Lori Osborne Elevates & Celebrates Women's History in Evanston

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Lori Osborne is the Director of the Frances Willard House Museum and the Evanston Women's History Project. In these roles, Lori brings to light the stories of up to 300 Evanston women who made great strides in the Women's Movement.

In this interview we talk about two very exciting projects happening at the Frances Willard House at 1730 Chicago Ave in Evanston;
1. The She Persisted BicycleTour of Evanston Women's History - pick one up May 27, 1-4p.m.
2. Vanessa Filley's Artist in Residence Photography project - unveiling June 2, 12-5p.m. 

More information below about both projects. Thank you to Lori and all the volunteers at Frances Willard House in Evanston for keeping this museum part of our lives!

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The Frances Willard House will be open for tours this Sunday, May 27th for regular tours between 1-4 p.m. Bring the family and enjoy a tour!

It’s also the debut weekend for our Tour Evanston Women’s History Map, which provides a self-guided tour highlighting fifteen women’s history sites throughout Evanston around the theme, She Persisted.

 

FWHM, in partnership with the Evanston Women’s History Project and Shorefront Legacy Center, is proud to announce the first annual Tour Evanston Women’s History Map. The 2018 map will highlight fifteen women’s history sites throughout Evanston around the theme, She Persisted. It will provide a fun, informative and relevant summer activity as a self-guided walking, biking, and driving tour, with brief information about fifteen amazing Evanston women.

Lori Osborne, director of FWHM and the Women’s History Project says: “We are excited to bring this new way to experience Evanston women’s history to the community. It combines two of our favorite things: healthy activity and women’s history!”

Designed by local illustrator Caroline Brown, the map will cost $10 and will be available for purchase beginning Sunday, May 27th (Memorial Day weekend) from 1-4 p.m. at the Frances Willard House and the Evanston History Center (EHC). It will be available for purchase throughout the summer when these locations are open (Willard House – Thursdays and Sundays 1-4 p.m.; EHC – Thursdays-Sundays 1-4 p.m.). Additional locations to be announced.

Sponsorship of the map comes from Emile Hogan Broker @Properties, The Wellness Revolution, and The Printed Word.

 Click here for more info.

From evanstonmade.com
2018 Visiting Artist: Photographer Vanessa Filley

We are pleased to announce our new visiting artist program. Through this annual program we will partner with a local artist who will create new work inspired by the museum - its story, its collection - and display this new work in the museum. Our inaugural artist is Photographer Vanessa Filley and she will working at the house starting this month. We will be showing her work (in progress) starting Saturday, June 2nd with an open studio as part of Evanston Made from 12-5 pm. Her work will be on display and viewable throughout the summer when the museum is open for tours (Sundays 1-4 pm) and select special dates to be announced.

Vanessa Filley is a fine art photographer whose current work focuses on women's organizing movements. While in residence at the FWHM she will be working on a project that imagines a web of connections bridging the perseverance of women organizing throughout history to women organizing today. Come see what she creates!

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

Photographer Vanessa Filley on The Lisa D Show

Photographer Vanessa Filley's art tells the stories of today, the past and a future imagined. Storytelling through her photography, Filley builds engaging, inviting and sometimes eerie images with visually compelling collaborators … her children and her friend's children.

In this interview we walk through several of the pieces from her upcoming show “A Nursery Rhyme For You” opening Nov. 4, 5-8 p.m., at Perspective Gallery in Evanston, up thru Nov. 26. If you don’t make it, check out her work online at vanessafilley.squarespace.com

This interview is candid, inviting the listener into Filley’s artistic process and beautiful mind. I am grateful to know artists like this who make Evanston a more interesting and beautiful place to live.

More Info: A Nursery Rhyme For You

As a child some weekends we visited my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey and other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of great New York City museums.  I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a portal to another time, an imagined life.  In the attic of my grandparents home there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of early American homes. I dreamt of wearing these ballgowns and living in a different era, but despite my dreamy nature I never got much beyond dress-up in shoddy 1970’s halloween costumes.  

As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations in an era when unfettered childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by an abundant access to technology I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic I longed to have brought into my own childhood while avoiding much of the contemporary child’s play market and trying to impart an honest sense of the world we live in today.

I find great inspiration in anything from fairytales to the primal relationships between humans and nature to current events. Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power and in an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasy of a child are effected and shaped by the external forces buzzing in the world around them. In A Nursery Rhyme for You My Dear I am attempting to both create a child-like fantasy world and to allow the harshness of reality to seep in.  When I make an image I am very interested in exploring it’s underbelly.  It may look pretty on the outside, but perhaps there is more to it.  I want to both dwell on and delete some of the darkness in any given scenario, to try on a story for size, to understand what it might be like to exist in that moment and how to learn from it, but also leave it behind, as if in a dream.

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The Lisa D Show" is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, very low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com