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We discussed an extremely important subject in Baby Feminism today- women’s suffrage. The word “suffrage” means the right to vote and run for office. We watched scenes from “Iron Jawed Angels,” a great movie about the women’s suffrage movement and some of its leaders, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. Did you know women couldn’t vote until 1920? This change was brought about by a group of strong, determined women protesting for their rights, and maintaining a stance of nonviolence despite being mistreated and abused by their opponents. This movie made us realize that, even though it may seem like a hassle, voting is extremely important and a right that we fought hard to win.

We’ve really been buckling down in our last few weeks of Animation, and this week we were able to knock out the finishing scenes for two of our sequences. We shot a cute scene with our clay figures that will go into our “No Cliques” rule, and we shot the final scene of the entire video. The girls also worked on decorating some paper dolls that will go in our “Contact Us” rule.

This week in Photography, we look at some more examples of video portraits produced by Rebecca Davis for the Daily News. This particular series was done as part of the 10 year anniversary retrospective of 9/11, and it features interviews and photographs by the Daily News photographers who covered 9/11 as it was happening. The series is incredibly moving, and it is particularly interesting for how it brings out the stories behind the photographs that have become so iconic of 9/11. We talked about the field of spot news photography, which requires you to really throw yourself into these sometimes scary situations as they are happening. These images circulated on the front pages of the news, and they are incredibly important documents of a crucial moment in American history. After this heavy discussion, we went out into the garden to do some photography. The girls were asked to compose their photos with objects in the foreground to create more dynamic images.

This week we had a packed class at Culinary Academy, and good thing- we had lots of food to prepare today for our hungry tutoring girls! We made pizzas, and learned how to top them with caramelized onions. We also made delicious gingersnaps. Everything turned out great, and all our tutoring girls sent their compliments to the chefs!

Today we started working on a very special project- a Girls Club zine! Fly showed us a bunch of her zines for inspiration, then we started getting to work on our own! Since portraits are a large part of her work, Fly showed us some tips for drawing realistic portraits. We practiced doing self-portraits, and “blind drawings” of each other. Once we have a cover and a title, our zine will be on its way!

In 2013, the Lower Eastside Girls Club participated in the NEA Big Read project, which celebrated the life and work of author and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston. As part of the project, we profiled eight local artists and entrepreneurs who live and work in the Lower East Side. Please check out our video below!

Inspired by Zora (Full Length Version) from Lower Eastside Girls Club on Vimeo.

The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.

Today Geek Girls worked on improving their soldering skills. Soldering is a is the process of binding two wires together by heating a soft metal called solder. This allows the wires to form a circuit. We also learned how to undo the action using a “solder sucker.” Pretty cool!

This week in Animation, we animated the first and last sequences of our guidelines video. We started animating the “We’re Here for You!” rule, the final rule of the Girls Club Guidelines. The girls made hand drawn pictures, which we cut out and animated. We also animated the decorated “Lower Eastside Girls Club” letters that we made last week. This opening sequence is incredibly adorable, and sets a wonderful tone for the rest of the video.

This week our guest artist Fly helped us create our very own art journals! First, she showed us the journals and sketchbooks she’s been keeping since she was a kid, as a source of inspiration. Fly told us we could put absolutely anything we want in our art journals: sketches, stories, self-portraits, dreams, photos, comics. So we did!

This week in Photo, we had a very special guest photographer, Emine Ziyatdinova, come share her work and her experiences.  Emine has done a really incredible project photographing teenagers in Jacksonville, Ohio. She follows them through their daily lives, and through some very important milestone such as prom and graduation. The project explores the experience of youth in small town Ohio, while getting at larger issues of beauty, class and poverty in America. We were fortunate to have Emine walk us through her entire experience working on the project, from shooting to the final editing process.

Emine also showed us some of her video portrait work, and we all went outside to the garden to shoot video portraits of some of the girls. The girls learned about how to find the best light for portraits, how to shoot different angles, and techniques for a successful interview. Hopefully, some of our girls will now feel inspired to turn their cameras on their own lives, because Emine has shown us just how meaningful such a project can be.