News

Heather Ault will be presenting the 4000 Years for Choice project at the 125th May Day Champaign-Urbana Midwest Zine Fest at 6pm on Saturday, April 30th, 2011.

http://midwestzinefest.ucimc.org/

4000 Years for Choice was invited to donate posters to Planned Parenthood of Illinois’s Generations Gala event on Thursday, May 5, 2011. These posters will be included in the auction. As well, additional posters will be gifted to several supporters as a thank you for their committment to protecting women’s reproductive healthcare in Illinois.

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/illinois/generations-celebration-healthy-families-36501.htm

To support their wonderful and important spiritual work, a series of posters have been donated to Faith Aloud’s fundraising event on June 11, 2011!

http://www.faithaloud.com/

Through the 2011 Stephen L. Barstow Art and Design Lectures Series, Heather Ault presented her work to an audience of students, faculty, and community members at Central Michigan University. This year’s theme was contemporary protest art. Her lecture took place in the Bovee Auditorium on March 22, 2011.

http://www.cmich.edu/x32617.xml

As one of the keynote speakers, Heather Ault presented her research and artwork at the Abortion Care Network’s national conference in Florida in February 2011. Her analysis covered the history, images, language, and spaces of the pro-choice movement. Her presentation was described as “the sleeper hit of the conference, and the one everyone was still talking about weeks later” by one attendee.

http://www.abortioncarenetwork.org/

As part of the Human Rights and Social Justice program, Heather Ault presented her work at Miami University in Ohio. In addition to a public lecture at MacMillan Hall, she visited three undergraduta classes to discuss her experience as an artist, activist, and researcher of reproductive choice narratives. An exhibition of all 50 posters in the series is on display to the public at McMillan Hall from November 18th through December 14th, 2011.

http://www.miami.muohio.edu/news/article/view/14388

4000 Years for Choice will be at the United States Social Forum in the Tent Village! Please come check out the tent space that will display the protest signs, posters, and postcards.

Heather Ault will also be participating in co-organizing an abortion rights workshop, headed up by World Can’t Wait. Here’s the info!

Workshop
Standing up for Women’s Right to Abortion in 2010
World Can’t Wait and 4000 Years for Choice
Wed, 06/23/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:00pm
TWW Building, Floor 2
151 West Fort Street, Detroit

People who care about the humanity of women must boldly challenge the anti-scientific assumptions and anti-women morality that prevails throughout the debate over women’s right to abortion with clarity: not by seeking common ground with the movement that seeks nothing less than the submission of women to men. At a time when the country is fighting multiple unjust wars and during a time of great political and economic instability, racist tea-baggers should not be the only ones in the streets right now. We will discuss how the efforts to stand up for abortion rights interacts with our work to reverse the “Bush doctrine” of aggressive, torture, and indefinite detention, and the fascist direction of U.S. society associated with the Christian fundamentalists and the neo-cons. This presentation will include showing a video clip from “Abortion, Morality, and the Liberation of Women,” which we use in high school and college classes. We argue that “abortion is not murder; fetuses are not babies, and women are not incubators” and that confining our protest to what the Democratic Party accepts will just lead us further and further away from a world where women themselves can truly and freely decide when and whether to bear children.

Finally, here’s a list of USSF workshops prepared by the Gender Justice Working Group:  A Program of Gender Justice Related Events

My MFA thesis show, upon graduation from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, consisted of a series of celebration signs that visualize the 4000 Years for Choice history. These signs are intended to connect people with spaces, namely, clinic spaces where there is little, if no, active grass-roots pro-choice presence. Rather than “defending” clinics whenever there is an anti-choice attack, why not think pro-actively with art, music, and festivities that speak to the joyfulness and empowerment  that is gained from knowledge, resources, creativity, and autonomy in our lives? These signs speak to this potential, as women learn about the ancient traditions of contraception and abortion and realize they embedded within history for as long as it has been recorded.

More pictures can be found on the Flickr photostream!