By: Kristen P Ahern

Textile art sculpture of woman covered in flowers with yarn skein hair — One of Elizabeth’s upcycled sculptures: Reviving Ophelia

With everything happening in the world today, it was such a relief to take 90 minutes this week to spend on a video call with Elizabeth Wislar, one of the amazing founders of Costume Professionals for Wage Equity and our March #ConsciousHeroOTM. I knew that Elizabeth was an activist for wage and labor equity in our industry, however I did not know until more recently that she is also a passionate environmentalist and upcycling artist. During our conversation, we bounced seamlessly between these topics and it is clear that her passion for the arts, the environment, and fair labor practices are deeply connected.

In the spring of 2019, Elizabeth shared a particularly disappointing job posting she found with a group of colleagues online, expressing how horrified and disgusted she was. The usual griping and complaining ensued but finally someone suggested “Let’s DO something about all this” and thus launched Costume Professionals for Wage Equity. For the first 20 years of her career, Elizabeth worked as a freelance costume designer in Chicago and also founded Chicago Custom Costumes. Then she got her first job as staff in an academic setting, where she began realizing the steep disparity between staff and faculty. Following that experience, she remained more in touch with the ethics of pay in the theatre industry.

As a result of founding CPfWE, costume professionals are finally talking to each other and talking about how morally wrong many practices are. Elizabeth says we need to forgive ourselves and older generations for taking low paid, less supported work than our fellow designers. Only when we admit that it’s wrong and forgive ourselves can we begin to fix the problem. She provides a necessary link between an older generation of costume professionals who cannot see how far we have left to go to achieve parity. The same is true for how designers work with the environment, we need to admit something is wrong with how we are doing things, forgive ourselves, then begin to change our practices.

Elizabeth is living her values through her artistic practice. In our conversation, Elizabeth highlighted the privilege inherent in her ability to protest and attempt to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Pushing back against wage systems can have disastrous financial impacts. Similarly there is privilege in living a sustainable lifestyle, both sustainable choices in costuming and in life can be more expensive. There is a higher cost to buying more sustainable materials but also in more sustainable living options, like owning land to locally produce your own food, that are only available to those with the financial means to do so. By building a more financially stable theatre community, more people have the option to make healthier choices for themselves and the environment.

Upcycled materials are key in Elizabeth’s art and costume design, she believes that all the materials we need already exist. One place they exist is in costume storages around the country/world. The conversation about how this stock should be used, repurposed, and reinvented from one designer to another is crucial in transforming our material use as costume designers. Eliminating the practice of “stock hoarding” would be a huge advance in more sustainable design, if managers of stock’s can be convinced of the value of letting go of older pieces. Many garments exist that just need a little modification to be perfect in a new play.

Elizabeth’s experience with environmentally conscious materials in arts goes back further than her career in costume design. She began as a visual art student who explored use of upcycled materials. It is easy to see the connection between her costume design experience and her stunning upcycled sculptures. Typically she begins with some materials that she wants to use and develops the piece as she works on it. For Reviving Ophelia (above), Elizabeth had a discarded styrofoam display mannequin, balls of wool in stock, a collection of thrifted needlepoint pillows, and a backer board from a new door. As she was working on it flat on a table, the sculpture reminded her of The Story of Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais and named her piece Reviving Ophelia. It is even held together free of toxic glues, mostly using small metal pins!

Elizabeth always had an interest in our footprint on the planet and how we encroach on nature. She was influenced by her father’s Choctaw heritage to be responsible for all of her resource use. Her parents were both dedicated to making do with what they had, they considered the excessive packaging on grocery items and even took her brother’s Boy Scout troop on a field trip to a junkyard to just look at where all their stuff ended up. Much in the same way we’ve become disconnected from where our food comes from, we’ve become disconnected from where our trash ends up and you make different decisions when you understand what’s really going on.

Elizabeth hopes that one side effect of everyone working from home in March and April is that people will get a better sense of their waste, and hopefully put out less garbage because of cooking at home. She watches as people freak out over a lack of disposable materials (like toilet paper) and hopes it will force people to examine their consumption. As with many of us, Elizabeth sees her activism creating a more desirable future: financially stable and environmentally conscious. These efforts are what make Elizabeth Wislar our March #ConsciousHeroOTM!

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