groundswell has the voices heard every year we finally got funding again to have a making history which is all guys have separate gender projects what do you gain from it what are the benefits I think it's important to have an all girls or an all boys project just like a unisex project because youth within the same gender don't get enough time to spend together yeah you have boys that have their friends and girls that have their little friends and this and that but like on a whole having like 20 people work together on a learning experience working with the same gender summer has allowed me to learn about other girls experiences and lives and also it taught me a lot about myself and you think that it's very rare that you could see or find a group of young men or all women working together without any so-called quote-unquote drama or fights but it's amazing to know that we could cooperate as a team and inevitably built together unity strength pride understanding amongst one another and we don't see enough of that being portrayed in any society right now you know and to me you could get that with working together with the same like opposite genders but it's even stronger with someone like you that can understand you and help you learn more about yourself because honestly a lot of us had stories to tell and we all were different you know so between women there's like same genders there's like a natural connection in a closer bond and more of an understanding of different experiences and situations that they're in yeah feminism like when you're working with women not only as a group it shows you that you know people are going through the same thing you're going through and like we know each other like your girl we know this and not like like no girly things like brushing hair and painting your nails but like we just know we know like we can express to each other different things we probably don't understand because you're a woman and I understand you I understand where you're coming from and so as Kai said you know you think it's going to be drama you know but we all came together and we kind of we made it work and they were really girls in this group were really cool so like I think it's positive working with girls and like keeping your same gender groups because like you kind of know each other you know what you want you know this and that and like you know which other's minds because you're the same almost the same person groups are important because it allows them to get out of their comfort zone and get along with boys or girls that they thought they would never get along with it allows them to put aside their social differences and work as a team and I think that's what grounds what really challenges us youth to do and I really appreciate that because in the group when we first started there was a lot of people we would all be divided up into our little groups that people would relate to we were people that we would never talk to because we were like so terrified to talk to them he was like what if she thinks I'm a weirdo so eventually we just all got into our little group of love so when we started working we had no choice but to talk to each other and I feel like doing that with females and with males since outside of grounds well men and women will face their own differences and all troubles with guys and girls so like say you have two people in the group and they don't like each other outside and when they came to grounds when they finished they were like best friends so I really think that's the main point of doing all girl and all boy groups to challenge each other yeah you could be the same gender and there could be so many differences and we had to learn how to work with all our differences like leave the drama at home come here and work together with each other if you don't like anyone I mean I don't think that happened here but you know there are people that sure before they started working with grounds well may have had homophobia or like some type of rejecting personality to something that they were uncomfortable with and grounds well challenge you to be around the things you're uncomfortable with I would never think I would be speaking in front of people like you know I don't and this is challenging to me but I like a challenge and you have to learn when it comes to working you want to get paid you want to make art you want to do something you want publicity then you're going to have to work for it no matter what and you're going to have to work through your differences and in the gender thing gender roles and all that I mean there are projects that were unisex and had both people you know genders and but this was different it's a different experience you know you could do that any day you could work with a man or a woman you could do that anywhere anytime but this was a time for us to come together and really make a positive change within a community so so we have about 15 minutes left so what issues do you think face young women of your generation today and are there any misconceptions that adults quote some of you are definitely adults but in general the older generation what misconceptions do they have and again what issues do you face well women face a lot of issues nowadays I mean they face issues through centuries women will always look down upon and men always have the upper hand and so when you're a woman you're trying to do this you're trying to do that the only way to make yourself look better is if you have what that man has like men are up here and women are down here and if you try to reach that goal what men have people are going to think that okay your soul is better like they say women they should be house wise they're taking care of your kids washing dishes and being in the house all the time and not doing a man's job for centuries men have gone outside and done the work and brought in the food and women just prepare it and they don't realize that women they can do men's job as just as good and even better and women are really faced with societal images and how you think you should look and they're portrayed in different ways that it's kind of upsetting and you can't just look at the cover and