R&D Grant Applicant Resources

The Mexican Woman’s Post-Apocalyptic Survival Guide to the Southwest: Food, Clothing, Shelter, y la Migra examines and celebrates the survival skills of a group of contemporary Mexican women living on the US Mexico border. After spending the day tending their gardens, feeding livestock, completing knitting projects and firing handmade bricks, many of the women are active on their social media accounts, posting the fruits of their labor and/or selfies beside family members. My relationship with the woman of DouglaPrieta Works began when I was asked to paint a mural on their community space. I agreed and spent many mornings and afternoons in their presence and they have become role models to me, not only as stewards of the land but as mothers, artists and community advocates. DouglaPrieta Works is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering woman and children in Colonia Ladrillera, a rural neighborhood in Agua Prieta, SON. Members engage in permaculture in the desert and also focus on water preservation, brick making, energy conservation, and community learning.

For this new body of work will I photograph each woman in ‘heroic’ stances atop the land they preserve and utilize for survival. This photographic series is meant to place the brown woman in a landscape of power, demanding dignity and respect. The prints will be large scale (40×60 inches) for the aggrandizement and power the women possess, as a mechanism to counteract biases based on race and economic status.

Phase 2 of the project will consist of a “”how to”” survival guide that will exist as a printed art book and an interactive e-book including live links, and video. I will learn and document the many aspects involved with surviving solely on the resources of the desert land based on the following topics:

• Food: Growing crops, herbs, and raising chickens, roosters, and rabbits.
• Shelter: Making and firing bricks. (Members made and fired the bricks that now make up the DouglaPrieta Works building).
• Clothing: Knitting, crocheting sewing, and quilting.
• La Migra: Descriptions of what one could face when traveling on foot across the desert and how to deal with La Migra (border agents).

The book will also touch on additional details of DouglaPrieta Works’ practices including water preservation, energy preservation, and ethics. This detailed guide will consist of photographs and drawings illustrating the life and land the 12 women hold in high regard. The e-book will contain short video tutorials showing the women at work in their organization, along with live links to resources and articles.

Historically, art has provided a segway for the viewer to empathize with other humans. The work invites the viewer/reader to imagine themselves as outsiders or under the most extreme circumstance, like surviving the apocalypse. It forces a shift in the cultural paradigm starting with the local by empowering new cultural icons that exist outside of the status quo. The piece features new cultural icons in a scale typical of European aristocrats or American pop stars. I want to honor the women of Mexico from this particular border that value and practice an environmentally sustainable lifestyle in a time where consumption and waste are at its height in American culture. The work will center women producing sustenance for their community as a reminder of how the fruits and vegetables reach our own homes during a time where public rhetoric destabilizes cultural views and relationships with countries whose people are facing a crisis, forcing unwanted migration. A migration that supports our agriculture system and hospitality industries to name a few, all in the shadow of the American landscape. The piece is meant to empower women of color woman as educators, a role that is revered in the Mexican culture because DouglaPrieta Works also functions as a learning space where the women are continually learning and teaching each other new skills whether it be a new sewing technique or conversational English topics.

My community of practice is generally geographic, situated on the US Mexico border and/or the Southwest region of the United States. As the sociopolitical climate of the border region remains controversial, I am interested in exploring the idea of permeability and of how the perception of the border can be reimagined through a feminist lens atop a fence that bisects one culture. In this sense, my community of practice is deeply rooted in place and my personal experience in a particular border community. The inherent reciprocity of the United States and Mexico is often invisibilized rather than highlighted. Barriers are what drive my artwork to respond to the dangers they implicate, and for the peoples and environments involved.

This proposal responds to my personal perception and value of migrant labor and women’s leadership. I hope the viewer will reflect on border crossers who risk their lives to make our lives easier, with intentions grounded in survival and providing. The proposal frames an imagined situation where the reader faces the thought of a Post-Apocalyptic Southwest. The book is meant to place women of color in positions of power and ask the question, would our perceptions, rhetoric, and actions be altered if our lives depended on the knowledge and skills of Mexican women? What if you were faced with having to migrate south in order to survive? Would she be held in the highest regard if you knew your next meal derived from her ability to butcher a chicken? What if she knew the recipe and process for making bricks and your shelter relayed on her sharing the knowledge? What if you were forced to jump a fence into another country? How would you navigate through the desert or interact with La Migra (border agents)? This project invites the viewer/reader to imagine a flipped border scenario while learning about the realities of the everyday survival and the methods being performed by women on the other side of the border fence in Agua Prieta, SON.

