Delhi Feminist Artist Gogi addresses the 2012 Gang Rape of Nirbhaya

ALTAR FOR NIRBHAYA by Gogi Saroj Pal

“At the heart of Gogi Saroj Pal’s art is the understanding of female complexity” ( Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker in Gogi Saroj Pal, The feminine unbound, Delhi Art Gallery, 2011)

Gogi Saroj Pal, a radical feminist artist based in Delhi, India has spoken out about the contradictions for women in India for many years. Her most recent series  “Altar for Nirbhaya”  is dedicated to the 23 year old victim of gang rape in 2012. Nirbhaya, meaning “courageous one” is a pseudonym for the name of the victim. She was raped on a bus in Delhi enabled by a bus driver who drove around the city for over an hour while five men raped her after attacking her boyfriend.

It is a horrifying story. Two weeks later she died. What makes the story all the more upsetting is that she had hoped to provide free medical care to the poor after she finished medical school. Her family is poor, they had worked hard to enable her to get an education.

Her story ignited rage all over the world. But now three years later, we have all stopped thinking about her. Gogi’s paintings remind us vividly of the violence of that attack and the death of the victim. The sickle at the center piece of several works refers to an attribute of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction.

The contradictions for women in India loom larger than any other country in the world. As Gogi has said

“Our mythology is crooked and so is our mentality,” says Pal. “As we celebrate Navaratri [Hindu Festival of Lights in honor of Durga the universal mother], we also kill a girl child, and as we worship goddesses for money, we continue to rape our women.”

Indeed, in India the worship of Durga is a hugely popular festival, Durga is regarded as the universal mother. Goddesses in general prominently figure in Hindu mythology and daily ritual practice: there is Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort, the Goddess of Wealth; Saraswati, Brahma’s consort, is Goddess of Art and Knowledge; Durga ( “the invincible”) is a manifestation of Parvati, consort of Shiva, Goddess of  love, fertility and devotion. Parvati’s older sister is the powerful goddess Ganges and mother of the much loved Ganesh. And on and on, there are 167 goddesses listed online most of them variations of the same principles.

Gogi’s work has long been about the female spirit. She transforms ancient figures into contemporary forms. Rather than the obvious goddesses (although she has depicted Kali Goddess of Time, Change and Destruction), her work includes obscure mythical creatures based on early Sanskrit texts including the Kinnari ( (part bird, part female), nayika ( heroine) Kamdhenu, (wish fulfilling cow), burraq  (dancing horse/human), hatha yogini ( firm, unyielding female yoga practioner). She has transformed these creatures and characters in her own way to express female power, resilience, and the contradictions of contemporary Indian society.

The only other specific historic person she has represented is Nati Binodini, a 19th century stage actress who defied conventional society, to pursue her career.

Born in Neoli, Uttar Pradesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where her father was a freedom fighter, Gogi also comes from a family who defied conventions. Her grandmother was the first woman to take a professional job in Lahore in the beginning of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer in removing her outer heavy veil, leading to accusations that she was “naked”.

Gogi defiantly depicts all of her women as sensuous nudes who are also powerful and independent. Their big eyes examine us, challenging us to interfere with them. Sometimes they take on impossible yoga positions,  or fly through the sky. Their sensuality is not only the result of their luxuriant shapes, but also the stunning, highly saturated colors the artist adopts. Still, as one art historian points out, Gogi was going against the flow of feminism as she pursued her commentary on women through naked bodies. It is partly the result of her grandmother’s act of defiance in removing the veil. Partly, the fact of the contradiction that women’s power  according to societal norms, must be hidden from men behind coverings, and therefore it becomes  a means of oppression.

The new work for a young woman who wanted to fly through the sky, but was cut down from her dreams by a ruthless, ignorant act of violence includes a sickle, in several versions. A sickle is a traditional means of cutting, a reference here to the violence of destruction, as well as an attribute of power in the hands of Kali.  In one painting, a silhouetted dark ghost of a powerful female strides away from us: grasps the sickle herself. This young woman sought to create change in society like Kali, the Destroyer of Time and Death. The painting suggests a space beyond our world. Unique in Gogi’s work we do not see her face, or her body, only a shadow.

Nirbhaya’s death as a sacrifice to social forces beyond her control, also looks back to the tradition of sati, the sacrifice of a woman on the funeral pyre of her husband, or even father, something Gogi has also represented.

But Gogi is honoring Nirbhaya, her hopes and dreams, even as she gives us the image of blood spattering over an empty rectangle, an empty life.

The ongoing violence against women in all parts of the world becomes part of the content of this group of paintings, as Gogi deeply understands both the history of powerful women and their vulnerable position in a changing world.

American Art at the Newly Expanded Tacoma Art Museum

Tacoma Art Museum with detail of Marie Watt, Blanket Stories: Transportation Object, Generous Ones, Trek 2014, Cast bronze.

