WOMANISH: selfies, immersion, and a whole lot of “ish”
A three part exploration of Chicago’s WOMANISH Exhibit.
Overview
Welcome to WOMANISH, the Chicago experience founded by sisters Danyelle and Dionna Gray created to empower Womxn and help visitors discover their “ish”. For the price of 35 dollars, you can explore the multi-floored space that harbors art, music, and ample opportunities for the perfect Instagram post. Each floor has multiple installations with unique “ish” related names created by a variety of female artists selected by the founders.
WOMANISH consists of five floors. Here they will be broken down to give you a background of the experience.
First floor:
- The diner: The diner has a 1950s vibe meant to represent the “We Can Do It” movement. It has a checkered floor, colorful eating booths, a customized WOMANISH menu, and a mural.
- Merch: The first floor has the bonus of a small merchandise section where visitors can browse through apparel such as t-shirts, tank tops, and hoodies.
Second floor:
- Censoredish: Censoredish is made to look almost like a provocative grocery shop. There is a variety of fruit with sexual conotations such as peaches, eggplants, cherries, and bananas. Centered in the middle of the display is a bright red “Juicy” sign. There is also graphic art that incorporates fruit on the walls.
- Publish: In a small hallway beyond Censordish is Publish. Publish has a checkered floor, yellow walls, and a panel that reads “FIGHT CENSORSHIP!”. It encourages people to read the heroic stories of empowering Womxn from the past alongside forging new stories of their own.
Third floor:
- Consumerish: Consumerish is a artistic representation of the “pink tax”, the name for the discriminatory prices on gender-related services and products such as tampons and pads. Within a mock pharmacy lined with shelves, there are large pink blood drops, a shopping cart, boxes of pink-painted tampons, a life-size receipt, and a colorful collage mural.
- Paidish: Paidish is surrounded by black curtains and filled with neon green lights that include a massive 20 dollar bill with Harriot Tubman as the face of the bill and sign that says “F U PAY US”. There is also a rug and chair that are made with an 100 dollar bill pattern. This represents the wage gap between men and Womxn in the United States.
- Childish: Childish is about channeling one’s inner child and consists of a variety of interactive elements. This includes a swing set, seesaw, barbie jeeps, and whiteboard walls that could be drawn on. Furthermore, there are clouds and planets hanging from the ceiling, rainbow lights throughout the room, and songs meant to remind visitors of childhood playing in the background.
Fourth floor:
- Fleurish: Fleurish is a small walkway with mannequin hands holding flowers and patches of green turf. It is meant to encourage viewers to grow and embrace who they are.
- Vanish: Vanish wraps around the stairwell on the top floor. It has several colorful, translucent panels alongside mirrors so that visitors can see themselves in new lights. This installation encourages viewers to dig into their imagination and love their differing perspectives.
- Cultureish: The entryway of the fourth floor is Cultureish. It is a walkway with artistic portraits of various Black Womxn. This is a celebration of “Black girl magic” and embraces the beauty of Black Womxn hair.
- Selfish: Selfish mimics a salon, a place for visitors to have their own self-care moments. It has many mirrors, wigs, a seating area with fake hair dryers, and a nail salon.
- Moodyish: Moodyish is a boldly yellow room filled with hanging butterflies, a mannequin holding lemons, a vintage looking telephone, flowers, and some fencing. In yellow letters on the wall is the phrase “TELL ME TO SMILE & I’LL SCREAM”. It is meant to represent how women are expected to always be “happy homemakers” by society. A bonus of in this room is a ring light with a phone holder, a perfect setup for the “seflie”.
- Gloomyish: Gloomyish is a single person room that has a blue ambience and an upside down hanging umbrella with diamond-like pieces dangling down. It is an artistic embodiment of how “gray skies” can overcome us, but the bad days too shall pass.
- Bubbleyum; Pink Room: This room next to Gloomyish is completely pink. It is meant to encourage all Womxn to accept themselves and to never “judge a book by its cover”. It has a variety of small, encouraging decorations such as a flip phone that reads “just keep swimming”. There is also a mirror that says “tell me your deepest darkest secrets”. With this, visitors can sit down, write a secret on a slip of paper, and put it in a jar or desk drawer for others to later read.
