Viral Integration at UC Irvine

Two drawings from the project Paul’s Brain will be on exhibit through Dec. 15, 2024 at UC Irvine’s College of Health Sciences. Viral Integration was curated by artist in residence elin o’Hara slavick. Opening reception is Thur. Feb. 1, 6-8pm in the 3rd floor lobby. Viewing hours are Mon. - Fri. 8am - 5pm. More info here.

Samueli College of Health Sciences
856 Health Sciences Rd.
Irvine, CA 92617

Two Solo Exhibitions included in the 10 year anniversary of Proxy Gallery

Two works of mine are included in the upcoming 10 Year Anniversary exhibition of Annetta Kapon’s Proxy Gallery.

The Floating Gallery Los Angeles presents: Annetta Kapon: Proxy Gallery 10 Years.
August 5-September 30, 2023
Opening reception Sat. August 5, 6-8 pm
Floating Gallery 5760 W. Pico Blvd, LA 90019

More info here.

Tikkun/Repair from Proxy Gallery 78. Michele Jaquis: We are Here, Together. June 2021.

Proxy Gallery 84. Michele Jaquis: Shelf Life. June 2023.

Photos and design Antonis Ricos.

Sociality - group exhibition at LA TATE Gallery

Two drawings and one of my deconstructed American flags will be on display in the group exhibition, Sociality, Curated by Keith Walsh, at LA TATE Gallery, March 11 - April 8. Opening Reception is March 11, 5-7pm. More info here.

LA TATE Gallery
4816 West Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90016

Art by Michael Green, Robby Herbst, Michele Jaquis, Vincent Ramos, Michael Shaw, Laurie Steelink, and Keith Walsh.

Sociality unites seven Los Angeles artists who dynamically engage ideas and systems of association, self-representation, grass roots political organization, and humanism with communities within and beyond the art world.

Our work is founded on the principles that artists who make art are shaped by their social environs, whether experienced or mediated. We are responsive and committed to an art that attends to social issues as forms of commentary, consciousness, self-determination, resistance, and constructing potential solutions to the challenges of forging communities within the atomistic realm and tropes of the capitalist art world and society. 

The gallery is a temporary political center and social space that allows us see the world anew, to recognize the art exhibition as a hub and generator for making connections beyond its doors.  We avoid dry analyses and hypotheses by utilizing dynamic means to engage objective subjects and subjectivities. Sociality presents our agency for personal, cultural, political emancipation and community building.

Exhibition announcement with black and Red text on yellow background.

Telling Stories exhibition at El Camino College Art Gallery

My two channel video installation, Paul’s Brain, will be included in the group exhibition, Telling Stories, curated by Michael Miller at El Camino Art Gallery in Torrance, CA, February 13 - March 9, 2023. More details here.

As part of the exhibition programming, I’ll also be facilitating an oral history recording workshop in conjunction with my project We Are All Americans, Tuesday Feb. 28, from 12-4pm.

Telling Stories artists Jane Chafin, Joyce Dallal, Marsian De Lellis, Joseph Hardesty, Michele Jaquis, Lauren Kasmer & Joyce Dallal, Thomas Kidd, Karen Medley, Rosalyn Myles, Mei Xian Qiu, Craig Torres, the Wednesday Gang Quilting Group and the El Camino College Anthropology Student Association uses painting, puppetry, recipe sharing, quilt making, Culinary Performance, and photography. Workshops are happening every day. The El Camino College Anthropology Student Association is creating the Title Wall: Our Stories: A Self-Portrait of El Camino College. Please send your selfies to eccartgallery@elcamino.edu. Come by the Art Gallery to see how you can participate.

Public Reception
Saturday, February 18, 2-5 p.m.

Homesite: A Culinary Performance
Featuring the Wednesday Gang Quilting Group

Campus Reception
Tuesday, February 21, 1-4 p.m.

Featuring Craig Torres Master Class on Tongva uses of Native Plant Food Source

Tuesday, February 28, 12-4 p.m.
Michele Jaquis: We Are All Americans: Oral History Recording Workshop

Artist Conversations
Tuesday, March 7, 1-4p.m.

Marsian De Lellis and Mei Xian Qiu

exhibition postcard with black, jumbled letters spelling Telling Stories, and dark blue text reading El Camino College Art Gallery at the bottom, all on a tan background with illegible text in tight rows.