THE AMERICAN WEST: THE HAUB FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE TACOMA ART MUSEUM

Elk Buffalo, The Monarch of the Plains created in 1900 by Henry Merwin Shrady sets the tone for the exhibition in the new wing of the Tacoma Art Museum, designed by Olson Kundig Architects. Shrady drew his buffalo in a zoo. This monarch of the plains, like so many of the Native leaders depicted in these paintings at this time, was captured and confined.

The mighty buffalo is a frequent subject in the Tacoma Art Museum’s new collection of 295 works of American art by 140 artists acquired by a generous donation from the Haub Family. In a later gallery, we are confronted by the fauve-inspired Buffalo at Sunset by Apache-affiliated artist John Nieto painted in 1996. In between is Frederic Remington’s Conjuring Back the Buffalo of 1889, filled with skulls, which marks the condition of the buffalo at the end of the 19th century: almost extinct as a result of widespread and intentional slaughter.

The effort to exterminate the buffalo failed. They are now not exactly thriving, but numerous. Native peoples also survived attempts to exterminate and assimilate them and to terminate their tribes. Today many aspects of their cultures are being resurrected and reshaped in dialog with the contemporary world. More than that though, as profound speakers and savvy activists, they play a crucial part in contemporary efforts to stop the devastating practices causing climate change.

At the far end of the sculpture gallery (its plentiful natural light carefully controlled by the architects), a conversation begins. Beside a 1978 bronze sculpture of Chief Washakie by Harry Jackson, the words of the Chief spoken exactly one hundred years earlier eloquently state the physical restraints of those years:

“The white man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure, and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot…every foot of what you proudly call America, not very long ago belonged to the red man.” —Chief Washakie, 1878

By including this stirring description by Chief Washakie of the nightmares of forced resettlement, Tacoma Art Museum Haub Fellow, Asia Tail, begins the task of reframing the romanticized concepts of the art of the West on display in the Haub Collection. Affiliated with the Cherokee tribe, Tail explained, “The quotations are just the beginning of a project to integrate Native voice and presence in this exhibition.” Four compact interior galleries display a selection of 120 paintings from the Haug collection. The understated design reflects Olson Kundig Architects’ surprising philosophy that art, not the architecture, should dominate at an art museum. The new wing is meant to evoke both a railroad boxcar and a longhouse, two references to the West embedded in Tacoma.

Comments by both Haub Curator of Western American Art Laura F. Fry and native speakers appear beside many of the paintings and sculpture throughout the exhibition.

Junius Brutus Stearns’s The Meeting of Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, 1851

For Junius Brutus Stearns’s The Meeting of Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, 1851, Laura Fry focuses on the artist’s love of ancient history: “In creating this fanciful image some 40 years after the Shawnee leader’s confrontation with General William Henry Harrison in 1810, Stearns presented the scene of an American conflict between two epic leaders in the same light as the legendary events of ancient Rome.”

But we also hear from Tecumseh himself “The only way to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right to the land. … The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs.”

Charles Bird KingWanata (The Charger) Grand Chief of the Cherokee

Wanata (The Charger) Grand Chief of the Cherokee by Charles Bird King purposefully, but with somewhat pathetic results, tries to give Wanata the pose of European “grand manner” portraits. The artist never met Wanata, so he made up the portrait from someone else’s sketch. King was commissioned to paint portraits of the Native leaders who came as delegates to negotiate with the US government in 1821. The idea of a vanishing race was already creating Indian galleries on the East Coast in the 1820s.

Next to Canonicus and the Governor of Plymouth by Albertus del Orient Browere, Tail comments “This painting hints at the long history of conflict between Native American tribes and the US government. Native leaders have continued to fight, long after Canonicus’s time, to protect their people and advocate for their rights. Because of the efforts of our ancestors, millions of Native Americans from hundreds of nations are still here today.” Obviously this is a direct refutation of the prevailing ideology behind the paintings of native leaders in the 19th century, that they were a vanishing race.”

Scott Manning Stevens (Director of Native American Studies at Syracuse University) points out in his catalog essay that including the Northwest in the concept of the West integrates the hundreds of native groups practicing various ways of life. It moves beyond the limited cliché framed by Western movies that focus on cowboys and Indians of the High Plains. The catalog also includes insightful essays by Fry and Peter Hassrick (Director Emeritus and Senior Scholar of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming) as well as color illustrations and discussion of individual artworks.

Robert Henri Young Buck of the Tesuque Pueblo 1916

The collection includes many surprises (most of the works have never been exhibited before), including a work by Rosa Bonheur, and paintings by Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton, Maynard Dixon, and Taos school artists, as well as examples of landscape painting by such well-known artists as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran.

Thomas Moran Green River Wyoming

Some people I spoke with felt strongly that the museum should work much harder to deconstruct the clichés of the West in the labels and in the organization of the display. I would have liked to see more contemporary native art.

Curator Laura Fry understands the issues. She spoke of complicating given ideas citing, as an example, the multiple racial backgrounds of cowboys. Asia Tail’s project represents an ongoing commitment on the part of the museum to expand native voices.

