Women on the Rise! 2nd Annual Girls Summit at MOCA North Miami

May 29 through 31, 2013.

Join educators of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s acclaimed Women on the Rise! program and noted girls’ scholars, activists and educators, for a three-day intensive conference on innovative approaches to education and empowerment for young women. Designed for educators, artists, counselors, therapists and anyone who works with girls and young women, the second annual Girls Summit will be held at MOCA from Wednesday, May 29 thru Friday, May 31. Through an active program of hands-on workshops, performances, panel discussions, and film screenings, the Girl’s Summit will address issues such as access to healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, body image, girls’ health and sexuality, and gender non-conformity.

The opening day of the Girls Summit, Wednesday May 29, will focus on food justice. Sheri Davis-Faulkner, PhD. will discuss corporate obesity in her talk “Critical Race Feminist Media Praxis: Methods for Reading Black Girls Bodies Within, Across and Beyond Health Marketing Frames.” Erin Healy from the Miami-based Youth L.E.A.D (Leading Environmental Activism through Democracy) will direct a workshop on the environmental and social impact of industrial food production and sustainable, just solutions. Artist Crystal Pearl will discuss cultural backgrounds and dietary choices as portrayed in her series of work “Food Body.” Lori Ross, Director of Programs for Girl Scout Council of Tropical Florida will present the workshop “It’s Your Planet- Love It!”

Each afternoon from 4 – 7 pm of the three-day conference, youth programming will be held for groups from Breakthough Miami, Girl Power, Urgent Inc., Honeyshine, Pridelines Youth Services, and PACE Center for Teens.

A highlight of the Girl’s Summit will be an interactive performance that evening at 7:30 pm by the artist collaborative Disorientalism. Entitled “Brown Bagging: Quality is Our Recipe”, the performance explores race and labor in American food production and promotion through historical food industry characters such as Wendy of Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers and Aunt Jemima. In this performance, we join the artists in Wendy’s Brown Bag factory where the mismatch of material and immaterial labor, industrial and post-industrial production, work and game, self and commodity plays out on the factory floor. Disorientalism is collaboration between Asian-American artists Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim, which studies the disorienting effects of technologized labor, junk culture and consumerism. Through live performance, video and photographic projects, Disorientalism explores how these forces mediate race, gender and bodies.

Girls’ Health and Sexuality will be the topic of three presentations on Thursday, May 30. Experimental filmmaker and local artist artist Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez will conduct a workshop on recontextualizing female sexuality in film. FIU professor of psychology Dr. Dionne Stephens will conduct a workshop on culturally appropriate tools for educating ethnic minority girls about sexually transmitted infections. Anya Wallace, MOCA director of Women on the Rise!, will introduce an art-making project for young women about developing sexual identity and significant life choices.

That evening, The Girls’ Club Collection (117 NE 2 Street, Ft. Lauderdale) will present Ready Mix, an exhibition by artist collaborative Disorientalism, which investigates the transformation of Aunt Jemima from “slave mammy” to “modern working mother”. The artists will lead a tour of the exhibition, along with guest curator Jillian Hernandez, PhD, founder of MOCA’s Women on the Rise! program, at 7 pm.

The final day of the Girls Summit, Friday, May 31, will be dedicated to Girls and Gender Non-Conformity. Dana Edell, PhD, will direct a series of theater activities for girls exploring ethnic stereotypes of boys and masculinity. Dr. Jillian Hernandez will introduce the work of artist/activist Zanele Muholi who documents the lives of gender non-conforming women in South Africa and discuss her dissertation research on masculine body presenting LBT young women of color. Hernandez will moderate a panel discussion with participants of MOCA’s Women on the Rise! program and a staff member from The Alliance for GLBTQ Youth on issues faced by gender non-conforming young women and girls.

Admission for the three-day summit is $30 for all three days or $10 per day. The programs run continuously from 10 am – 3:30 pm, with evening programs from 7:30 to 9 pm. Students with ID are admitted free of charge and Miami-Dade County educators may earn Teacher-in-Service credit. To reserve, visit www.mocanomi.org or call 305.893.6211. The 2nd Annual Girls Summit is presented by Museum of Contemporary Art’s MOCA Art Institute and is co-sponsored by The Girls’ Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale.

The 2nd Annual Girls Summit is organized by Dr. Jillian Hernandez, founder of MOCA’s Women on the Rise! program for at-risk teenage girls, who will join the faculty of the University of California San Diego as Assistant Professor of Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies in Fall 2013 and Anya Wallace, director of Women on the Rise!, and PhD candidate, Art Education and Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University. The 2nd Annual Girls Summit is co-sponsored by The Girls Club Foundation, The Women’s Fund of Miami Dade, The Miami Foundation and the Aqua Foundation.

MOCA North Miami
770 NE 125th Street
North Miami, FL 33161
305.893.6211
www.mocanomi.org

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