Opening Day - How to Wear Mauve

Miss Lawson, neat in appearance and perfectly coiffed, represents a woman’s testament to joining the post wartime work force. By toying with mainstream expectation, accompanied by pseudo-inspirational expressions, she tosses a wry wink toward to crowd with hopes of turning such phrases on their heads through candid conversations.

Today, we are invited to Feminine Career Counseling sessions where dreaming has been pre-approved.


About the show:

How to Wear Mauve--and other helpful hints from the Working Gal, is both a live performance and installation. The Working Gal will be one-on-one advising with interested Cal Fundraising department office workers to share her career and family-rearing advice.

About the artist:

Maggie Lawson is an artist, using photography, installation, participatory projects, and performance to generate deeper dialogues about issues of identity, especially gender. This Working Gal first began with a series of self-portraits in December 2009. These self-portraits are reenactments of Maggie’s grandmother’s experience (whom she is also named after--Marguerite Lawson). Marguerite was a secretary and later housewife in the 1940s and 1950s. Maggie uses photos of her as inspiration, transforming herself through makeup and costume into the kind of woman she imagines her grandmother to have been. The reenactment experience makes clear how few years and little primping separates Maggie’s experience of being a woman from that of her grandmother’s.

In that vein, the Working Gal derives her advice from attitudes and hints passed down to Maggie from the women and men in her family as well as society at large. The Working Gal is a caricature of these inherited limiting beliefs around professionalism and family. The performance is a ritual that uses humor and personal experience to engage participants in their own limiting belief systems with the intention of creating space for something new and more authentic to emerge.

This Friday, October 28th at 7:30 pm stop by to meet the artist in person, as the Working Gal will be disseminating winsome pearls.