TEAM PROFILE: carole frances lung

FreeQuency: To start, what are your name & pronouns? How did you come to be at Antenna and what is your specific role at the organization?

carole: I am carole frances lung, I use they/them pronouns and I’m the Director of Operations at Antenna. I came to the organization in April 2022 and was the Executive Director until Antenna adopted a shared leadership model with three co-directors over different organizational areas.

I think of operations as designing the conditions under which people can do their best work. I administer Antenna’s organizational and care operations, including finance and grant administration, fundraising and foundation relations, governance, human resources, organizational systems and compliance, institutional planning and partnerships. I also lead initiatives that strengthen equitable labor practices, such as W.A.G.E. Certification, team care policies, and advocacy for artists and culture bearers. 

FreeQuency: Probably half of what you named would traditionally be recognize as operations – the more mechanical side of keeping an organization running – I’m interested in the other half of what you named, such as the care & advocacy work. Can you talk more about how that’s a part of operations? 

carole: My approach is grounded in my research and lived experience as a textile and garment producer and labor activist. Before joining Antenna, I spent more than 20 years researching labor history, served as a union member at Cal State Los Angeles, and marched with the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center. I was drawn to Antenna because I saw an opportunity to put the values that guide my life and practice, into practice within an arts organization.

As an artist run organization, we are restructuring to make sure we have time as creatives to tend to our art practices so we can better serve the creative ecosystem. Since joining Antenna, we’ve created things like rolling summer sabbaticals for the team and ensuring team members receive professional development funds. We’re looking at ways to honor working artist’s lives that ensures they can do their creative work as well as their arts admin jobs. We try not to burn ourselves out, and to move with intention and care, and this vision is under the umbrella of operations. It seems national funders are more open to this organizationally “post-pandemic”.

FreeQuency: What are you most proud of during your time here and what are you most looking forward to in the future of Antenna? 

carole: I’m really proud of the team and the board. We’ve worked hard to create transparent and equitable hiring and board development practices, and the result is an incredible group of people who care deeply about the work.

I’m also proud that Antenna has made a real commitment to paying artists fairly. Becoming WAGE Certified reflects our belief that artists deserve to be compensated for their labor, and it gives us a clear framework for equitable pay based on our organization’s budget. That commitment extends beyond exhibitions through programs like Antenna Press, Pro Bono Printing, and our Micro Grants, all of which direct resources back into the creative community.

Looking ahead, I hope we can continue investing more deeply in the creative ecology despite these challenging times. I also hope there are opportunities to become more organized around labor. Too often, artists feel pressured to accept low pay or no pay at all. I’d like to see us collectively raise the standard and recognize artistic labor as work that deserves fair compensation.

FreeQuency: You mentioned some of the values you are bringing in professionally are rooted in your experiences in labor & your artistic practice – can you talk a little bit more about those values and that background? 

carole: I’ve come to see administration as a creative practice. The values that shape my life, labor, care, equity, and shared responsibility also shape how I facilitate organizational capacity building. I wanted to carry these values into an arts organization where they could move beyond institutional constraints and become part of the daily practice of building relationships, and supporting artists. At Antenna, that has meant creating structures that allow people to flourish, from equitable hiring and care policies, to making space for the team to be administrators and creative practitioners.

My art practice is rooted in my firsthand experience as an apparel producer. In my twenties and thirties, I worked in the apparel industry as a bridal gown designer, production manager, and sales representative until my position was offshored (I was laid off). That moment became an opportunity to rethink my relationship to textile work. I earned an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

In Weimar, I gave myself permission to use my skills and first hand knowledge as a textile worker as the foundation of my artistic practice. I created a storefront installation and socially engaged labor performance called SL Mode One Size Fits All which used discarded textiles gathered from the streets of the former East Germany. The work explored labor, reuse, and my own experience of feeling like an outsider.

When I came back from that time abroad, I had one more year in grad school and it was during this time, my alter ego Frau Fiber, was created. For the past 20 years, Frau Fiber has done her best to put cracks in fast fashion in the system by teaching people how to upcycle and mend and make their own clothing. 

FreeQuency: Where did the name come from? What’s Frau’s mission? I see you have a copy of “The Sewing Rebellion” in front of you… 

carole: I’d like to share excerpts from the PhD thesis through the University of Sunderland after eighteen months of reflection and writing. Like any dissertation, it includes the academic framework, research methodologies, a glossary of terms, and contributions to knowledge. The sections I’m most excited about, however, are those that I hope to develop into a series of pamphlets, making the research more accessible to broader audiences.

