Baker Artist Portfolios

Tavia La Follette, PhD, is the founding director of ArtUp a non-profit where she runs Sites of Passage, global interchanges for the migration of ideas across political/cultural borders.  As a professional who uses “Arts as Social Practice” as a medium to enter her work, La Follette’s practices are implemented at both a macro and micro level, expanding far across the globe, or deeply embedded into communities close to home.

Previous Sites of Passage exchanges have taken place between Egypt and the US (revolving around the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy Movement), Israel, Palestine, and the US (revolving around the ideas of Borders, Walls, and Citizenship), and South Africa and the US (revolving around Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs). The most recent exchange has been between Russia and US (revolving around the ideas of Propaganda & Pop Art called Pop-Aganda.  All projects have been produced at The Mattress Factory Museum.  Each project takes about three years to research and execute. 

La Follette is an associate professor teaching in the MFA in Theatre program at Towson University, focused on self-generative/transdisciplinary/process-oriented work.  Towson University also allows her the opportunity to direct mainstage productions and teach classes like Prison Abolition: Performing Truth, Ensemble, Theatre for Social Change and Community Outreach. La Follette is the founding director/curator of CoLab, based out of The College of Fine Arts.

She is also an Artist-in-Residence at CREATE Lab, operating out of Carnegie Mellon University. Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment explores socially meaningful deployment of robotics.  LaFollette accesses STEM/STEAM lab tools to build her “Art as Social Practice” projects with community. These often are environmentally driven and citizen scientist based, like her Lemonade Project.

La Follette was born in Buenos Aires Argentina to U.S. filmmakers amidst a production and grew up in New York City in the 1980’s.  Her aesthetic heart and curatorial eye carry the struggles of the city at that time and the art that grew from that labor.

She is currently based out of Baltimore, Maryland, where she lives with the political cartoonist, Gary Huck. Her most impressive and experimental work ever—are their twin-boys, Maxwell, and Calder.  

TAVIA ON SOCIAL PRACTICE

My work is not for sale.  It does not hang in a white gloved gallery with an absurdly wild price tag. Nor is it performed on a stage that is not accessible to most people. Rather, my work is in collaboration sociality—which is also not for sale.

Projects tend to swim around conflict—not because I want trouble—but because these are social realities imagined in the context of culture. Through art, I strive to break down those contextual relationships, explore and create new realities towards cultural evolution.

WHY SOCIAL PRACTICE?
​Our dusty Brooklyn apartment was infamous amongst my friends.  Although, the alluring eight-foot tall windows with spider plants for curtains and the “museum” of artifacts from my parents travels always made for great conversation, when the inevitable dinner time rolled around, I always got the concerned complaint, “Your parents ask too many questions!”  I am afraid I have not fallen too far from the spider plant, shooting out roots, searching for answers and new ground.
 
As an artist, I believe it is my job to interpret and analyze cultural behavior. I do this through crossing borders, physical, psychological, and emotional. My work in performance art and puppetry has taught me the power of symbols.  Symbols help me to say what I cannot say with words, they tap into our emotions.  Emotions, like religion, help us recognize our values. Values, like cultures, contradict. This contradiction, this paradox, is what interests me about the human condition.  This is why I ask “too many questions” and spend my time crossing disciplinary borders: to build connections, to send shoots in search of new perspectives towards new epistemologies.   
 
Being an transdisciplinary artist, mother, professor, and philosopher allows me to be a current, a connector that travels through and with ideas, times, and cultures. 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     -  Tavia La Follette