The Artnauts: A Global Collective of Artists for Peace

I recently met the “Artnauts” a  collective of about 20 artists led by the dynamic George Rivera, a Professor of Art at the University of Colorado,  Boulder. Here you see him in the front and center of the members of the group who participated in their 20th anniversary celebration.

 

The Artnauts have been traveling the world since 1995, going to zones of conflict and offering art, communication, dialog, and mutual understanding. In their words: “The collective uses the arts as a tool for addressing global issues while connecting artists from around the world.” They have created exhibitions with local artists in Palestine, Bosnia, the Amazon, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, South Africa, Russia, China and many more. As they go to these places, they are also immeasurably enriched by the experience.

 

I was honored to be invited to speak at their anniversary exhibition at Red Line Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

 

The anniversary exhibition highlighted ten of their more recent exhibitions. These featured small works that could easily be transported.

 

Above you  see two themes that are repeated, the ongoing Palestinian crisis and the impact of climate change and globalization on indigenous cultures in Central and Latin America.

 

For many years George Rivera carried  huge boxes with large prints to venues around the world.

 

In addition to the commemorative exhibitions, Linda Weintraub was invited to curate a special exhibition of new works by some of the Artnauts, “Rally ‘Round the Flag of Justice ” Here she is speaking about the exhibition (in front of a different exhibition about guns)

 

All of the works are critiques, with the flag as an abstraction, a metaphor, a source of irony. Of course, we immediately think of the US flag as the subject, but there were many types of flags.

For example, Trine Bumuller, inspired by her Artnaut exhibition in Sarejevo last winter, created a tent like shape with Tibetan prayer flags to honor the nightmare of the Bosnians;  on the flags she painted the image of the Sarajevo roses superimposed on photographs of the still visible ruins of the city or other images. Red “Sarejevo roses” were painted on sidewalks where sniper’s bullets landed.

 

Andrew Connelly featured a queen size bed with the US and Israeli flags sewn together, “in bed together” and under the transparent sheet we could see the Palestinian flag barely visible.

 

The group has visited Palestine many times, and collaborated with Palestinian artists, most recently this summer in “Art and Resistance,” an exhibition for which I wrote a catalog essay.

Here we see George Rivera in front of his piece on Palestine/Juarez, with rubber bullets and a water bottle signifying the two borders.

He pointed out that the red triangle on the flag also signifies the wall on the two borders.

At the symposium accompanying the exhibition he said (on November 11, only three days after our “election”)

“In spite of what we have become on Tuesday, around the world, they love us a human beings.  The Artnauts affirm in this time people who stand up to injustice. “

He spoke of his own personal motivations for creating a collective that would stand up to injustice.

“I came out of intense racism in a small town in Texas. Art is a tool for addressing global issues, while connecting to artists around the world.

 

We seek to bring a sense or caring and humanity. The Artnauts stand for the intersection of critical consciousness and contemporary artistic practice.”

One of the most fascinating locations that the Artnauts have travelled to is the Amazon river, where they collaborated with local tribes and communities. I am still trying to sort out the information about this and will revise my discussion when I learn more. Suzanne Faris’s amazing sculptural installation speaks to greed, consumerism and the gobbling of resources.

 

Beth Krensky has created a long white truce flag shared between the Israelis and Palestinians. Made of white handkerchiefs baby t shirts, etc each olive pole that it hangs from is inscribed with a quote from a mother who has lost a child

Jerusalem mother:

“For me the struggle is not between Palestinians and Israelis,nor between Jews and Arabes. The fight is between those who seek peace and those who seek war. My people are those who seek peace”

Nablus mother:

I’ve known Israeli bereaved mothers for many years. The mothers’pain is similar, no matter if they are Israelis or Palestinians . . . the pain is seared into us and will be with us forever.”

 

And on the theme of the Mexican border crossing Tony Ortega’s work included the theme of hybridity, crossing a “Warhol soup can” with a Mexican soup in an installation that included a hybrid flag and a water barrel providing water for border crossers.

Kim V Martinez also spoke of the border crossing, its difficulties and its dangers, referring to those who died within one small area.

 

These are only a few of the artists represented by the collective and in the special exhibition. George Rivera has carefully published a catalog of each exhibition and deposited the archives with the Lilas Benson Latin American Collections at the University of Texas at Austin, so their legacy for future historians is assured. Amazingly enough, they have not received any reviews in the past 20 years in the United States!

 

The Artnauts are deeply committed to speaking through their art of injustice. They speak in many voices, directly, poetically, politically, metaphorically. They speak of peace, of land, of consumption, of greed, of death, of hope, of perseverance. It was truly inspiring to meet them in t he week of our disastrous election.

 

We can look to these artists and others as we plan our resistance to the national nightmare currently unfolding like a slow, long-lasting earthquake.

 

“Liberty Denied: Immigration, Detention, Deportation” an exhibition

 

This exhibition co curated by myself and Mark Auslander, Asociate Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies is at the Museum of Culture and Environment, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Wa until December 10, 2016

Wed to Fri 11-4 and Sat 10-3

Cecilia Concepción Álvarez
Con Las Esperanzas de Vida
acrylic on canvas 2016
“In this piece I attempt to spotlight the horrific conditions that refugees from violence suffer in detention centers. We the American taxpayers subsidize these for profit detention centers with our taxes. These detention centers predominantly incarcerate refugees from Mexico and Central America. These people are held indefinitely in deplorable, dehumanizing conditions and subjected to the same type of violence they were fleeing from in their home countries. These peoples’ migration has been spurred by the violence created by USA drug addiction, arms sales and USA policies/CIA/Corporate destabilization of their governments.
In order to heal the wounds of capitalistic colonialism, we need to be honest and interested in creating a discourse and action plan that confronts the violence. We need to examine our part in creating this sorry state of affairs.
In my artwork I attempt to bring to light the parts of our society that are rendered invisible/without value; in a visual vernacular that does not use violence as a symbol of power/excellence. Each person held without legal recourse has a story and a reason to flee. They come here with the hope of life.”