say you know I don't like that person you have to read you can't just skip to the middle of the book you have to read from the beginning of the book because that's where you know where their life starts and you have to go through the person and you realize you're this person and you're not what I thought you are so you can't just look at someone and say okay you're 16 years old and you're pregnant I don't like you you have to look at that person you don't know what happened to them you have to look at their situation because you never know if you could be in that same situation so you feel young women still face the same discrimination as women have historically today you still have issues of teenage pregnancy what are some issues that young women of around your age deal with definitely I think misconceptions that adults or I would say grown folks or people in general give young women young women the idea that we can't think or do things ourselves without getting hurt without getting raped without being promiscuous without like you know going out and never coming back home this misconception has come mainly from the majority of young women who portray these vulnerable negative qualities there are too many girls our age and women in general that are portraying this and the thing that makes it worse is too many of us allow it to be portrayed do you think the media has something yes definitely the media is what really manipulates mass manipulation is through TV programming means it could alter the way you think and the way you feel so when women watch these shows and they see like bad girls club love and hip hop basketball wives and all this trash you know no offense to anybody that watches that stuff but when they see that they go out and they try to reenact this thing and if you say you haven't watched a show and it hasn't made you feel angry it hasn't made you feel hurt it hasn't triggered you in any way that got your attention that's exactly what I want to reenact these and care about what these women on TV are doing and we allow it to keep going on and you know what's funny who's the ones that make these shows and who's the ones that work on these shows they're just doing it for money all these reality TV shows and they portray these ignorant stereotypes about us got us looking like I'm not going to say the words but have us looking so promiscuous and a lot of us are not like that a lot of us don't curse when I see that problem and I see that adults complain about our generation you know they often forgot who raised it you know what I mean so they complain and complain and complain but we only learn from the example that we see that they are doing and you know I define myself as a young woman that has a lot of respect maybe I have too much pride in myself so I can't allow that thing those type of things to represent me see I redefine myself and who I am and I think we did that through this mural defining who a woman could be and um you have to learn to redefine yourself and that's what we did yeah I really agree with Kai because when adults look at you they say oh you should do this you know they're ridiculing you but what you didn't realize is that you were a child too you were my age you did the same things I did so like anytime saying you know we're looking at you and you're setting an example and so we're doing whatever you say you know and like when you see these people on TV you know it's like they're exploiting their ignorance and it's really upsetting like when we look at like she said the basketball wives you know you see these women up there and they act a certain way so you think okay they're on TV they're famous why should I act like that too you know and it's just it's exploiting your ignorance and exploiting you know who you are and not just you know being simple being who you really are you're just trying to turn to someone else because the society says that's okay and someone says okay that's good you're gonna look like this so you're just like okay if I'm gonna be famous I'm gonna be rich I'm gonna be nice I'm gonna wear that you know you don't look at yourself and say wait do I really want to be this person do I want to exploit myself or do I want to be myself and just grow as who I am in person instead of being what everyone else tells me to be you know don't conform to what everyone else is being you know but I don't know what to say but like just being you know what society wants you to be look inside yourself and tell you you know I'm gonna grow as a person that I am and not gonna look at that person next to me and say I should be you I should look like you because you don't have that you can grow you can be famous you can do whatever you want because you have that willpower to trust yourself but you gotta you know look inside yourself and not just try to be the other person next to you know I think as young women we forgot what it is to be yourself and I think that now we're trying we're learning we're trying to find out what it is to be a woman I think we all start off as girls and some women are still girls themselves and it takes you have to learn to be a woman there's a difference between a woman and a girl a woman knows what's right and what's wrong she knows how to have pride in herself she knows how to walk with confidence and she just she knows what to do but a girl is still in the process of learning and I think a lot of us are still girls and we look to references to okay do I want to be this do I want to be that what is a woman and we all thrive to be that and some women look towards media and they're like okay she's famous and she has flawless skin but I don't have flawless skin so I'm going to put makeup on to look perfect and other women look at the women in their family and they look at them like okay she's a confident woman and she doesn't let anybody tell them what to do and she has her own job she pays for her own bills she takes care of her children I want to be that woman and I think a lot of women are trying to be that a lot of girls are trying to be that but they look at other people and they're trying to be something positive but everybody's just like oh you're not doing this so