E. Maude Haak-Frendscho
About
E. Maude Haak-Frendscho (she/her) is an Easthampton, MA-based (ancestral Pocumtuc and Nipmuc lands) arts worker and serial collaborator. She programs experimental works that foreground process and experience, that strive to forge relationships of mutuality, and that are informed by social and spatial practices, as well as the embodied experiences of those phenomena. These works often take shape as site-specific and community-based projects and publications where she holds the role of curator, facilitator, or project manager. Haak-Frendscho co-runs Neighboring Systems, a publication and event platform, staffs the Cummington Cultural District, and is a member of the Easthampton City Arts (ECA) Coordinating Committee. She recently served as the Creative Economy & Cultural Planning consultant for the Town of Belchertown, and has also been a collective member of Vox Populi Gallery, worked with Olney Culture Lab, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Southern Exposure, Pro Arts Gallery, Vera Project, Seattle Young People’s Project, Ong Ong, and Tooth & Claw Women's Zine Distro, among others.
“A poem can't do much but
it gives off sparks from its wheels,
the bristle and the clicks, mostly
at moments of resistance.”
– Brenda Hillman,“To a desert poet,” Practical Water
“We need to understand the body not as bound to the private or to the self – the western idea of the autonomous individual – but as being linked integrally to material expressions of community and public space. In this sense there is no neat divide between the corporeal and the social; there is instead what has been called ‘social flesh’ (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000). The body itself is a political site or place that mediates the lived experiences of social and cultural relationships.”
– Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place