 

 

Immigrants arrive in the United States with hopes of a better life. Coming from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, they are driven to leave their homes by the forces of free trade that bankrupt small farmers, climate change which devastates crops, by gang warfare, and drug mafias, some of which are referenced in Art Hazelwood’s incredible print. Note especially that the field, the ground is filled with skulls!

 

Those who do not cooperate with gangs and drug dealing are personally in grave danger even in their own homes. As a result, brave migrants cross harsh deserts for thousands of miles by train, truck, car and foot to cross into the United States in hopes of a safer life in which they can earn a living and support the family they have left behind.

The border is today a militarized zone that divides not only families, but also animals and all life, as seen here in Art Hazelwood’s prints

 

Since numerous obstacles make legal migration possible only for the most privileged, migrants must pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to help them cross the border without papers. Once here, they often miss deadlines for applications because of constant moves, making documentation impossible once again.

 

Our farms require the hard work of migrant laborers, too hard for most of us. Capitalism invites them in, and then beats them down.As a result of their undocumented status, immigrant workers are frequently forced to live in unsafe conditions, suffer abuse on the job, or shortchanged on their pay.

The collaged text on Lawrence’s work reads

“Welcome to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. Our ample 277,000 sq.ft. facility stands in Tacoma’s Tide Flats- a highly toxic superfund site; A Tsunami and Lohar zone that’s visible from the museums of art, history and glass. Even if you and your family have lived and worked in the US for years, you are now a prisoner of the U.S. slated for deportation. You may or may not have access to legal counsel or a translator or news! To clarify security, detainee jumpsuit colors have changed! Now your Red uniform= high risk. Orange=medium risk. Green=medium to low risk. Blue=low risk. Segregation by color helps you see that other detainees cannot be trusted. So don’t talk to them or join their hunger strikes!”

 

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identify undocumented immigrants, often as a result of a minor traffic violation or racial profiling, they put them in detention. Over 30,000 immigrants are detained in 200 detention centers nationwide. With over 1500 beds, the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, run by the for-profit GEO Corporation under a contract with ICE, is one of the largest in the country. The detainees live in inhumane and illegal conditions with no privacy, poor health care, no outdoor exercise and terrible food. They are forced to do the work of the center for 1$ a day no matter how many hours they work.

Since lack of documentation is a civil offense, detainees have none of the rights provided by our criminal justice system.  Their only option is to attain “relief” through pro bono lawyers such as those at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. A judge decides the case, without a jury. Many of the cases drag on for months and years. Deportees are taken to buses often in the middle of the night and returned to countries in which they have often never lived or left many years ago, leaving behind families in the US.

 

The artists in “Liberty Denied”  explore some of these experiences.  Blanca Santander speaks of the jolting cultural adjustments of immigration, but celebrates the strength of women who survive it.

 

Carino del Rosario reveals the ironies and absurdities of passports as a means of identification.

 

Cecilia  Alvarez represents the suffering of families separated by detention and deportation. (see her statement at top of post)

Tatiana Garmendia, originally from Cuba, describes her own family’s experience of torture in detention, sewn painfully into a blanket. That is the artist with me next to the chair.

 

 

Doug Minkler pointedly depicts the cruel contradiction of our current attitude to immigrants.

 

 

Jen Sorensen tells the story of immigrant activist Danilo Lopez and

Daniel P. Mendez-Moore outlines the hypocrisy of public policy.

Three works were originally commissioned by the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian-Pacific American Experience in Seattle as the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) building in Seattle

(which held 230 people and also serviced people who wanted to become naturalized) was vacated for the new facility in Tacoma

(which holds over 1500 people in even worse conditions with only housing provided, no windows, no privacy).

Dean Wong’s haunting photographs document the empty, eerie building. Robb Kunz provides brief segments from interviews with immigrants about their experiences.

 

Christian French gives us the “INS Game,” the arbitrary process of acquiring legal status, still embedded in the floor of the INS building, here adapted as a card game.

 

Manuel Rios speaks of Identity Theft in his disturbing painting of a blindfolded person against barbed wire, suggesting both the act of immigration and the fearful aftermath.

 

Eroyn Franklin, in a fold out book format, follows the lives of two detainees in detail, Many Uch, in the old INS building, and Gabriella Cubillos (Gabi) in the Northwest Detention Center, both during their detention and after their release.

 

Last, detainees themselves make art to pass the endless time in a detention center with no programming, no courses to take, no recreation, nothing to do, except being forced to work as virtual slave labor for $1. per day no matter how many hours they work. These amazing purses come from Pavel Bahmatov. They are made of wrappers of ramen cut with dental floss, painstakingly woven together.

 

 

The exhibition opening included a former detainee speaking forcefully of the dreadful conditions at the Northwest Detention Center, as well as students who are currently protected by DACA, delayed action for childhood arrivals, who spoke through surrogates to protect their identity.

 

 

The purpose of the exhibition is to shed light on the nightmares of immigration, as well as the positive contribution that immigrants make to this country. It also makes reference to the larger political and economic realities.

 

“Liberty Denied” is paired at the Museum of Culture and Environment with a stunning exhibition of Arpilleras, “Tapestries of Hope,” created by the mothers of the disappeared in many cases from the clothing of the disappeared. This private collection of works belonging to Marjorie Argosin includes detailed and poignant imagery.  The experiences of the families of the disappeared make haunting parallels to the nightmares that today’s immigrants and their families experience during Immigration Raids, then arbitrary detentions and deportations  In Chile though there have been tribunals and even monuments to the crimes of those years. Perhaps someday the US will recognize that it is committing the same crimes.

 

 

 

Constellations (Asterismos) on Amorgos in the Cyclades

 

Constellations, the creative artistic festival on the island of Amorgos, is in its fourth year, organized by a group of 10 volunteers who live on Amorgos, two of them originally from the island. Amorgos is part of the Cyclades group of islands,  its more famous islands are Mykenos, Santorini, Naxos, Paros and Syros.). It is less well known partly because it has no airport. You have to take a ferry there (8 hours from Athens, 3 hours from Naxos).

