Women Resist
I started Call and Response in March 2020 when the world shut down. Over 500 artists across six continents have participated in 20+ rounds. Random pairings. No fees. No gatekeepers deciding who gets to collaborate.
This edition happened because women's voices are under attack. Again.
Call and Response has always been political. We've addressed racism and police violence. We've explored nature as climate collapsed. This round focuses on women resisting because resistance isn't one action—it's the accumulated weight of women refusing to disappear, to stay quiet, to accept what diminishes us.
Twenty-one artist pairs from Los Angeles to Belgium to India responded to "Women Resist" from their specific locations and urgent realities. The work that emerged is wildly diverse—collage, photography, poetry, painting, digital manipulation, text. Some collaborations are tender exchanges between strangers who found each other through this random pairing. Some are fierce visual arguments. All of them claim space during a political moment that demands women's silence.
Women have always built the infrastructure that supports creative work—organizing exhibitions, mentoring emerging artists, creating spaces for dialogue. This labor gets dismissed as "community building" while men's identical actions get called "leadership." Women resist by continuing to build anyway. By refusing to apologize for caring about other artists' survival. By making the systems we need when traditional structures exclude us.
This exhibition documents what happened when artists had two weeks to respond to each other and to the political moment. The work ranges from subtle to screaming because resistance looks different depending on what you're resisting and how much energy you have left.
*These exchanges took place over two weeks. One artist creates work and sends a digital image to their partner, who responds in any medium. Back and forth—each artist getting 24 hours per turn, though most worked faster. The result: 20+ artworks created through rapid creative dialogue between two artists who had never met. The resulting documentation shares the artwork in the order it was created and tells a story of their thought process.
