RISING ARTISTS GRANTS
THROUGH A SERIES OF RISING ARTISTS GRANTS , WE PROVIDE SUPPORT TO ARTISTS WHOSE WORK TRANSFORMS CULTURE …
I CAME BACK FOR MOLLY is an autobiographical solo show exploring issues of mental illness created by Molly Carden . The goal of the show is to reach communities of young people who are struggling with mental illness – educational institutions , including colleges , as well as psychiatric hospitals and other mental health programs . Carden hopes to expose her own struggle of liberation and , in doing so , participate in the collective liberation of every young female-identifying person who has grappled with deep feelings of inadequacy at any point in her life .
YOU WON ’ T GO ALONE IF YOU GO is a new book on incarceration and motherhood by Harriet Clark . When asked about her work , Clark explains , “ My writing explores how prison life in this country overlaps with family life . To that end , the violence at the center of my work is the violence of family separation , which is , as I see it , the foundational violence of this country , stretching back to the residential schooling system for indigenous children and the familial dismemberments of the slave trade and extending now to the de-mothering of incarcerated mothers , from the constant assault on their parental rights to the larger cultural stigmas attached to mothering through bars . I ’ m interested in how difficult circumstances affect the forms of care we can offer each other . One of the primary ways we shame women is by insisting that the forms of love and care they offer are wrong or inadequate ; as a legal system and a culture , we do the opposite of supporting mothers-under-stress . My book looks at caretaking under difficult circumstances in a way that I hope is never lurid or other-ing and that takes seriously the many factors beyond a mother ’ s devotion that affect how intact a family is able to be . My aim is to dignify those mothers and those ways of being mothered that are so consistently de-valued in our culture .”