The proposed project relates to my current body of work geographically speaking as well as through providing an alternative viewpoint of life on the border. The work is meant to counter the overgeneralized statements made by individuals with power. Like many of my previous works, the goal is to take control of a false narrative by zooming into one geographic location and focusing on real people who we will find to have more in common with than not.

This multilayered piece will enable me to work on a lengthy; socially charged work combining Photography, Video, Web, and Book Art in a way that could add to the movement of cultural acceptance in the United States. It will deepen my artistic practice by creating an opportunity to explore creative non-fictional writing as a new mode of expression in my portfolio. Furthermore, this work will deepen my relationship with women in my community facing incredibly different circumstances than I am at this moment and who are willing to share space and tackle common goals. Finally, this project will broaden my understanding of book publishing, and equitable, collaborative practices.

Listen to Jenea discuss her community of practice.

Listen to Jenea talk about drafting her proposal narrative.

The story I hope to tell in a book-length poetry manuscript titled Radius is of three generations of women, all immigrants to America. My grandmother was born just after the turn of the 20th century, lived through the Japanese Occupation of Korea, was married in an arranged union to a wealthy silk factory owner, and was then widowed during the Korean War. My mother was her second daughter, believed to be taken in by my grandmother when one of my grandfather’s concubines died in childbirth. Caught between the crossfire of North Korean and American armies, my mother sustained bullet wounds in the thigh and foot. She was ten years old. My grandmother, having just lost her husband and with six children to care for, left my mother to die as the remaining members of the family fled for safety. My aunt, who was two years older, carried my mother on her back until they reached the next village. Many years later, my grandmother immigrated to America to live with my mother for over 30 years—a difficult and complex relationship that ended in estrangement followed by my grandmother’s death. This story of war, survival, immigration, and family has influenced my entire life. This along with the themes of loss, betrayal, identity, and exile are a part of the manuscript. I represent the third generation, fusing the stories of my mother and grandmother together with a voice that provides an empathic imagination for understanding and forgiveness.

The artist research and development grant will allow me to conduct research at two sites: Busan, Korea, and Los Angeles, California. These visits will enable me to garner the necessary information and experiences to write additional poems and complete the remainder of the manuscript. Specifically, these site visits will afford me the opportunity to visit the landscapes where these events took place and to use these images as reference points and inspiration. I will have the opportunity to talk with family members and family friends that can share their experiences of the war. In addition, I will be able to acquire copies of documents and artifacts that will help to flesh out and add authenticity to the manuscript. Finally, I believe my conducting the research itself might become a part of the storytelling. My need to articulate, find purpose in, and put form to this long history of trauma and loss will actually become a part of the narrative.

In addition to the site visits, other proposed activities include meeting with Korean history scholars; conducting interviews; researching both the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War via texts, museum visits, and the Internet; and generating new work throughout the process. These activities will help to answer several of the driving questions behind the proposal:

• How can the suffering, specifically of Korean women and children, be interpreted through the framework of intersectionality? To what extent, if any, can the Korean culture be implicated? To what extent, if any, can the Korean government be implicated?
• How has the country healed after such physical devastation? How have people changed emotionally and mentally?
• What is the aftermath of the war on families? What are the lasting ramifications and how are they manifested?

To my knowledge, there is no poetry collection that incorporates the history of pre- and post-war Korea as told from the perspective of three generations.

Though my work focuses on Korean history and Korean culture, my community of practice is far more broad. Though writing is in its very nature a solitary undertaking, I could not possibly become the writer I hope to be by merely working in isolation. As an early-career poet, my community of practice has been primarily forged by communities of learners. These communities exist on a local and national level and include formative contexts in which poets develop, such as formal workshops, writers’ groups, conferences, residencies, and classes. These opportunities offer experiential and collective learning by fellow practitioners and are often facilitated by established poets. Out of these communities of learners, many informal relationships have emerged that I also consider my community of practice. These include mentors and trusted readers, who have provided me with incredibly rich and productive literary friendships.