 

The festival celebrates the island and its amazing out of the way villages, churches, and landscapes. The island is rugged, formed of hard metamorphic and volcanic rock. It used to have forests and a lot more terraced hillsides. Today it has goats, donkeys, mules, olive trees, wild herbs (we always come back with oregano and sage,) and religious festivals. There are some beaches, great hiking, and good food. You can do yoga at Iris Studio by the beach, you can get acupuncutre and herbal tea from Vangelis in Langada, you can get a fantastic manicure from Elpida in Aigalis. But above all it is a beautiful friendly island with many amazing landscapes, houses, rustic churches and stunning villages without any cars. There is one road for cars from one end of the island to the other.

 

According to the organizers, the idea of the festival is to celebrate

 

“A diverse, beautiful place bursting with history and emotion.A circle of friends loving, and living on an Aegean island.This is Amorgos, and this is us. For the past three years talented artists from all over Greece have showcased their creative work, honoring us and our guests with their presence, and bringing life to the island. Our goal for the 4th year of the festival is to encourage more artists to participate.

All performances take place next to ancient monuments, surrounded by landscapes of rare natural beauty without any complex stage settings.

No one involved in the organization of Asterismos (the Constellation), or any artists, is profiting financially in any way. Everything in this festival is created and offered out of love for the arts and the island.”

 

 

From Wednesday June 15 to Sunday July 3 they had events all over the island.

We saw three events while we were there.

 

 

SaGyni Dance Theater by Fizz dance group took place in the last rays of the sun on a path to the famous Church of the Panagia Epanocholini. The path was just wide enough to provide a space for performing. The group began with a dance that for me evoked a connection to the most archaic kore and goddesses.

Amorgos is famous for the largest Cycladic figure ever found, which is now in the Archeological Museum in Athens. As these woman danced in their nude stocking costumes they appeared to be part of the earth, joined to a mythic past. They were like the Kore of the archaic era coming to life.

 

 

The stripping of that outer garment was clearly an act of liberation. The three dancers continued with several different dances and poetic recitals that evoked contemporary lives for women and feminist issues:

a scene of seduction between two women, a competition among the three women performed on chairs, signified by exchange of clothing, such as a jacket, a shirt and hat signifiying a man, reaching out and rejection, playing cards, high heel shoes, all of these performances and exchanges suggested emotional relationships. The three women are struggling to find a way. They were sometimes accompanied by recitations, but that was in Greek so I couldn’t understand the words, but the implication was musings and philosophical responses on the theme of women. The connection of the landscape and the dance/theater was perfect, they blended gently with the setting of the ancient stone walls, reddish bushes, and soft pink flowers, the setting sun, the cooling wind.

 

Then up the path came a man with his donkey! In Amorgos, donkeys are still very much the only transportation away from the single road. They are working donkeys that help to carry many things.

The Greek farmer leading the donkey could not pass, as we were seated on steps and blocked the road. He stayed and watched, although the donkey showed no interest and went to sleep.

It was a thrilling partnership to the avant-garde artistic performance, two worlds, two lives, respecting each other, and part of the spirit of the Constellations festival on the island.

 

The next night we went to a performance for children called “Concerto for Double Bass and Wolves”

Dramatized narration by Mary Terzaki with Dimitris Sandalis on the bass cello.

It was a retelling of fairy tales with wolves, recasting the wolf as a hero instead of as a scary character. At the end all of the children got up and danced along with Mary as they exchanged masks.

The last Constellation event that we went to was the theater performance “It’s been a year” by the Eos theater group from Athens.

It was performed by seven actors at twilight on the top of a hill crowned by the famous Panagyia church of Amorgos. We see the playwright, Natalia Stulianou , below in the foreground, with her back to us.

 

 

The acting was so good that I could sense what was happening even without understanding what they were saying. The story is told through the eyes of a young man, exploring his family home and thinking about his ancestors. You see him in the background in the blue shirt

The Eos dance group is special. It emphasizes engagement with the audience. As they describe themselves “ EOS was founded in 2012 with the vision for an accessible expression and research in all forms of art, culture and social affairs.  . .  EOS runs several theatre training programs for young people, including programs for the training of young immigrant children . . .”

The full names of the cast in the play that we saw and the era that they represented is here:

One: Thalis Politis (First war 1914 – 1918)

Two: Semina Panigyropoulou (Second war 1939 – 1945)

Three: Dimitra Drakopoulou (Smyrna 1922)

Four: Iakovos Midrinos (the Civil War 1946 –1949)

Five: Angeliki Srati (the Dictatorship 1967 – 1974) –Natalia Stulanou, the playwright, was playing that part in Amorgos

Six: Dimitris Kakavoulas (the Economic Crisis starting in 1980 as a Greek broker in New York, who commits suicide)

Seven: Christos Dyonisopoulos (who lives today, brother of Six, and tries to find out about the lives of his ancestors, which are all the above)

 

I was so fortunate to be visiting my sister in law, who lives on the island of Amorgos, during this amazing festival.

 

Montmartre!

Montmartre! After teaching art history for over 30 years and reciting the tale of Picasso creating Cubism with Braque at the Bateau Lavoir, I had no idea really of exactly where it was or the great significance of Montmartre historically as a place of revolutionary ideas, as an independent enclave in Paris, and as a site of intersection for the avant- garde starting as early as the impressionists and lasting until World War I. All his life Picasso looked back on his years in Montmartre as the best of his life. His connection to the musicians, poets, singers, dancers, as well as its radical political history, profoundly shaped him. It was easier to break rules in Montmartre.

 

Its earliest story is the reason for its name, Mount of Martyrs, St Denis was martyred there, and of course the story is that after decapitation he picked up his head and walked away preaching all the way. He is the patron saint of Paris. ( That’s him on Notre Dame with his head).

 

And even before the artists arrived in the late 19^th century, Montmartre has a thrilling history as one of the centers of the Paris Commune of 1871. Again I always knew about Courbet advocating and helping to pull down the column in the Place Vendome of Napoleon I, but he was also part of the Commune in Montmartre along with many other vivid personalities such as the Red Virgin, Louise Michel , an ardent revolutionary. Women played a major part in the commune as active warriors. After the fall of the commune Michel was exiled, but after the amnesty for the radicals in 1889 she came back to France and continued to be a radical and activist.