Un-Civil War! exhibition at Torrance Art Museum

My recent work, altered American flags and a few drawings from the series We Are Here, Together, are included in this group exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum.

UN-CIVIL WAR! (AN ELECTION SPECIAL) CURATED BY MAX PRESNEILL

The events of January 6th, 2021, in Washington DC shocked the nation. The country has felt a divided space with a polarization and demonizing of opposition that has left many citizens in fear that a spark could ignite the fires of civil war. There has been a steady build in journalist articles reflecting upon the possibility of a second US Civil War. Regardless of the realities of this the fact remains that this concern is a part of the current zeitgeist. What will the current mid-term elections bring us? Increased enmity or a rejection of extremism? Will democracy win out or will armed insurrection begin? Or will the status quo continue to stoke the embers of discontent?



Artists: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Sandow Birk, Diana Sofia Estrada, Michele Jaquis, SC Mero, Jeremy J Quinn, Dread Scott, Allison Stewart, Gabie Strong, Keith Walsh, Bruce Yonemoto

Opening Reception is Oct. 1, 6-9pm
Show runs through Dec. 10, 2022

painting by Sandow Birk, depicting a fictitious war between northern and southern California in the style of historical war paintings.

Sandow Birk, “In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias”

Migrant Madonna exhibition at SoLA Contemporary

I’m excited for this work to be shown together for the first time: Fake Passport, 2008, lightjet print; we’ve unraveled ourselves, 2012, framed inkjet print with shelf and two balls of yarn from unraveled sweater made by my great-grandmother; Tikkun/Repair, 2021, remnant of sweater made by my great grandmother hung; and We Are Here (Yiddish / Spanish), 2019, embroidery on canvas. All included in the group exhibition Migrant Madonna, curated by Joyce Dallal and Naima White. On view at SoLA Contemporary April 21 - May 14, 2022.

postcard advertisement for Migrant Madonna exhibition, white text on blue and beige background.

Conney Conference on Jewish Arts

Looking forward to presenting my work next week at the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts at University of WI, Madison and on Zoom.


The Jewish Arts in an Expanded Field:

The conference will address themes of interdisciplinarity, diversity and intersectionality in the changing landscape of the Jewish Arts. In a moment in which we are experiencing a generational shift among Jewish identifying artists to a more inclusive and polyvocal, fluid understanding of Jewish identity, the politics of Jewishness are foregrounded in astounding new ways. From graphic novels to digital art and highly charged dance and performance, to theater, music and literature, we see both a return to ritual and a search for new narratives of the contemporary Jewish experience. The 8th iteration of the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts will focus on the remarkable evolution of the field as it has expanded into the future while acknowledging its own histories.

Dream House: A Collaborative Zine in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Womanhouse

One image from my series Collaborating with my five year old son while social distancing has been included in Dream House: A Collaborative Zine in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Womanhouose, edited by Cindy Rehm.

Dream House, Perfect Bound, 88 pages, 2022 Available for $20 purchase here.

Like the destroyed physical structure of Womanhouse, the dream house is a ghost, a mirage, a utopian fantasy always in need of reconstruction. Through a collective dreaming and the use of materials old and new, we build the woman-house of today. Dream House includes the work of over ninety contributors organized into four thematic sections. Whispering Walls includes works which echo the social structures that have historically limited women’s autono- my. Body House contains renderings of the femme maison, and visceral manifestations of the body. By Her Hands considers all forms of women’s labor from mothering, housework, handiwork, and emotional labor. The final section, New Constructions, contains works that refuse easy notions of the feminine or present imaginings of utopian herlands.

List of Contributors:

