“Cecilia Vicuña: About To Happen” at the Henry Art Gallery

The Henry Art Gallery’s  exhibition of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña gives new life to found materials. On two walls and a large floor area, Vicuña placed over 100 Precarios, very small sculptures created from detritus gathered on beaches since the 1960s. Precarios refers to the delicacy of the tiny sculptures, but they also speak metaphorically of fragile indigenous recovery from colonial erasure, and the planet’s current threatened condition.

As with the idea of Precarios, Vicuña’s art moves from micro to macro in scale and concept. The Balsa Snake Raft to Escape the Flood wends through the center of the gallery with a wild range of materials: bamboo, willows, twigs, fishing line, beads, rope, net, styrofoam, plastic, feathers. As we look at this long shape, the snake seems to explode into the air, its fragile materials unable to support us.

Vicuña weaves words as well as objects. High at the top of two facing walls Vicuña placed a poem in one single long line. Underneath is a case filled with her poetry books and “Book Objects,” tiny sculptures with brief handwritten texts that offer enticing tidbits of ideas. This tiny book is called “Des a par e cer (Disappear) 1980s. It says “To appear is to be in pairs/ To Disappear is to unpair.” Well you can think about that.

Caracol Azul (Blue Snail), a large bail of unspun blue wool, partially unrolled on the floor, creates a giant image of a snail trail.  From an indigenous perspective unspun wool “stands for cosmic gas and interstellar dust that gave birth to galaxies and water.” And the snail trail connects to the beginning of writing.

At the far end of the gallery, the installation Burnt Quipu made of orange, brown and yellow lengths of wool that hang from the ceiling, creates a dense forest like environment that we are invited to walk through. It commemorates the forest fires of last summer.

Vicuña incorporated several long Quipu in a performance at the museum: we passed them from one person to the next creating a connection and community among the almost 100 people there, as she sang a poem wearing a white Quipu.   

Vicuña references climate change in several media. Her long raft suggests the difficulty of surviving sea level rise. A three channel digital video La Noche de las Especies, (Night of the Species) animates her drawings of microorganisms and immerses us in both their wonder and their extinctions. Finally, there are six short films in the auditorium. In one of them , she collects seeds while she sings “Semiya,”a seed song (which you can also hear in a Precarios installed in a corner of the gallery) .

As I moved through the exhibition, I felt the poetry both visual and textual, permeating me. The changing scales from large to tiny, the resurrection of the most humble materials into extraordinarily fascinating sculptures, the singing, the films, weave an experience that is more than just viewing. Walking through the gallery is a walk through a forest, but this forest is constructed from words and found materials only some of which are natural ( as the forests and nature in general today is so often littered with plastic).

It speaks of the past and the present, but leaves a question mark hanging over the future.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and N Scott Momaday

“Jaune Quick-to-See Smith In the Footsteps of my Ancestors) at the Tacoma Art Museum (until the end of June) confronts us immediately with her deep connection to the natural world and what we are doing to it as colonial extractors. The Swamp, 2015, puts the current crisis right in our face in both the styles of white modernism, and native abstractions.

The art work is described as follows: “A figure both human and animal stands in a swamp, wreathed by symbols of the vivid life one finds in swamps. Humans and animals are caught up in the stew of action, just as none escapes thoughtless decisions that poison the air and water that everyone needs. This painting acknowledges the importance of swamps within our ecosystems, their cleansing waters, and their rich habitat.”

In the central figure, Smith stated that she “created an elk anthropomorphic female figure, converted from a male elk love medicine.” As we look at it, we feel ever more deeply entangled and disoriented. The central figure is standing knee deep in a pond (a stew). The most distinct creature is a walking snake, in the lower right that seems to be walking away from the devastation. Embedded in the hot yellows and reds are fragments of masks, feathers, a pair of hands, an “Indian” stereotype profile yellow face with a single feather headdress. Oops there are the ears of Mickey Mouse ( an obvious reference to Disney, here standing in for corporate takeovers)!, In the upper left a majestic trickster rabbit ( named Nanabozho) oversees the entire disaster.

According to Gail Tremblay’s catalog essay ” “Nanabozho was sent to earth by Giche Manitou who assigned him to name all the plants and animals and to creat a system of mnemonic mark-making that would help humans remember the order of things in ceremonies and stories”

We feel the spilling of blood, the disruption of the sun, the pallid blue background indicating a vast space on which we have laid spoil to the planet. We can also see the devastation wreaked on native tribes on this continent in the last 350 years embodied in the paint strokes and the cascading images. Linear outlines suggest pictographs, but not literally, more invented, there is a Mexican mask, a bomb.

And that is only one painting! I give you Tongass Trade Canoe. This astounding ecological statement from 1996 is chillingly pertinent to our present catastrophe. It refers to the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the calving ground of many caribou where oil is being drilled.The plastic laundry baskets suggest the trivial products that come from the destruction of the natural environment.

