Inspired by the MAH’s beloved annual HERstory event, this addition to the MAH’s History Gallery features significant moments in women’s history through the lens of important Santa Cruz women and events. This interactive exhibition will include features on important women, such as:
- Yaquenonsat, a Native woman who in 1812 led the local indigenous resilience to colonization
- Heather Edney, who founded one of the earliest harm reduction programs in the United States in 1990
- Dr. Rebecca Hernandez (Mescalero/Warm Spring Apache and Mexican American), the first nominee and recipient of the annual HERstory Award in 2024, for her work as a Community Archivist and previous Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz.
- Bettina Aptheker, founder of UCSC’s Feminist Studies Program
- Madeline Aliah, a local trans femme teen poet.
I first started making shadow boxes after picking up some old spice racks at the flea market in the early nineties and wondering what to do with what I like to call my spiritual smegma - pebbles, crystals, special buttons, miniatures, all the collected minutiae of friends and relationships past.
These curiosities became the foundation for my 2005 art show Sacred Spaces in Small Places: Shadow Boxes, Spirit Shelves, and Altar-Egos, which spoke to the need to incorporate the spiritual in both our daily lives and in the mundane world by transforming everyday items into altars for meditation, reflection, and rejuvenation. Throughout history and across various religious beliefs, altars have served as a means to focus intentions, honor ancestors, affirm values, and reaffirm our connection to the divine.
I made a dozen or so over the years, some with themes such as the story of Amateratsu and Uzume, some were specific for Love Magic, and the Dream Box was mostly comprised of the eclectic snippets, tokens, and ephemera that once decorated the register on at Herland. Most of them I gifted away, notably to Melissa Bernstein, who later gifted it to the MAH, where it was first a part of the Infinite Other exhibit in 2018-2019, and in Then & Now: LGBTQ+ Gathering Spaces in 2023.
What do I love most about the Dream Box? The incredible amount of detail and how salient it is for the time. Inluding:
- Political buttons ("My Goddess Can beat Up Your God")
- Magazine cutouts ("Americans are ALTARING Their Lives" is my favorite)
- Fortune cookie fortunes - ("Your Mind is Your Greatest Asset") Herland was neighbors with the Mongolian Barbeque, and every day I would sweep up fortunes
- Objet-trouve: lost marbles, single earrings, orphaned keys, a lucky wooden nickel from Lovedog Tattoo
Inside this 3-D collage live Asian drag kings and radiant black queens, butches and femmes, Aztec goddesses and Feng Shui cures, Zen tarot cards, babes on unicyles, and an abundance of body positivism. Condom references in a time when safer sex was being fully embraced during the AIDS crisis. Stickers promoting same-sex marriage.
And the symbols! Pink triangles, labryses, Venus and double Venus, cowrie shells, salamanders, butterflies, hearts, cats, marijuana leaves, and rainbows aplenty. All of the tarot - chalice, blade, pentagram, flame, plus the wheel... A chorus of affirmations: "Double happiness" and my personal favorite from G9 - "I will never underestimate my body's capacity for pleasure." Michelle Tea even makes a cameo, sneaking in.