The commune was brief, from 18 March to 28 May 1871 but of monumental importance in the history of radicalism: During those few weeks, the communards abolished the death penalty, and military conscription, for starters, then rights of workers, free secular education, equal pay for men and women, separation of church and state, requisition of empty houses for homeless, citizen status for foreign inhabitants. All great ideas that we still need today! The communards inspired Marx and Engels as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it was an inspiration for the Russian Revolution.

Right after the commune, the Catholics began the huge Sacre Coeur, an obvious way of physically squashing the rebellious history of Montmartre with this gigantic building. It was completed in 1914, exactly the year that Picasso and the avant-garde left Montmartre. It was no longer the radical village they had come to, it was now an outpost of the city and its oppresions. Yet even today

Montmartre still feels like an isolated enclave with a different character than the rest of Paris. When we descended the butte to go the Grand Palais, I was overwhelmed with the heavy Second Empire architecture.

Montmartre has miraculously retained its atmosphere (although now the homes are those of the wealthy), but the streets look like those of Utrillo’s paintings.

 

The steep streets prevent most cars from using them, the sand colored buildings, the paving stones, and of course “Le Moulin de La Galette,” the only surviving windmill from the 16^th to the late 19^th when there were 30 windmills that ground the wheat of the farms there.

“Le Moulin de la Galette”, so familiar to us from Renoir’s painting is a later name for a now decorative windmill, named for a homemade brown bread.

The restaurant has just reopened this spring, but of course it is an ultra chic place now, not the public garden seen in Renoir’s wonderful painting. The artists used to gather here for outdoor dancing every Sunday, but that large space is now gone.

 

There were poets, musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, dancers, singers, all friends, all going to cabarets together. We went to  Au Lapin Agile, still there, still the same atmosphere of intimacy with the singers, of all ages ever since 1860!. Wonderful dark interior and we were given a cherry liqueur as we listened to poetry, humour and revolutionary workers songs. The singers encouraged us to sing along as they walked among our tables.

The Lapin Agile still encourages young singers as well as supporting older singers. On the walls were an eclectic mix of different paintings, sculptures ( Buddha, Christ ). One of the singers spoke of Apollinaire and Picasso, among others, who enjoyed the music and poetry there. I could almost feel them still sitting there. One of Picasso’s paintings of patrons in the Lapin Agile used to hang there.

 

In the Place du Tertre, handsome painters offer to paint our portrait. Some of them were quite good!

The Musee de Montmartre including the garden where Renoir painted the Swing, displayed historical images of Montmartre, of the commune and the martrydom of St Denis, and a recent exhibition  “Artistes a Montmartre from Steinlen to Satie 1870 – 1910” which emphasized the role of artists like the radical protestor of injustice, Steinlen, Toulouse Lautrec, and Degas who encouraged Suzanne Valadon to become an artist.

Perhaps most significant was Aristide Bruant, singer of the famous cabaret Chat Noir ( famous logo of cat with a Byzantine halo) who created the “chanson realiste” style that we heard “Au Lapin Agile.” The singers at Au Lapin Agile all wore black with red accents matching the Toulouse Lautrec painting of Bruant.

(and note the painter in the square also wore that color scheme)

 

The highlight of the exhibition was the love affair of Eric Satie and Suzanne Valadon in 1892. Satie’s music was playing as we looked at some of his love letters to her, as well as her painting of him as a  young man, before his suave identity as the ultimate Bohemian had formed. Satie wished to capture in music the instant seen in the impressionist painting, as well as connect to the real world.

 

Kupka, Bonnard, Bernard, Dufy and others who are less famous, but equally provocative all lived in Montmartre. Van Gogh was not in the exhibition, but he too lived in Montmartre. We saw a studio that belonged to Valadon and later artists, as well as Utrillo’s bedroom (Utrillo is Valadon’s son).

At the beginning of the 20^th century,  Picasso arrived in Montmartre and he began to publish images ala Toulouse Lautrec in a small newspaper there.

The famous Bateau Lavoir was home to many painters, musicians, and poets, and the scene or Picasso’s famous banquet for Douanier Le Rousseau, the artist who inspired the other artists with his “primitive” style.

We were fortunate that while we were in Paris there was a major exhibition of the Douanier Rousseau as well as Apollinaire. Rousseau’s well known paintings still thrill me with their direct color, design and subjects.

Apollinaire is the experimental poet, and art critic, who wrote some of the first analysis of Braque and identified the Cubists as a group. When he died of influenza in 1918, an era ended for the avant-garde in Paris.

 

 

 

Mona Hatoum at the Tate Modern

 

 

While this early poster/billboard by Mona Hatoum might seem amusing at first, it is actually deadly serious and not a pun.

Mona Hatoum confronts us directly with the nightmare of violence in her early performance work. Here is a description of Variations on Discord and Divisions (1984)  “. . . the artist, wearing an opaque mask and all dressed in black, crawls between the rows of spectators to reach the performance space. She then performs a number of actions that culminate with her removing raw kidneys from under her clothes, cutting them up, putting them on plates, and serving them one by one to the audience.” (“A Prologue to the Past and Present State of Things
Variation on Discord and Divisions: Mona Hatoum, Ibraaz,
009_00 / 2 July 2015)

Below is a still from that performance of the early 1980s. It could have been made yesterday. It captures the horror of unexplainable violence. We in the West like to say that only Islamist (ie politically motivated and brainwashed) terrorists commit the kind of barbaric acts suggested by this image, but of course it is all of us. (The recently approved US budget for combat operations alone was 40 billion). Anonymouos drone attackes and ongoing murders of black people by police in the US are only two examples.

