LOUDER THAN WORDS ART AND ACTIVISM
S.A. BACHMAN is a socially engaged artist, activist and educator. She is the co-founder of two artist collaboratives, LOUDER THAN WORDS (with Neda Moridpour) and THINK AGAIN (with David John Attyah). Bachman recruits art in the service of public address while examining the ways that capitalism, racism and misogyny conspire to jeopardize women and the outnumbered. Her socio-political critiques expose the insidiousness of sexism, white privilege and conformity. Working at the intersection of art and social justice, she employs appropriated images to explore how the mass media structures our conceptions of race, class and gender.
Bachman’s work addresses structural violence against women, economic inequality, undocumented labor, queer liberation, race justice and militarization. Her interdisciplinary practice utilizes photomontage, mobile billboards, outdoor projection, moving image and offset printing. Since the 1990s, Bachman has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary art and feminist education, teaching at high schools, community colleges, art academies and universities.
Bachman has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New England Foundation for the Arts. Her photographs and interventionist projects have been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston and Philadelphia), the Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Rose Art Museum and the Alternative Museum. Bachman’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Palacio de Bellas Artes Ciudad de México and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. It has been reviewed in Artforum, Ms. and Social Text. Her political posters and photographs are published in Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies and Graphic Agitation 2. The early projects of THINK AGAIN are documented in the monograph, A Brief History of Outrage.
Bachman has created artwork in conjunction with a range of collaborators including United for a Fair Economy, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, Peace Over Violence and A Window Between Worlds. She was a founding member of the Boston Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) and has extensive experience facilitating youth workshops on diversity and intolerance.
NEDA MORIDPOUR is a socially engaged feminist artist, advocate, educator and co-founder of two artist-activist collaboratives, LOUDER THAN WORDS (with S.A. Bachman) and the [P]Art Collective (with Pouya Afshar).
Born and raised in Iran, a strong awareness of gender discrimination, inequality and censorship permeates Moridpour’s methods and philosophy. She approaches art as a social practice, crossing disciplines and boundaries to explore social issues while establishing dialogue and mobilizing communities. Her art reorders entrenched cultural gridlock via bold round-table talks, visual and performative interventions, prints and lens-based practices.
Her collaboration with A Window Between Worlds, I CAN WE CAN, engaged more than 20,000 participants globally and her work with the [P]Art Collective brings together artists and professionals to exchange ideas about social issues in Iran via artmaking. To engage society, Moridpour works with many socially active organizations including Peace Over Violence in Los Angeles, Omid Foundation, Sepas, and Samar in Tehran. She has extensive experience facilitating workshops and roundtables on gender based violence and she continues to work as an anti-violence and human rights activist.
LOUDER THAN WORDS received the Women’s Caucus for Art International Honor Roll and her work with [P]Art Collective won the 1st prize in the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival. Moridpour’s work is in the collection of the L.A. County Museum of Art and was recently exhibited in Islamic Art Now, Part 2: Contemporary Art of the Middle East.
Moridpour resides in Boston and Los Angeles. She is a Professor of Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and holds an MFA in Public Practice from Otis College of Art and Design.