In New York City on Sept. 21, Tiffany Shlain is assembling art, activists and leaders for a day of action, inspired by feminist milestones of the past, present and future.
Tiffany Shlain’s moveable monument Dendrofemonology: Feminist History Tree Ring is on the move—soon to take up temporary residence in New York City’s Madison Square Park, where it serves as a focal point for her event, Mobilization for Women’s Rights and the Planet, on Sept. 21, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Coinciding with the start of Climate Week NYC and anticipating a historic election, Shlain’s daylong, public activation and rally will address a convergence of critical concerns in this dual “age of urgency.”
Shlain’s Dendrofemonology is a tree ring roughly five feet in diameter, with text burned into the wood showing a timeline of the story of women and power in society—an ambitious feminist take on historical tree rings. After debuting in San Francisco, not far from her childhood home near Muir Woods, the art installation made a purposeful appearance last fall on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., just before Election Day, as part of a four-day art activation orchestrated by Shlain to bring attention to eroding status and reproductive rights for women, with calls to “reclaim our history” and “vote our future.”
In New York, as in D.C., the Sept. 21 proceedings will include speakers, performances and a processional—this time a “walk for Women’s Rights and the Planet” along the High Line, joined by cast members of the Broadway musical ode to the women’s suffrage movement, Suffs, and ending at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea for a viewing and artist’s talk on Shlain’s solo exhibition You Are Here. Participants are encouraged to wear white, as homage to the persistent and enduring tactics originated by suffragists, who “infused their public protests with symbolism and visual impact by proudly wearing white, at a time when it was unusual for women to even gather in public,” said Shlain.
Dendrofemonology is a play on the term dendrochronology—dating historic events by growth rings in trees. Shlain’s feminist tree ring by that name creates a counternarrative to typical historical accounts, which she says mansplain history, with a sweeping timeline of women and power in society seared into its surface.
With handwritten entries burned into points on its concentric rings, Dendrofemonology bears a chronology of just over 30 milestones—from when women were worshipped as goddesses 50,000 years ago, through the recent fall of Roe v. Wade. Shlain said her favorite line on the tree ring is in 1920, when women fought for and won the right to vote through the 19th Amendment.
In New York’s Madison Square Park, Dendrofemonology will reprise its role as counterpoint to surrounding steel and stone architecture that evokes more masculine constructs of power, as it did in D.C. with the Washington Monument as backdrop. Among trees that are its living descendants in the mid-Manhattan green space, the spherical, evocatively cervical slab of salvaged wood, just five feet in diameter, will assert its ancient wisdom. In the shadow of skyscrapers, it will hear testimony from artists and activists representing groups including the ReEarth Initiative, the ERA Coalition and the National Organization for Women about the urgency to protect the historically marginalized, and the earth itself, from those who would subjugate and do violence to them.
There’s an urgency … to being present, and to being active and engaging in our democracy.
Tiffany Shlain
Shlain speaks of trees as “silent witnesses to history” whose rings, counting into centuries, give us perspective on the timeline of our own lives. “You’re only on this planet for a short amount of time, only a certain set of tree rings. … To me, it really is a reminder that you better live this one precious life, as Mary Oliver says, the way you want it, with the values you believe in and the action you need to take to make the world better because you’re going to be gone soon.”
The death of her father, whose writing on women’s power through history influenced her own artistic path, caused her to “think about death a lot … in a way to motivate me, to try to make the world better, live the life that I want to live, love as fully as I can, being as present as I can. And there’s an urgency, I think, to being present, and to being active and engaging in our democracy.”
In a chapter of the recently published book Mission Matters, Shlain relates how she chose to “tell an alternative story on an alternative medium of wood versus stone” to “offer a visual readjustment, reminding us that a much more profound rebalance needs to take place. Not only do we need to see and value half the population, but we need to recognize that the system that produces these tall, erect structures, to project power and control over the land, comes at such a cost—extraction from the earth, pollution, land battles and destruction of the environment.”
The path from Madison Square Park to Shlain’s solo exhibition in Chelsea will mark both a personal and political pilgrimage for the artist. In her tree ring-inspired works, she explores both self-reflective themes and perennially impenetrable societal conditions.
In Self Portrait, 2022, on reclaimed pinewood, she notes personal milestones like the age at which she stopped believing in God (9) and when her daughter was born (33).
For the piece We Are Here, 2024, she recounts how she “saw this wood … that looked like it was soaked in blood—that’s just the way the sap is—and on it I wrote over and over again, ‘War’ and ‘Peace.’ … It was my way of channeling all the violence in the world” in its endless, vicious cycle through history.
“I believe if we had more women leaders, we would not be killing people,” said Shlain. “Once you make life in your body … your first action is not going to be to kill people.”
Art and politics, she says, “are like this double helix, and sometimes it takes the art to move consciousness in society” before political change can happen; “both of those double strands” are needed “to make progress.”
“I love this idea of a movable monument” that can be constantly changing, Shlain explained. When Dendrofemonology “was in D.C., I added the word ‘Today’ with a semicolon” to make space for what will come next, which we have the power to influence.
“The problem with most monuments,” she continued, is that “they don’t evolve. And I love that I can.” This new form of monument, like our thinking, can evolve. “That is hopefully what progress and growth are about,” like the scientific method, “learning new information and then adjusting how you think about things based on that new information.”
Through her chosen path of art, including film, writing and sculpture, Shlain’s works collectively express that “here at this moment in history, we have the power to affect what happens next … in our own lives” and in the political realm, where outcomes contribute to shaping our collective future and that of the planet.
“I’m hoping that the next tree ring moment will be having the Equal Rights Amendment added into our Constitution and sex equality guaranteed across this country,” said Shlain.
“And who knows? Maybe there’ll be something else new to burn” into the timeline “in January.”
Get more info or RSVP for A Mobilization for Women’s Rights and the Planet in New York City, Sept. 21, 2024, 10 a.m. at Madison Square Park.
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