WIA President Marge Dean spotlights value of domestic labor in new exhibit

Reprinted from Animation Magazine

By Ramin Zahed

This Friday, November 7, the Automata gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood will open the doors on The Sweepers, a new conceptual art exhibition of the work of acclaimed animation leader and multi-media artist Marge Dean. Each piece is build around the same concept: What would a world where housework is valued — and the women doing it recognized as creative visionaries — look like?

The Sweepers is presented as a group show of the housewives of the fictional Floor Field Cleaning art movement (1940-1975), a subset of the school of Abstract Housework. Its defining characteristic was the expansive, unbroken clarity of stained or soaked linoleum, in which dirt was divorced from its context and cleanliness itself became the subject. Six artists are represented with a portrait, a sample floor from their portfolio, a short biography and inspiring quote. Displayed are also samples of the tools of their trade. An animated interview with one housewife, Laurie Poons, plays through the exhibit and functions as a continuous explanation of the context of the show (watch it below).

Ahead of the show’s debut, Animation Magazine caught up with Dean — who is well known in television animation circles as an Emmy-winning producer/executive, as Head of Studio for Skybound Entertainment (Invincible) and as founder/President of the nonprofit advocacy group WIA (Women in Animation) — to discuss this deeply personal return to her conceptual art roots.

Animation Magazine: Congrats on this wonderful new exhibit, Marge. Can you tell us a little bit about how this venture began?

Marge Dean: And after years of talking about WIA, and encouraging women artists to stop putting their creative vision on the back burner, I realized that I was the poster child for Women in Animation. I studied art, aspired to make my own films but in order to support my family, I took on the role of facilitating and realizing other people’s stories. I have a good career in animation working on great projects with amazing artists. This gallery show is a circling back to where I started.

Read the full article here.