According to the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council “The Tongass contains nearly one-third of the old-growth temperate rain forest remaining in the world, as well as the largest tracts of old-growth forest left in the United States. Old-growth temperate rain forests hold more biomass (living stuff) per acre than any other type of ecosystem on the planet, including tropical jungles. The Tongass alone holds 8 percent of all carbon stored in U.S. national forests and is recognized as a globally significant carbon storage reserve.

” In fact, the Tongass is the last National Forest to allow large-scale clear cut logging of ancient old-growth trees, and according to draft plan released this year, will continue to permit this outdated practice for another 15 years. “

Here is a detail. Surrounding the huge canoe image are references to the devastation being wrought on the environment as a result of greed, exactly our problem today. This huge painting was completed more than 20 years ago. Its genius is the deadly ( literally) serious issue, the calving grounds of caribou, that you see marching across the top of the painting.

But it also has humor, ” Protect Endangered Loggers,” “Chips Ahoy” “Grizzlies and Bald Eagles, Goodbye Clutter” “Clear Cut Choice”

I wrote about Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in my book Art and Politics Now in the ecological chapter which addresses the huge difference of “enlightenment” attitudes to nature – that it is separate ( and inferior) from humans- and the indigenous perspective that we are part of nature. But in my book I illustrated “Fear,” also in the Tacoma exhibition, a powerful anti war work, her excruciating images of war overwhelm us with their detail and specificity.

Here is a series of four prints that bring together humor and tragedy. The US tried very hard to obliterate the native point of view, the native peoples, the native cultures of this country. Thank goodness we white people failed in that endeavor, we may have only their perspective to save us now, from our own ways.

In the movie recently screened at the Seattle Public Library, “Words from a Bear” about N. Scott Momaday, we were once again confronted with both the ongoing strength of the Native American message of our embeddedness in the land, in nature. Beside that we learned of the US efforts at genocide: slaughter of buffalo and horses,the banning of religion, especially the Sun Dance, forced marches to reservations far from familiar lands, boarding schools- the effort to make native children white by removing them at the age of four from their families; allotments which broke up tribal territories, then after World War II there was the urbanization which isolated natives again from their culture and families, on and on.

But Momaday was lucky. He did not go to a boarding school, his parents were story tellers and writers and painters and teachers, he got a full scholarship to Stanford and received a Ph.D. in 1963.In 1969 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book House Made of Dawn. This astonished him and thrilled the entire indigenous community, as one writer declared we moved
“beyond the ethnographic past.”

The main theme of the movie though is that he “invested himself in his landscape.” He stated “I am who I am because of the land.” His voice is crucial in today’s world as we are increasingly alienated from nature. He says we cannot separate from the land. It is that insight that we all need as our culture increasingly is devolved into looking at life through a small screen filled with scarce metals taken from the earth.

Edgar Arceneaux at WaNaWari

WaNaWari is a new cultural center in the Central District. Located at 911 24th avenue on the site of Inye Wokoma’s grandmother’s house, it is “Reclaiming Space for Black Art and Stories.” Four people are collaborating: Inye Wokoma and Elisheba Johnson are African American artists affected by gentrification and displacement . Jill Freidberg and Rachel Kessler, are white artists using art and stories to challenge white supremacy, especially as it is expressed through gentrification and displacement.

A week ago we gathered for a special event with Edgar Arceneaux, visiting artist from Los Angeles with a current exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery “Black Book of Lies” (until June 2 ). The exhibition is a space that looks from the outside like a wooden structure of hard to characterize design somewhere between slave cabin and space ship.

Inside is a labyrinth filled with books in various conditions.

As we wind through it, it is a tight space, a bit claustrophobic. You can barely pass between the shelves filled with many types of books: first of all are burnt scroll-like objects, a reference to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Then you run into your own reflection on a shiny surface. Whoops! are we intruders or destroyers or tourists or book lovers filled with horror? As we wind into the space (a labyrinth with a false ending, a center, and a way out) the books on the shelves change, first there are altered books on contemporary art, particularly the book Arte Povera, about contemporary Italian conceptual art, which lends itself easily to other sardonic titles ( I leave it to your imagination), Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence ( of Arabia) Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Lenin, Chaucer, Descartes, Bible stories, volumes of the Encylopedia Brittanica,. As we go deeper and deeper into the labyrinth we finally arrive at nine Bill Cosby books that have been stuck together unreadable, an indication of the huge issue with Bill Cosby today, cultural icon to disgraced predator. We are happy to find the exit.

At the workshop we were asked to make our own small models for libraries. Arceneaux spoke of how books can destroy or transform, how they can get thrown out, how they create layers in our lives. With a piece of brown cardboard, some colored paper, magazines to cut up, a few bits of plastic and other things, we were asked to imagine a library building.

The results were astonishing, all sorts of imaginative structures and each of us told a narrative as we briefly presented them.

I was pretty intimidated as I am a writer, not an artist, but Edgar was super helpful and encouraging. My library, which everyone immediately compared to the Guggenheim of course, rises up through rainbow colors to a culmination in nature with a flower at the top. We were asked to include a reference to a book we were given and to have at least 5 different categories, mine were fairly obvious, exercise, cooking, art, history, literature, myth, poetry and nature. Other people had wonderfully imaginative categories such as giants for example.

