Tavia's profile
Tavia LaFollette, PhD, co-directs an MFA program focused on self-generative/interdisciplinary/process-oriented work. Towson University also allows her the opportunity to direct undergraduates and teach Ensemble, Theatre for Social Change and Community Outreach. LaFollette is the director/curator of CoLab, based out of The College of Fine Arts.
She is 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 lab tools to build Art as Social Practice projects with community.
She is a director, curator, designer, puppeteer and performer. As founder/director of ArtUp, she runs Sites of Passage, global interchanges for the migration of ideas across political/cultural borders, via the non-profit.
Previous exchanges include: Egypt and the US (revolving around the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy Movement); Israel, Palestine and the US (revolving around Borders, Walls and Citizenship); and South Africa and the US (revolving around Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: legal vs economically driven apartheid). Russia and the U.S. are next. Like the previous Sites of Passage projects, this cultural/collaborative dialogue (revolving around Pop-Aganda, Revolution & Iconography) will include women identifying voices from a variety of artistic practices and will be produced at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh (www.mattress.org), PA, where La Follette serves as a curator in residence.
LaFollette was born in Buenos Aires Argentina to U.S. filmmakers amidst a production and grew up in New York City in the late 70’s and 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. Her most impressive and experimental work ever—are their twin-boys, Maxwell and Calder.
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 interdisciplinary artist, mother, professor, and philosopher allows me to be a current, a connector that travels through and with ideas, times, and cultures. Sometimes little baby boys are the best pass to cross a border!
New works produced by me usually 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.
- Tavia La Follette
She is 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 lab tools to build Art as Social Practice projects with community.
She is a director, curator, designer, puppeteer and performer. As founder/director of ArtUp, she runs Sites of Passage, global interchanges for the migration of ideas across political/cultural borders, via the non-profit.
Previous exchanges include: Egypt and the US (revolving around the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy Movement); Israel, Palestine and the US (revolving around Borders, Walls and Citizenship); and South Africa and the US (revolving around Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: legal vs economically driven apartheid). Russia and the U.S. are next. Like the previous Sites of Passage projects, this cultural/collaborative dialogue (revolving around Pop-Aganda, Revolution & Iconography) will include women identifying voices from a variety of artistic practices and will be produced at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh (www.mattress.org), PA, where La Follette serves as a curator in residence.
LaFollette was born in Buenos Aires Argentina to U.S. filmmakers amidst a production and grew up in New York City in the late 70’s and 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. Her most impressive and experimental work ever—are their twin-boys, Maxwell and Calder.
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 interdisciplinary artist, mother, professor, and philosopher allows me to be a current, a connector that travels through and with ideas, times, and cultures. Sometimes little baby boys are the best pass to cross a border!
New works produced by me usually 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.
- Tavia La Follette
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