The museum also commissioned a public sculpture outside the new wing by Seneca artist Marie Watt: Blanket Stories, Transportation Object, Generous Ones and Trek. The artist invited community members to contribute blankets that would be cast in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry. Each donated blanket has a story that can be accessed on the museum website. It creates a giant relaxed x shape in front of the museum, a concept that could have many meanings.

Clearly, the museum is interested in framing the collection of art of the American West in new discourses. I look forward to hearing about further programming that will introduce new ideas and voices to counter the traditional romantic perspectives in art of the Haub Collection.

City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India at the Seattle Art Museum

Debanjan Roy,India Shining V 2008, fiberglass with automotive paint, 66 x 32 x 36”, Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. ©Debanjan Roy, Photo courtesy Aicon Gallery.

GANDHI WITH AN IPOD!

A life size red fiberglass figure of Gandhi painted with glitzy red automobile paint and holding an iPod leaps out at us in the first gallery of “City Dwellers, Contemporary Art From India,” works on generous loan to the Seattle Art Museum from the collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan.

Debanjan Roy’s sculpture defiantly alters our image of the humble white-garbed Gandhi. We are a long way from the non-violent Gandhi, who was murdered in January 1948 in the aftermath of the extreme violence of the Partition of India and Pakistan. (See the film Earth by Deepa Metha for a potent telling of that time). The red color of this sculpture refers to that violence; the shiny synthetic material refers to the contemporary reality of India, commercial, business oriented, and materialistic: the antithesis of everything that Gandhi believed in and lived.

Scooter, 2007, Valay Shende, Indian, b. 1980, welded metal buttons, 45 x 70 x 30 in., Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Valay Shende

Valay Shende’s gold studded motorscooter is a magnificent statement that belongs also in the concurrent Pop Art exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. It is popular culture glorified with gold. Shimmering, tactile, and seductive in its generous curves, we can visually immerse ourselves in this scooter with its mixture of the modern and the contemporary.

All of the work in this exciting exhibition plays with the past and present, upsets clichés and fixed romantic notions of India, and provides insights into where this huge and dynamic country is today. At the same time, it is clear that all of these artists have great reverence for their own history, both cultural and historical. I can’t help envy contemporary artists in India for the enormous wealth of cultural references at their disposal.

Reassurance, from the Definitive Reincarnate series, 2006, Nandini Valli Muthiah, Indian, b. 1976, color photograph, 40 1/4 x 40 x 1 in., Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Nandini Valli Muthiah

Disillusioned, from the Definitive Reincarnate series, 2003, Nandini Valli Muthiah, Indian, b. 1976, color photograph, 40 1/4 x 40 x 1 in., Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini

Nandini Valli Muthiah places the blue-skinned Krishna in contemporary surroundings. In contemporary India, Krishna frequently appears in full size statues  and reenactments in religious processions. Here we see him up close and brooding. We can see the intricate details of his costume, the painted blue of his skin, and a glimpse of his inner life. The juxtaposition of myth and reality is deeply moving. Muthiah conveys the burden and responsibility and perhaps the inspiration of renacting Krishna in these unusual photographs.

Include Me Out II, 2011, Vivek Vilasini, Indian, b. 1964, inkjet photographic print, 68 1/4 x 64 1/4 x 2 in., Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Vivek Vilasini

Vivek Vilasini photographed dozens of people seemingly standing on an historical façade of a Hindu temple in South India. If we look closely we see a catalog of contemporary Indian people from school children in uniforms to women in saris. The artist himself sits near the top in contemporary dress. Vilasini seems to have been able to pose all of these people in such a way that we are convinced they are actually standing on the narrow ledges  of the temple where the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon have cavorted for centuries. Goodbye Hindu gods, hello contemporary India

Criminals (after 2001 newspaper photograph), from the project Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, 2000-2004, Pushpamala N., Indian, b. 1956 with Clare Arni, British, b. 1962, C-print, 15 x 22 in., Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Pushpamala N., Photo courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi

Pushpamala N and Clare Arni perform and restage publicly available imagery from historical paintings to police mug shots and, of course, Bollywood posters. So effectively are they re-created that you always have to look twice to know that they are not the real thing. Their work is political: they are looking at female clichés, oppresions, and assumptions by foreign photographers who romanticize India. Here is a provocative analysis of her work and other artists in the exhibition.

One of the most fascinating photographs in this series is the Tamil leader who is also a film star reenacted by the artist, based on a magazine cover. So we have several layers , and a deep reflection of politics and power as a performance both by Pushpamala N and by Jayalalitha, the film star who became a Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. She was recently arrested and is just out on bail this month.

Pushpamala N., ‘Cracking the Whip (after 1970s Tamil film still)’. From the photo-performance project Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, 2000-2004. Type C-print on metallic paper, 20 x 24 inches. Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Pushpamala N.,

Manjunath Kamath’s amazing triptych, of which we have only the center panel here, has a dizzying array of references. Looking at it is a treasure hunt to see what we can spot. But before descending into the details the overall coherence of the piece dominates, the artist plays with perspective space in a way that corresponds to the compicated spaces of sophisticated Mughal painting that show interiors and exteriors, gardens and landscape, near and far all at once.

