Downtown Phoenix Voices is an ongoing series of profiles on the many diverse and inspirational voices in the downtown Phoenix community. To read the previous installment in the series, click here.
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At age 6, Tara Logsdon, dressed in a bathrobe-turned-lab-coat with her Fisher-Price doctor’s kit, would check the status and tend to the needs of her patients: a stuffed hippopotamus, a panda bear, a chicken and a snake that lined the shelves of her closet.
Logsdon’s young life mildly mirrors who she is today, more than 30 years later: a teddy bear surgeon.
Since 2002, Logsdon has been rescuing teddy bears from thrift stores located all over the Phoenix, Mesa and Sun City areas to transform them into one-of-a-kind teddy bears.
Logsdon admits the rescued bears into her teddy bear operating room, where they receive treatment for dismembered appendages and new physical features. She adds adornments such as buttons, beads or various fabrics that give the bears a makeover. Sometimes, a heart is cut from a recycled Louis Vuitton bag and given new life as it is sewn onto the chest.
But these bears are refurbished for more than the purpose of giving them a makeover — they’re a part of Logsdon’s DIE BEARMY, an army of recycled bears.
Logsdon, the founder and chief medic of DIE BEARMY, described what she does as a movement to make people more conscious of their lifestyles and what they are using and wasting.
“It’s not so much about the bears,” Logsdon said. “It’s about everything. We have so much stuff already … If you put a little bit of love and work into things, we can make everything new again, special again.”
According to the DIE BEARMY website, it is Logsdon and her bear soldiers’ mission to “combat mass production and consumption and bring awareness to the desertion of living and inanimate things.”
Logsdon conveys this mission through rescuing, repairing and recreating these bears to promote more use of resources we already have to create “new” things.
Logsdon explained that a teddy bear is a good medium to convey this mission because most people at one point in their life have had a teddy bear, so everyone from kids up to adults can relate to her cause.
Because Logsdon is working to fight against mass production, she does not mass-assemble her bears but instead rebuilds the bears upon request.
Once she gives the rescued bear the necessary surgical treatments and makeovers, the bear, along with its prescription on how to adapt to its new environment, is given to its adopted family.
While Logsdon is based out of her studio apartment in the Garfield neighborhood just outside downtown Phoenix, her army has had the opportunity to travel all over the world. Some of her bears were a part of an art exhibit in Tokyo and most recently got to travel with a Los Angeles celebrity hairstylist to Milan for the 2014 Fall Fashion Week.
“This bear was in a thrift store and now it is getting to hang out with the models in Milan,” Logsdon said. “That is why I do this. I think that is the most amazing story.”
But at the core, the motivation for DIE BEARMY came from Logsdon’s grandparents, two of her biggest inspirations.
DIE BEARMY is named after Logsdon’s grandmother, Dorothy Elizabeth Icenogle. DIE are her grandmother’s initials presented in monogram, which rearranged the order of the initials to form the word “die” meaning “the” in German.
Logsdon’s grandmother was a seamstress and embroiderer, whose work Logsdon called “serious magic.” Her grandfather was practical and logical, she said, and very in tune with nature. Over all, Logsdon’s grandparents were very deliberate and non-wasteful people who were recycling even in the ’70s, before it was a common practice for most people, she said.
This is the type of mindset that motivated the underlying meaning of Logsdon’s DIE BEARMY movement: combat mass consumption and production by reusing and recycling.
Almost anything can be reused, Logsdon said, and artists like her make good recyclers.
“(Artists) take things that other people see as worthless and turn it into something valuable,” Logsdon said.
Logsdon renders the same type of passion and impact she has had with DIE BEARMY unto the downtown Phoenix community as well. Joshua Rose, editor of American Art Collector Magazine who worked with Logsdon at Shade Magazine, a Phoenix-based contemporary art magazine, said that Logsdon is one of the most creative people he has ever met and that she has great vision for her art.
“(Logsdon) has been a consistent and strong voice in the art community in downtown Phoenix for a long time,” Rose said.
Logsdon and her bears have participated in several art gallery exhibits in downtown Phoenix over the years and currently has her giant bear temporary art exhibit at Sixth and Roosevelt streets. The most recent display of her work, “ForBEARance,” was shown at Chaos Theory, an annual collaborative art exhibition at Legend City Studios in early October, which featured work from 66 different artists.
“ForBEARance” featured teddy bears and other stuffed animals Logsdon rescued. The main teddy bear in the exhibition is practicing forbearance, or self-control, by rising above the distractions of his senses and recognizing the extremes while at the same time remaining unaffected, Logsdon said.
Logsdon said she gets really inspired for Chaos Theory because she feels like she can do something out of the ordinary based on what she is feeling at that time.
“I grow every year from that show, which is really cool,” Logsdon said.
One of Logsdon’s upcoming pieces, called “Día de los BEARtos,” will be opening for Third Friday on Oct. 17 at GROWop boutique on Sixth and Garfield streets. Logsdon calls this a collaborative piece where she will decorate bears for Halloween and 10 other artists will create masks for the bears. The bears will hang together on a wall of GROWop as one big piece.
In February, Logsdon will have a show at Frontal Lobe Community Space and Gallery on Grand Avenue and McKinley Street called “BEARial Ground,” where 50 crosses with bears attached, symbolizing the phrase “cross to bear,” will be on display. In March, the crosses and bears will be nailed in the ground along the Artlink Art Detour routes to symbolize the death of each word.
Rose explained that it is not only Logsdon’s artwork that has made an impact on the community but her mentorship with artists as well. Rose said that Logsdon purposefully places herself in the middle of communities such as the Garfield neighborhood to not only contribute her artistic talents but also to collaborate, encourage and support other artists in the process.
Heidi Abrahamson, jewelry designer and longtime friend of Logsdon’s, described Logsdon as an insightful, perceptive and pure-hearted person who has had a huge impact on the downtown Phoenix community.
Abrahamson also discussed how thoughtful Logsdon is with her art. She said Logsdon thinks things through and is analytical with her work, which can be seen through her recent “ForBEARance” piece.
“Bears aside … she makes us look beyond the possibilities and into deeper meanings of things,” Abrahamson said.
Contact the reporter at Caitlin.Bohrer@asu.edu