Beth AbaravichCathy AkersJerri AllynClaressinka AndersonAmanda Maciel AntunesLani AsuncionTricia Avant, Renée AzenaroGianna AyoraTherese BachandLauna BaconHolly BoruckLauren BradshawPolly Breckenridge, Amelia BriggsUrsula BrookbankNancy BuchananAlicia Byler, Karen Carrie, Wai Yan CheungAndrea Biller CollinsAnne ColvinKarin CronaSydney CroskeryPaola DanieleLaura Darlington, Emilie DasheNicole DaskasCherie Benner DavisChelsea DeanKim DegenJessica DillonJessica DolenceLala DronaSleepy Ephem, Alexis Espinosa, Diana Sofia Estrada, Trisha Faye, Lea FeinsteinRachel Finkelstein, C. FinleyLuka FisherMichelle Francescon, Malado FrancineDwora FriedMarisa J. FuternickVivian GeilimYves B Golden, Lindsay Goltz, Sarah GreenKristy HigbyMichele JaquisShalla JavidYvonne JongelingSharon KivlandGrace KredellKarolina LavergneElizabeth Leister, T. Charnan LewisAubrey Ingmar MansonAline MareKelly Marie MartinLilly McElroy, Brooke McGowenTom McLaughlinAlyce Haliday McQueenSiofra McSherryMemoticonMother ArtMehregan PezeshkiMinna PhilipsJennifer PilchMelissa PotterAlison PirieMary Anna Pomonis, Ali Prosch, Fiona QuilterHeather RasmussenFay RayCindy RehmChelsea RevelleMichelle RobinsonYasamin SafarzadehJinal SangoiHannah ScottSafi Alia ShabaikPeggy SivertFrances SmokowskiFelís StellaAllison StewartKayla TangeCeleste VoceDanielle Giudici WallisRebecca Waring-CraneSusan J. WhiteElizabeth C. Wild, Julie Zemel

Dream House cover image: Karin Crona

Dream House zine
pg. 52 Rebecca Waring-Crane (top) and Mary Anna Pomonis (bottom)
pg. 53 Michele Jaquis

2022 Present Work Finalist

Happy to announce I am a finalist in Prospect Art’s Present Work, which “will feature one Los Angeles-based artist yearly in the form of a physical exhibition and public talk. The program provides an opportunity for local artists to showcase completed work that has yet to be shown. Prospect Art will secure an exhibition location for the artist's work to be presented free and open to the public. Artists will be provided with a small honorarium to help offset production costs.” More here.

We Are Here, Together at Cerritos College Art Gallery

detail of installation view at Cerritos College Art Gallery (photo credit: James MacDevitt)

detail of installation view at Cerritos College Art Gallery (photo credit: James MacDevitt)

Sept. 12-25 day and night you can see my multi-lingual text-based drawings and embroideries through the windows of the Art Building at Cerritos College in Norwalk, CA, as part of the Gallery’s Window Dressing Series. More info here and here.

DIG: A Hole To Put Your Grief In - Aug. 13-21

On Saturday Aug. 13, will be facilitating a socially engaged project Mud Drawings: Reflecting On Our Grief as part of DIG: A Hole To Put Your Grief In, inspired by one of the projects I made last summer for Collaborating with my five year old son while social distancing. Participants will be invited to collect natural materials from the site, make drawing tools with those materials, and then use their handmade tools make a drawing with mud dug from the hole. Participants can make mud drawings independently throughout the week.

Press Release:

DIG: A Hole To Put Your Grief In, a project by Cara Levine, invites the audience to experience a container for their grief and mourning following over a year of collective loss. The initiative was created as a collaborative project supported by American Jewish University’s Institute for Jewish Creativity (IJC), a network designed to elevate Jewish artists based in Los Angeles.

During a week of activities at the Shalom Institute, nestled in the breathtaking Malibu mountains, Levine will dig a large-scale hole in the ground, inviting various communities and audience members to join her. Artists and community leaders will offer a schedule of activities in and around the site, ranging from collective drawings to live performances, audio recordings, and community rituals.

Please follow this link for the full schedule and registration.

The weeklong duration reflects the symbolic period of shiva, or seven days of mourning in the Jewish tradition. Culminating on the second Saturday, participants will fill the hole with water and perform a ritual cleansing, or mikveh, before refilling the hole with its original dirt, and planting native seeds to complete the cycle for renewal.

This will be a collective space to hold and process some of the grief of the year, with rituals and performances inspired by different faiths, histories, and viewpoints. As the pandemic era transforms and yet holds great uncertainties, it is important to mark this moment. While Levine continuously digs on a daily basis and invites the public to deepen the hole, she has invited artists Adrienne Adar, Dorit Cypis, Faye Driscoll, Ekaette Ekong, Sonia Guiñansca, Asher Hartman, Michele Jaquis, and hannah rubin to make or lead new work on site.