Learning of the visceral intensity of Hatoum’s early work transformed my understanding of her art. It came through even in the documents of the 1980s performance pieces in the current exhibition at the Tate Modern. In them you see the artists’ highly compressed emotions of anger and frustration with the political situation in Palestine and the Middle East. As a Palestinian refugee in Beirut

(albeit a privileged one with a British passport), she felt deeply displaced when she was unable to return home from London on what was to have been a short trip because of the Civil War in Lebanon.

Three works represented by photographs and notes are Live Work for the Black Room  1981,  Under Siege,  1982 and  The Negotiating Table  1983.  In the first ( above) described by the artist as about “death, disaster, doom and gloom,” she falls to the floor repeatedly in a completely black room, drawing a chalk outline of her body, then places a candle next to it. The photograph has an odd abstract quality, although details show the outlined bodies clearly, as in a crime scene.

In Under Siege she stands inside a transparent cube covered in clay, then falls down repeatedly for seven hours.

Repetitive falling changes to stasis in The Negotiating Table: the artist encased and immobilized by bloody entrails, her head covered in gauze, lies motionless on a table assuming the aura of a sacrificial animal. Empty chairs surround her: failed talks lead to dead people. All of these works have soundtracks of war news and leaders talking about peace.

In these same years, Hatoum also explored video art, but in an entirely different way from feminist video in the US. She immediately perceived the camera as a physically invasive force. During Don’t Smile You ‘re on Camera, 1980 she moves a camcorder across the bodies of individuals in a small audience, alternating those images with projections of naked bodies.

She continues this exploration of the body in literal depictions such as Socle du Monde 1992-3, a large cube with “intestines” covering its surface, evoked through iron shavings that curl convincingly as the tubes of our innards.

Measures of Distance, 1988,  records her mother in the shower (shown behind a “curtain” of Arabic script that resembles barb wire). The artist reads letters from her mother as the text of the piece that address both her mother’s own deep sadness in exile, and her relationship with her daughter. One of  Hatoum’s best known works, Corps Etranger 1994 takes the idea of photographic penetration much further by filming medical imaging footage penetrating her own body. We stand on top of the video as another invasive force as we watch it probe her inner body.

But in spite of her intense performances and intimate explorations,

only once in her entire career, in Measures of Distance, does Hatoum include personal details.  Otherwise we only have the fixed, brief biography of her early years in Beirut and move to London. We know nothing else of her life.

Hatoum’s concern is to make the feelings of her art penetrate us. She does not want us to have an opportunity to tell a story, to narrate a context. She manages to convey the large atrocity of war, destruction, and exile, without any specifics at all. In that way, she rises above who she is, and who we are, and speaks of the human condition as we reap the emotional harvest of violence.

Undercurrent exemplifies her understated metaphors open to several interpretations: at the same time that it terminates its spiraling paths of red electric cord with light bulbs that suggest an ending, and a woven center that may suggest collective resistance, it can also be alluding to bleeding to death, electrocution and torture. Even as the poetry of the piece captures us, we are enmeshed in its multiple meanings.

That subtle ambiguity is obvious in Hatoum’s ongoing use of her own hair as a major material for her art, in entire installations of balls of her hair, or sewing with hair and most remarkably, weaving the particular pattern of the Keffieh with hair (which some writers explore from a feminist perspective). Those cast off dead cells, that fragile filament, becomes a layered statement about death, life, and their eerie balance. The delicacy of the works made of hair make them recede almost into invisibility, but that invisibility is the point.

In contrast to invisibility, another experience in Hatoum’s work is a sense of threat, entrapment, and anxiety.  Through a barbed wire fence we view Home 1999, a table covered with ordinary kitchen appliances like colanders and cheese graters that serendipitously lights up and creates loud noises. The unpredictable threat to what should be the security of home is a theme the artist explored as early as 1979, and it has many iterations such as Homebound, 2000,  shown at “Documenta” in 2002 which included a bed, crib, and chairs.

Sometimes we have just a huge grater as a room divider or a bed. These works have been compared to Martha Rosler’s famous Semiotics of the Kitchen of 1975. Rosler also transforms ordinary kitchen implements into threatening objects. But for Rosler, she holds the knife, she wields the threat, and for Hatoum the threat comes randomly from outside, beyond her control. Hatoum references the impact of war on individuals, while Rosler redefines and defies social expectations for women, a very different point of reference.

Deeply affecting in its simplicity, Light Sentence 1992, features a room with stacks of small cages arranged in two rows, some with their doors open, lighted by a single bulb that rises and falls between the rows. The magic of the piece and its contradiction is the shadows of the cages cast on the walls, constantly moving, mesmerizing abstract patterns. The shadows escape the entrapment of the cages.  Poetry competes with claustrophobia.

Hot Spot, 2006, a grid/globe with red neon marking the continents joins her ongoing manipulations of maps, globes, and borders as in Map made from glass marbles on the floor, escaping their geography,

or the map of the world created by removal of fibers in a woven carpet, Bukhara (red and white).

As the marbles slip around the floor and the carpet conveys the absence or the globe’s glow spreads through a room,  the concept of mapping and borders as an arbitrary source of conflict and war is obvious. And of course it all comes back to Israel /Palestine, the root of Hatoum’s own exile and that dreadful unsolvable conflict based on the colonial decisions of over one hundred years ago.

The early performances provide the foundation for all that follows in Hatoum’s work.

While the artist’s body now appears only in its dead cells (hair, nails, blood), Hatoum expresses the same violence and compressed terror through the ordinary objects of everyday life and in our own lives. Hanging Garden as installed at the Tate, brings it home: bunkers that have stayed so long that they have grown grass. By looking at the metaphors latent in the objects she chooses from our daily life, we feel inside us the corruption of humanity in our intensely violent world.

Break Free From Fossil Fuels Pacific Northwest Anacortes

 

 

The amazing weekend of protests in Anacortes featured many different actions, trainings, planning, spreadsheets, signs, artists, legal advisors, health professionals, food experts, miracles.

 

Only a few weeks of preparation produced incredible results. I want to salute everyone who took part in whatever aspect, all of us had a part to play large and small, active and supportive. It was a thrilling adventure and I am fully motivated to support the way forward in every aspect of my life.