The arts community in the city of Phoenix has also provided a broad landscape—a wide literary community—in which I have been fortunate to participate. This community of practice, made up of writers, teachers, editors, publishers, students, patrons, civic leaders, etc., has supported literary artists of all genres by creating and organizing meaningful opportunities where we can come together; by encouraging audiences at all levels of participation to attend literary events; and by inspiring and sustaining writers to produce and share their best work.

As a poet, I am fascinated by how specific and particular details of our individual lives and experiences broaden into the universal. Those details articulated and expressed in infinitely imaginative ways bring both delight and satisfaction to the intellectual and artistic mind. My aesthetic ambition is to write poems that resonate on an intellectual register as well as an emotional one. In this way, the work would reflect my communities of learners, as it is what we are working together to accomplish. Though my manuscript offers a single cultural representation, I do hope this expression of war and its concomitant sufferings will speak to larger audiences. I hope to share this work at readings and workshops in my larger community of practice, which would include the arts community in Phoenix.

The grant would allow me to conduct research towards the completion of a full-length manuscript. The concept arises from my chapbook, Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City (Dancing Girl Press), which briefly introduces the themes referenced above as well as themes of assimilation and biculturalism. My work has consistently investigated these notions of identity, and my approach as a poet has been to identify and consider the intersections of language, personal history, politics, culture, and gender. My hope is that the particulars of this story become part of a larger shared experience for those who have imagined or experienced war.

Leaving one’s country may be a singular transformative experience for an artist, but I would argue that the return to one’s homeland may be just as influential. These site visits to Busan, South Korea, and Los Angeles, California, will offer immersive and authentic experiences for me as a writer. It is not the research alone but the opportunity to see the landscape, witness its transformation since the war, and conduct personal interviews that I believe will make a lasting impression from which I can draw upon in my work.”

Historias en la Camioneta records my experience on the shuttle to and from Agua Prieta, Sonora Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona. My fellow passengers reveal their perspectives and personal narratives, informed by the backdrop of the desert landscape. The combination of the passengers’ dialogue and changing scenery intimately reveals the interrelationship of personal histories to the particular places passed during the journey. The transient nature of the “tellings” in the shuttle exists for a fixed time as invisible traces of our era, lost in the passing landscape and unacknowledged.

Historias en la Camioneta
December 2010
Spirit Abuse March First Friday, Albuquerque, NM
Video, Phoenix Transect Website, Arizona Historical Society Museum, Tempe, AZ
Video installation

Printed on handmade cholla paper, enlarged view of an ankle pierced by cactus needles form the human landscape. The performative piercing ritual of feminist mestiza takes on blood and the body as a visceral response to the blood within the history of our borderlands and now as the death toll of migrants is ever so present.

Untitled 1
2011
The Border Project: Soundcapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes,
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson AZ
16×20 inches
Archival print on cholla handmade paper

Window display in Mexico City examines the ideas of Eurocentrism embedded throughout the world, especially those disguised in marketing installations. For centuries, the “European look” has been the status symbol of being more educated, affluent and desirable. This image strives to make visual the thriving force of consumer propaganda and the consequences of perpetuating racial and cultural insecurity.

Window Display in Mexico City
Save Our States (S.O.S), D-Block Gallery, Long Beach, CA
Save Our States (S.O.S), D-Block Gallery, Phoenix, AZ
Environmental Imagination, GPSA Fall Juried show, Tempe, AZ
8.5 x 11 inches
Blind emboss on digital print

Skinning to Whiten: Survival Mechanism renders visible and auditorily the violence and obscenity projects onto the people of color and through the mainstream media. In doing so, the piece ignites a larger conversation about the effects of the institution of whiteness and our own historical involvement and complicity. The piece combined video projections, sound, rice, metal and a 5 day, 5-hour durational performance of brown rice being scrapped to become white rice.

Skinning to Whiten: Survival Mechanism
December 2011
Harry Wood Gallery, ASU Tempe Campus
The Hive, Phoenix, AZ, 2016
Video Projections, sound, border fence scraps, white rice, brown rice

Listen to Jenea discuss her work samples:

The work sample includes five poems from my manuscript in progress. The working title is Radius, in reference to the way in which we move back and forth from our “centers,” which include “home,” “loved ones,” and/or “our past.” I chose the following poems because they represent my attempt to complement form with meaning using diction, figurative language, poetic conventions, and mechanics to enhance the poem’s purpose. Research opportunities made possible by the grant will enable me to write additional poems and complete the remainder of the manuscript.