My culmination of the spiral in nature is both an homage to my father who was a naturalist, and my love of nature. That sounds like such a cliche, but it is more and more true for me as I am increasingly concerned about alienation from nature as we plug something in our ears and look at our phones all the time. I feel privileged to remember to listen to the free concert of birds (thanks to my birding friends) and enjoy eating fruit and vegetables from a bounteous garden behind our house that my husband has developed ( I am from New York City so knew nothing about soil, fertilizer, etc).

Edgar gave me the flower on the top. Thank you Edgar. Thank you WaNaWari.

Yəhaw̓!

Contemporary Indigenous Art in Seattle’s King Street Station Inaugural Exhibition

Prepare to be delighted and overwhelmed! As you enter the huge exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art on view at the new art space ARTS at King Street Station, the first work you see is an accumulation of objects hanging over the front desk by Catherine Cross Uehara (Uchinanchu/Hapa/Okinaway American) “between you & me & the Ancestors…” It includes photographs of her ancestors, a wedding dress kimono, memorabilia and much more.

Turn around and on the opposite wall is an archival film of the famous Vi Hilbert, (Upper Skagit) who singlehandedly saved the Lushootseed language from extinction, encouraging a community audience to “lift the sky” together. In her telling: “The Creator has left the sky too low. We are going to have to do something about it, and how can we do that when we do not have a common language? …We can all learn one word, that is all we need. That word is yəhaw̓—that means to proceed, to go forward, to do it.”

So, go forward and plunge into the exhibition of 200 artists from 100 tribes. The curators, Asia Tail (Cherokee), Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole) and Sapreet Kahlon, accepted all indigenous submissions. They include children and elders, professional artists and beginners, all media from traditional cedar, bead work and dolls to digital and audio. We see sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, text, cartoons, games, performance, skateboard, maps. There are all styles from realism to surrealism, to abstraction, to traditional, but mainly there are many mixes as well as approaches that need new names, rather than these tired Euro-American terms.

To enjoy the exhibition simply embrace its mind-expanding diversity, then immerse yourself in one wall at a time, each a compact exhibition. But the exhibition works as a whole as well. Large paintings and sculpture of all sizes animate the large space. Gaps between the walls allow a view through to another part of the exhibition.

Timothy White Eagle (White Mountain Apache), performance: “Songs for the Standing Still People”

Timothy White Eagle (White Mountain Apache) performed “Songs for the Standing Still People” within a space hung with jingles and chains that we are all encouraged to shake to create our own music. He called us to action against the “vast forces” that “will ravage us if we do not act” though a story of rocks that came together and changed the world.

Traditional indigenous media mix with contemporary media throughout the entire exhibition. Cedar hats demonstrate stunning dexterity and expertise by Kimberly Miller (Skokomish), Nancy Burgess (Grand Ronde/Umqua/Dakota), Roquin-Jan Quichocho Siangco (CHamoru) and Celeste Whitewolf (Cayuse/Nez Perce/Nisqually/Pitt River’Karuk’Hawai’ian/Confederate Tribes of Umatilla).

Hanging in the stairwell is a mixed media homage to weaving by Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos/Confederated Tribes of Coos/Lower Umpqua/Siuslaw) “Eagle Machine dancing the beautiful.” It combines a cotton wood bark skirt with her photographs and mixed media references to indigenous history.

Other favorites include: Maureen Gruber’s (Inuvíaluít) “Colonial Shopping Cart” made from a large Hudson’s Bay bag and lined with fur;

Adam Sings in the Timber’s (Apsáalooke) photographs of young women in regalia re-asserting indigenous presence in various locations in Seattle;

Susan Ringstad-Emery’s (Iñupiat) Nalukatuq, 9 foot banner with a little girl tossing a star back into the sky (based on a folk tale), and celebrating children as the future of change;

Priscilla Dobler’s (Mayan) “El renacimiento de la Sociedad: The rebirth of society” in the stairwell, commentary on traditional Mayan embroidery as its threads unravel into a contemporary geometric enclosure;

Jacob Johns’s (Hopi) “Water is Life” banner that speaks of freeing the Snake River, a reference to our threatened salmon and orcas because of the many dams on the Snake.

One of the most striking works is by HollyAnna “Cougar Tracks” de Coteau Littlebull (Yamama/Nez Perce/Cayuse/Cree) who upcycled 15,190 pieces of plastic to create a twelve by three foot “Big Foot” who “Lifts the Sky.”

The representation of elders in paintings and sculpture like “Ode to Ramona Bennett” by Taylor Dean (Puyallup) and the carved wood portrait mask of Vi Hilbert by Taylor Wily Krise (Squaxin), spiritually imbue the entire exhibition with their powerful spirits.

In addition to this huge exhibition there is a series of three Latinx/indigenous exhibitions at the Vermillion Café. The year-long exhibit also encourages new native curators at many venues, workshops for young native artists, films, and much more.