I can easily spot some of the cultural references: Superman, and Picasso, and tourists taking pictures. But there are other references I would like to know more about. I particularly love the juxtaposition behind the sofa of Christ, the bull and the red uniformed Chelsea Pensioner ( identified immediately by my British born husband).

Overdose, 2009, Manjunath Kamath, Indian, b. 1972, color photograph, middle panel: 95 1/2 x 72 x 2 3/4 in (one of three) Collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan. © Manjunath Kamath

1561-The Submission of the rebel brothers Ali Quli and Bahadur Khan
Akbarnama

Hamza outside the Fortress of Armanus, 1567-82, Mir Sayyid ‘ali, Persian, active 16th c., opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 34 15/16 x 28 3/4in. (88.8 x 73cm), Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Richard E. Fuller, 68.160

MUGHAL PAINTING POWER AND PIETY Asian Art Museum July 19 – December 7, 2014. The dazzling exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum is paired with Mughal Painting: Power and Piety at the Asian Art Museum, a small, but intense selection of miniature paintings along with objects similar to those that appear in the paintings, such as daggers, rings, and necklaces. This dialog of two and three dimensions is provocative, and helps us to look much harder at the tiny details of the miniatures (magnifying glasses are provided). Mughal painting initially was the result of the amazing rule (1556-1605) of the enlightened leader Akbar who unified India. He embraced Persian cultural traditions, as well as reaching out to include all religions, created a huge library with books in many languages, and brought artists, scholars, translators and holy men to his court.

Although he was a Muslim, he sought unity among different traditions. Akbar altered the course of Indian history and art in a way that lasted many centuries. In a brilliant lecture at the Asian Art Museum by LACMA associate curator of Islamic Art Keelan Overton ( who also curated the exhibition which will be followed by a second installment on Decmber 9) , we learned the ways in which these miniatures were put together in albums for the pleasure of the elite.  Once you start looking, you can seem seems and additions, glued together just the way we make albums today.

Akbar’s ecumenical philosophy and Gandhi’s non violence have long vanished in India. Since Independence in 1947, sectarian violence has repeatedly erupted in India to devastating results, but today, the religion of capitalism is the dominant force and focus of disruption. These contemporary artists provide us with both critique and humor. A fiberglass Gandhi with an iPod? Krishna in a four star hotel room? Makes perfect sense.

The Common SENSE: Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery

“The common SENSE”

Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery October 11, 2014 – April 26, 2015

I like the multiple puns in the title of this exhibition. Common sense is a term we use for what works on the most basic level. It helps us through a lot of situations that might otherwise be difficult. (We should, in fact, think of it more often these days, when everything seems so convoluted). Another meaning is suggested by capitalizing SENSE. Ann Hamilton is fascinated by our senses: this exhibition emphasizes the sense of touch, but seeing and hearing are part of that idea for Hamilton.

A third meaning is that everything on the planet shares the common sense of touch. According to Jainism, the world is divided by the number of senses we have. The only sense that every class of life on the planet has is touch, some have only that (the pay off is that some one-sensed vegetable bodies, like the turnip, have numerous souls). One might say that touch is what we will be left with when all else fails.

That idea suggests another reference (not a pun) in this title. Commonsense is telling us that climate change is deeply altering life on the planet. Common sense says we must change.

The exhibition leads us to this idea in an unusual way.

In each gallery a shelf has been set up with pairs of metal prongs that hold stacks of a single passage of text on newsprint. We could read, and, if we chose, and even take a text with us. During the course of the exhibition, then, the texts will disappear (they are taken from a tumblr site where we can all add passages that are selected for inclusion). Some new texts will be added, but even in my two visits separated by ten days, there were many gaps where texts had been before. Gaps, that is another point here.

We are actively removing the exhibition content, the opposite of the usual museum visit, when we are allowed only to look, never to touch, and certainly not to take away the work. But here, the artworks are these texts on newsprint. They have no value except as an exchange of ideas. Although they are supposed to be on the theme of touch, I found most of them spoke of seeing, writing, creating.  We can say that our creative lives are dependent on the primal touch: we touch the keyboard, poetry touches our ears, a play touches our eyes and there is the touch of emotion on our hearts.

In the first gallery we immerse ourselves in brief passages from well–known writers, like Elizabeth Bishop or John Berger or T.S. Eliot and , oddly,  “Cock Robin” children’s books.  In the same gallery is a case full of scissors and copies of “commonplace” books,  an accumulation of favorite texts copied down together.

We are invited to make our own “commonplace book” with the texts in the gallery and place them in a folder labelled “A Common Place” that we were given as we entered. Since I love to read, that seems like a great idea.  There is a bit of a ready-made quality, compared to actually copying quotes, the texts are readymade, preselected, and typed. But they are resonant quotes. And the pleasure of reading them is partly the need to slow our pace, and think about what they say. We cannot rush through this space. That is one of Hamilton’s trademarks: expanding time and space in a meditative way.