One of those sections is a fictional interview with my performance persona, Frau Fiber. To create it, I trained ChatGPT with Frau Fiber’s history, values, influences, and twenty-year body of work, then interviewed her as though she were a real person. The result is a dialogue between Frau Fiber and me that blends fiction, historical research, and contemporary questions about labor, technology, and authorship. It even generated new slogans in Frau Fiber’s voice, such as: “Buying fast fashion isn’t just a purchase, it’s a vote—for pollution, for sweatshops, for waste mountains taller than any skyline; Shop to last, not fast; Mend what’s broken instead of throwing it away; Choose timeless over trendy; Know the story behind your clothes.”

Frau Fiber’s mythology is rooted in the history of East Germany. She was born behind the Berlin Wall on September 13, 1966, and belongs to the so-called “Lost Generation” of East German workers who lost their jobs and had few opportunities to retrain after reunification, . Her fictional parents disappeared after being taken by The Stasi for resisting the state. This backstory positions Frau Fiber within the contradictions of East German history: she believes in collective care and shared resources while rejecting authoritarianism and state control.

Our interview moves fluidly between politics and everyday life. Frau Fiber reflects on her childhood in Apolda – talks about tending her garden, shares a recipe for coffee and cake, and considers the role of care, labor, and making in contemporary society. Throughout the text, her fictional voice is paired with my footnotes, which provide the historical and political context that grounds her stories in documented history.

FreeQuency: You mentioned how Frau was ideated as an interruption in the fashion industry – specifically fast fashion. Since Frau’s creation, how have you seen the industry change? What is Frau trying to interrupt now?

Carole: I’ll be 60 in September, and I’ve watched the apparel industry change dramatically over my lifetime. The acceleration of globalization through policies like the Multi-Fibre Arrangement in the 1970s and NAFTA in the 1990s fundamentally reshaped how and where clothing is produced.

When I was growing up, there were two or three fashion seasons a year. Today, many fast fashion companies release new collections every two weeks. The scale of production is almost unimaginable. We’ve already made more clothing than the world could possibly need. In fact, I think we could stop producing garments today, and there would still be enough clothing for people to wear for the rest of their lives.

FreeQuency: I think about that all the time. ALL the time. 

carole: Failure and futility are central to Frau Fiber’s mission. She understands that no single action can transform the global apparel industry, so her work creates openings for reflection, conversation, and collective action rather than offering simple solutions.

For fourteen years, she led The Sewing Rebellion teaching people how to mend, alter, make, and remake their clothing as a way of reconnecting with the labor embedded in what people wear. In another project, Tailor Made, Frau operated a pop-up tailoring shop featuring a “Wheel of Wages,” which listed garment workers’ wages from major clothing-exporting countries. Before receiving an alteration, each participant spun the wheel, and wherever it landed determined the price they paid.

The experience often made people uncomfortable, creating a moment to reflect on the vast disparity between what they paid for a repair and what garment workers earn to produce the clothes they wear.

Since 2013, Frau Fiber has also worked through the Institute for Labor Generosity Workers & Uniforms (ILGWU), her evolving headquarters and living archive, now based in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. The Institute preserves garments, tools, publications, uniforms, and other materials that document the hidden histories of labor (there are plans to make more of the archive digitally accessible). Through the Institute, she publishes the fictional newspaper ILGWU Pins & Needles, now available online, where contemporary news is reimagined through Frau Fiber’s perspective on labor, solidarity, and economic justice. She also produces regular labor reports that connect current events to the global textile and apparel industries.

Today, Frau Fiber is shifting away from small-scale workshops to focus on projects that can reach broader audiences through publishing, digital platforms, and large-scale performances involving other participants. Rather than scaling up, she is scaling out, expanding the reach of her ideas beyond her own physical presence. The goal is not simply to teach people how to sew, but to create new ways of thinking about labor, clothing, and the systems of production that shape everyday life.

FreeQuency: That’s an interesting question – how does one scale “out” instead of “up”?

carole: We’ve been thinking about that for the last six years, and as I’m building the Institute’s website, I’m finally starting to see some answers.

One example is the Frau Fiber vs. the Machine trilogy, inspired by the John Henry folktale. In each video, Frau Fiber sits in front of an industrial textile machine and attempts to compete with it. Failure is built into the work because the point is to confront the impossible task of taking on an industrial system with a single human body.

Right now, she’s also deeply interested in the Luddites and the Luddite Revolts, thinking about what those struggles against mechanization 200 years ago can teach us about our relationship with machines today.

Another project is In Your Factory Are the Doors Locked?, an annual eight-hour performance commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that has traveled for fifteen years. I’m hoping to present it at NYU, near the site of the original factory, bringing the work back to the place where that history unfolded.