 

At Deception Pass State Park, the center of planning and information, where I spent a lot of time, we had the beauty of the park to inspire us to make sure it has a future. I kept thinking about our ongoing drought and overheated planet, and wondering if the green Northwest can have a future.

In the kitchen there was breakfast for the many many campers, a massive vat of oatmeal, my very own homemade yogurt , tea, coffee

we made our lunches and were given dinners, a monumental planning job before hand. Hats off to all those who pulled it off!!

 

There was legal training for those who wanted to participate in civil disobedience. It was so helpful, what to say, how to act, we even role played, that I was tempted to think about it for the future, although going to jail is not my temperament. All was carefully planned and coordinated. I spent time helping with the info both that you see above.

Some people biked all the way from Seattle!

 

 

 

A lot of people were making art there

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The absolute highlight for me was the Saturday Indigenous Day of Action,

“Its in Our Hands” was the theme.

 

We marched on the road next to the dreadful refineries, we chanted, sang, danced, with the indigenous peoples from many tribes.I put a movie on my facebook, I am not sure how to add it here.

 

The rally after the march honored many people, but above all Mother Earth. I found it incredibly moving to hear elder Diane Vendiola of the Swinomish speak of growing up on the polluted point where we stood, eating fish and clams now no longer available, in water that is completely toxic.

 

The plants were built on unceded land taken away from the Swinomish by Ulysses Grant after the Civil War.

 

We had to breath the fumes from the Tesoro emissions, as we listened. We had to smell their acrid smell, it made the ceremonies all the more urgent and beautiful.

 

 

At 2 PM we had a water blessing ceremony led by Inez Bell of the Tulalip, in conjunction with ceremonies around the world. In addition to ceremonies, there were of course global Break Free actions to protest fuel plants and other massive sources of pollution, coordinated by 350.org and inspired by Bill McKibben.

 

Not long after we blessed the water, a canoe of Lummi youth arrived and the canoe came right into the center of our events, as a symbol of working together as a community. The Lummi sang an eagle song, and two young men danced an eagle dance as eagles circled overhead. I was too mesmerized to take a picture of the eagle dance.

 

Members of the Swinomish, our hosts, as well as Chief Ruben George, a leader from First People of Canada, youth and their leader Patsy Bane from the Makah, Tyson Johnson leader of the Quinault, and leader Jules James Lummi spoke of saving the earth, of honoring our ancestors, of the war we are fighting to survive, of the importance of giving up oil, fossil fuels entirely. James spoke of the horrendous fire in the Boreal Forest in the Alberta tar sands.

 

The Lummi were honored with a paddle by the Swinomish because they have just defeated a coal terminal. Jules James eloquently spoke of coalition building, working together. He has traveled to other tribes the Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, for example, who are also saying no to toxic polluters.

 

Paul Che Oke’ Ten Wagner, the brilliant musician, spoke and posted his remarks on facebook. His shirt asks us to honor the Duwamish.

“It was an honor to speak at In Our Hands rally to help end the era of fossil fuel catastrophe, my point was that we must step back into the circle of life and learn to honor the gifts our Mother Earth has to offer us, the linear action of the colonial world has a finite end and if our Mother Earth reaches the tipping point, the point of no return for stable climate the human race will reach that end and there will be a great reciprocity or giving back to our Mother Earth but not of our liking…. It will be the bones of our grandchildren and their children being given back to our Mother Earth due to our lack of respect for the gifts our Mother” Paul Che Oke’ Ten Wagner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because of the shifts I signed up for, I missed all the luminary events on water and on land. I have a few images from the water, and I am hoping the salmon march will post some photographs.

All of the news coverage addressed the arrests from the railroad sit in that blocked trains for three days. Probably because they were so well trained in civil disobedience, the people arrested were actually let go almost immediately.

 

Interesting that the arrests are given so much more space than the peaceful coming together and commitment of more than a thousand people.

 

I love this earth, I want it to survive for my grandchildren. Thank you Kayactivists, Indigenous, climate activists, so many people of all ages and stages of life who came together last weekend!

 

The youth of Plant for the Planet are my grand finale. 

 

“Mood Indigo: Textiles from Around the World”

 

 

 

“Dreamy blues/Mood indigo.”

—Duke Ellington, 1931

 

Breathe deeply as you enter the first gallery of “Mood Indigo, Textiles from Around the World,” then look carefully at the dried plants hanging on the walls. Now, enter a high enclosure of fabric dyed in many shades of blue and experience a constantly changing sound scape that evokes the sounds of color, and the color of sound.  The collaborative contemporary installation Mobile Section, 2015, by textile artist Rowland Ricketts and sound artist Norbert Herber provides a perfect introduction to this highly original exhibition. It gives us the material qualities of the immaterial, color, created only by the refraction of light.

The first exhibition of textiles at the Seattle Art Museum since 1980, “Mood Indigo” features almost 100 different textiles and garments, many of them never before exhibited. While Pamela McClusky, Seattle Art Museum’s wonderful curator of Art of Africa and Oceania took the lead in the theme of the exhibition, she collaborated with the curators of Native American Art, Chinese Art, and Japanese Art, as well as, importantly, Nicholas Dorman, Conservator, and Paul Martinez, Installer, who solved the incredible challenges of installing flat textiles in a dynamic way.

Together they excavated the collections with an eye for indigo blue, a radical project.

 

Indigo does not actually exist in the world. It must be produced from a molecule in one of about 20 plants (of which there are 600 varieties). Rowland Ricketts explained the process in detail.  When the plants reach waist high, they are harvested, dried, stomped on, mixed with water, left 100 days in compost, turned, sliced, watered, and bagged. The resulting paste ferments in a vat with wood ash, lime, and wheat bran (everyone around the world has a different formula, often a family secret). During the oxidation/reduction process as it is stirred daily, the color appears, like magic. Vats themselves apparently have attributes and respond to the person stirring it. The color comes alive in different ways according your own mood!

 

 

 

Focusing on indigo textiles erases borders of geography and categories. Textiles here emerge from the margins established by European academic traditions that privileged painting and sculpture, and from the depths of storage at the Seattle Art Museum.

