in the late 90s and early 2000s, i’d become smitten with stencils and had been doing some anti-war and political street stenciling and had started to stencil on recycled vinyl records as that was something i had lots of sitting around, as a dj and music journalist that covered dance music. i was making paintings and clocks out of those recycled vinyl records, stenciling designs i created that i would also turn into tshirt designs. sometimes i would spray paint stencil shirts; occasionally i would silkscreen shirts.
right before hurricane katrina, in june 2005, me and some other women who had crafty businesses came together to form the new orleans craft mafia. we latched onto the craft mafia idea which had come out of austin, tx in 2003 and spread to other cities around the country. we’d barely formed and started functioning as a group when katrina hit and scattered us all.
post-katrina, displaced to kentucky but “commuting” back and forth to new orleans at least once a month, i was hustling to come up with money and basically my crafty biz exploded as folks were wanting to support each other and insurance/fema money was flowing. the new orleans craft mafia took off and making stuff became more or less my full time job. i even helped found a craft mafia outpost in louisville, kentucky, where i was living most of the time. i couldn’t make clocks fast enough, i was printing tshirts and other apparel, making stencil signs on discarded wood, i even made accessories like cufflinks out of old board game pieces, and glued together all kinds of weird stuff onto vinyl records in mixed media assemblages. i had a good run with the craft mafia from 2005-2010 but bowed out when my personal life imploded and the pet biz kinda fell in my lap at the end of 2010.
the highlight of this timeframe for me was during the 2008 presidential election cycle, with my stencil portrait of then-presidential-candidate barack obama. after producing stencil and silkscreen t-shirts, paper prints, stickers, and bicycle spoke cards, i was invited to participate in a national exhibit in washington d.c. during obama’s presidential inauguration in january 2009 put on by artist shepard fairey, entitled manifest hope. two of my obama paintings were exhibited (and sold!), and one of them appears in the coffee table obama art book art for obama: designing manifest hope and the campaign for change. my design was even licensed by a norwegian magazine (aftenposten innsikt) for the cover!
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