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The Art of Building Community
Lisa Marsh introduces Lorraine Serena, collage artist and founder and artistic director of 'Women Beyond Borders' (WBB), an international collaborative feminist art project
all photos are from the archivs of WBB
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 Lorraine Serena’s paintings, prints, shrines and installations have always celebrated connections. However, her most intensive and intricate initiative thus far is ‘Women Beyond Borders’ (WBB). This global network of artists has sparked and spun off in a multitude of creative, cooperative and unexpected ways. WBB gained momentum around the world for over 15 years, and reconnects over and over again with its founder, Lorraine Serena.
Women Beyond Borders began in 1991 with a small group of women artist friends in California who investigated how they could create a collaboration which made a difference in the world, and which allowed women‘s voices and visions to be heard and honored. They wanted to initiate a project which would foster cooperation, dialogue and community among women worldwide.
An identical small wooden box was sent out to 200 women artists, to be transformed by each participant. In November 1995, the first exhibition of these boxes took place at the Contemporary Art Forum in Santa Barbara, CA. Since then, over 1000 artists, coordinators, curators and sponsors from over 45 nations have participated and over 900 boxes have been donated to Women Beyond Borders. Exhibitions, workshops, presentations and panels have been arranged in over 50 venues around the world. As the project travels, it continuously weaves an unparalleled network of women beyond borders.
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Exhibition of over 200 Women Beyond Borders boxes in Missoula, Montana, April-June 2007
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Lisa Marsh: Lorraine, how did you manage to do all these various things? raising children; working as a teacher, caring for your elders, not abandoning your creative process, as well as being the center of the WBB ‘saga’?
Lorraine Serena: There was a constant knowledge and a drive inside of me, I always knew I had to do something. When the children where small, I used every little break I could find to continue my paintings - be it in the garage, or outside, or on top of the refrigerator. When my children were older, I returned to the university to pursue a master’s degree in Fine arts. I began creating color-field paintings as well as altars and shrines which spoke of the universality of Eastern and Western traditions.
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 After my children left home I began the Women Beyond Borders project which has been the focus of my life ever since. I have followed my intuition as I worked within the limits and possibilities of my life. Being a vehicle for new ideas and following through with what had to be done.
Lisa Marsh: Your art has always been about the celebration of connections, and the vital necessity of women’s voices and visions in our world. How we see things, what we find important, and how we want to make a difference. Since the inception of WBB, the weaving of connections between women has become your most important artform…....
Lorraine Serena: Yes, it feels as if it is my destiny to collaborate and build community. The most important factor for this endeavor has been trust. Throughout my life I have been trusted. This basic trust has allowed me to trust in turn the growing process of Women Beyond Borders and the hundreds of participants it involves. This trust has allowed the highest expression and cooperation of diverse women around the world.
I also trust in the ultimate purpose and meaningfulness of this path which gives me continued inspiration to never give up. By taking a nonjudgmental, supportive stance, the Women Beyond Borders project has flourished. I trust in the power of collaboration and in the freedom of expression. The project has always travelled along these lines of trust.
 Lisa Marsh: Women Beyond Borders currently involves over 1000 curators and artists from around the world and has been exhibited in galleries and museums, shopping malls, an historic train car between Austria and Russia, a temple in Katmandu, an airport in California, and a 15th century Italian villa. Each curator adapted the project to their needs and returned it to you more colorful, more mature, more complex. How can you be at the center of this huge and diverse project that expands in all directions, and still know what to do next? How do you keep your momentum and your equilibrium in the middle of all this activity?
Lorraine Serena: The fundamental direction of the WBB project comes from within. I didn’t choose it, it chose me, and I am probably a good person to have been chosen. As long as I keep myself open to this, all that is necessary for the project to grow evolves in a timely manner. The most important thing is to trust that I am a tool for the weaving that is going on here. From time to time I step back and observe the pattern, but I trust the intuitive process as I walk in concert with others. When the mission is great, life’s challenges are easier to bear. Fear becomes relative and I find myself taking risks for the project which I would never have dared to take for myself alone. Nothing that I do feels disconnected or irrelevant from the bigger picture, and in the end the whole becomes an offering.
 “In light of the world situation, we move forward with even greater conviction that women’s voices and visions are a healing force in the world. The arts are a universal and essential language allowing us to look beyond ourselves in order to create a new paradigm of relatedness”
Lorraine Serena
Lisa Marsh: A box is such a powerful archetypal symbol for women. It can conceil and protect, but it can also suffocate and suppress, keep you ‘boxed in’. A box can carry pleasant surprises as well as doom and death. By embracing both the light and the dark side of its meaning, the Women Beyond Border boxes carry a powerful message of respect for women’s truth, regardless of whether it is pleasant to hear or not.
Lorraine Serena: And it is exactly because of the extreme variety of expression of the boxes that an ongoing and open dialogue is created. Participants express their personal experiences and ideas, their wishes and dreams, their anger and their pain. As the box is opened, so is dialogue. The building of community is at the heart fo Women Beyond Borders. Women then begin to exchange, to collaborate, to converse, and to support one another.
Lisa Marsh: And in this, they are united in a common longing for the inclusion of and respect for feminine values in our public life and our social structures. By publicly referring to other women and to their experiences as something that matters, women create authority. They hold one another up and make themselves heard. They coin a new currency of ‘mattering’ and bring it into circulation, into our public life where women’s authority is direly needed.
Lorraine Serena: Yes, we women are this and that and everything in between! And each of us has a deep desire to be heard. This wealth of creative expression needs no rigid curatorial strategy but rather trust, and an openness to grow along with the project.
Lisa Marsh: Lorraine, how did you come up with the idea of the box?
Lorraine Serena: The box has always been an important metaphor for me. In many of my early paintings, women emerge out of a box or box-like structures. I did never consciously conceptualize this, but that day in 1991, when several of us were trying to come up with a unifying concept for a collaborative women’s art project, I had a small wooden box in my studio. When we saw it, there was an immediate knowing that this was it! There was a great sense of immediacy, of urgency even. We had 200 boxes made immediately, and contacted artists and curators in various countries. As the project grew into a movement, Women Beyond Borders has become my path and my artform, and the little wooden box reflects how women ‘step out of the box’ all over the world.
Lisa Marsh: Thank you very much, Lorraine, for sharing your insights, your art and your time with us.
Lorraine Serena is seeking a permanent home for the collection of almost 1000 boxes from all over the world which have been donated to WBB since 1995, and for the collection’s archives. Women Beyond Borders needs a museum which can care for, store, maintain, travel, and exhibit the boxes, and make them accessible to many more women, men and children.
Any idea supporting the project in its current stage and in its future direction is welcome. Please contact Lorraine at LorART@aol.com to connect. Make sure you also check the project’s website for an online exhibition of boxes at www.womenbeyondborders.org
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