Alan Salazar, a local Chumash tribal leader, and storyteller will launch the project with a blessing on August 14. Cantor Chayim Frenkel from Kehillat Israel will perform a Havdalah service on Tuesday, August 17. The closing Day on August 21, will be marked by a group celebration and live performances.

The Shalom Institute campus was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018. The leaders and community from SI welcome DIG as part of their grief process over the loss and sacred transition taking place on their land.

This project is made with additional support from American Jewish University’s Institute for Jewish Creativity, Cantor Chayim Frenkel, and the Shalom Institute.

The Institute for Jewish Creativity (IJC) is a proud project of American Jewish University (AJU). The IJC cultivates a network of local Jewish artists, and supports a contemporary, vibrant, Jewish cultural landscape in Los Angeles and beyond, in the spirit of AJU’s mission to elevate individuals and communities through Jewish wisdom and creativity.

Inclusive Pedagogy (during a pandemic)

Today I gave a talk for colleagues at Otis College of Art and Design about my experiences teaching last semester. Here it is…

In 2014 when I was pregnant I pulled Meg Cranston aside after a Chairs Council meeting to ask her to lunch. 

I needed to know… How do you successfully balance an art career, while running a department and parenting?

Meg told me “it's not that long of a conversation… Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” At the time I had no idea what to do with that advice.

But when the pandemic forced us all to work from home and pre-K – 12th grade schools to close, I began to understand.

I considered not teaching in the fall. I was too overwhelmed by what felt like being half a person trying to do the jobs of three. But I didn’t want to let my course community partner down and with all the furloughs I was worried – what if I lose my job? I will never get another in academia without a full semester of online teaching experience. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. 

My fall Creative Action class Uniquely Abled partners with progressive art studios [ECF Westside Art Center and UCPLA’s Washington Reid Gallery] for adults with developmental disabilities including autism, down syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Marlena Donohue is the dedicated course Mentor [which essentially means we team teach, but I am the instructor on record].

The goal is not to design for people with disabilities, but instead to make art in collaboration across differences. It’s a balance of bonding over similar interests and forgetting about diagnoses, while simultaneously supporting a range of communication, physical and learning needs that anyone from Otis and our community partners might have.

As a collective we became a sister site of the Self Isolation Pandemic Artists Residency Program started by Samantha Fields at CSUN and we loved the idea of artists with disabilities infiltrating this normative space.

Each week we had 28 people on Zoom and it was beautiful chaos when everyone was visible and active in the chats. Unlike these screen-shots taken during a break.

So how did we make this inclusive? First I added everyone’s timezones in my phone so I was conscious of what time it was for each person in the class.

Closed captioning was installed on my Zoom account so it was automatic without anyone needing to request it.

We kept our Zoom meetings under two hours and utilized breakout rooms. Each room had a mix of participants from each site with one facilitator (myself, Marlena, our TA, or staff from one of the partners). 

I mirrored the NEST [Otis College’s course management system] course content in Google Drive to allow for multiple access points to the course materials.

And provided in class demos and step by step visual instructions on how to access the drive from multiple devices. I also encouraged the use of peer assistance, so if you have trouble uploading something, just email it to someone else who can help.

The staff at UCPLA and ECF reported that my group emails to all participants outlining each week’s asynchronous work was too overwhelming for some of their clients, so instead I would cc only the staff who would then review the content on Mondays in one on one meetings.

Reflections on asynchronous work were accepted in written, audio or video format to allow multiple ways for participants to respond – this is also something I learned from Meg. 

We slowed down. The participants spent two weeks drafting community agreements,

and two weeks sharing their prior work with each other.

Otis students joined Zoom workshops offered by ECF and UCPLA. 

And everyone collaborated through mail art, digital file sharing and shared virtual studio time.

You can see their final projects at UniquelyAbledArt.com

It was a challenging semester, but this class was the highlight each week just to spend time with such compassionate and engaged artists - who were amused, not annoyed, by my son’s occasional interruptions.

I continue to go back to these words [Everything worth doing is worth doing badly] because sometimes remote working as an academic administrator without adequate childcare feels impossible. Sometimes making and teaching art and design online feels impossible. And sometimes focusing on DEI efforts in the microcosm of Otis while the world outside is falling apart feels impossible. But all of it is necessary and worth doing, even if sometimes I feel I am doing it badly. I hear faculty talk of the pressure they feel from chairs to be perfect. To deliver better online classes than the ones they taught in person.  Instead I tell them of Meg’s advice. I see it as permission and forgiveness to skip a committee meeting [occasionally], to ask for and give extended deadlines, and to not hide our children behind Zoom backgrounds. 

