Baker Artist Portfolios

Tavia La Follette, PhD, is the founding director of ArtUp a small non-profit where she runs Sites of Passage (SOP), global interchanges for the migration of ideas across political/cultural borders. “Arts as Social Practice” is 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 at Towson University’s Department of Theatre, focused on self-generative/transdisciplinary/process-oriented work.  Towson University allows her the opportunity to direct main stage productions and teach classes like Prison Abolition: Performing Truth, Ensemble & Theatre for Social Change. La Follette is the founding director/curator of CoLab, designed to rotate directors every few years and is based out of The College of Fine Arts.

As a recipient of the 2017, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s Ruby Award, she produced Ancient Instincts, a sound and movement experience where the audience perceives the same performance through different isolated sound tracks (via headphones). The project is an ongoing investigation into our most ancient sense, hearing and how it impacts our understanding of the world around us.

She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at CREATE Lab, operating out of Carnegie Mellon University. Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment explore 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.

Growing from this experience, and the SOP work, La Follette is now shifting her work away from human conflict to focus on humanity's conflict with the planet, our addiction to petroleum and plastics, and raising the voices of those who suffer the most from human caused climate change.  In 2026 she will begin working with the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) scientists to bring their ecological work to the public through site-specific conceptual installations/performances and citizen-scientist projects.

The first step in this shift opens in May at Creative Alliance.  Designed to empower the next generation of ecological researchers, the project seeks new ways of working based in community and ecology – to nurture structural change.  The exhibition explores medicinal plants, marine biology, the environmental microplastic catastrophe, and rising waters from human caused climate change through art, installation and performance.  This is a project in partnership with Yar Burba, an indigenous ecological research center run by Favio and Desy Arosemena. In the words of founder/director Favio, “Yar Burba signifies the Guna people's spiritual connection with nature. It is an expression of how we understand the world: humans, the jungle, the sea, animals, and spirits form a unity. Everything is alive, everything has energy.”

La Follette was born in Buenos Aires Argentina to U.S. filmmakers amidst a production and grew up in New York City in the 70's/80’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. Their most impressive and experimental work ever—are their twins, Max 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 99% of humans. Rather, my work is in collaboration with society—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, to 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 a transdisciplinary artist, mother, professor, and philosopher, allows me to be a current, a connector that travels through and with evolving ideas, times, and cultures.