ARTS at King Street Station covers 7500 square feet, sponsored by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture (ARTS) whose offices are in the same space. ARTS is dedicated to supporting and exhibiting people of color. Located at 303 S Jackson Street, it is open Tuesday to Saturday 10am–6pm and First Thursdays 10am–8pm.

Inye Wokoma’s Amazing “Turning the Earth” at Liberty Bank Building

Inye Wokoma’s four mixed media art works inside the Liberty Bank Building lobby will be visible only to those who live there. So I am taking this opportunity to introduce these four intricate art works. Inye gave me an overview of their significance. The wall on which they are installed has two sides.

On the side you see is The Infinite Earth on the left and The Black Earth on the right.
On the other side of the wall is The Red Earth and The Green Earth. I have primarily quoted Inye’s articulate explanations here.

“It is a story of transformation and transcendence in four chapters based on the central metaphor of making barren land that fertile. Through this metaphor I am exploring the systemic racism African American faced upon migrating to Seattle in the 20th century, how we as a people confronted those challenges to build a community and the role Liberty Bank played in that story. “

“The visual motif references both Christian and Ifa spiritual traditions as a way to acknowledging the depth and complexity of our collective story as a people of the African Diaspora. I am both drawing from and expanding on these traditions by anchoring the imagery with deific figures that are rooted in the Central District daily life and mythical at the same time. “

Each piece has a story and together they comprise the larger story of the African American experience both coming from the South and living in the Central District.

The first part of the story is The Red Earth which he explained as the red clay earth of Alabama, for example. It is difficult to work , and low in nutrients making it low in fertility. He parallels this with the area of the city that was lacking in civic investment, and systematic neglect, as in the “Negro District, the Ghetto, the Bottoms, the Central District, the Hood” which created the difficulties of building community.

We see a woman who is both a maid and a farmworker holding a fork. Around her head is a huge halo, in the center of which we see a key, the key to a home, a home that is only a dream because loans for homes were not available in the Central District until the Liberty Bank was founded in 1968. She is both an Orisha of the Sankofa religion and a deity in Christianity, this strong black woman.

“The Red Earth – Rooted in our collective history of confronting housing discrimination and redlining, this panel connects this history with the agrarian lives many of our left behind in the south by paralleling working poor soil with building community under economic deprivation. The Red Earth is a visual metaphor for what it meant to build community with intentionality under the harshest circumstances. It establishes the conditions that made institutions like Liberty Bank necessary”

Next is the “The Black Earth,” the story of the founding of the Liberty Bank, black earth is rich in nutrients, that can nourish a community. The nourishment came from the founding of the Liberty Bank, and the story is told by the daughter of the founders, James and Mardine Purnell, whose photographs you see. Credit Unions preceded the bank in the 1950s and in 1968 the Purnells and seven strong community members came together to create the bank. We see James Purnell carrying a jug of water against a blue background that also suggests flowing water. The details of the process and deeds of sale are in the rain drops.

“The Black Earth – A more direct retelling of the founding of Liberty Bank, this panel uses the metaphor of black soil as a symbol of fertility. It evokes the bringing of water as a catalyzing force activating soil that has been prepared for cultivation and connects this to the Purnells’ mission to establish a bank that would bring much needed resource to the community African Americans were actively building in the central district. “

Next is The Green Earth which does not have a central figure. It embodies a coherent community, more abstract and more chaotic, with its roses and a gold wreath at the bottom, and a collage of photographs of events and people of the community.

“The Green Earth – A visual allegory for earth that is fertile and bountiful. It evokes the African American community in the Central District at its height and centers Liberty Bank’s role in that story. This panel is all about the complexity of a living social ecosystem. ”

Last is The Infinite Earth . We see twins who will carry on the legacy of the bank, there are references to music, Sankofa, abundance, fertility, birth. Looking hard we can see photographs of Civil Rights Leaders like Malcolm X, and even photographs from the Hubble telescope inserted into some of the bubbles. It includes all the elements and the solar system. The cowrie shells refer to both currancy and abundance.

“The Infinite Earth – The panel explores the possibilities of the future by anchoring that potential in learning from the best that our collective past has to tell use. It evokes themes of transformation, endurance, connectedness, communal love, service, and vision as the heart of  the of Liberty Bank story. “

Art and Regeneration at the Liberty Bank Building in the Central District

As we approach the new Liberty Bank Building on Union we can see from a block away that it is special. Its bold white with orange and brown accents stands high above surrounding buildings, a dramatic contrast to the innocuous developments on two corners of 23^rd and Union, what was once the heart of the black community in the Central District.

Coming closer we see a striking African inspired pattern on the roofline overhanding the sidewalk. On the wall of the building is a “brisket” weave pattern interrupting the regular rows of bricks. The older bricks of the pattern come from the original Liberty Bank, the first African American owned bank in the Pacific Northwest, opened in 1968.

As a result of red lining, this neighborhood in the center of Seattle, became a concentrated black neighborhood. In 1968 national civil rights legislation made discrimination in housing, sales and rentals illegal and the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted the same laws.  In that same year Liberty Bank made it possible for African Americans to buy homes in the Central District, or anywhere else if they wanted.