But suddenly the exhibition changes its flavor as we turn the corner into the next set of galleries. First we see dead animals in cases. We recoil and wonder why they are here. We had warning (the story of the murder of Cock Robin), but we didn’t know it, until it was too late.  But more copies of children’s books with the story of Cock Robin’s murder and funeral await us across the hall.

Then comes another shock: almost unbearably the next four large galleries have eerie, blurry images of dead birds and small  mammals. They are reproduced as multiple copies: the dead creatures were laid on a flatbed scanner (we don’t know that right away),printed on newsprint and then hung in stacks on the wall. Apparently, only the parts that touched the scanner are sharp  (the claws, the heads)

What are they? Why are they there? I am invited to “take” an image. I can’t make myself take anything. It is too horrifying to take an image of a dead bird. So the gallery facilitator rips one off and hands it to me. I feel sick to my stomach. As I pass the blurry photographs of dead birds and animals (dead at the hands of scientists who preserved them and studied them I learn later) I feel increasingly oppressed. At first they are like shadows, then it is death captured in a copy, hanging on a wall.

Then, it comes to me. Of course, this is about extinctions, climate change, what we are doing to the planet. Our acts of early classification and taxidermy, our urge to extract species from their natural life cycle and habitat and categorize them, has led inexorably to our present accelerated slaughter of the planet. We are just killing on a larger and larger scale with each new extraction, by fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands as well as climate change itself which is altering the seas, the seasons, the cycles of life from the microscopic to the huge ( For example pine bark beetles have longer breeding seasons in warmer winters and are killing many more trees now) .

In one gallery a young woman reads from a book. It is The Peregrine by JA Baker. She reads a passage and then copies it into a notebook. In another gallery, a young man sings a dirge “We remember the elephant, we remember the polar bear, we remember the camel, we remember the shrew, we remember the armadillo, we remember the leopard etc.”

Downstairs we go to the next gallery which is filled with large old fashioned glass museum cases, all enveloped in curtains.  When we open the curtain, we see a new set of specimens, not animals or birds, but fur coats, animal skin clothes, various examples from the Burke and Henry collections, each with a tag that identifies the donor. ( Can you imagine donating your fox skin wrap to a museum today).

After the claustrophobia of the specimens in cases, the final very large gallery opens up into an entirely different sensory experience. On one wall are the familiar shelves with texts, but filling the space are what appeared to be wind operated fans; initially, I thought it was a reference to the millions of birds killed by wind power (perhaps it was indirectly). Scattered around on the floor are stools.

On closer inspection, though, the “fans” were complex devices: the artist identified them as “bull roarers” traditionally a simple shape with a string attached to it, that is swung around the head to make a vibrato sound that can be heard over great distances.

Ann Hamilton’s idea here appears to be to gather us together on the stools in this gallery to listen to the sound and meditate on it as well as the state of the world.

But I am not sure of that. These bull roarers are extremely complicated in their design, one side is a blade, the other is a constructed device that makes a sound as it moves up the pole by friction and down the pole by gravity (like a breathing cycle the artist explained). They have little relationship to the simplicity of historical bull roarers (which we usually identify as part of a sacred indigenous ritual such as burial, perhaps another reference the artist had in mind). The exhibition needed the sense of resolution, but I think the “bull roarers” designed according to a mechanical anglo tradition, did not create a space for spiritual gathering.

In spite of my reservation about the last gallery, “The Common SENSE” by Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery is a landmark event.

First, the artist created unusual networks on the University of Washington Campus by reaching out to the Burke Museum, the Special Collections at the Library, and even the choral music program.

Second, she invited our participation, in both the removal of texts from the exhibition to start our own “Commonplace Book”  and the addition of texts at the tumblr site (readers-reading-readers.tumblr.com), as well as, if we chose to, reading in the gallery ( sign up at readerscribe@henry art.org).

Finally, at the exit of the exhibition, we are invited to have our own photograph taken behind a white screen, with only our shoulder touching. We become specimens like the birds in the galleries, except of course, we are not dead, and can walk out of the building.

But perhaps as we walk out, we bring with us a new common sense of the results of the actions of humans with five senses on the planet, and the responsibility we bear to make sure that the planet will continue to survive. We cannot continue in the line that Ann Hamilton has drawn from the medieval murder story of Cock Robin to the present rapid rate of extinctions.

Ann Hamilton has embraced the present state of the planet and our responsibility for it in this emotionally complex art work.

Art in Seattle from my monthly Leschi column: “Modernism in the Pacific Northwest” and ” La Toya Ruby Frazier: Born by a River,”

PART 1

 “Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: the Mythic and the Mystical” Seattle Art Museum” June 19 – Sept 7, 2014

For almost two hours, in a closed café at the Seattle Art Museum, Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art, talked to me about her upcoming exhibition “Modernism in the Pacific Northwest.” Both lucid and animated, she was so riveting that I didn’t notice the time pass without even a sip of water!