I don’t want perfection. All I ask of myself and my faculty is that we are engaged, inclusive and authentic in our teaching – with all the messiness that this entails.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: Dispatches from the Edge of an Apocalypse

Postcard reproductions of four recent projects, We Are Here (Yiddish/Spanish embroidery), Never Again, and Collaborating with my five year old son while social distancing: Green Ninja & Aardvark Mom are included in the Exhibition in a Box, HINDSIGHT IS 2020: Dispatches from the Edge of an Apocalypse.

The exhibition was recently reviewed by Carol Cheh for KCET’s Southland Sessions: 'Hindsight Is 2020' Offers Visceral (Not Virtual) Art Experiences in a Box.

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Below is the press release:

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is physically closed through Spring 2021, so our Fall 2020 exhibition has gone mobile. Inspired by art historical precedents - such as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise, the Fluxus Fluxkits, and Wallace Berman’s Semina mail art project - our Fall show is presented as a limited-run ‘exhibition-in-a-box.’ In the spirit of mutual aid food banks, the gallery will be distributing these art boxes free-of-charge (while supplies last) to anyone that requests one.

The exhibition, Hindsight is 2020: Dispatches from the Edge of an Apocalypse, consists of miniaturized reproductions of works by fifteen contemporary artists exploring the events and anxieties of the last year, including: plague, virality, isolation, remote contact, face masks, parenting/childhood under lockdown, work/food/housing precarity, struggles in the service industry, plight of frontline/essential workers, disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, the constitutional crisis, the rise/return of fascism/anti-semitism, armed militias, police/state violence, protesting bodies, structural racism, xenophobia, the climate crisis, wildfires, etc.

The participating artists are Carmen Argote, Badly Licked Bear, christy roberts berkowitz, Michael Hanson, stephanie mei huang, Michele Jaquis, Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Elana Mann, Narsiso Martinez, Thinh Nguyen, Dominic Quagliozzi, Conrad Ruiz, Allison Stewart, Chester Vincent Toye, and Gordon Winiemko.

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Collectors were invited to reserve a boxed copy of Hindsight is 2020: Dispatches from the Edge of an Apocalypse and to receive instructions with pickup locations and dates (contactless, free) or delivery options (donation required to cover cost of shipping), by emailing curator James MacDevitt at jmacdevitt@cerritos.edu.

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We Are All Americans at the ICA LA

I’m so excited to be participating in Field Workshop: Action Projects at the ICA LA. Join me on Aug. 21 to participate in Season 3 of We Are All Americans - a socially engaged documentary project in the form of an oral history recording workshop series and an audio podcast. Participants will be able to sign up for 1 hour time slots between 1-6pm to have social distanced (with masks) recorded conversations about how family stories are passed down from generation to generation and what it means to be American at this moment.

RSVP here.

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Essay published in Artlines, Summer 2019 Edition

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Last February I presented my work on a panel at CAA in NYC, “Liberal Democracy and Social Practices,” moderated by Susan M. King for the Women’s Caucus for Arts. Essays by each panelist (Karen Frostig & Hazel Uzunkaya, elin o’Hara slavick, and myself) were published in Artlines Summer 2019 Edition. Read it here (mine is page 10-11).

* Since the essay was written I learned that the Great-grandmother who came to the US on a fake passport was indeed Ida Casarsky (on my maternal grandfather’s side) not Pauline Zuckerberg (on my maternal grandmother’s side).

THEN, WHAT If? NewMediaNewMusicNewEngland at Five Points Gallery

Happy to have two short video clips included in this among friends, strangers and video art sheros.

“THEN, WHAT IF? has been curated by Gene Gort and Ken Steen from an international call for entries and includes seasoned veterans and young producers. a collection of 60 video clips and 60 sound compositions that are 60 seconds in duration each, and are paired randomly using a Cageian model of indeterminacy with 3600 potential variations.”

THEN, WHAT IF? is on view at Five Points Gallery in Torrington, CT Nov. 1-30, but can also be experienced online at NewMediaNewMusicNewEngland.

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