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"My involvement with the Civil Rights movement, which I joined in 1963, and the Women's movement, which I joined in the 1970s, informed some early decisions about my art career. Primarily, these movements helped me recognize that my art was supported by community: We shared technical resources, brainstormed together, and created a new language to express the liberation of human beings. At the same time, however, I felt marginalized by society. Funding of the arts began eroding in the 1970s; there was a general denigration of art with social/political content, and collaboratives and collectives began to have a more difficult time as individual artists scrambled for scarce resources. By 1985, I made a very intentional choice that my place was in the middle of community and that I would find my way back, as a visionary, to the center of my culture. I define community as finding the people who support you in all different ways because we can't survive without each other's support. This doesn't mean that I don't work alone at times—I love to make beautiful objects and drawings. I draw and write alone, and I share my ideas widely. I bring together unusual collaborations because that is the only possible way to do my work. I like uniting diverse groups—such as artists, scientists, engineers, city planners, architects, and a wide variety of cultural and class perspectives—in order to focus different kinds of intelligences on a problem. This is not our current model for artists. I took my model from the Renaissance and from the Bauhaus to Joseph Beuys to the feminist collectives of the 1970s.
For me, the ultimate joy is connecting to each other and the environment."
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