Angela Jimenez

These images are from Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (2009), a book project by photographer Angela Jimenez about the all-female worker community that has been building and operating The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, one of the largest and longest running lesbian-feminist festivals/communities in the world, since its founding in 1976. Each year, the tight-knit community spends nearly a month on the land building all aspects of the Festival on a private plot of land in Michigan, much of it using materials recycled many times from previous years. The community's raising of the Night Stage, upon which female musicians will perform in front of the thousands of women who come to the Festival each year, is a central and symbolic act of their work and cooperation. At the end of each summer, the community tears everything back down. They return year after year to build it again.