1. Title: “Photograph of My Grandfather in a Western Business Suit, 1950”
   Journal of Publication/Date: Gulf Stream Magazine, 2013
   In this poem I remove punctuation and capitalization to create the effect of disorientation as experienced in war. I include words in Korean to further this sense of instability and random spacing between uneven grammatical units to force longer caesurae and disrupt rhythmic continuity.
2. Title: “Radius”
   Publisher/Date: Five Oaks Press, 2015
   “Radius” consists of almost entirely declarative statements, a kind of parataxis, in an attempt to reveal three generations without the construct of a true narrative poem and without rhetorical causality. To represent complexity in the relationships, I juxtapose abstract declarations to create an inferential judgment on the part of the speaker.
3. Title: “Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City”
   Journal of Publication/Date: DMQ Review, 2014
   In this lyrical poem, action takes place in slow motion and backwards to replicate the experience of memory. This poem serves as the invocation to the manuscript, inviting readers to witness how the speaker arrived at this “crash landing.” The “crash” is a metaphor for immigration and represents its sense of jarring dislocation.
4. Title: “Dinner at Yamashiro, 2010”
   Journal of Publication/Date: DMQ Review, 2014
   This poem serves as a mirror to “Photograph of My Grandfather in a Western Business Suit, 1950.” The form is replicated with larger spacing anomalies to show the disconnectedness between the daughter and mother. The setting is relevant in that Los Angeles is the location where the family in the poems immigrates, and the smog is symbolic for the obscured perspectives of the women.
5. Title: “Landscapes”
   Journal of Publication/Date: Soundings Review, 2014
   In this lyrical elegy, I attempt to capture the landscape of the mother country as an object of mourning. I try to create an intimacy and a longing in the voice of the speaker using personification of physical geography.

Listen to Jenea discuss her process map:

Current Status:
Forty-eight of the targeted 80 poems have been completed. Of the 48 poems, 19 have been published or are in the process of publication in literary journals. Fifteen of these 19 poems will also appear in the chapbook Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City by Dancing Girl Press. The Artist Research and Development Grant will provide support to conduct research that is pivotal to the completion of my first book-length collection of poetry titled Radius. I will conduct research at two different sites: Busan, South Korea and Los Angeles, California.

Process Map:
January 2015: Book flight and accommodations for first research site: Busan, South Korea. Contact Wu family members (mother’s sisters), Seo family members (grandmother’s nieces), and Hyum Mi Kim (mother’s childhood friend) via phone. Inform them of travel arrangements and schedule meetings between 6/9/2015 and 6/19/2015. Seek out history professor of at Busan University and schedule personal interview if possible. Begin formulating interview questions for all meetings. Focus this month’s research on the narrative of the Korean War. Pursue books and articles written by individuals who lived through the experience. Continue generating new work inspired by the findings (3-5 poems).

February 2015: Establish contact in Busan government agencies to obtain birth, marriage, and property records. Focus this month’s research on collecting visual representations (photographs and video) of life in Korea from 1900 to 1940. Continue generating new work inspired by the findings (3-5 poems).

March 2015: Begin focusing research on Japanese Occupation of Korea, 1910-1945. Look specifically to accounts by Koreans who were older children at the time of the occupation to learn about life before and after. Continue generating new work inspired by the findings (3-5 poems).

June 2015: Plan and prepare all recording devices, including video recorder, audio recorder, DSLR camera, and portable scanner. Conduct research trip to Busan, South Korea. Upon return, schedule interview and meetings for second research trip. Prepare interview questions. Continue generating new work (3-5 poems).

July 2015: Transcribe interviews. Organize all research findings. Construct a chronological outline of all recorded information. Begin contemplating ways to shape the manuscript. Travel to second research site, Los Angeles, to interview my mother and aunt and visit the Korean American Museum’s archives. Continue generating new work inspired by the findings (3-5 poems).

“The three experiences listed have prepared me to work with communities across disciplines, generations, and nationalities. The work has heightened my cultural competency and has sensitized my approach, especially in working with migrant women, children, and the elderly.

