Wave Pool Gallery
Cincinnati, Ohio
May 2019
Installation: 4-Channel Video, Cakes, Screen-Printed Greeting Cards, Card Sculpture
“For this exhibition, For Another Maggie, Lawson worked with different Cincinnati-based collaborators: her parents and their baby boomer contemporaries in a series of workshops to design starter kits for young adults, bakers at Central Pastry in Middletown, to produce a series of 12 cakes designed and decorated with positive aphorisms on ageing, and University of Cincinnati art students to design and print positive birthday cards on aging. In the spirit of intergenerational connection, Lawson’s exhibition also invites the audience to write birthday wishes of hope in service to older people and their future selves in the privacy of a 6-foot birthday card—fighting back against the expectations of dread that hang around advanced birthdays.
The Oakland-based artist chose Cincinnati specifically for this project because this is where her family lives and she wanted to create the piece in collaboration with her ageing parents. Lawson says, “I see my position in my life as almost to the official marker of middle age, 40, as the perfect space between young and old to create a piece that connects both.”
The title For Another Maggie comes from her inspiration for the project: elder rights activist and Grey Panther founder, Maggie Kuhn. Like Kuhn, Lawson aims to imagine a future in which everyday rituals and small strategies for remaining vibrant and connected might transcend our institutionally codified and socially normalized prejudices around ageing.”
Maria Seda-Reeder
Writer, Curator, Educator
Maggie Lawson 