When I moved to 20^th and Union in 1997 ( an early but not the earliest white here, some of my neighbors came a good ten years earlier), middle class professional blacks who survived the crack epidemics of the 1980s and early 1990s were still here. But they were mostly elderly. In the next twenty years, the neighborhood has become dominated by white “settlers” not unlike the innundation of whites who almost destroyed the indigenous population in Seattle in the 1850s.   At the same time, the cost of housing has escalated, affected by the massive tech boom here, and the character of the housing, increasingly closed off condominiums with private garages, has destroyed neighborliness. Many small buildings with neighborhood businesses have been sold to developers who build larger, more expensive spaces. We treasure those landlords who are resisting this trend (I am so fortunate on my block on Union between 20^th and 21^st to have three such landlords).

Enter the six story Liberty Bank Building! It is on the site of the original Liberty Bank. Not only are the people involved committed to enabling African Americans to return to their historic roots with affordable and low income housing, they also built the Liberty Bank Building with 30 percent Women and Minority Owned Business Enterprises (WMBE).  87 per cent of the apartments have Black renters. All the commercial spaces are going to Black owned businesses, most notably Earl’s Cuts and Styles who has been across the street for decades.

This success would not have been possible without massive efforts on the part of many different groups, notably Africatown, Capitol Hill Housing, Byrd Barr Place and the Black Community Impact Alliance. Africatown has been particularly visible, and vocal under the dynamic leadership of Wyking Garrett,  son of the irrepressible Omari Garrett and grandson of one of the original founders of the Liberty Bank.

He is seen here speaking at the ribbon cutting. See my husband’s article about that in the Leschi News.

My main focus here is to examine the stunning art installations some easily visible to the passerby, others inside the lobby and partially visible from the street.

I can’t think of a building since the government supported art projects of the 1930s with such an extensive art program focused on narrative. All the pieces address either the history of the Liberty Bank or the Central District.

To begin with the outside. Esther Ervin inset an original safe deposit box into the center of her “drum benches” along Union.  She has smoothed them off to make a comfortable place to site and patterned the wood in a basket weave. She highlighted the top of the base with a tile design in Afrocentric colors.

Look up at the building and you see the etched glass panels by Ervin that outline the red lined Central District. In the right weather they reflect onto the building where you see plaques with poems by one of my favorite poets, Minnie Collins. Here are two of them.

Walk around to the entrance of the building framed by a square open gate with more safe deposit boxes inserted into the two sides (including their original hinges).

Dominating the façade is Al Doggett’s stunning mural celebrating creativity in the Central District, music, dancing and political resistance. It sweeps above our heads, filling the entire six floors of the orange façade. Doggett explained the design challenge of keeping the flow of the design in spite of all the windows.

Just beyond the entrance and visible from the street ( through a window) is Aramis Hamer’s mural ”Liberty” with multicolored hands reaching for a gold chain spelling out Liberty, referring at the same time to freedom from the chains of slavery, the chains of prison and the gold chains of hip hop performers. In the sky  bills fly with the faces of the founders of the Liberty Bank.

In the courtyard Esther Ervin’s three bronze salmon with swirling designs  “Struggle Against the Current” swim over reeds in a channel that will fill with water when it rains. They point directly to the difficulties that African Americans face in life.

Inside the building the art visible only to those who live there or those who visit features Al Doggett’s large mural that details the history of the Central District.  It names and depicts businesses, places, and people, some of whom are still with us. He unifies the complex composition with an undulating musical line emanating from a saxophone player and dancers and culminating with a choir of children and adults.

Doggett was also responsible for the panels outside the elevators identifying the twelve parks in the neighborhood named for outstanding African American leaders who lived here.

Opposite the elevator doors Doggett created one more mural called Ancestral Masks of Diversity, which honors the range of different ethnic groups of the CD, Native American, African, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican.

Just inside the main door of the building is a large concrete support that includes the door of the original bank vault and four intense works by Inye Wokoma. The next blog post gives more detailed discussion about these works.

Lawrence Pitre depicts African Americans as they get loans from the bank,

Ashby Reed used a palette knife to invoke the streets of the CD in a semi abstract composition.

Finally Lisa Myers Bulmash created collage portraits of the architect of the original bank, the new Liberty Bank Building, and all nine of the multicultural founders of the bank. These collage portraits include a volume of an encyclopedia at the center, inset with a oval metal coin purse opening with varying images of the Statue of Liberty. The bow tie is a drawer knob. Bulmash is a master collage artist and every detail is meaningful from the fabric of the clothes to the background.

The commitment to art at the Liberty Bank Building is impressive. Al Doggett as Creative Director and Esther Ervin as Project Manager spent three years on the project, including their own significant contributions. So often these days art is an afterthought on new construction, or an afterthought, or non-existent.

In the Liberty Bank Building we have the start of the new Central District proudly establishing a unique presence,and pointing to the future.