It was a rare opportunity to learn about cutting edge thinking in an area that really fascinates me: how history gets written or, to put it another way, who ends up being important and why. In honor of the first exhibition of the Marshall Hatch Collection at the Seattle Art Museum, Patricia Junker has combed through archives and answered those questions for the famous artists of the Northwest modern era, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson.

Modernism has been defined as art based on French Cubism and its descendants. But in the case of these artists, it refers to something entirely different. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, precisely during World War II, these four artists, disgusted by the violence of the war and fascism in Europe, met regularly to discuss alternatives to European art as the basis for their work.

The Northwest artists found a common sense of humanity in the art and philosophy of contemporary Native Americans as well as that of Asia. They deeply explored both mythology and mysticism. Unlike European artists who turned to African art purely for its forms, or East Coast artists, whose exposure to Native art was as historical cultures, these artists immersed themselves in the spectacular Northwest native art collections in Seattle and were invited to view long house performances by the Swinomish, a Coast Salish tribe on Skagit Bay. The artists could even buy native art at The Olde Curiosity Shop on the Seattle waterfront, which supported native artists by selling their work (it still does).

Likewise, the Seattle Art Museum provided an extensive collection of Asian art, thanks to its founding director, Dr. Richard Fuller. Dr. Fuller’s dual commitment to Asian art and contemporary Northwest art led him to support Kenneth Callahan as his employee at the museum, as well as to provide Mark Tobey with a monthly stipend. He also regularly bought their art and that of many other Northwest artists. The contemporary collection he amassed was carefully supplemented by Seattle Art Museum Board Member Marshall Hatch after Fuller’s death in 1976.

What we have seen so far on exhibit though, is what Patricia Junker described as “not even the tip of the iceberg.” Popular writing about these artists has often followed a 1953 Life magazine article suggesting that rain and mist in the Northwest were their main sources of inspiration. Patricia Junker states that it was careful study, discussion and thoughtful analysis of Asian and native art specifically during World War II that is the crucible for their art. It was a time, not a place, that formed them. While the artists later went their distinctly separate ways, as we will see in the exhibition, this shared exploration permanently shaped their art.

But the second part of the story that Patricia Junker tells shines a bright light on the crucial role of women in shaping these artists’ careers. She cites five women starting with Kenneth Callahan’s wife Margaret, who was a catalyst for the artists to make art with a social conscience. Also crucial were Dorothy Miller, Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Marion Willard, pioneering New York City art dealer; Elizabeth Bayley Willis, energetic curator and promoter of Mark Tobey in particular; and Zoe Dusanne, Seattle contemporary art dealer. The intelligence and perseverance of these curators and dealers successfully contradicted the dogmatic and immensely influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who repeatedly dismissed Mark Tobey and Morris Graves as minor disciples of Paul Klee! Now, with this exhibition we can see their complexity for ourselves.

Postscript: On seeing the exhibition, it was a revelation. I felt I knew the work of these artists, but this exhibition gave me an entirely new perspective.

Graves as seen in this intense, highly saturated bird image suggests interior and exterior reality, spirit and matter. In the next gallery dark images of despair were equally new to me as part of Graves’ emotional spectrum.

The complexity of Kenneth Callahan in his intricate interweaving of figures and shape suggested his knowledge of art history as well as his turbulent responses to the contemporary world. You can’t see the figures very well in this detail of the painting Rocks and People, but they create an intense expression of struggle and suffering. The idea of embedding the human body into the rocks is itself a powerful idea.

PART 2

“La Toya Ruby Frazier: Born by a River” December 13, 2013 – June 22, 2014

We all know about Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills and libraries for the “ambitious and industrious” public. What we have not heard about are the struggles of African Americans who worked at his mills. The dynamic photographer La Toya Ruby Frazier tells that story in her exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.  

La Toya Ruby Frazier grew up in what is known as the “Bottoms” of the Monongahela River in Braddock, Pennsylvania, nine miles outside of Pittsburgh. Braddock is the site of the first and the last Andrew Carnegie steel mill, Edgar Thomson Works. Generations of Frazier’s family have worked in that mill since the turn of the last century. As African Americans they were paid less and, over the decades, had many job related injuries and much illness. But they could not afford to move away from the toxic environment near the plant.

La Toya‘s grandmother, who raised her, was born in the 1940s when the town was prosperous, her mother in the 1960s, and she herself in the 1980s, the era of Reaganomics, when the war on drugs decimated her family.

The artist describes a childhood memory: “One night the river flooded. Crossing through miles of man-made manufactures, contaminated soils and debris, it filled the basement and soaked the floors of my childhood home on Washington Avenue . . . if 70 percent of the world is covered with water and more than 50 percent of our bodies is comprised of water, then the properties found in waters that surround our artificial environments reflect not only a physical condition, but a spiritual condition in which we exist.” In other words, the toxins in the water are part of the fiber of her body and those of her family. They contaminate not only their bodies, but also their spirits.

