CareForce Crew, Austerlitz, NY. Photo: Marc Shavitz 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

Marisa Morán Jahn (SMVisS ‘07) – Lecturer 2017 – Present

An artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn’s artworks redistribute power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Characterizing her playful approach, MIT CAST writes, ‘[Jahn] introduces a trickster-like humor into public spaces and discourses, and yet it is a humor edged with political potency.” She is the founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization that codesigns public art and creative media co-designed with low-wage workers, immigrants, and women.

Marisa Morán Jahn, CareForce One, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

Marisa Morán Jahn, NannyVan, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

Marisa Morán Jahn. CareForce One at Los Angeles City Hall, 2018. Photo by Marc Shavitz. Image courtesy of the artist.

CareForce

Initiated by Jahn, with the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the CareForce is an ongoing set of public art projects amplifying the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce — caregivers.
Caregivers, largely composed of immigrant women, are bearing the brunt of America’s already fractured public health policy and weak workforce protection.
The CareForce consists of two mobile studios (NannyVan, CareForce One), a Tribeca Film Institute-supported app for domestic workers, performances and choreographies, printed works, CareForce One Travelogues, and CarePod, a real-world urban-scale architectural project.

Jahn’s work asks “What would it look like to value care as a community investment? What if we recognized careworkers as an important indicator of a community’s health, happiness, and resiliency?”

Marisa Morán Jahn, CareFree Disco, 2017.

A selection of silkscreened prints created for CareForce, n.d. Images courtesy of the artist.

Abortion is Normal

Abortion Is Normal was an exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art in early 2020 organized by a collective of cultural practitioners as an urgent call-to-action exhibition to raise both awareness and funding in support of accessible, safe, and legal abortion.

Gustav Courbet, L’Origine du Monde, 1866.

Marisa Morán Jahn, Bang!, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jahn’s work Bang! is a 21st century feminist adaptation of Gustav Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du Monde’ (origin of the world), a painting from 1866 recognized for the erotic charge of its male gaze. Jahn’s version puts forward that the fulfillment of women’s desire in hetero encounters exists necessarily via access to reproductive technology, such as the copper IUD seen above.