Femaissance Forges Activist Art

Granny panties and glitter-covered silicon chicken wings.

- Raphael Helfand

“Community can exist in a capitalist structure when there’s small business,” says Maddy Rose, co-founder and curator of Femaissance, the all-female art movement. “So frequently, ‘capitalism’ suggests absolute selfishness, the desire to climb to the top and knock people down as you go. But small female businesses made $1.7 trillion in 2017. Why? Because women are tribal as fuck and we’re really good at multitasking and helping each other out and watching each other’s babies.”

Rose and Halle Kaplan-Allen, Femaissance co-founder and events director, are doing exactly that on a beautiful evening in late April at Oleander on Royal, where their exhibition, Femaissance: Primavera, is currently on display. During our interview, Kaplan-Allen holds Stellan, the 9-month-old son of gallery director Jamie Lehr, on her shoulder while she greets the French Quarter creatures who wander in off the street to gawk at the pink-walled room covered in vagina drawings.

Rose does most of the talking. “We were really inspired by The Wing in New York, which is an all-female workspace. And we were having all these conversations, feeling complacent about life,” she says, describing the circumstances of Femaissance’s inception last fall, two years after she and Kaplan-Allen graduated from Tulane. “So when Jamie said she wanted to do an all-female show, I was like ‘Okay, I have this idea, but I have to do it with my best friend,’ and [Jamie] was like ‘Run with it...’”