Frazier has just received the third Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence prize, awarded biennially for an early career black artist: she received a cash prize and this exhibition endowed by the Foundation. Seattle Art Museum’s Sandra Jackson-Dumont curated this selection of photographs that opened in December. As we approach the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence gallery on the third floor, we first see a long corridor with selections from Frazier’s personal life experience. All of these black and white photographs were taken in or near her grandmother’s home, where Frazier was raised about a block from the steel mill.

Here, as a child, the artist experienced warm love and a special world that her grandmother created inside this house surrounded by toxins, illness, and deterioration. It is that world of love that La Toya celebrates. In the intimate photographs we see her grandmother cradle two of her extraordinary collection of dolls, her hands with a cigarette and a wedding ring. In one image, the artist, now a young adult, sits on the floor with her grandmother, with a recreated hairdo like those her grandmother lovingly wove for her as a child.

 Her mother sits in a hospital gown with her exposed back to us, many wires attached. The other half of the frame shows the destruction of the community hospital in Braddock. The wires of her mother’s body and the dangling wires of the hospital echo one another.

One color photograph ends the corridor, a timely (as we think of the massive leakage into the water of Charleston, West Virginia this spring) image of industrial degradation along the Monongahela River with a big sign that says “Clairton Works, Continues Improvement to the Environment.”

As we enter the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Gallery, large format color photographs taken from a helicopter give us the context for the issues that Frazier wants us to understand. We see the blue Edgar Thomson Steel Mill, still operating, and the lines of railroad cars that carry the steel. Nearby are just a few houses and trees. That is Frazier’s neighborhood. But Frazier’s focus is the empty hole left by the destruction of the community hospital and the home of Isaac Bunn surrounded by rolls of white rubber dumped all around it.

Isaac Bunn came to the opening and I talked to him. He wanted to buy more land around his house, but his paperwork was lost, and the owners invited a company to dump rubber wrapped in white plastic there. They look like a snowstorm gone wrong. Inside the house are four generations of Bunn’s family.

Bunn is now director of the Inclusion Project. As Braddock has acquired the status of poster child for redevelopment of rust belt cities, partly because of its flamboyant mayor, these long time working class residents feel left out of the process. Bunn wants them to be part of the conversation.

So far, as documented in the photographs, we mainly see the march of the usual condos. In addition, according to both Bunn and Frazier, “social practice” artists from outside the community are creating projects that have no real connection to its history, especially its African American working class history,

A riveting speaker and personality, Frazier interspersed her narrative of work, illness (the most common are cancer and lupus, from which the artist herself suffers), toxins, poverty, racism, community and love, with frequent references to art history and major artists who have been important to her work, ranging from Louis Hines and Jacob Riis, pioneering social documentary photographers, to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the avant- garde photographer.       

She commented on New Deal photography as “top down”, asking us how many knew the name of the woman in the famous “migrant mother” photograph by Dorothea Lange. She has studied with Carrie Mae Weems and other contemporary socially engaged photographers. The intersection of economic and political forces that create and destroy life, community, and environment come across clearly in her art work. She is precisely aware of how she fits into the larger context of social documentary as well as photography in general.

Her work perfectly balances aesthetics and content.

On the digital display in the gallery, Frazier’s sardonic performance protests Levi ads set in Braddock with the slogan “Go Forth”. “Go Forth where?” she asks, if you have no money, and you are dying of cancer and the only hospital in the community has been closed. The digital display, a pioneering project itself, includes Frazier’s work shown recently at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. For another analysis of her work read this blog.

La Toya Ruby Frazier’s highly focused mission to tell the story of working class African Americans counters the narrative constructed by outsiders who have no idea of the life that continues in this ravaged place. Her work belongs to the people who can’t afford to leave. She wants them not just to be remembered, but honored.

The Tate Modern “A Chronicle of Interventions” Spring 2014

Group Material, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America 1984 installation photograph by Dorothy Zeidman

“If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own culture. Anyone who has ever protested repression anywhere should consider the responsibility to defend the culture and the rights of the Central American People.” “Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America” January 1983.

While in London at the Tate Modern, tucked into a small “project” gallery at the entrance that could easily be overlooked, was an exhibition with the title “A Chronicle of Interventions.” The exhibition was a collaboration with the TEOR/éTica space in Costa Rica.

In the first gallery, Doug Ashford and Julie Ault, early members of Group Material, curated a partial documentation of the 1984 Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America 1984. It was first shown at PS 1 recently “converted” (minimally) from a large public school. The installation at the Tate Modern included some of the documents that appeared as part of the installation of the original timeline and a slideshow of the installation.

The posters, flyers, flags, articles, paintings, buttons, and artists’ prints had been submitted in response to the “Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America” issued in January 1983. Installed at the Tate, they lost the aesthetically sophisticated arrangement and immediacy of the original installation. We looked down on them in a box, rather than seeing them in our space.

In the installation views of the original timeline that survive, we see a stunning partnership of numerous art works and ephemera arranged above and below a red line with its black dates (the colors of the avant garde post revolutionary Soviet Art).

