Deborah Caiola

Deborah is a painter and teaching artist. She is inspired to create art around the human condition, by challenging oppression and mainstream beliefs, listening with compassion, and building community. The forms that her work has taken have been in interview-based portraiture and images of birds imbued with anthropomorphic ideas and concepts. Her Portrait of a Generation series is aimed at giving voice and visibility to eleven women who came of age before American women’s rights became mainstream. Portraits in Emotion is a project Deborah facilitated whereby eleven artists whose lives have been touched by mental illness came together for thirty hours of interviews about art, mental illness, stigmas, and spirituality. During the interviews, the participants drew portraits of each other and themselves, resulting in a group exhibition in Philadelphia and New York. She is currently working on a third interview-based portrait project about faith and feminism. Deborah has collaborated with the Trans-gression Artists’ Collective, William Way Community Center, and currently teaches at Oasis Arts and Education, assisting adults with mental disabilities in creating art. Ultimately, Deborah’s intention is to fill her work with empathy and compassion so that the viewers may find empathy and compassion for others and, most importantly, for themselves.

Deborah will create a performance piece entitled A Conversation with Women of God, that will examine women and spirituality in the context of several different faiths. The participants will be feminist women who have devoted their lives to God. Deborah will conduct brief individual interviews during which she will sketch and photograph each subject. Based on the interviews, Deborah will develop portraits that incorporate symbolic imagery to represent each woman's belief system and spiritual path. Both the individual interviews and the group interviews will be filmed by Columbian filmmaker David Sarasti, and the film will be used to make an installation piece that ties the paintings of the women and their religions together. A Conversation with Women of God will be exhibited at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia.

Exhibition at Bridgett Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia of Texturing Women's Choices project in collaboration with Dr. Sharon Ravitch, interviewing women born between 1935-1945 to share stories that will help in the creation of multi-dimensional portraits of each woman. Support for materials.

Support towards framing, materials and transportation of work for a first solo show in Philadelphia of oil portraits. The exhibition runs at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, October 6 to November 17, 2001.