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Library

Mollie Dash

July 4, 2016

|

Catskill, NY

Song

Recorded by

Jess Holler

This interview is available in-person only. Please get in touch if you would like to listen.
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Summary:

This interview with Mollie Dash was conducted on July 4, 2016 at the Catskill Maker Syndicate in Catskill, New York (in Greene County). In this interview, artist Mollie Dash discusses her own art practice (currently with yarn), her move from Brooklyn to Catskill in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the flooding of her apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the Catskill Maker Syndicate, the Catskill Mapping Project, and the culture and dynamic of the village of Catskill. Mollie’s interview emphasizes the role of the community of Catskill as a refuge; new and emergent collaboratives, movements and public spaces in Catskill, and concerns about the accessibility of public trails in Catskill — which Mollie and artist Matt Bua’s Catskill Mapping Project seeks to address. Mollie also briefly discusses her Childhood in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (a suburb of Philadelphia), her education in art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and her hopes for the future of her art practice and her time in Catskill.

This interview will be of interest to anyone interested in art practice, experiences of those displaced by Hurricane Sandy and related flooding, the recent history and culture of Catskill, arts and public spaces revivalism in Catskill, yarn and textile artwork, makerspaces, homesteading, transitions from urban to village life and comparative experiences of life, lifestyle and arts communities in Brooklyn and Upstate, and public space advocacy; and to anyone seeking particular information about the origins and mission of the Catskill Mapping Project or public mapping collaboratives more generally.

Themes:
Art and Artists
,
New York City
,
Homesteading
,
Nature
,
Catskill Maker Syndicate
,
Interviewer Bio:
Jess Holler

Jeff Nagle and Jess Holler attended an open session of the Catskill Mapping Project held at Magpie Books in Catskill on Wednesday, June 29th, during Oral History Summer School 2016, on a suggestion of a documentary filmmaker friend of the program who lives in Catskill. There, they met artists Matt Bua and Mollie Dash, and bookstore owner Kristi Gibson — affiliated with the Catskill Maker Syndicate; and all of whom were interested in being interviewed for the Hudson Oral History Archive.

Jess Lamar Reece Holler is a folklorist and oral historian from Columbus, Ohio. Her oral history and applied folklore work has focused on issues at the intersection of personal health, environmental health and justice, and food access and food justice. She has been particularly interested in documenting stories about how people come to connect questions of food, health, and environment in their own lives and through grassroots organizing; and in experiences of home, place, displacement, and place-related trauma, memory and healing. In Summer 2016 — the time this interview was conducted — Jess is working on an oral history project with the Eastwick community in Southwestern Philadelphia around environmental justice, displacement and the multiple attachments of home; and a statewide project documenting the rise of organic and ecological food system in her native Ohio. Jess is particularly interested in collaborative mapping work, negotiating public and community space through artwork, and mapped oral history initiatives.

Additional Info:
Interview language(s):
English
,
Audio quality:
High

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Permissions: 

This interview is hereby made available for research purposes only. For additional uses (radio and other media, music, internet), please click here to inquire about permissions.

Part of this interview may be played in a radio broadcast or podcast.

Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”

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