Tessa Paneth Pollak

With FAAC, “Feminist Telephone: A Labor-Saving Device,” in The Afterlife of Energy: Post-carbon and Feminist Post-work Politics. Journal of Architectural Education, 78(2), 638–648.

This text resulted from an experimental game of feminist “telephone,” used as a labor- and energy-saving device. Confronting the difficulty of getting multiple professional minds and bodies together across time zones (from West Coast USA to the UK) and space, we held one initial video meeting to discuss the prompt. We then relayed a text, one to the next - copy-paste, then edit, pass it on, copy-paste, edit, repeat. As in any game of telephone, the “message” gets garbled and transformed. At the end, four members of the collective met online. Together, that group worked to interpret the message - from ourselves, through ourselves, to ourselves - into a publishable and “deliverable” text that could be further interpreted by readers. To (try and) make sense. Together.

FAAC; Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (Catalina Mejía Moreno, Charlotte Lucy Kent, Emma Cheatle, Martina Tanga, Olga Touloumi, Susanō Hideko Surface, Tessa Paneth-Pollak). Working together since 2013, FAAC is an intersectional feminist research group that labors in the production of new pedagogies and epistemologies in art and architecture. Collectively, we have presented at conferences, including the College Art Association Annual Conference, and published widely, such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

VEG-N makes vegan cuisine accessible

Sept 26, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture (The Dish)

I once had a vegan roommate who shunned products that approximated meat because she felt they normalized meat culture. This is clearly not the sentiment held at VEG-N, where the menu focuses on burgers, chili and hot dogs — all plant-based and fully vegan…

Staff believe new director will be ‘unifying force’ for MSU Horticulture Gardens

August 14, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture


When Mason McNair was 6 years old, his mother had to entice him into a trip to Juniper Level Botanic Garden in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the promise of ice cream.

“But by the time she was done, I didn’t want to leave because I was having so much fun playing in the gardens,” McNair said.

He recalled a “magical” experience of exploring the winding paths at Juniper Level, navigating through elephant ear leaves bigger than he was and art installations made from found objects. 

Since then, he has built a career that keeps him as close to gardens as possible….

In Mason, women of Dixie Belle give furniture, themselves ‘new life’

June 5, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture

Moka & Co. balances crisp internationalism with traditional touches

May 29, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture (The Dish).

Preview for Capital Area Film Festival

April 11, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture.

Despite a tumultuous local history, obstetricians and midwives aim to move forward and collaborate

April 4, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, News (Cover) and Photo essay

Sparrow Health pulls funding for independent childbirth classes

Decision raises concerns about fewer options for expectant parents

February 22, 2024. Lansing City Pulse, News

Newly ordained Rabbi hopes to help Jews find community.

December 14, 2023. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture.

Actors reunite for 'Murder for Two: Holiday Edition'

November 23, 2023. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture.

Local poets perform tribute to late poet Jude Jordan with composer Adrienne Torf

November 9, 2023. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture.

After four months of rehearsing on Zoom, Lansing-based poetry collective Voices of the Revolution and San Francisco-based composer and pianist Adrienne Torf held their first in-person rehearsal Saturday (Nov. 4) in East Lansing.

“It was amazing,” Tari Muñiz, a local poet and founding member of the collective, said of the rehearsal. “It left us vibrating. It left us breathless.” ...

Their joint undertaking with Torf celebrates another partnership: the 2003 album “Collaboration,” which is the culmination of Torf’s 19-year artistic collaboration with her late life partner, poet June Jordan.

When Jordan and Torf first began working together in the early 1980s, they had to do so remotely. The two women were on opposite coasts — Torf in California, Jordan in New York — so they communicated by mail and phone.

Jordan would start to draft “a first pass” of a poem, Torf said, and she would send it through the mail. Torf would then record her first pass at the music onto an audio cassette and mail it back. After receiving the mail, they would “get on the phone and talk through it.” ...

"New anime convention hopes visitors feel excited and accepted"
October 19, 2023. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture.


The first time she heard of a dragon, Lilah Cray was 17 years old.

While being religiously homeschooled in an insular Christian community in west Michigan, she was allowed to read one book, the Bible, and watch one cartoon, “Veggie Tales.”

But enrolling at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor “changed everything,” she said. Early on during her time there, she met a guy named Cody who was playing Magic: The Gathering.

