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Exclusive Interview with Miranda July
Vox is excited to share an exclusive interview with Miranda July and The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage! Miranda July answers a few questions about her early connections with Riot Grrrl, she says “It offered a model of strength and self-reliance (DIY) that I really needed as an artist.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Q: So you ended up participating in the movement?
A: No. My sense is that Riot Grrrl had ended by the time I moved to Portland in 1995. No one I knew really considered themselves “riot grrrls” but the impact of the movement was substantial and growing. My world in Portland in the first years I lived there revolved around girls playing music (even I was in a band, The Need) and recording themselves, and living together in shared houses and dating each other and teaching each other self-defense and dressing freakily and stealing (as some vaguely political act) and making fanzines and bombs and fanzines about making bombs. It was in this context that I started Big Miss Moviola (which became Joanie 4 Jackie). As an aspiring filmmaker it made perfect sense to me to begin making movies—not by making movies, but by making pamphlets with manifestos inside, calls to arms, and inviting other women to send their movies to me so I could compile and share them amongst us. I did this for the next 10 years and I compiled 150 movies, until I made my first feature. It felt like a bluff, but it wasn’t—creating a loose underground network of women filmmakers actually did sustain me and teach me what I needed to know.

Miranda July is one of the artists in our current exhibition, Alien She, which will be up until April 27th.

Check out the interview and a new installation photograph of the show at Vox Populi on the PEW site!


posted: April 11, 2014 topics:
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