They Woke The World: A Living, Grassroots Monument to Women’s Right to Vote.
Inaugural Event & Celebration of the 92nd Anniversary of the 19th Amendment at the Riverside Art Museum
Riverside CA – The Riverside Art Museum (RAM) announces a groundbreaking event as a part of the exhibition You Are Breathing In It! Alternative Art Practices, curated by Karla Diaz. The exhibition runs from July 14 to September 22, 2012, and the They Woke The World event is on Sunday, August 26 at 1:00 p.m. to celebrate the historic effort to secure the right to vote and participate in governance, regardless of gender, known as the suffragist movement.
They Woke The World, conceived by Ari Kletzky, is a living, grassroots monument to the suffragist movement, which established women’s right to vote. This experiential monument takes a variety of forms: a sing-along and digital quilt, website, events, and education programs. In this new vision of monument, the work of remembering happens through engaging activities and educational content aimed at individual and societal well-being, rather than in a material object. Monument in this form is contextual, evolving, multi-generational, and participatory, inspiring a range of interrelated emotions, thoughts, and activity. This dynamic process of memorialization moves us to more deeply understand, remember, and engage with the history of the suffragists.
The inaugural event at RAM is centered on a sing-along of a historic Suffragist-era song, which has never been recorded. Suffragists wrote the song while in prison. It tells the story of their experience and marks this historic turning point in the nearly century-long struggle to secure women’s right to vote, which directly led to the 19th amendment guaranteeing that right.
This ‘seed recording’ will be used to launch a website, future events, and a global digital quilt of suffragist history and people’s contribution. Once the sing-along recording is online, the general public as well as every congressperson inAmerica will be invited to become part of the monument by adding their voice to the sing-along or other content, such as an image or story, to the digital quilt. Each person in the living monument will contribute $3 towards educational programs as a vote for: the freedom to participate in one’s own governance regardless of gender, for education, and for celebrating those who woke the world.
For the 2020 centennial anniversary of the 19th amendment, the goal is to have enough congresspeople show their support for women’s right to vote by being part of the monument to echo the historic ratification of the amendment. From Olympia Snow to Harry Reid, Kay Bailey Hutchison to Dianne Feinstein, women and men across all spectrums can celebrate and honor the courage of these visionary women who persevered and woke the world.
The They Woke The World event will be held at the Riverside Art Museum on Sunday, August 26 at 1:00 p.m., the 92ndanniversary of the 19th Amendment going into law. A $3 donation will be collected from participants in lieu of museum admission. Other activities include a panel discussion and a tour of the building designed by suffragist-era pioneer Julia Morgan. Morgan was the first woman to graduate from UC Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering in 1894 and the first woman to be accepted to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France in 1902. The building tour is part of a companion event at A + D (Architecture and Design Museum) in Los Angeles, which will honor women within the world of architecture, on Saturday, August 18th, the anniversary of the day that the 19th Amendment was ratified.