An Artist on the Cutting Edge of Mama-ism

It’s London, 1981, a post-Sex Pistols punk scene, and a petite young woman from Kansas City, Mo., strikes a pose for her first performance art piece. (For her next one, she will shave her head as a matter of artistic integrity, but that’s another story.) She’s hulking in front of a backdrop that wraps images of the Marquis de Sade and the satirical painter Hogarth into a would-be London Bridge built of cow bones and stones. You know, the decline of civilization, blah, blah, blah, and yes, she boiled those bones herself, and no, her flatmates were not happy about the smell.

Artist-animator-filmmaker Lisa Mann, 39, looks at the slide from her London days and grimaces at how tragically hip she was then, on an overseas study program with Brown University. That was before she had a baby, before she co-founded MAMA, Mother Artists Making Art, a group that once put on a performance art piece in Los Angeles about breast-feeding. (During the performance, Mann pumped and then drank her breast milk. “Shocking!” she says now with mock horror.)

No longer with MAMA, Mann is striking out on her own and still trying to find her footing on the mother-artist track--her “after baby, A.B.” period, she says. She’s the mother of 2-year-old Mason, and, with her husband, John “Googe” Endieveri, is settled into a 1904 house with oil paintings by her grandmother on the walls.

“Artist and motherhood have long been something people have pooh-poohed,” Mann says. “ ‘How could you be a real artist and a mother, which is so traditional?’ How do you create work and remain viable and feel creative? Designing a birthday card or invitation for your kid just doesn’t cut the mustard.”

These days, her main income comes from teaching experimental animation--using materials such as clay, sand and three-dimensional objects--at USC’s School of Cinema-Television. Before motherhood, her work included an experimental film that won a student Academy Award in 1993 and played at film festivals around the world, including the MTV Human Rights Watch Film Festival and Tour in New York City. The short documentary, “Seven Lucky Charms,” on battered women who kill their abusers, uses cutout animation and other imagery.

Christine Panushka, a USC professor of animation, hired Mann to teach at the school.

“The moving images that are animation are going to be the art form of the next century. People like Lisa are blazing the trail,” Panushka says. “The rigorousness of Lisa’s thinking and the fierceness she brings to animation is important.”

Mann’s next 16-millimeter film, “Cat Calls,” was going to be about sexual harassment. She began the film in 1995 with a $35,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant--but that was before Mason was born. Now she’s rethinking its theme.

“All of a sudden, mommy hormones washed over me,” Mann says. “It was like, ‘I can’t make an angry film now. I have to be nurturing and nesting.’ I’m just now getting back to it and thinking, ‘Can I still make it about sexual harassment or can I make it about harassment as a mother [during public breast-feeding]?’ ”

The Breast-Feeding Experience in Art

Her idea of nursing mothers as an art theme started to take shape with MAMA in 1998. Three of MAMA’s five mothers had become friends through breast-feeding support groups. They got tired of strangers’ stares when they stopped to feed their babies; as artists, they wondered, how could they convey the intense, draining experience of breast-feeding?

One of the group’s resulting pieces was “California Civil Code Section 43.3,” named after the law passed in 1997 that gives women the right to breast-feed in public.

The project featured a box built to look like a child’s alphabet block, with pictures of baby animals painted on the side. The box was put on a wooden bench in a busy courtyard, outside a restaurant. Passersby could hear the taped sound of a baby’s cry coming from the box; open the box, and the crying stops.

On a TV screen inside the box, observers could watch a video of breast-feeding mothers and listen to their recorded voices describing the experience. The camera was pointed over the mothers’ shoulders to show their point of view.

“We purposely let it all hang out,” Mann says. “Nobody was supposed to be discreet. We were, ‘Hello, everyone, these are our breasts. We’re breast-feeding.’ ”

An alternative arts group, a.k.a. NewTown, chose the piece for a monthlong exhibit at Pasadena’s trendy One Colorado plaza.

This year, Mann became vice president of the group, a Pasadena nonprofit made up of volunteer artists. The group, with artists like Mann, blurs the line “between what is a life led and what is an artistic experience,” says Richard Amromin, a.k.a. NewTown’s artistic director. “When you deal with the common experience, like we do in NewTown, that breaks down the barrier between the observer and the observed, between the creator and the participant,” he says.

“You end up with art that doesn’t preach to an audience but shares with an audience. To me, that’s what [Mann] is talking about.”

NewTown, which is funded by grants and donations, puts on events outside traditional art venues and performance spaces. That could mean a compost heap, a swimming pool or, in July, the streets of Pasadena. Mann dreamed up the summer event, “Reels on Wheels,” because she wanted to see a drive-in movie outside of a confined space.

For the free evening event, NewTown led participants in a convoy of 80 cars to undisclosed locations, where a short experimental film was projected onto the side of a building, with the soundtrack transmitted via the cars’ FM radio.

Mann can’t exactly pinpoint when she veered off into the experimental arts. But growing up in Missouri, the oldest of three kids, she took to finger painting with her grandmother, an amateur artist who made oil portraits of friends and family. At age 5, Mann created a self-portrait cut from a piece of pink felt.

Mann went on to get a bachelor’s degree in art from Brown University and a master’s in fine arts from Cal Arts. Her work, primarily on issues affecting women, included installation art, photography and sculpture.

“Everything I do is autobiographical,” she says. “Things that are close to my heart. It’s hard to do art of things you don’t know anything about.”

Work Begins After Son Goes to Bed

What she knows now is motherhood. On most nights, she and her husband, an engineer, are home with their son. She doesn’t usually get started on her artwork until after 10:30 p.m., when Mason is asleep and the house is picked up, and then she works until 2 a.m. or so. As she watches him grow, she’s thinking of new forms of art to explore. Maybe material that appeals to kids--flash cards, puzzles and paint-by-number art--and wraps in feminist themes.

One of Mann’s strengths, says New York artist Rachel Siegel, is the way her work keeps evolving, with different media and themes.

“A lot of artists who work with social issues often get didactic,” says Siegel, who has worked with Mann on art projects here. “She’s able to keep the artistic vision and be experimental and still get the message across. . . . She’s good at looking at the bigger picture--taking something personal and looking at it on a larger scale.”

Mann’s first big project since Mason’s birth will be finishing the “Cat Calls” film. It probably will stick to its original theme and include illustrations of sexual harassment, such as obscene phone calls. And it will wrap in themes of motherhood. Somehow.

“You walk a fine line of being dismissed, ‘Oh, that’s women’s art,’ ” Mann says. “That’s the trick.”

* Renee Tawa can be reached by e-mail at renee.tawa@latimes.com.