- Holidayish: Down a hallway at the back of the fourth floor are three smaller rooms. The first is Holidayish. This room has a Christmas tree, wrapped gifts, and other holiday-related decorations. It is unclear how this tied to the rest of the exhibit.
- Miamish: Miamish is the second of the smaller rooms. This room had a beach tapestry and an inflatable pool that contained beach balls.
- Unnamed: The last of the three smaller rooms is unnamed, but it seems to be a zen-workout studio of sorts. There are three pink yoga mats, rocks and plants, pink boxing gloves and punching bags, empty candle sticks, and a sign that reads “I am peace”.
Basement:
- Lightish: Directly past the bathrooms in a hallway in the basement is Lightish. This hallway exhibit is meant to bring exposure and attention to Womxn safety in public spaces. Here the wall was covered in blank light rods and words such as “VISIBILITY”, “AWARNESS”, and “SAFETY” alongside QR codes to self-defense courses, an abuse and rape national network, and the national domestic violence hotline.
- Partyish: In a room directly off of Lightish is Partyish. Partyish is a space for viewers to “let go”, have a good time, and celebrate being part of the Womxn community. It has colorful decorations hanging on the walls and ceiling. In the back in massive three-dimensional blocks is the word “MAGIC”. Lastly, there is a large speaker blasting fun party music.
Immersive Experience
Whether this exhibit is worth the $35 entry fee + parking in downtown Chicago is still up for debate, but it definitely had some installations worthy of praise.
One of the first installations you are guided through at the pop-up is Consumerish, designed by Brianna Beckham. As mentioned above, the exhibit brings the “pink tax” to life and shows the financial strain of feminine health and beauty products. Beckham notes that her work is “always an extension of herself and her environment,” so this exhibit is meant to display her personal experience with our consumerist society. The focal point of this installation is a massive receipt that tallies up the ways women are upcharged for bare necessities. Women pay 10% more for clothing, 7% more for toys and accessories, 13% more for personal health products, and 8% more for senior living care. Beckham notes that over 40 states still collect taxes on tampons, making it a “luxury good” and not a basic necessity. At the bottom of the receipt is a list of examples ranging from black calculators costing $6 while pink ones cost $7 or pink razors costing $2 more than blue ones. Clearly, gendered items cost more when they are sold to females. The receipt is a powerful way to grab visitors’ attention and does a great job explaining what the pink tax is with very few words. The rest of the installation is more visual than informational but continues to drive home the message. There are plain, bleak shelves stuffed with little pink boxes of tampons. The contrast between the brightly colored products and the sterile shelves highlights the issue at hand. The shelves represent the corporations benefiting from the pink tax and the universal need for health products. The mural and yellow shopping cart provide a great photo-op as well!
In the Selfish installation, we caught up with some other pop-up visitors who shared what drew them to the exhibit and what about it changed their perspective on culture and the feminine experience. One of the group members said: “The reason that we came here is because I wanted to show my girlfriend that I appreciate her perspective.” The girlfriend, standing next to him, blushed as he gave this answer and some of the friends that joined them let out a few “aww”’s. Another group member said that their favorite installation was Selfish because “it’s an empowering experience, not just for women, but for anybody. You come in here, be yourself, relax, have fun, and you don’t have to conform to any stereotypes. You just do you.” The installation definitely called for guests to be themselves. There were sticky notes where many wrote affirmations or words of advice/encouragement (I wrote “#rtvf298”). There were wigs, makeup products, blow dryers, and other resources available for guests to doll themselves up for a photo. We concurred with that interviewee that Selfish was one of the more fun, enjoyable parts of the exhibit.
One of the most powerful experiences I had at the pop-up happened in the Pink Room. As mentioned before, the mirror in the room prompted guests to write down their darkest secret and shove it into the desk drawer. I went through and read some of the secrets past attendees wrote. Here is a short list of some of the best secrets:
“I am still in love with my ex”
“I find myself stuck but I can’t talk to anyone because they will think I am too pathetic.”
“I am 5 months pregnant and my baby daddy don’t want me.”
