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Ms grant/35
as it usually does, with an instigator. Jean Samuel had a vision, and idea for a collective autobiography. She needed women to work with, came to the Building with her project, began collecting names. What emerged is an extraordinary dramatic reading called Dark and Bright Fires, which the group has been presenting at colleges all over the L.A. area since its first performance at the Woman's Building last October. This is a fairly typical experience: women meet through the Building, create new work, take that work outside the Building. And it's a kind of experience we're committed to supporting, since it's one of our major ways of getting our work out into the world and, through this, of reaching whole new audiences and drawing them into the Building.
Meanwhile we are limited by our shortage of staff, and by our own inexperience in administration. Stories about miscommunication, stories about who thought who else was responsible ("Not me!") have become our form of grim in-group humor. Rith Iskin, an FSW faculty member and director of the Woman's Building Galleries, characterized the sitution this way not long ago: "We're all competent in our own fields. I'm an art historian and a curator, and I operate well as both. Deena (Netzger) is a fine poet and novelist. Helen (Roth) is a wonderful graphic artist, Suzanne (Lacy) si a wonderful performance artist -- and we're all good teachers. But we're not administrators. We work hard, but we don't have administrative training or experience, and the more the Building grows, the more overwhelmed we get. This is why we decided that we must hire professional administrators."