More broadly, I’m thinking about how Frau Fiber can create works that extend beyond teaching people how to sew or mend. When I began The Sewing Rebellion, those skills weren’t widely available. By the time the project was retired in 2019, the landscape had changed dramatically. There were countless tutorials, repair movements, and communities teaching those practices. Rather than repeating that work, I’m interested in creating projects that use clothing and textiles to spark conversations about labor, technology, history, and collective action.

FreeQuency: You mentioned ‘Frau vs. The Machine’, but you also mentioned using AI to create Frau or ‘Frau as The Machine’ where Frau is an entirely separate being from you. I’m wondering about that conceptualization in your art practice of Frau as separate from you and as someone you’re in conversation with...I’m interested in how that conceptualization fits into the larger conversation you brought up about waste in the fashion industry and the reality of AI’s impact on the environment – how are all of those things coming up for you in your practice? 

carole: The alter ego, or third-person voice, gives me enough distance to reflect on my own experiences rather than simply retell them. Early in my career, I worked in the apparel industry producing knockoffs. At one company in New York, I was sent to Bergdorf Goodman to take garments into the dressing room and sketch them by hand (this was before cell phones) so they could be copied. That experience shaped a lot of Frau Fiber’s work. She often uses the knockoff as both a strategy and a critique. The United States has a long history of copying fashion, whereas many European countries have stronger protections for designers.

Another experience that informed Frau was realizing that, although I didn’t have health insurance, my body was insured by my employer. If I had been seriously injured or killed, the company would have received a million-dollar payout, while I would have been responsible for my own medical bills. Experiences like that are deeply personal, and creating Frau Fiber allows me to step back from them, transforming my autobiography into something more reflective and political.

I’ve always been interested in identity and performance. Before graduate school I was a dancer, and experiences like Burning Man made me think about how clothing constructs identity. Frau Fiber emerged through a uniform and a set of actions, much like a superhero. Wonder Woman and Diana Prince are the same person, but the uniform signals a different role in the world. Frau operates in a similar way: the uniform creates space for ideas and conversations that might not be possible as simply “carole.”

More recently, I’ve started drawing Frau Fiber as a comic character. Comics offer another way to reach broad audiences, and as I’ve been writing fictional newspapers and other texts, an entire cast of characters has begun to emerge, other workers, scholars, and collaborators who expand Frau’s world beyond a single voice.

AI has become another layer of this practice. I’m interested in finding AI tools and companies whose values align more closely with my own, and I’m revisiting Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto because it raises many of the questions I’m grappling with. Frau herself is a kind of science fiction, not because she’s scientific, but because she’s fictional. She allows me to imagine other ways of thinking about labor, technology, and the future.

I don’t hate robots, and I don’t reject technology. I’m interested in how we might use these tools to build the kind of world we actually want to live in. I recently bought my first robot vacuum, and I love not having to vacuum. At the same time, I remember seeing industrial robots at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and witnessing the impact automation had on workers and their communities.

That’s what continues to draw me to the Luddites. They weren’t opposed to technology itself. They were protesting the ways technology was used to exploit workers and concentrate power. The real question isn’t whether machines are good or bad. It’s who controls them, who benefits from them, and whose labor is made invisible in the process.

FreeQuency: …so you’re a Luddite?

carole:I don’t consider myself a Luddite, but I do share many of the questions the Luddites were asking. They weren’t opposed to technology itself. They were skilled textile workers protesting how new machinery was being introduced to concentrate wealth, undermine their livelihoods, and strip workers of their ability to shape the conditions of their labor. Their actions were a form of labor resistance, not a rejection of innovation.

My work asks similar questions today. Who designs technology? Who owns it? Who profits from it? And whose labor becomes invisible or expendable in the process? Rather than rejecting technology, I use it as a site of inquiry. Whether I’m performing alongside industrial knitting machines, studying global supply chains, or working with digital tools, I’m interested in understanding how technologies shape our relationships to labor, one another, and the things we make.

At the same time, I value making with textiles in slow and intentional ways. Sewing, mending, knitting, and weaving cultivate a different relationship to time, materials, and labor. They remind me that knowledge lives in our hands as much as in our machines. Those practices create space for care, reflection, and embodied knowledge in a culture that often prioritizes speed, efficiency, and consumption.

Ultimately, I’m less interested in whether technology is good or bad than in whether it contributes to human flourishing. Technology should expand our capacity to care for one another, not simply increase productivity or profit. Those are the questions that continue to guide my work.

For more about carole’s (& Frau’s) work, visit their website