“I am terrified of my future.”
“I still talk to my ex that cheated on me.”
“I am bisexual but can’t tell anyone or I’ll get kicked out of my house.”
“As much as I work on valuing myself, I still find myself needing others’ approval.”
I loved reading these anonymous secrets, and it definitely helped me connect more with this exhibit. I imagined the other people, like myself, who attended this pop-up and wondered what takeaways they had from it. Generally, it put the pop-up in a lens of “something bigger” than the experience I was having at that exact moment.
Something that fascinated our group was how other visitors interacted with this pop-up. Between the aforementioned secrets, pens left around the tables, secret messages written on walls, and Instagram handles dropped all over, attendees certainly left their mark. We noticed that many interacted with the installations in ways they weren’t intended to. Many artists had strategies set in place for how people where interact with their work. They put out post-it notes, asked them to reveal secrets, gave them wigs to try on, etc. We saw that, beyond that, many used other tactics to make their presence known. The tampon boxes in the Consumerish exhibit had messages, Instagram handles, and other notes scribbled on them. One of the exhibits had a variety of toys laid out for people to tap into their inner child. We saw one group take elements of another subtly sexual exhibit and combine everything for a somewhat twisted photo-op. When Olivia visited, she saw that LED lights were out in some of the rooms. As a creative tactic, she and her friends used their phone flashlights to salvage the experience.
Okay-ish?
While the neon lights, disco balls, and tinsel might have been eye catching, WOMANISH did not leave me starstruck. When my group arrived at the exhibit, we were surprised to realize that ticket sales were limited such that only a few groups were in the museum at a time. But the experience was almost too quiet.
The escalators were turned off during our visit, so we weren’t sure which way to travel in the exhibit and ended up going in loops around the building. There didn’t seem to be a guide, signs, or any suggested way to experience all of the exhibits. While less intrepid visitors might have missed it, our group found 2 additional installations in the basement which we only stumbled upon after using the restroom.
Besides the lack of physical direction, I also felt that the exhibit lacked an overall thematic direction. The second and third floors tied nicely together. Censorship of women’s bodies as fruit led to an exploration of the “pink tax” and menstruation in Consumerish. The societal disregard for women’s menstruation tied well into Paidish, a space centered on women’s wages and the desire for equal pay. Following this, was a child’s playground dreamscape, Childish, which worked surprisingly well as a juxtaposition of the intensity of fair pay in the workplace.
But the final floor seemed disconnected from the previously well thought out exhibits. The symbolic immersion of the spiral staircase, which could’ve pulled us into the space, was jarring compared to the previous transitional spaces. Several of the rooms on this floor seemed hastily thrown together, with little thought to prior exhibits and sparse décor.
On multiple occasions, we would enter a room in which the lights and music were turned off and we would crawl around to find a plug or a light switch. It turned into a ludic immersion experience, or a gamification of the space, trying to make a dingy room into a slightly more interesting one through the flip of a switch (Ermi & Mäyrä, 2007). Despite the well planned Culturish and Selfish spaces, overall the final floor of the experience left a bad taste in our mouth and detracted from the otherwise enjoyable experience.
The experience definitely had some fun photo opportunities but at the end of the day, it was essentially a museum dedicated to the perfect selfie. As traditional art museums struggle to break down their barriers to entry, “exhibition making” experiences are becoming more and more popular to the media hungry masses (Stromberg, 2018). These “made-for-instagram museums” create attentive photoshoots for visitors, more often focusing on the instagrammable moments, than a cohesive theme (Pardes, 2017). This idea of a “spreadable” experience where visitors can (and should) bring the art into a first-person narrative is shifting the way we view art museums and challenging art institutes to be more in touch with the media currency (Jenkins, 2006). WOMANISH knew its audience’s love for Instagram and certainly curated a visually attractive experience. However, when you take away the filters and cutesy captions, the attention to detail was missing which lead to many of the exhibits feeling worn out and over utilized. Whether dirty props were scattered about or confusing exhibits failed to direct visitors towards meaningful interaction, our group was left scratching our heads at the $35 price tag. A selfie museum, like WOMANISH can be a fun place to go with friends but maybe only once.