Cody showed her that dragon — and then the ropes of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons and other games.

Soon, Cray joined the anime club. It opened her up to realms of fantasy and imagination that had been banished from her childhood. It opened her up culturally, too: She got her first taste of ramen....

with Ms. Dixie Longate at Wharton Center
October 19, 2023. Lansing City Pulse, Arts + Culture

... We spoke with Ms. Longate (in character) in advance of her visit to East Lansing’s Wharton Center.

So, why Tupperware?

Dixie Longate: Everything stays fresher in Tupperware. I want to make sure whatever you’re putting in your mouth is fresh. I’m so grateful to be able to travel around and see this big, beautiful country and help people with their food storage needs.

How did you get into Tupperware? 

Well, I started selling Tupperware about 22 years ago — part of the conditions of my parole. See, you need a job in order to get your kids back. I wish they’d change that law. You know, you get out of prison and you’re so excited to do fun things. And all of a sudden, you’ve got your kids. I’m like, “How am I supposed to go to people’s homes?” You know, because of the restraining orders. ...

Casa de Rosado kicks off Hispanic Heritage Month with two new exhibitions
September 20-21, 2023. Lansing City Pulse.

...The monarch butterflies that flit through light-filled oil paintings by artist Jaime Vanegas Castro, on view in Casa de Rosado Galeria & Cultural Center’s main gallery, will soon begin their annual journey back to Mexico. In an adjoining room, a juried exhibition of thirteen calaveras submitted by Michigan-based Latinx and Hispanic artists invites the playful imagery of the upcoming holiday of Dia de los Muertos.

In Michigan, the holiday coincides with the monarchs’ departure. In Mexico, it coincides with their joyous return. The monarch butterfly “is a powerful symbol of migration,” said gallery founder and director Theresa Rosado. “But not only that — there are traditional beliefs that the monarch is actually a soul that’s departed.”...

November 2022. Sears Peyton Gallery.

... Hornick starts with a painting to copy and equips herself with biographical information about its subject. She drums to connect with each sitter. After journeying, she jots notes that she works, over time, into narratives. Hortensia del Prado and Cecilia Gallerani become characters she sets out to meet up with. She remains awake. But description and interpretation intertwine, as in dreamwork. Sometimes, information comes packed in a pun, requiring wordplay to untangle. She sees del Prado caught in a lightning storm, her infant daughter held to her chest; she needs “lightning bugs” to lift her home. Journeying to meet Gallerani, she spies a harbor seal; it is her unborn child with the Duke, which will forever “seal” their fates. ...

... The paintings that engage her tend to be “the best portraits, technically.” She works to reconstitute them from the ground up, emulating even the old gesso formulas of rabbit skin glue, marble dust, and titanium powder. She labors on backgrounds, layering blues on blues, greens on reds, until they reach a near-black from which the figures emerge. Then, metabolization: she weaves animal and woman tighter by heightening underlying color correspondences in ways that further naturalize the pairing...

December 2020, Fondation Beyeler.

…As a student, Arp would certainly have been aware of Rodin’s “erotic drawings” because of the scandal caused when Count Harry Graf Kessler exhibited fourteen of them at the Grand Ducal Art Museum in 1906. The works defied local expectations of modesty; Rodin was cast as a “foreigner” who exhibited “a lack of morality” and Kessler was forced to resign. Ironically, Wilhelm Arp had sent his son to study in Weimar rather than Paris precisely to avoid exposing him to such “sirens of the metropolis.” Yet such exposures in Weimar seem only to have lured Arp toward Paris. …

Another nude from Arp’s early explorations points to contact with Rodin: the cut-out resulting from Arp’s 1911 decision to retrace one of his drawings with scissors along its penciled contour and affix it to a new support. This early experiment, which Hauptmann seems to have owned from the time of its execution until he donated it to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1976, points to a more intimate familiarity on Arp’s part with Rodin’s little-known studio practice in this period of cutting out his own watercolor nudes. …

With FAAC (Feminist Art-Architecture Collaborative), Fall/Winter 2018, Harvard Design Magazine.

