Get Ready for the 10th Anniversary of SWAN Day!

Get Ready for the 10th Anniversary of Support Women Artists Now Day! New Contest - $500 Prize for the Best SWAN Photo!  Dear Women in the Arts & Media Coalit, This year is the 10th Anniversary of Support Women Artists Now Day/SWAN Day and it is going to be SWANTASTIC! We are kicking off SWAN Month with our new SWAN Photo Contest.  Do you have a SWAN dress, hat, shirt, pants, shoes, bicycle, surf board, motor-boat, second home - anything with swans on it that you can be photographed in, on, or near?   If so - have someone take a picture and enter the SWAN Photo Contest. We are offering two first prizes of $500 - one for the best individual shot, and one for the best group shot. We will create other prizes and categories depending on what we receive.  We are especially interested in pictures of people (any gender), but if you have a particularly adorable pet who gets into the SWAN spirit, we will welcome those pictures too. (But try not to give your pet a SWANferiority complex). Go to the SWAN Photo Guidelines & Online Entry Form>> Refresher Course - What is SWAN Day?  For those of you who are new to SWAN Day, SWAN stands for Support Women Artists Now.   SWAN Day is a holiday that was conceived by film critic Jan Lisa Huttner (also known as the Hot Pink Pen) and WomenArts Executive Director Martha Richards, while they were sharing a pizza after doing a conference presentation together in Bloomington, IL in April 2007. The two activists had been looking for ways to build larger audiences for women artists and to build solidarity among women artists worldwide. They decided to declare an international holiday. Over the next months Huttner and Richards met with other women's groups and individual women artists to promote the idea. In December 2007, Huttner announced the event to the press, and Richards used the WomenArts mailing list to invite people all over the world to create events celebrating women artists and to post them on the free SWAN Calendar on the WomenArts website. The first SWAN Day was held on March 29, 2008. In the past nine years there have been over 1,500 SWAN events in 36 countries!  Read more about SWAN Day's history>> SWAN Day is officially on the last Saturday of March, and we encourage people to celebrate it throughout the month of March (Women's History Month) or whenever the spirit moves them. Every day is a good day to support women artists!! SWAN Day is a completely do-it-yourself effort. You are welcome to celebrate in any way you see fit - whether that is getting together with friends, writing a check to your favorite woman artist, organizing a performance, or producing a whole SWAN festival. The goal is simply to put the spotlight on the creativity and accomplishments of women artists so that we can inspire each other.   Want to Organize a SWAN Event?  Your SWAN event can be a performance, exhibit, rally, parade, workshop, reading, or any activity that draws attention to women artists or raises money for women artists in your community. We have posted Publicity Tools and Fundraising Tools to help you organize your event, and you can download our official SWAN Day logo for free.  If you have questions, please feel free to contact us. If you post your event on the SWAN Calendar, we will include it when we publish our giant list of SWAN events on SWAN Day.(See last year's list>>) Also, we pick events from the SWAN Calendar to share with women artists around the world through our newsletters and social media during March and April. Posting on the SWAN Calendar is the best way to let us know about your work since our staff reviews every calendar listing before it goes live on our website. We have made it easy to post your event. Just follow the directions in our Step-by-Step Guide. If you already have a Facebook Event Page, we can import it to the SWAN Calendar for you. Just use our Facebook event form to send us the link. This Week on the SWAN Calendar Ghostlight Now & Then Barbara Kahn's Ghost Light Now & Then is a "time-fluid" play. During an inexplicable seismic event in 2017, two women are flung through a window into the Greenwich Village Theater in the early twentieth century, where they encounter the ghosts of past productions who haunt the site. The show will be performed at Theatre for the New City, 155 First Ave (between 9th & 10th Sts), New York, NY. Runs March 2 - March 12, Thursdays - Sundays. Read more on the SWAN Calendar>> Do I Contradict Myself? Do I Contradict Myself? presents the work of six women textile artists responding to this excerpt from Walt Whitman's poem, Song of Myself - "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."   This exhibit is part of the Spring Break Art Show at 4 Times Square, New York, NY.    Featured artists are Colette Aliman, Maeve Broome, Fanny Gentle, Alexandra Goldberg, Yunjung Kang, & Victoria Manganiello.  March 1 - 6.  Read more on the SWAN Calendar>> Recent Posts on the WomenArts Blog  WomenArts is doing a weekly series of paid guest posts and spotlight articles on women arts leaders. Here are the past five posts:  Women Who Score - The Alliance of Women Film Composers Innovative Non-profit Works for Age & Gender Equity in Portland, OR  Ingrid Hernández Explores the Meaning of Home in the Outskirts of Tijuana The Colorful, Radical Quilts of Chawne Kimber Merry Lynn Morris Invents a Wheelchair Fit for Dancing If you would like to write an article for us, please check out our Blog Submission Guidelines>>  Looking for Theatre or Film Opportunities or Grants?  Free Monthly #StageOpps and #ScreenOpps Newsletters Can Help! Women in the Arts and Media Coalition in collaboration with WomenArts is publishing free newsletters for theatre and film/video artists listing submission opportunities, grants, auditions, residencies and more. You can follow #StageOpps and #ScreenOpps on Twitter or see the latest issues by visiting the Coalition's website. To submit listings for the #StageOpps or #ScreenOpps newsletters, please write to: stageopps@womenartsmediacoalition.org or screenopps@womenartsmediacoalition.org.