Across the street, Africatown and others will be  in charge of part ofthe full block to be developed. The original development here was part of the 1960s initiative to stimulate inner city growth.

Mary Coss’s “Groundswell” Tells About Salination and Climate Change

 

 

 

During a recent residency, Mary Coss was growing barnacles on Willapa Bay, the second largest estuary in the United States (over 260 square miles!)

 

The artist described the process to me in detail:  first she coated a wire mesh with cement snags to attract the barnacles, then dragged it over an oyster bed and left it for the barnacles to forage for food. Barnacles grow very slowly so a resident scientist kept track of the barnacles growth after she left.

 

Then she met scientist Roger Fuller † through the “Surge” project, a pairing of scientists and artists organized through the Museum of Northwest Art by former Executive Director, Christopher Shainin.

She learned that barnacles are the “canary in the coal mine” for water salination.

 

Groundswell, the last of a trilogy of works called Silent Salinity

(see her website for information on the other two), dramatically presents the first step of salination in the wild: barnacles attaching to fresh water sedge, a three sided grass.

 

Sedge likes freshwater and it is being starved as the fresh water rivers recede with decreasing rainfall leading to decreasing flow. This is a specific on the ground visualization of one manifestation of climate change .

 

Coss recreates that changing landscape in her gallery installation: the sedge is wire and paper pulp), and salt invades not only the sedge, but encroaches on us in the corners of the gallery.

 

Coss referred to it as a “dystopian landscape.”

 

 

Hanging above the salinated sedge you see a single line of writing in wire quoted from Roger Fuller’s essay on salination:

 

Silent Salinity: Net Loss

Scientist Roger Fuller’s pondering the state of the estuaries and the impact of global warming:

 

“I was out stomping through the mudflats in my hipwaders today, and discovered a bulrush ghost meadow. A small field of stumps, like a miniature forest clearcut. In the upper intertidal zone of brackish estuaries, tall, dense, verdant meadows of bulrushes grow, creating a tidal jungle of vegetation that hosts a myriad of critters and a far-reaching food web that spreads its strands through birds, crabs, and fish, even reaching as far as our dinner table.

 

But this was a ghost meadow I found, a slim reminder of a lush ecosystem once present, now vanished. Poking up from the deep, brown mud were stumps…3 inches tall, less than an inch thick, triangular, almost woody, stumps. Coated by years of mud and algae. A few sprouted barnacles. Easy to miss. Here and there a small plant poked up, but the tall, lush meadow was long gone.

 

There has been no meadow here for at least 8 years of my memory, and aerial photos confirm that I haven’t lost my mind, yet. I never noticed the change until today, the gradual retreat of a once lush ecosystem.

 

Makes me wonder what else has disappeared while I’ve been busy paying attention to other things? Perhaps that first barnacle was a sentinel of change, marking a salinity threshold silently crossed as the interplay of river and tide shifted. Or was it a shift in the food web, a small change in some quiet, unobserved corner of the complex web of life in which the bulrush is enmeshed?

 

It reminds me of the idea of “shifting baselines”…we think what we see today is the way it’s always been, when in fact things are slowly shifting and changing, right beneath our rubber waders. Without data, we have no sense of what we’ve lost, of what we’ve gained.

 

Far up the shore there is still a remnant of marsh, pinned against the dike with no place left to shift. How long will this remnant last? Will anyone notice when this meadow too slips away, when it becomes a ghost meadow?”

 

The entire poem is written in wire on the end wall. Here is a detail where you can read the word “barnacle”

 

 

In addition to the salt encrusted sedge, and wire poetry, the installation includes a large wave which Coss described as “nature itself coming through”. The wave is manifested in a large structure of wire hung with billowing blue fabric. On it the artist projected flowing water. The wave seemed to be actually overcoming us in the gallery as it descended from the ceiling and, at the same time, the salt is spreading toward us on the floor.

 

The second image is the view from the window on the street. We see a salt encrusted screen and the wave. Coss inserted wire writing with her own poetry into the wave.

 

Coss succeeds in giving us what she calls a “visceral” reaction to climate change. The salt makes the huge story of climate change and global warming intimate. Perhaps that is because we all know salt, it is both physically part of our bodies, and a substance that we experience daily in our lives.

 

We also know that too little can kill us and too much, as we see in Groundswell, can also kill.

 

 

‡Scientist Roger Fuller works at the Skagit Climate Science Consortium and is a spatial ecologist with Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment. He has expertise in estuarine ecology, restoration ecology, climate change impacts, climate change adaptation, and decision-support tools.

 

PS Read the book Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky to really understand how crucial salt has been historically.

Elizabeth Gaskell and the politics of workers and women in the 19th century

During the six weeks that I have been recovering from my hip replacement surgery, I have been reading and listening to the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. First I listened to Ruth, then read Wives and Daughters, and finally Mary Barton. It turned out that Ruth is a midcareer book, 1853, Wives and Daughters at the end of her life, left unfinished 1864-5, and Mary Barton her first novel, 1848.

She is best known for North and South, which I read a long time ago, and Crandell, also a BBC series, which I found less compelling than the three above.

