As a part of the closing reception for the Hera Gallery exhibition project, Threading Time and Place, Kathie Florsheim and Sonja Czekalski are leading an artist-led performance on Saturday, August 1, following the artist talks that start at 2 pm at Hera Gallery.
Through text-based work and visual intervention, The Redline Project asks viewers to consider what is lost when language itself becomes politicized - and what role artists, writers, and citizens play in resisting that erasure.
I spoke with Kathie Florsheim on Monday morning about her project and the motivations behind it.
Kathie Florsheim: I am, by profession, a photographer and a writer. I’ve lived in Providence, Rhode Island since 1972.
Steve Ahlquist: Tell me about this project you’re working on. What are you hoping to accomplish?
Kathie Florsheim: It’s called the Red Line Project.
It’s about the federal government banning 350-plus words from use in federal government communication. I don’t think it’s okay to censor words because that’s a stalking horse for what’s next. With this project, which right now is embodied in an installation at Hera Gallery, I’m intending to inform the viewing public - anybody who wants to come in - that this is happening. All 350 words are on the back wall for people to see. The choice of words seems arbitrary. Nobody knows who designated them. There is no official list. The federal government does not acknowledge this as fact. I am making an issue of this because I think people need to understand what is being done in our name.
Steve Ahlquist: Can you give me an example of some of the words that have been banned?
Kathie Florsheim: Tax credit. Climate change. Sex. Woman. Women. I could go on.
Steve Ahlquist: So this is about controlling the language around DEI, economics, climate and... Women is weird, because isn’t the Trump Administration all about men are men and women are women?
Kathie Florsheim: It’s probably a reproductive rights thing.
Steve Ahlquist: Right. What are you hoping to do with this?
Kathie Florsheim: I am trying to start a national movement so that other artists pick up their various implements and skills and do something to bring this into the national conversation. We can change what people are thinking and talking about. Nan Goldin’s work is a very good example of that.
Steve Ahlquist: In what way?
Kathie Florsheim: Nan Golden is a photographer who has made her life her subject matter. Long story short, she had been a heroin addiction for years, and she photographed herself. Her first series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was well known. She got off of heroin, and several years later had to have shoulder replacement surgery. She was consequently given OxyContin; you know what happened next.
Steve Ahlquist: That’s terrible.
Kathie Florsheim: The same doc who got her off of heroin got her off of oxy. In the meantime, she decided to say thank you to the Sacklers. She did installations, performance pieces, and the like that drew attention to what the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma had done. She was so successful that the Sacklers’ names were taken off of several buildings, their money was refused, and their donations were returned. She, pretty much alone, made them persona non grata. She’s has written about this in a book called Empire of Pain.
I am not interested in taking credit for something like that, but I would like to start a movement and see other artists pick it up because there are so many possibilities to mock what the government has done. After all, it’s easy to figure out their word games. I have all kinds of ideas for what I’d like to do if I could get this exhibit into other locations, galleries, and large spaces. I want to do a piece where I drop confetti from a second- or third-floor window or balcony, and the confetti would have all the words on it. You would pick up a word, and now you own that word, and you talk about it. That’s what I would like to accomplish.
All the time I’ve spent not being a photographer, trying to get other people interested in this, because if I didn’t do this project, I wouldn’t have a studio to go into. If I don’t lean on the First Amendment as something I can use, there is no studio, there is no work, there is no nothing. As much as I’m conflicted about the time spent on this project as opposed to myself as a photographer, that’s the reason I’m doing it.
I miss being a photographer more than I can express. It is so hard to put aside your creative impulses for politics, but social justice calls on us to do this work. In one of the meetings we had at Hera to talk about what we were doing, I expressed that I wanted to get back to my personal work, and Uli Bramst said, “Kathie, this is your personal work.” And it is.
As much as I feel caged, I have to remind myself that I can wrap myself in my camera’s work, and I am photographing to survive what it takes to do this project.
Steve Ahlquist: If I can think out loud for a minute, this work feels defensive. The other side is choosing the battleground. In that process, we’re not fighting for more; we’re fighting to preserve what we have, and that feels like work we shouldn’t have to do. If this were a creative effort to bring something new into the world or a new point of view, it would be more artistically rewarding.
Kathie Florsheim Totally. This is defensive, and I would like to go on the offense, which is part of the reason I’m doing this. There are ways of being on the offense, and being offensive. I have games I would like to design with people who could build them; it’d probably be a board game, where you would obscure words and such. I have lots of dreams, but I don’t have a place to do it. There have been a few hints; could we curate this exhibit and place it in a new gallery? I don’t know if that’s going to happen.
It’s hard to imagine how to take it anywhere because this piece, which is at Hera now, was designed for the space. I measured every inch of that gallery, and the person who made it happen is my printer. He formatted the stuff so it fit the walls. We took different print samples at different sizes, held them up, stood back, and looked at them. Is this the right size? When we knew how big the print had to be, my printer had to figure out how to get the piece to fit the walls with that print size.
He sent me proofs, and we figured out what paper to use. It was a long process. And when we got the final pieces, they came in a roll. The first thing off the roll was the print of First Amendment, and when I saw it, I started crying. I am losing my voice as I talk about it because it’s... I don’t have any way of describing how important that is. If we lose that, we’re done. And I absolutely refuse to accommodate that, period.