The mural project at DouglaPrieta created the opportunity for me to build a deep relationship with women in the collective. More than 200 hours were spent working at DouglaPrieta, which allowed for a great number of work hours and downtime, opening up new possibilities for deeper interactions and planning time.

Border Arts Corridor has served a community that has been deprived of the arts for nearly two generations. From curating to hosting events, this work has developed my interpersonal skills with artists, stakeholder, dignitaries, youth, and elders. My experiences working binationally has heightened awareness for the growing need for female representation and leadership in our border. I see this organization contributing to the revival of our city as a cultural hub in the borderlands as it was in the early 20th century.

The Holocaust Project Documentary is a heartfelt project spearheaded by educators and students with a common goal of eliminating discrimination so an event like the Holocaust may never occur again. The documentary’s primary focus is the way our binational community interacts with a generation who went through the most horrific event in modern times. This event serves as a force to remind our young generation of the importance of empathy and tolerance in today’s age. This work has helped me to continue to develop my portfolio in stay current in digital photography and video production.

As an artist, I am ready to take on the proposed multidisciplinary project, as the skills necessary have been nurtured in the past five years with my work as an artist, educator and arts organizer.”

Listen to Jenea talk about why she chose to highlight these experiences:

My work as an artist is broad — I consider myself a dancer, a choreographer, an arts educator, an artistic director and a producer. Over the past ten years, I’ve had the pleasure of presenting flamenco in the Arizona community through festivals like Lluvia Flamenca and Festival de Espana and performing and teaching throughout the valley. I’ve always strived to present Flamenco, in the purest most authentic way possible. Throughout my career, I’ve been told that my style is too aggressive and masculine; that women should not do so much footwork and instead focus on the fluid movements of the hands and arms, always concentrating on creating a picturesque, beautiful flamenco image. I’m continually searching for ways to improve my technique and artistry. That drive has brought me a good amount of success. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to tour with world-renowned, New York-based company Noche Flamenca, alongside many payos (Spanish dancers) and gitanos (gypsies). But no matter how hard I work, my dancing will never be puro in their eyes because I am American. So, I am stuck between these two worlds where I’m too puro and not puro enough at the same time. I’m too fat. I’m too queer. I’m too short. I’m too American. I’m too flamenca. I’m too aggressive. I’m too brown. I’m too intense. These are all comments that have been made to me throughout my career. These ideas are not merely what define me but often also what I define myself against as an artist. Through this project, I hope to silence those voices from my past and finally reveal myself as an artist.

“Graduate coursework has enabled me to pursue poetry as an academic and intellectual endeavor, which includes the ability to research, write both academically and creatively, and develop a disciplined writing practice.

The editorships were invaluable in gaining experience with project management, specifically the ability to work within budget and time constraints, as well as working in collaboration with other artists to develop and execute an artistic vision. Interviewing and transcribing are also skills that will be transferable for this project proposal.

Generative workshops and conferences with other practitioners and established poets have been and are an integral part of developing my writing, reading, and revision skills.

Participating in community-based readings strengthens writing communities and promotes art, but they also allow me immediate feedback regarding the resonance or lack thereof in a particular poem. The information has been critical in the revision and editing process.

Residencies have allowed me the time and space to focus on developing and sustaining a writing practice with a specific creative project in mind.”

The proposed budget was put together with the process and product of this proposal in mind. The grant will allow me to purchase the tools that will enable me to complete the work promptly and professionally. My main obstacle as a multidisciplinary/digital artist is the absence of a personal computer that can manage the new software I prefer to utilize in my practice like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere. A MacBook Pro is a portable digital powerhouse that can handle the load of digital processing I require in my workflow.

The camera equipment is part of the budget that will enhance the outcome of my work and will add to my artist tools for this proposal and future projects in the making.

Printing and framing with a fine art company will be like icing on a cake. This budget line will provide me the opportunity to submit to shows in Arizona and Sonora over the coming years. I also plan to apply for shows out of state with a body of work that is essentially ready to ship and hang.

Listen to Jenea discuss assembling her expenses list:

The additional $5,600 of the budget is being funded by Stateside Presents, our presenting partner ($3,100) and our Fiscal Sponsors- Performing in the Borderlands ($1000) and Northwestern Mutual ($1500).