… We demand our right to demand

to put forth an impossible demand is to provoke, and to test its validity. We assert our right to demand without offering a road map or a solution. KATHI WEEKS Our goal is to eliminate the need to demand. We want uncontested access to our rights, without having to demand them

for to demand is to imagine, to dream, to aspire, to envision.

we practice compassion, recognizing humanity and foregrounding the fulfillment of others and our needs

We demand from our institutions

teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. Education should resist the rules and conditions of capital. Institutions should conceive of themselves as ethical and political agents of change ANGELA DIMITRAKAKI

time,

for us to transform teaching and for our students to transform learning

space,

both physical and metaphorical, to act, think, work, experiment, perform, produce, change, and disrupt in, without being penalized or prosecuted …

*Authors: Ana María León, Andrea J. Merrett, Armaghan Ziaee, Catalina Mejía Moreno, Charlotte Kent, Elaine Stiles, Emma Cheatle, Jennifer Chuong, Juliana Maxim, Katherien Guinness, Louisa Iarocci, Martina Tanga, Olga Touloumi, Rebecca Choi, S. Surface, Saher Sohail, Sarah Parrish, Tessa Paneth-Pollak

This manifesto was the product of the workshop “FAAC Your Syllabus!” (April 21–22, 2018), convened by the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC). During the two-day workshop, 18 international feminist educators, activists, and curators met, discussed the feminisms that influenced them (textual or otherwise), debated methods/priorities, and workshopped their syllabi on art, architecture, and visual and cultural studies.

Layout by Jiminie Ha.

September 2018, The Rib

…There is no way to see the entire thing in one day, but a day is what we have allotted, and we are traveling with a toddler. So we unfortunately miss what are supposed to have been some of the most compelling entries: Detroit artist Tyree Guyton’s Heidelbergology; 2 + 2 = 8 and the other installations at SiTE: Lab. One venue that stands out from the rest is the Fountain Street Church, a sprawling neo-Gothic structure that is an architectural attraction in its own right. The building houses an array of social justice oriented works. Though ArtPrize is the brainchild of Rick DeVos—a member, like the better-known Betsy, of the prominent conservative Michigan family enriched by the Amway fortune—one finds artworks at Fountain Street Church addressing social justice issues dear to the left: racism and police brutality, immigrant rights, mass incarceration, sexism and misogyny. Climbing the stairs to the upper tier of the dimly lit sanctuary, one can experience Lora Robertson’s film installation By Her Own Hand, in which two films exploring women’s undervalued labor in the life cycle pierce the darkness and several layers of gauzy fabric suspended from the ceiling, floating hauntingly in this sacred space flanked by colorful stained glass.

At the Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives, Aedan Gardill’s portraits honor four African-American woman innovators from Michigan, depicted with the tools of their trade and alongside copies of their patents for inventions from hair products to thermostat heating. That these obscure figures, rescued from the archive, hang opposite a glisteningly uncritical and oversize painting of the head of Oprah Winfrey bedecked in butterflies and titled Phenomenal Woman indicates something about the poles that ArtPrize almost compulsively pulls together…

Feb 2019, Art History (UK)

… As an agent of what Arp called the ‘mechanized, rational, and modern’, typography sits at the nexus of three entities that Arp understands to reduce and rationalize the body: the machine, geometry, and language itself. Against this agent, in order to displace the typographically standardized unit, Arp deploys a bio-logic – a form of mutable, organic, asymmetrical liquidity that, unlike the Vitruvian man, is neither ‘well-shaped’ nor easily or ‘ideally circumscribable’, nor even necessarily human. This essay looks closely at how Arp deploys this bio-logic against typography to come up with a pseudo- or imaginary writing system that resists three related aspects of Western alphabetic writing: syntax (the separateness of linguistic units); parataxis (the requirement that those units be arranged side-by-side, or in an ordered sequence); and taxonomy (the use of language, particularly naming, to categorize). …

in The Nature of Arp, ed. Catherine Craft. Dallas, TX: Nasher Sculpture Center, 2018

