Riot Woman with Artist Aurora Lady

Aurora Lady is a Los Angeles-based artist and visionary who is not only a bad ass feminist illustrator, stylist, glitter make up artist, and fashion designer, but one of my creative guides. She is a constant source of inspiration and someone I can trust to hear me out and give feedback on my wildest ideas and biggest, boldest, scariest, hairiest plans. She’s always there to push me towards creative follow through, which is such an essential person to have in your life. She’s been a supporter of this podcast from the first moment I imagined it and its also the creator of the Riot Woman logo!

One of Aurora and my first significant hangs was at a local copy shop in Pasadena where we copied, collated, and stapled our zines together to get ready for the 2014 LA Zine Fest. Hanging out with her I felt the same kind of energy I felt when my friends and I stayed up all night getting our zines ready for the Portland Zine Symposium in the summer of 2001 and 2002, but tempered with the perspective that comes with having lived a bit more.

Fitting to our friendship origin story, in this conversation we talk about zines as educational building blocks for feminism, discovering punk when we lived in rural places, forging feminist community via Live Journal and how that’s different than Instagram today, making friends in LA (or anywhere) as an adult, and how we “signaled” our feminism and relationship to Riot Grrrl as teenagers and twenty-somethings through fashion, as well as the radical influence of Courtney Love.

We also process the resurgent trend of all things 90s and discuss the trap and difficulty of chasing nostalgia. Finally Aurora shares her advice about how to develop your art and what you’re about as an artist (and it has nothing to do with Instagram).

You can find Aurora on Instagram at @auroralady, browse her awesome t-shirt and one-of-a-kind wearable art in her Blue Shop of Death, and sign up for her fantastic weekly newsletter where she shares all kinds of insights into her process as an artist and cool projects she’s working on.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.