Handmade Gifts for Teens by Miranda July

From the Publisher, explore the whole range of Miranda July's works, including Snarla (1992-1993), The Drifters (2002), Eleven Heavy Things (2009), and Interfaith Charity Shop (2017).

Alongside the plays, July made a fanzine, Snarla, with her best friend at the time, Johanna Fateman. The five issues were composed of July and Fateman's experimental feminist fiction about themselves and each other, sometimes disguised as characters that Fateman called Ida and July (a name Miranda took for her own and eventually legalized).

In 2001, July was invited to perform and make a sound installation for the upcoming Whitney Biennial, curated by Lawrence R. Rinder, Chrissie Iles, Christiane Paul, and Debra Singer. July chose the museum's main elevator as the site for a series of distinct short narratives whose characters she voiced. A woman and her husband talk while watching their house burn down, a rock star becomes vulnerable while revving up the audience, and a teacher inspires children to lift their fists to the universe.

Eleven Heavy Things, curated for the 53rd International Arts Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, was installed in an enclosed garden within Giardino delle Vergini. The cast fiberglass, steel-lined pieces included pedestals to stand on, tablets with holes for body parts, and freestanding abstract headdresses. A series of tablets invited heads, arms, legs, and, in one case, a single finger to fill in the appropriate holes.

Commissioned by London-based Artangel, the Interfaith Charity Shop opened to the public as a fully functional store from August 31 to October 22, 2017, on the third floor of Selfridges, an iconic luxury department store on Oxford Street. It was jointly staffed and stocked by Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim charity shops who were invited by July to join forces. Items for sale were typical of those traditionally sold in charity shops—secondhand clothes, books, games, kitchenware, toys, and bric-a-brac.

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