As a married Victorian writer ( she was married to a Unitarian minister who worked with the poor, an important fact that contributed to her insights.) Gaskell had six children, half of whom died. The death of her second child led to her novel Mary Barton.

 

I was riveted by this novel. the characters are vivid, the plot intense ( so intense that I had to listen to it in little bits to avoid being overcome with anxiety), the politics beautifully incorporated into the narrative.  It was written the year that Marx published his Communist Manifesto. In the novel, not only does the heroine avoid becoming a fallen woman by her own insight, but she saves her lover from being hung for murder. But the real confrontation in the novel set between 1838-42 in Manchester at the time of the beginning of the Chartist movement (featured also in the miniseries Victoria on Netflix now), is between the working class and the owners of industry. At first it is a march to London to ask for improvement of the horrible conditions of poverty of the working class, then it is a strike with a demand for more pay, then it is an act of revenge against oppression, and in the end it is an amazing communication between an articulate impoverished man and the owner of a foundry whose son has been murdered in revenge for oppression.   This exchange ends with their shaking hands, a symbol of communication between workers and owners, and as Gaskell states so eloquently, the grief of the owner at the loss of his son is then channeled into advocating reforms for workers.

Ruth is about a woman who does fall, but then by good luck is saved, by a dissenting minister. She is eventually found out, and shunned as is her son, and she ends as a nurse to those dying of the plague, finally catching it and dying as a result from the man who brought her downfall.

Wives and Daughters is different kind of book. I read the praise for this late work as her “best work” but I disagree. It is focused on the very subtle gradations of difference in class in a small town, micro differences, indicated by behavior, politics, dress, and social customs. It was fascinating ( and also had a strong female heroine), but I found Mary Barton as the real powerhouse story. Gaskell is a later generation than Austin, and I find her much more compelling because she incorporates the politics of the oppressions of the working class and womens vulnerability to downfall and strength to survive into her stories.

If you want a good read this winter turn to Elizabeth Gaskell.

Charles Dickens admired her and published her work in his magazine Household Words, but if you look at her career, it is amazing how many magazines were available for publishing at that time, and how much she published.

PS I just read that mothers tend to not appear in Victorian novels, and it is true, none of the female heroines in Gaskell have living mothers, one has an unfortunate stepmother.

 

Martin Luther King Day 2019

 

Martin Luther King said it all

“A Nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military deense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

 

As our government shutdown was going  on and on, and ordinary  dedicated Federal employees Americans were standing in line at food banks, the outpouring of love at the MLK March was deeply inspiring.

 

Before the march I went to a workshop on understanding Hate Groups which had some amazing statistics on reporting and non reporting of hate crimes. This is how it was described.

The Truth About Hate Groups and Hate Crimes.

It’s time to take affirmative action against hate. This workshop examines how white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups proliferate. Bias crimes go unreported. Mainstream media cover only the most violent offenses. FBI hate crime statistics are inaccurate. The result: communities get a false sense of security. In this workshop you’ll learn about how malicious harassment cases are – and aren’t – reported. Participants will learn how radical right organizations recruit and retain members, why defectors abandon the movement, and what their stories tell us about stopping hate. The session will end with individual action plans to “stop hate in your own community.”

 

Presenter: Former civil rights reporter Lonnie Lusardo is a cultural competency professional and author of From Hate to Compassion: How Seven Former White Supremacists Transformed Their Lives, due for publication in 2019.

 

Then the March came with its powerful multiracial, multi ages message of love and resistance.

 

 

Jack Whitten’s Odyssey: A New Perspective

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Whitten made his name  as an abstract painter in New York City beginning in the 1970’s and had a solo exhibition in 1974 at the Whitney Museum! During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City he was friends with musicians, poets, writers, and other artists. It was a time of mixing media, but he made a name for himself as a painter of large abstract canvases that were purchased by the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

One publication stated at the time of his death

“And as a black artist, he resisted the period’s prevailing impulse of racial representation to explore the plastic and metaphorical possibilities of paint.”

Artsy Editors Jan 23, 2018

I will return to this point at the end of the post.

 

Other artists honored Whitten with these words:

“Jack would preach that art was one of humanity’s last bastions, and abstraction was where we as black artists could truly be free.” Shinique Smith, artist

 

“Whitten was always trying to find a celestial dimension in the most prosaic materials.” Massimiliano Gioni, curator

 

“To talk to Jack was to recognize the beauty and richness of existence, the possibility in even the dimmest times.”

Andrianna Campbell, curator

alll quotes from Artsy Editors Jan 23, 2018

 

All of these quotes about Jack Whitten as an abstract painter, as well as frequent references to his experimentation with materials give insight into his current exhibition of his sculpture at the Met Breuer .

 

It is astonishing that they have never before been shown except in small exhibitions in Greece. The sculptures reveal an intricate and layered mind, that brought together the cultures of Africa and Europe on the South coast of Crete, where he lived part time starting in the 1970s. Because I have spent quite a bit of time in Greece, I loved these sculptures. They were stunningly original, lovingly created from various materials, both found detritus and beautifully worked woods, and suggest a calm inner joy that is balanced and exuberant at the same time.