 

The indigo textiles in this exhibition encompass all classes of society and all parts of our life. They cover us when we sleep and work, they ornament us for special events, they define rituals and ceremonies, they wrap us when we die. Indigo blue clothing signifies status and royalty, but it also covers the backs of peasants, prisoners (in the 1940s), and “blue collar” workers. The textiles contain secrets and symbols. The indigo blue suggests many emotions, sad, reflexive, humble or joyful.

The exhibition ranges from ancient African fragments to a towering Basinjom (spirit) mask and gown, from an imperial Chinese robe to a Japanese fireman’s outfit. It includes a Guatemalan cape, a Peruvian feather quilt, a contemporary American textile created from denim jeans,

 

a Tlingit basket, a Javanese head shawl, a Laotian shawl and a Korean Bojagis.

Japanese kimonos fill an entire gallery like fluttering butterflies.

 

Colonial powers traded indigo in massive amounts, particularly from Bengal.  Three huge Belgian tapestries made during the height of this trade anchor one gallery, each representing a different continent, Asia, America, and Africa. The allegorical royal figures seated at the center of the tapestries are dressed in blue fabrics, and they are surrounded by a wealth of symbols. Meticulously restored, the tapestries have never before been displayed by the Museum (they were a 1962 gift from the Hearst Foundation). Fascinating as they are to view, I felt that they recapitulated the oppressions of colonialism as they towered over clusters of tapestries from each continent. The egalitarianism of the exhibition was disrupted by their scale and their academic imagery, the three royal figures were all women draped in fabric that exposed their breasts.

The Belgian tapestries magnify the global scope of the exhibition, but the real joy of “Mood Indigo” is the range of cultures that it encompasses, and the many different directions that focusing on Indigo blue can take us.   Curator Pamela McClusky even pointed out that in May we will have a blue moon (when there are two moons in one month).

 

“The deeper blue becomes the more urgently it summons man toward the infinite, the more it arouses in him a longing for purity, and, ultimately, for the supersensual.”

—Wassily Kandinsky

 

at the Seattle Asian Art Museum

April 9 – October 9, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

“Journey to Dunhuang: Buddhist Art of the Silk Road Caves,” March 5 – June 12, 2016

While you are at the Asian Art Museum, visit the exhibition of photography and painting based on the Buddhist art in the thousands of caves of Dunhuang, a World Heritage site in Western China. Now in a desolate desert landscape, it formerly lay at the crossroads of several civilizations on the “Silk Road”.   The exhibition intersperses historical photographs from the 1940s by James and Lucy Lo, and replicas that they commissioned in the 1950s of some of the ancient paintings. It provides an insight into an important phase of Buddhist art that lasted from the fourth century to the fourteenth century. Some of these painters may have travelled from Ajanta in India, where you see similar caves with early carvings of giant Buddhas and stories of the life of Buddha painted on walls and ceilings.

 

May Day Art and Writing Booth 2016

Yesterday Raul Sanchez and I had a booth at the rally before the Immigration March to support workers and immigrants rights.

We invited people to tell a short anecdote or draw a picture about how immigration laws had affected them.

We had quite a few drawings and a few writings which I am posting here.  The first drawing here by a young girl shows herself and her father separated by the wall from their mother in Mexico.

Translation: above left My students are afraid that it is possible they will be separated from the parents.

 

Above right ” I see families being torn apart. I see parents sacrificng their whole lives and community to support thier families to nly live in fear. I see children wtih no options. I see a world that allows this to happen! Be part of the Change  Yes We Can Do It. !

“Ai Wei Wei Fault Line” at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art

 

What a surprise to discover a beautiful new venue for contemporary art in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.  The San Juan Islands Museum of Art has existed in temporary venues for several years, but it moved into its current re purposed building a year ago, and hired a dynamic young director, Ian Boyden, 8 months ago.

 

Not only is this a wonderfully intimate museum space, but Boyden just created a provocative  three part installation that included Ai Wei Wei, and Goya both addressing the devastating cruelty of bureaucracy, governments, and soldiers.  The third part of the installation by Dana Lynn Louis suggests moving the dark feelings from the other two exhibitions out into air and space.

 

Ai Wei Wei’s installation “Fault Line” is what brought me to Friday Harbor.

 

Following his dazzling and moving installation on Alcatraz Island last year calling attention to the identity of dozens of political prisoners detained all over the world, Ai Wei Wei has continued to have exhibitions which he has organized from China while he was under house arrest and unable to travel outside the country from 2011 to July 2015.

 

His strategies for making the invisible visible continues in this exhibition on a theme that he has addressed frequently: the death of over 5000 children in the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008.

 

 

In this presentation, the list of names fills two walls of the museum, here you see the director in front of the list and, below, a detail of the last part of the list which ends with no 5196, Zhu Guiying a girl born in 1990. Each year on the child’s birthdays Ai Wei Wei posts on his twitter feed to honor that child.

Behind a partition, the video “Little Girl’s Cheek” 2008 interviewed the parents of the children who died in the collapsed schools. Ai Wei Wei hired researchers to gather the information.The parents, relatives and friends tried digging out the rubble covering the still living children with their bare hands when no help arrived. It is unimaginably painful to hear them describe the cries of the children.

 

The soldiers stood by doing nothing. When the parents protested they were barred from the site. When they went to officials they did nothing, explained nothing. The government harrassed the investigators that Ai WeiWei had hired. The parents were mostly peasants who had sacrificed everything for their children’s education and now had only a tragedy.

 

The officials blamed the earthquake for the collapse of the dozens of schools, but the shabby construction was clearly to blame.

 

In other installations by Ai Wei Wei on the subject of the children lost in the earthquake we have seen hundreds of backpacks, or piles of the rebar that collapsed. Ai Wei Wei bought tons of it and straightened it.

 

Here, we have shapes evoking coffins.

There  are 8 coffin like forms made of rosewood, that seem like enlarged jewelry cases with black foam holding pieces of rebar carved in marble that seem to rise up from their containers like ghosts coming back to haunt us. “Rebar and Case” (2014) has not been shown in a museum before.

