Call for Work for an Exhibition on the Theme of Extraction
Next year LaborFest will participate in the 100th year commemoration of the Ludlow mining strike in Colorado, better known as the Ludlow Massacre. This strike in Southern Colorado coal fields lasted from September 1913 to April 1914 and represents one of the bloodiest strikes in American history. To help commemorate this important moment in labor history, LaborFest will host an exhibition of art works on the broader theme of Extraction. Submission of art is sought for a possible exhibition at The Emerald Tablet in North Beach, San Francisco during the month of July 2014.
From earliest man’s extensive deforestation of the world for the purpose of creating fuel, extraction of the earth’s resources without environmental stewardship characterizes man’s efforts still today. Witness mountaintop removal and fracking, or ocean trawling, processes which leave in extraction’s wake widespread environmental destruction and no thought for earth cycles of replenishment. Likewise, the human body can be viewed as the site for extraction, whether in terms of energy, strength, endurance, or will, as today’s governmental and global corporate entities seek to extinguish workplace health and safety standards and workers’ unions or seek out human populations willing to perform labor who cannot rely on safeguards for health and safety nor compensation for a living wage.
Work is sought which addresses Extraction in any of its features: systemic, historically continuous, unsustainable, destructive, and/or dehumanizing. Work is also sought that counters a negative view of the extractive processes transforming the world with visions of a just relationship between human consumption and human and earth integrity. Please send three to four digital images in .jpg format and a short biographical statement to David Duckworth via duckdiva@yahoo.com. Include textual information for the following: title of work, medium, date of execution, dimensions. All submissions must be received by November 15, 2013.
For more information on the Ludlow Strike, please visit the post “Tents I”, dated January 13, 2012, at the blog dpduckworth.com. Or refer to either Scott Martelle’s Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2007) or Zeese Papanikolas’s Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre (University of Utah Press, 1982). For information on LaborFest, please visit laborfest.net. For information on David Duckworth’s background in curating exhibitions, please visit the Curriculum Vitae page at dpduckworth.com.
David Duckworth. Untitled, from the series Short Tales from the American Landscape, 2008. Scanned pen-and-ink drawing, 9 x 12 in., with digitally manipulated positive-negative reverse.
dpduckworth 