support Lesbian Art button by Liza Cowan, White Mare Inc. circa 1980
This button has kind of gone viral, which really surprises me. I created this little thing in about 1980. I had a small button and graphics company called White Mare, Inc. I published greeting cards, postcards and buttons, mainly on a Lesbian theme, but not exclusively. Unlike most of my stock, which I had commercially manufactured, I made this one on my own button machines. Mind you, I had a rather sophisticated button machine, which I'd haul around to festivals and street fairs making photo buttons. I wrote about that here
Anyway, I was linking around the web this morning, browsing my usual haunts. I clicked an interesting link on one of my favorites, Design Observer, and it led me to a blog I'd never seen called intelligent clashing. Nice blog, by the way. So I was scrolling around it it and HELOO! here's my button.
Now, by serindipity or design, I had just last night been over at the website Outhistory.com at the exhibit site for Lesbian Buttons from The Lesbian Herstory Archives where found several of my buttons - without attribution by the way. The support Lesbian art button is the only one of mine that doesn't have publishing information around the rim of the button. Technically that's called the curl, but you don't have to know that to find the copyright infromation clearly printed. I don't understand how an archive can post something without attribution, but that's another story. Needless to say, I commented right away and added my information,
So, back to this morning. On the site Intelligent Clashing, I click on my button and it links to another site Nothing is new. where they've posted a bunch of the buttons from the Outhistory and Lesbian Herstory Archive site. Again without attribution but with links to OutHistory and the Lesbian Herstory Archive. Now, I understand why Nothing is new didn't add attribution. They didn't know it, because the archive didn't supply any.
So...I don't know if the button has shown up anywhere else, but I thought I'd better claim it here. At home.
Buttons by Liza Cowan, White Mare Inc. Direct photo image on Mita 900-D copier circa 1978
I've written about my buttons before. see post HERE
Update: through the miracle that is the world wid web, Nothing Is New has updated their site to include the publishing information. And it only took about 15 minutes of leaving comments on the site and connecting through twitter. Good Gawd, what did we do before the internet?
