Creating space and community: riot grrrl and visual art

Four influential artists discuss the connection between the riot grrrl movement and their work

By Eleanor Whitney
Published: October 22nd, 2008 | 9:15pm

In their single “Hot Topic,” post-riot grrrl electronic outfit Le Tigre famously name check a who’s who of feminist visual artists. To many listeners, this catchy electro-dance track served as a wake-up call to consider the connections between feminist music and visual art. While riot grrrl is often looked to as a movement in the early ‘90s that infused punk rock with a fierce, feminist attitude, visual artists also created work with a sense of ethics that tied them closely to that community.

Curious to tease out the connections between visual art and the politics of riot grrrl, I talked to four artists: Stella Marrs, Nikki McClure, Becca Albee, and Amy Yao. With an interest in what they are working on now, I focused our discussions on the evolution of their visual art practice since the riot grrrl-era of the early ‘90s.

Stella Marrs

Perhaps best known for her iconic postcards that mix vintage domestic imagery with incendiary phrases such as “If you can make a cake, you can build a bomb,” Stella Marrs is a media artist who is completing her masters degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Currently, she is building the Web site girlcity.tv that she hopes will be a showcase for women’s digital video work.

Marrs’ projects in Olympia, Washington in the early ‘80s laid the foundation for the riot grrrl community that would flourish there a decade later. In addition to a series of public performances such as “50 Girls, 50 States, Women for World Peace,” she co-founded a gallery, store, and performance space called Girl City. The space created an empowered community of artists. “People’s personalities were transformed in the process,” she says.

Nikki McClure

While she felt she was on the periphery of riot grrrl, artist, bookmaker, and designer Nikki McClure was empowered by the creative energy in Olympia, Washington to make songs and, later, pictures using cut paper. She describes writing a song and then running down an alley to perform it between sets at a Bikini Kill show. Later, making books became her way of writing songs.

She felt going on tour and writing music gave her the confidence to strike out on her own as an artist. As the audience for her art has grown, she describes her work as becoming more forthright and political. This fall she is taking a series of signboards called “Vote for Survival” on tour down the West Coast and is illustrating a book by renowned children’s book author Cynthia Rylant.

Becca Albee

New York-based artist Becca Albee also lived in Olympia in the early ‘90s where she participated in numerous feminist community projects including the “Riot Grrrl Radio” show on local station KAOS, and played in the band Excuse 17. Although visual art had been her focus before college, her strong interest in collaboration, political art, and the use of language made playing in a band a natural step for Albee.

She describes her earlier work as overt and didactic, but in her later work, Albee has found strength in subtlety by engaging viewers’ curiosity. “I’m interested in having a conversation rather than making a speech,” she says. Since the early ‘90s, Albee has maintained her interest in art that is collaborative and community-oriented.

Amy Yao

Amy Yao is a sculptor and installation artist who played in the band Emily’s Sassy Lime with her sister, Wendy Yao. As teenagers, they started a riot grrrl chapter in Orange County, California. Her involvement in riot grrrl pushed her to seek out feminist art exhibitions in Los Angeles, including a show by Tammy Rae Carland, who she had read about on a Bikini Kill record sleeve.

“Feminism has influenced me and helped expand my notion of what art can be,” Yao says. Her non-representational, understated works maintain a delicate sense of balance and political orientation. She also works collaboratively on a video project called B’L’ing and feels that her strong drive to create opportunities for art outside of established institutions has remained since her involvement in riot grrrl.

Nikki McClure states that the community she found around riot grrrl enabled artists to “voice what we found within ourselves and have a means to share it with the world.” Blurring the boundaries between high and low art, centering on women’s creative processes, and stressing the importance of community and collaboration, these four artists (and many around them) keep alive riot grrrl’s driving spirit in their approach to creating art.