you're weird or you're not fitting into the trend and a lot of people try to fit into the trend to not be spoken down on and that's what leads to being something that you're not which is what it is on TV on TV everyone's just like oh I'm glamorous I'm this and I'm that but you know you have flaws but you want to be something positive something perfect to make everybody else happy to bring in the money that you're thriving for but if we all were what we really want to be it wouldn't be that way and we wouldn't be judged upon being pregnant or having body disorders or having self-esteem issues we wouldn't have that if we had confidence in ourselves to be like okay I'm not perfect but I'm going to try to be something positive not try to fit into what society wants me to be or what the television wants me to be or what guys or girls want me to look like or feel like I'm going to be what I want to be and that's what I guess this mural is trying to tell everyone is that just because we're not perfect or because we don't come from a family with a lot of money or just because we don't come from a family that is so nurturing that doesn't mean we have to continue downing ourselves we can be something so much better than that if we take the first step yeah she's right like oh Marenique could you well like Jennifer was saying how like we're being stereotyped and told who they should be and the media is literally feeding into people women and women are literally killing themselves to look a certain way like you should have this type of pair or you should have perfectly clear skin or this type of body and this is what beauty is and that's what they're telling us but it's like beauty is in the eye of the beholder but now everyone's mind is being sculpted into a certain way so it's all one mindset yeah there's this fear it's more of a fear if you don't have perfect skin the guy that you like is never going to get you there's this fear that if you don't at least show your cleavage you're not considered a diva or sexy so I think media instills fear and I think we've been so brainwashed as a society that that's how you have to be to be considered a woman and it's definitely not and I'm kind of losing a lot of faith in my generation I don't want to sound like a defeatist type attitude but I don't see enough people really working on mowing themselves before you could even learn or gain some type of knowledge you have to know yourself you have to redefine yourself so if you redefine yourself and you know who you want to be nobody could tell you you can't be that and I don't see anybody trying to help teach anyone else their age about that and you know this generation is called indigo I don't know if any of you guys know Eric indigo is like how do I explain it without getting nervous indigo means eclectic ideas and views this generation of you guys notice that history repeats itself and style and how do I put this in a way style gets reincorporated like now we're going back to retro indigo is the eclectic side of our brains we're using more of the creative side so we have a generation of people that have all these ideas and we're trying to get back to that hipster movement right but I think we lost what it really means to be yourself as a as a whole as a woman or a man and when you lose what it means to be yourself you're not going to learn how to redefine yourself and we have gifts we all have gifts and I don't see anybody using the gift they have don't interrupt you for a second how would a program like this working on a mural doing research help young women like you find yourself and define yourself like I said putting you in a challenge making you uncomfortable that's what it's about because we got too comfortable as a society we got too comfortable with allowing people to redefine who we are as young women as young men as youth as teenagers and that's where the misconception comes from and we don't respect each other we don't learn about one another because learning about someone else helps you to learn about yourself I don't see enough people striving to enlighten themselves I'm not saying that there isn't any of that I'm just saying there's not enough and our mural honestly I think I posted pictures of it on Facebook and I did not expect to get the amount of feedback I got from learning my friend's life in my picture of the mural and I didn't expect to get a lot of feedback from men as well are there positive responses to it really positive responses I'm so proud of it I didn't expect to see that much appreciation from the opposite gender to a round of our discussion because we're running out of time what topics would you suggest for your projects and also at the end of that why is it important to support feminist art or you could do either or if you're not exactly sure you brought up a lot of important topics body image media how would you distill that into a mural topic I'm going to tackle the one you said the first one there was a quote I don't know where I got it from but it was a quote that said people are killing themselves without committing suicide and that quote really means a lot and I think we should do another topic that means what does it mean to die and to die literally because we're walking around and we're just there's no inspiration, there's no hope and there's no individuality at all and I want us to do a mural about what does it mean to be yourself men male-wise and female-wise not just I think we should do it with the all-girl not the all-girl, both the unisex one and we should do that what does it mean to be yourself what does it mean to not be influenced by stereotypes, to not be influenced by the media what does it mean to be you I think we should do that topic next that would be my favorite word redefine yourself so no one doesn't define you I think it should be separation from the media and like they were saying who you are, separating yourself from that mentality and discovering yourself I think we're all coming around the same kind of topic for it being yourself and not what media has said that you are and I think that that's a really good topic to show women to be yourself on TV and not look at this celebrity be