Starting in the 1970s with the early Woman’s Land movement in Minnesota and Oregon, Meadow Muska created a rare photographic record of lesbian collectives at a time when their very existence was a radical act.
Later, as an accomplished electrician in the construction industry, she launched the change-making nonprofit initiative Women in the Trades in Minnesota, along with Women Build, a collaboration with Habitat for Humanity.
One of the pioneers who built a new form of lesbian culture outside of social expectations or visibility, Meadow turned the camera on herself and her friends with their trust in her to keep them safe from public eyes, violence, and discrimination.
Over the ’70s and ’80s, she shot thousands of images, creating an extraordinary chronicle of a hidden lesbian world–dances, families, potlucks, festivals, soccer games, martial arts. “Rejecting society’s demand of binary or straight, and previous lesbian stereotypes of butch or femme, we defined women by who we were and behaved as we chose,” she says. Working with a Canon F1, a mechanical film camera, she channeled the cooperative nature of their new society into the very act of photography. Meadow developed the photos in a darkroom she dug out of her basement to protect the privacy of the women.
She kept these images hidden for over 40 years.
Then, in 2019, Minneapolis Institute of Art featured 29 of these groundbreaking images in Meadow’s award-winning first solo show, "Strong Women, Full of Love."
After a half-century, Meadow is opening her archive to a wider international audience. She has begun posting images of defiant women, living full lives, being happy and joyous, on her Instagram and website.
Welcome to MIA and my show.