I’m recalling from memory an incident that happened over the summer. I was at a gathering of artists, curators, and presenters and an artist was asked about a recent quote, which referred to her work as “white girl art.”

The artist answered that she didn’t want to be put in any box, and certainly not that one. Of course she didn’t, no one wants to be put in a box because once you are in one, it is hard to get out. Artists know that if categorized in one way, it will be hard to get observers, presenters, critics and curators to see them in any other light. And so the denial begins. It is sad to watch, and sad to be in that circumstance.

I know all of this from experience. I have been at various times in the Jewish box, the modern dance box, the post-modern box, the female box, the middle aged female box and soon to be the old-female-white-girl box. If people could hold all these ideas at the same time, it wouldn’t be so bad, because I am all those things. What is detrimental to us all is when a label is applied as a single definition, which makes truth too simplistic.

Personally I love structure and structured thinking and I don’t mind the box imagery although as you can tell I hate the “you can only be in one” mentality that seems to accompany it. I don’t mind it because I know when the Jewish box knocks up against the postmodern box knocks up against the urban rural boxes…well great things can happen at those porous borders.

However, since I am at a new stage in my life, I would like to leave you with this: How about a group called Artists without Edges? No countries, no disciplines, no organizations, no boundaries, no edges. And then we can begin to redefine ourselves and be seen with the multiplicity.