yourself and be true to yourself I think that would be a good thing I know what we should do I like things that are like sarcastic and paradoxical so let's do something like you know make it seem like maybe a TV show we could take a TV show and we could target it without it being without us getting in trouble let's challenge it and make it seem like we like it but we're against the idea of what it's portraying because Bad Girls Club that doesn't define me Jersey Shore doesn't define Italians love and hip hop I don't have no love and I don't have no hip hop in it let's just make it look like what it really is because that's what it is it's garbage and we could target it by saying there's a quote here I have on my laptop it's called today's reality more education but less common sense advanced medicine but poor health touch moon but neighbors are known high income but less peace of mind high IQ but less emotions good knowledge but less wisdom and finally lots of human beings but less humanity so let's not I mean I know voices heard is like a women's group but let's just target some paradoxical things that can make people really think specific examples from the media in popular culture so we can comment on it because we all basically target a media and that's the biggest influence on the world so let's target the biggest influence on the world and maybe create a new influence so next summer mass media voices heard rips it apart so we're at 3 o'clock but I'm going to open up for questions any questions from the audience any specific person or in general okay I want to know how you feel when you read that girls are being shot for going to school do you relate to that to you okay well when I was a young girl I never really had much of an education like I didn't really go to school cause a lot of reasons behind that but I used to live in North Carolina for a while and I didn't really go to school and I worked on a farm and it's kind of upsetting to see education is a really big thing especially for women cause we want to get out there and to hear that someone is shot because we're going to school is like everyone is born with the right to an education it's just how you choose to take that path and where you want to go with that and to realize that someone is being hurt because they want to be smart and they want to show and get more intellect it's really upsetting to see someone who would want you to die because they don't want you to have an education education is like key to everything and it's going to get you places it's going to get you that degrees, diploma it's going to get you that job and that space and that fashion design school and just when you don't have it it kind of sets you back but to hear that someone is stopping you from getting education it really gets me upset it makes me angry and it also makes me feel a lot more pride because they're fearing that she's going to gain the knowledge to break out of whatever she's been trained to think and that makes me feel even better than myself because they're scared that a woman could gain that much strength they're scared that a young person could gain that much strength and that just pushes me more to challenge them and I like that type of stuff and the more they try to stop me from learning or gaining any type of knowledge about anything the more I'm going to do it I believe I was a cat because the more I know you don't want me to do something that I know is good for me the more I know you don't like me I'm going to challenge you and I'm going to do my best to gain that knowledge and like I said knowledge is power the more knowledge you have about yourself first is the more you can control things and they know that knowledge is a control tactic the more knowledge you have the more you can control and they didn't want that little girl to gain that knowledge to control the more and enlightening but they're going to get their fair share of that anyways so Any further questions? Yes ma'am I'm impressed with the end product the mural is beautiful and I'm also so impressed with all the skills you all learn your thought your evaluation your thinking skills your collaboration just so many things not to mention the painting skills and you know so I guess I heard all three of you say that you were going to go into graphic design what about the mural you saw the impact it had on community and people on the street every mad woman are you confident enough to go out and paint your own mural to captain a similar project in Haiti or China or Australia you know bringing it back to the aspiration you expressed at the beginning or do you need more training I don't think you need training to do art no I'm just talking about the mural I think like definitely I think that's what I would do as a hobby I don't think it's not able to be done I think we're going to do that I think we'll do it in our own ways whether it's to groundswell or whether it's not I feel like I think it will have to be groundswell job to like I think after we like get more people in groundswell we can go international which is what I think we should do because we can't just sit here in New York there's more issues everywhere else so I think though we each have our own talents when we came to groundswell we all came into our own style our own talents but we can't just do it ourselves we take groundswell too because they brought us here so it would take groundswell as a group to get to a massive size and then eventually it's divided into little groups and go to Australia and go to Africa and go to Haiti and places like that and share their awesomeness with the world I think within the next five years that could be done maybe yeah five we're always fundraising so if anybody we accept credit cards and personal checks to groundswellmural.org please send us to Haiti to do a mural please any final thoughts young lady so are any further questions from the audience comments you're welcome thank you here's a quote again I'd like to thank Jennifer, Dakota, Marenique and Kai for young women who will be leaders in the future and will not be fit into Mitt Romney's binder and it was an honor to work with all of them and we hope to see you again