The juxtaposition of these three ways of representing the disaster overwhelmed me with the tragedy in a way that I had not been affected by previous installations. Part of the reason was the intimacy of the space in this small museum, where we walked between the coffin forms and looked down on the ghost rebars, thinking of the children buried still under rubble, most of them never properly recovered and given a funeral. Here was a graveyard of lost children, with unmarked graves.

 

In partnership with this installation was the gallery of Goya prints with the title print on a poster “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

What could be a more appropriate partner to “Fault Line” than Goya’s Caprichos, that sarcastic representation of the inhumanity of the bourgeoisie aristocracy and the clergy toward the poor.

 

No 79 Nada Nos ha visto (No One has Seen us)   Pobrecitas ( Poor Little Girls)

 

“Yo es Hora” Capricios no. 80 ( It is Time).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\

 

Relieving us from this immersion in the wicked ways of the power elite, we enter into the installation of Dana Lynn Louis “As Above, So Below,” It is a site specific installation for the  atrium of the museum, a space that resembles a greenhouse with its glassed in walls. Louis’s installation glass and mixed media sculptures change constantly according to light and weather conditions, time of day, or our own moods. It follow on her “clearing project,” which asked people all over thew world to “clear” themselves either spiritually or physically, but writing down these wishes and intentions on a piece of paper that was then burned.

 

 

Here we sense a different type of clearing, a more immediate clearing of the darkness of the other two parts of the installation with the lightness, both literally and metaphorically, of the suspended glass sculpture.

 

 

 

Ian Boyden is a great addition to our Northwest contemporary art scene. He is engaged and thoughtful, dynamic and motivated. Keep your eye on this museum for future exciting installations. UPcomin April 23 is Fragile Waters: Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly,” until September 5. It will open on Earth Day.

Clearly this museum is going to be on our itinerary! You can combine your art visit with renting a bike and Island Bicycles.

Ritual Cleansing on Site of Murders of homeless people sponsored by SHARE/WHEEL

 

 

 

 

 

“I have made mistakes but I am so lucky with all the help, love and support I have been given since I moved here.” Young resident of the homeless encampment under I 5 and continuing up the side of Beacon Hill East of I 5 known with the derogatory term “The Jungle”

 

Climbing up the steep, muddy hill to arrive under the freeway at “The Jungle” where the murders had taken place of James Quoc Tran and Jeannie L. Zapata, as well as injuring of nine others, I was surprised to hear the regular sound of drumming. Perhaps they had already started the ceremony. At the top, I found no jungle, only a bare expanse of dirt under the 1-5 freeway. And the sound of drumming turned out to be the sound of cars on I-5 passing over an expansion joint directly overhead. The camp was small, many people had left since the murders, only six people remained.

 

One of them, a twelve year veteran named Michelle explained to me how she had started with a ministry to the homeless with her husband, but when he died twelve years ago, she became homeless herself.

Another quite young woman ( far left in photo above) claimed that she had made mistakes and her problems were her own fault, but that she felt incredibly lucky that people were giving her so much help and caring.

 

Of course, her problems are not simply her fault,  they are the fault of a society that provides so little support and treatment options for drug addicted people. Apparently Tran was urgently seeking an out of state treatment program when he was killed. Three teenagers accused of the crime also lived in a homeless encampment, children of a drug dealing father and a mother who had lost custody.  This is the bottom of our society, the result of our hopeless waste of money on war, and military, and free access to guns, in the hands of people struggling with addictions.

 

In spite of efforts to create a living room area with some cast off furniture and a community fire pit, the desolation of the encampment under the freeway overwhelmed me with sadness. The constant sound of cars overhead never stopped. See the expansion joint in this photograph.

The cleansing ceremony started at 12:30. Two native Americans offered blessings and real drumming in each direction, we read some passages about love and caring from Leviticus, and we spoke a two part chant of love and caring. Each of us was sprinkled with water from a cedar bough.

Two medical officials from King County attended. King County keeps denying funding to SHARE/WHEEL saying their outcomes are not good enough. In other words in our data driven world, you have to have statistically quantifiable results. SHARE/WHEEL encourages dignity, self respect and personal responsibility, not quantifiable results.

 

SHARE/WHEEL is a caring, creative organization that provides services to homeless people in well organized tent encampments that are run by the occupants, drug free and alcohol free. I joined the grant writing committee there for a while and was impressed with the intelligence and organization of the other committee members, all of them living in the tent camps or in the bunkhouse, another type of shelter also sponsored by SHARE/WHEEL. “The Jungle” is not one of their encampments but they offer support to all homeless people, honoring each time someone dies outside with a one hour silent vigil outside city hall.

 

Every winter solstice they honor all the homeless people who have died outside. The numbers keep escalating.

 

 

They also create rituals like the one I attended today, and

sponsored the Tree of Live in Victor Steinbruck Park, near Pike Place market. That sculpture has negative shapes referring to the fallen leaves of the homeless. All over Seattle you can see bronze leaves embedded in the sidewalk honoring homeless people who have died outside.

 

SHARE/WHEEL,  an organization that for twenty five years has been providing a creative, caring, support to homeless people on their difficult path through life.  We cannot allow them to go under with debt because of lack of financial support from our government or ourselves.

 

A Plea from their Website:

“We must demand that King County follow their own emergency plan, and fund SHARE.   King County says they follow the “All Home” Plan (to end Homelessness) but they don’t.  That Plan is clear – existing shelters like SHARE’s should be preserved, not bankrupted.   Please immediately reach out to King County Executive Dow Constantine (kcexec@kingcounty.gov, 206-263-9600) and King County Community/Human Services Division Director Adrienne Quinn (Adrienne.quinn@kingcounty.gov, 206-263-1491) and ask them to fund SHARE!   Please also call your County Councilperson today and insist on action.

 

At the same time please consider making an emergency donation to help keep us going while together we persuade the City, County, and Federal Government that SHARE is needed, and cannot be allowed to fail. The shelter system here is already full and simply would not be able to handle over 450 extra folks a night.”