Steve Ahlquist: I believe that most people who live in this country feel that way about the First Amendment.
Kathie Florsheim: I think it’s ingrained. It came with why we fought for this country in the first place. I didn’t really appreciate that this place that we call home was an idea that nobody had done this way before. We’re still not living the way the Constitution says we should. We have a long way to go. We need to reinvent ourselves.
Steve Ahlquist: I am of two minds on the reinvention of ourselves in America. One is, if we were to reinvent ourselves right now, it would not be a good thing because the power to reinvent us would be in terrible hands. At the same time, finding a consensus on what our reinvention looks like might work if we started with something like the Bill of Rights.
Kathie Florsheim: We also need to reform the Supreme Court. The two ideas are related. I am very interested in why and how the Court became the ultimate decider, which from listening to Dahlia Lithwick’s podcast, Amicus, made me aware of how the current version of SCOTUS took its power .
They did an interesting hour-ish long conversation about how the Supreme Court became the ultimate decider. The case was Marbury v. Madison, but the country alternates between the people taking their power and giving it away, and the Constitution was a way for the residents, the country, those of us who live here, to protect ourselves from the government.
It goes back and forth: the government protecting itself against us, and us against them. There’s this push-pull, and I never thought about it that way. I’m also reading Andrew Weissman’s Liar’s Kingdom, a very interesting conversation in which he spends about half of the book talking about how lies misinform the public.
He suggests ways the people can take back power, and what that looks like. He cites the Black women who, during the Civil War, were separated from their children. When they were liberated, their kids were not. These women stood up and said, “We’re not having any of this.” There was one woman in particular who went to a judge, with an argument about habeus corpus as her argument for getting her children back and he agreed with her. She got her kids back.
I’ve watched people stand in the gallery or actually sit on the bench and stare at my exhibit, deciding what their word is. One of the gallery members walked up to me at one of our functions. We were standing shoulder to shoulder, and she said, “I want the word “diversity.” I said, “It’s yours. Go do a piece, go do something.”Another gallery member was sitting on the bench in front of the wall of words. I was standing slightly behind her, outside the gallery. I was photographing her because she was typical of the way people were responding, and I was hearing that it was very moving, but I don’t know what it feels like.
Steve Ahlquist: Because you’re the designer.
Kathie Florsheim: The response wall is growing. We have 6” by 12” rag paper cards. Each has one word on it. The words are spread on the bench in front of the word wall. You’re invited to take one of the writing implements, draw or leave a message, and pin it to the response wall. That’s gotten very interesting because people are responding to the responses.
I had no idea what was going to happen.
There’s a shock of seeing legislation redlined; that’s how this got its name. The slash marks are bad enough, but when you see those words redacted - I don’t know how to describe how shocking it was. What would happen if you were asked to read the legislation without these words?
Steve Ahlquist: Imagine a book with all those words replaced or omitted. It would be impossible to understand.
Kathie Florsheim: That’s the point. This is a stalking horse. Is it going to be a book next time? Oh, those are already banned. How about taking people off of advisory councils? Oh, right, they tried that with Susan Rice. She was on the Netflix board of directors, and she criticized Trump, and he made sure that they heard him say, “Get her off the board.”
Steve Ahlquist: When does the show close?
Kathie Florsheim: It closes on Saturday with a performance piece. Artists speak at 2 o’clock. I think there are eight or nine of us. I’m the last speaker, and then we’re doing this performance piece, which you could probably call a protest. We’ll have a red line from the gallery to the street, and interested people will pick up a piece of white paper and write their word in red on it.
As they filter out to the street, we will ask them to stop, come to the microphone, say the word, and tell us why it’s important to them, and then go line up on the street. Once we are all out there, three of us are going to alternate reading the entire list of 350 words. Then we’re going to ask people to take the red chalk and chalk our driveway and the sidewalk and come back in and chalk the gallery floor. The reason for doing that is that as people walk over this set of chalked words, they will disappear. Just like this language is supposed to disappear.
All the gallery artists are 100% behind this, because they know that this is First Amendment stuff. Other people also are going to want to have a say, because how do you express not liking what’s going on? I don’t have any way of affecting the legislature or these boneheads who are sitting around in the Senate - our own delegation included- who are not making any noise.
Call them up and start talking to them about words. Tell everybody. You don’t know what that’s going to bring. You already know that if you don’t do it, you’ve come to nothing. So if you do it, you at least have a chance of raising people’s awareness.
I know people are looking for a way to protest and say, “I don’t like this.” And in that spirit, my own grief and anger about what is being stuck on top of us is buried. I can do this project and feel better. I do not have to jump under my bed and stay there all day. I hope other people will take this opportunity to express their grief by doing something positive. This is not just offensive. This is saying, “I do not agree. You will not banish these words.”
Steve Ahlquist: This isn’t protest as therapy; you’re drawing a line and saying, “I am not going to give this up.”
Kathie Florsheim: It’s literally drawing a line.
Thanks to Katjhie and Steve for this.
great article- so bummed to miss this exhibit- kathie is great!