$65.00 from Nasher Sculpture Center Store

… If Arp’s experience demonstrated anything, it was the arbitrariness and fungibility of denominations such as dates and names, which were always subject to redefinition, renegotiation, and reassignment. In fact, it came to light that the artist had for many years circulated a false birthdate for himself — apparently, in order to appear “closer” in age to his beloved brother. According to his official birth certificate issued by the City of Strasbourg, which his second wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, finally retrieved in 1959, Arp was actually born on September 16, 1886. This means that the date Arp (apocryphally) used to draft-dodge was itself apocryphal in nature — a “strange addition.” Origin, for Arp, was always multiple, and could always be altered in the retelling … Any historian of Arp inevitably finds herself confronted with a thick layer of apocrypha, but apocryphal storytelling provides a useful framework for understanding anew the subset of Arp’s oeuvre that is the focus of this essay: Arp’s cardboard reliefs dating from 1923 to 1929, made over the span of years when he was most closely associated with the Surrealist circle in Paris. …

September 2017, JSAH

with FAAC (Ana María León, Tessa Paneth-Pollak, Martina Tanga, Olga Touloumi)

In 2013, we formed the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC), a research group committed to revisiting the art and architectural history survey course with a feminist approach to both content and pedagogy. Our aim was to advance the critical approach of “contestation,” which we understand as a constant, open-ended debate and an active, conscious inversion of the power relations that have shaped the value judgments of our disciplines. In doing so,we sought to elide the logic of the canon as a relatively stable roster of names and greatest hits. This proved no small feat: we wanted our process to be practical and implementable in today’s university and, at the same time, we wanted our syllabus to serve as a corrective to the problems we see facing that system.
    In a moment when higher education is still a major site of inequality, we wondered, is a true “pedagogy of the oppressed” even possible? ... (more)

“Sartor Resartus,” in Diane Simpson. Chicago: Corbett v. Dempsey, 2016, 51-53. Edited reprint.

…Pushed far beyond the circumferences of human limbs, necks, and torsos, bibs and aprons appear like the armor of some absent army of women and infants, now equipped for protection from industrial-scale hazards, like radiation or intense heat. ‘Aprons are Defenses,’ Carlyle’s narrator rhapsodized, ‘against injury to cleanliness, to safety, to modesty, sometimes to roguery… How much has been concealed, how much has been defended in Aprons!’ One gets the sense in the galleries of the artist attempting to bring the topography of the everyday—babies’ bibs, aprons, bathroom towel rings_into contact with large-scale histories of architecture and fashion.

February 3, 2016, Big Red & Shiny

In Diane Simpson’s sculptures currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the regime of technical drawing collides with the pensile contingency of the textile. To make her sculptures, Simpson subjects the sartorial layer to exacting mathematical study. There is meticulousness to her diagrams and ensuing sculptural translations. Together, they seem to chase after a language or mathematical constancy underlying the history of human dress, what Thomas Carlyle called the “Architectural Idea” behind man (or woman’s) “habilatory endeavors.” But as her calculations proliferate, they lead her to strange results ... (more)

January 2014, The Brooklyn Rail

… [B]y the end of the 1930s, WPA investment had made it possible to imagine the length of actual bridges spanning the “distance from New York to Youngstown, O.” But in his Newsprint Collage (1940), rather than draw a straight line from art world to steel belt, Reinhardt seems to embrace the problem of Alexander’s intellectual: in it, the structures of bridges insist on tangling into a painterly web. Here and there, we can discern the textures of industrial labor—a truss or rivets, a crane hook, a worker operating a rig—“the idea of bridges,” as Reinhardt once put it.” … (more)

June 2013, Modern Painters

… The exhibition follows several curatorial efforts by the Société to frame and package modern art for the American audience. It highlights the organization’s early one-man shows such that the abstractions of Kandinsky and the small figural compositions of Louis Eilshemius make for strange bedfellows. Subsequent galleries reconstruct the group’s inaugural 1920 exhibition and their ‘International Exhibition of Modern Art’ at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. This focus on the framing of ‘Modernism for America’ allows a different picture of the modern to emerge. The Société’s collection is eclectic and inclusive: It permits nonobjective and figural works to mingle, emphasizes the contributions of women … The exhibition also suggests an untold story—of the transatlantic mobility of modern art between the world wars as having largely been brokered by artists… (more)

March 2013, Modern Painters

… Besides evoking the shape and orbit of the titular soleil, the circular staging grounds where these bodies meet call forth the rounded generative matrices where they might have been produced: the womb, the egg, or the petri dish. If the compositions conjure scenes of biological reproduction, the show’s hanging reenacts the scene of graphic reproduction: The 14 reliefs and 10 collages occupy opposing walls, calling up the confrontation between relief print matrix and receptive page. … (more)