Artists in Conversation: Alise Anderson

Learn more about current Artist-in-Residence Alise Anderson’s exhibition My Grandma is a Memer, on view in the AIR Space through August 6, 2022, in this artist talk presented by Anderson in the UMOCA Auditorium Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 7pm. My Grandma is a Meme is an intergenerational collaboration between artist Alise Anderson and her late grandma, Trudy White. White meticulously, near compulsively, recorded her life, starting in the 1930s until 2018. Her archive is exhaustive, cataloging everything from cakes, party invitations, crocheted barbie-sized wedding dresses, and paintings she created, to the more mundane, like every car she owned and every movie she saw. Such an encyclopedic registry of the banal borders on absurd, but also functions as validation of productivity and forces visibility of work that is often dismissed as both domestic and ephemeral. Ultimately, these carefully curated scrapbooks, with their decades of entries, amounts to a productive life, and therefore, for White, a life well-lived.