 

At the entrance to the exhibition (see top of post) stood Lichnos, 2008. The name refers to a “spiny bottom-dwelling fish,” used in “a Greek Fisherman’s stew.” Composed of specific types of wood, carob, black mulberry, the piece is set on a pedestal of whitewashed concrete cinder blocks that immediately made me think of the whitewashing my sister-in-law in Greece does to her house every year. It is the same lime wash used here.   What stopped me in my tracks is the huge creative eccentricity of the piece, the juxtaposition of unlike parts to make an assymetrical whole. The stringy character of carob wood makes it hard to carve, echoing the challenge of catching the Lichnos.

There are more references here embodied in the found

materials, to Africa, to Alabama. And as we walk around the work it seems to be a strange beast seeking to escape confinement. The stunning polished red colored carob wood is flame like.

 

These two installation shots suggest one of Whitten’s inspirations must have been Brancusi (the lower installation is a small show at the Museum of Modern Art). We see the same exploration of materials, of the base, of meticulous aesthetics, of elusive content.

But he is absolutely original, a word I rarely use (nor do I often write about abstract art.) But I strongly felt the layers of content in these works bringing together so many different traditions, mythologies, types of knowledge.

Phoenix for the Youth of Greece, 1983 is one of the earlier sculptures. It includes mulberry wood, olive wood, bone, glass and a small piece of writing. Underneath is an”ossuary”, cluster of bones made of jaws of small fish and above a mysterious parchment with the phrase

“Using the bones from the past, we can understand the present and foresee the future.”

The soft olive wood frames the hard shiny mulberry.
But all of these materials suggest a larger story or myth, illusive, but still very present.

 

In addition to the layers of mythology in the sculpture, another series of work, the “monolith series” payed homage to great African Americans, in a medium that Whitten developed, hand made acrylic tiles: these stunning works, shimmer in the light, as the “portrait” emerges from its surfaces. But again, they are basically abstract works, with homage to such people as Chuck Berry, James Baldwin, Eduard Glissant, Terry Adkins and Mohammed Ali. The one below is to Chuck Berry. (Black Monolith XI Six Kinky Strings: For Chuck Berry)

The riveting complexity of the surface evokes music, and certainly that is another crucial reference point for Whitten.

It is exciting to be confronted with a body of work by a well known artist that has never been shown before. All of these works are a revelation. Here is the Tomb of Socrates.

with wild cypress, black mulberry, marble, brass and mixed media

It is shaped like a shield, with all sorts of found materials . At the center is a black stone that suggests the philosophers skull. As we know Socrates died by drinking poison because a new political order ganged up on him and declared him dangerous. We need this piece today to remind us of what happens when governments reject knowledge.

 

Why have these sculptures never been shown before? I came up with the idea of logistics. They were all made in Greece, they are fragile, they are embedded in that landscape, that history, mythology, that geography, not far from Africa. Perhaps Whitten felt he wanted them to stay there, whereas his abstract paintings are very much a part of US American post World War II world.

 

He was one of a handful of African American artists to succeed throughout his life in the mainstream. Was he simply better than those who have less recognition, or was he less threatening because he did not pursue political content. Thinking about the tone of approval in the quote at the beginning of the article, abstraction was certainly more illusive as a means of speaking than the unavoidable imagery of a Charles White ( who was also successful, but in a different arena) .

 

But I will say that for Whitten it was not only what was in style,  it was definitely not because he wanted to hide behind it in order to be safe. Abstraction worked with his abstract way of understanding the world. His abstraction is not an empty gesture, it is an act based on wide ranging exploration of ideas.

 

Based on the homages quoted above , it is clear that he was held in a certain amount of awe by his colleagues and fellow artists. I wish I had known him. Perhaps I would know the answer to my question.

 

There is no doubt though that he was deep, poetic, and incredibly willing to take chances. He came from deep poverty in Alabama in the 1940s. His father died when he was five, his mother left with seven children to raise alone. She must have been a remarkable woman.  He went to segregated schools but was already interested in shop and music. But what a leap to end up as a major painter in New York City already in the early 1960s.

 

So the mystery of life and success remains, is it initiative, luck, mentoring, perseverance, charm, talent. We know that for a black man in the art world of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, brains alone was not enough. The fact that his experiment with materials fit with what was acceptable at that time is a conjunction of time, place, person, inclination. He may also have been just lucky in his timing.

Late 60s and early 70s the art world was shifting from its exclusive focus on white men making abstract paintings, but diversity was not yet established  as a crucial consideration ( it still isn’t). He slipped in then, and off he went.

 

But to return to the sculptures, which I can’t help feeling are his greatest art. Why were they never shown? Because they didn’t “fit” what the art world wanted? Or because he saw them as personal and informal explorations. I want to believe that he saw them as an ongoing exploration, a synthesis of all his ideas. They were not ready for the world until after he died.

 

Thank goodness we have them now.