At the center of the original Timeline installation was a dramatic red construction, an artifact from a demonstration in DC: a maritime navigation buoy. As described by Claire Grace in an excellent analysis of the timeline in After All Journal, it was a “bright red sculpture that had been brandished a few weeks before the exhibition opened at a public protest in the nation’s capital. Created by Bill Allen, Ann Messner and Barbara Westermann, the sculpture takes the form of a giant maritime navigation buoy. At the demonstration, its bell rang a repeated toll of warning, marking time not metronomically but according to the jostling movements of protestors holding it aloft by the beams at its base.”

At the Tate exhibition, in spite of the museumification of the art works, the intense engagement of the artists comes across clearly. The cross media collaborations of visual artists, critics, writers, musicians, philosophers, poets, street artists compelled us to think about the power of art when creative minds address pressing social issues. Where is that collaboration today? The Occupy movement is an example. Climate Change activists are another. But today we still have a lot of fragmentation of activism, based, unfortunately along racial lines.

In the second part of the exhibition at the Tate, curated by Inti Guerrero and Shoair Mavlian from the organization TEOR/éTicabased in San Jose, Costa Rica, are seven artists using various media. The curators contrast their inclusion of artists “from the region itself” in comparison to the Timeline, which included Latin American artists in exile.

But there are other more obvious distinctions. The artists work as individuals from a theoretical distance, with modernist tropes. We need a lot of explanation in order to understand what a certain photograph or video signifies.

The only exception to that is Andreas Siekmann, whose charts in blue, with iconic and recognizable images, and hard hitting information, clearly tells us about exploitation. (He is German, not “from the region”).

The other artist whose work is straightforward is Regina Galindo, the well known Guatemalan artist who has been protesting through performance and poetry the nightmare of violence in her country. But even her work needed an explanation. The artist stood in the field that was slowly excavated around her. We could interpret it in many ways, until told that it referred to mass graves.

Other artists were esoteric: Michael Stevenson ( from New Zealand) had a lengthy narrative “Introduction to the Theory of Probability” that connected the Shah of Iran in exile in Panama, the presence of Patty Hearst on the same island, and the theory of probability represented through anonymous hands playing solitaire. (The connection was that the Shah’s bodyguard became a mathematician). Oscar Figueroa’s performance piece laid out a 3,275’ line of blue plastic to demarcate the segregation of communities of workers for United Fruit Company (blue plastic was used to protect bananas from pesticides, so the analogy of protecting local elites from imported dark skinned workers).  

A piece of blue plastic also hung on the wall of the gallery, a post minimalist object. I wanted more!

The contemporary body builder in the film by Humberto Vélez’s film The Last Builder makes a connection between a contemporary body builder and the African bodies that built the Panama Canal. Oomph. Not particularly provocative. José Castrellón explores what is referred to as “cultural hybridity,” in a parallel of the appearance of indigenous Kuna Tribe members and punk metal bands (I didn’t get this, but maybe with music I would). Finally, there was Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa’s dance of architectural styles, three dancers wearing a style as a costume and gradually shedding it. Pretty hokey.

The overall theme is colonialism, but with the exception of Galindo and Siekmann (his project is ongoing) , there was no reference to what is actually happening on the ground today. It was all theoretical and abstruse.

The huge contrast to the heartfelt work of the 1980s artists who joined the Artists Call was obvious. That is the main distinction between Group Material and contemporary artists selected for the exhibition.

There are plenty of artists in Central America addressing current violence and atrocities. The curators from Costa Rica (itself an exception to the politics of the rest of the region) simply chose to find artists who were exploring the present through a veil of theory and modernism.

I honor Group Material’s remarkable activism in response to the violence in Central America in 1984 and hope it will inspire artists today when that violence is still so obvious.

“If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own culture. Anyone who has ever protested repression anywhere should consider the responsibility to defend the culture and the rights of the Central American People.” “Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America” January 1983.

Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline

“If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture we are sacrificing our own culture.” 1984 Group Material Call to Artists.

In the defense of humanity in the midst of bestiality, of creativity in the midst of destruction, of non-violence in the midst of violence, the example of the creative voices of Syria is inspiring.

In London in early June, I had the good fortune of hearing several Syrian artists discuss the explosion of free expression in all media since the uprising against the oppressive government of Bashar al-Assad began in Syria in the spring of 2011. The program was in honor of the launch of the book of the same name published by English Pen. English Pen is an impressive activist organization that “defends the rights of writers at risk.” The book is a potent mix of personal experiences and extraordianry art, poetry, and music (of which we are given the lyrics). As I read it, I felt  both heartbroken at the destruction of the country and deeply moved by the perseverance of the Syrian people.

Lens Young, an anonymous collective of citizen photographers based in many cities, most clearly show us the juxtaposition of the beauty of life, the destruction of life, and the efforts for survival and return to normal life. Here is a link to their facebook page in Homs and Damascus and here are some of their deeply moving photographs that juxtapose war’s destruction and everyday life. Notice the tiny flowers on the balcony in the last photograph.

There are also explicit accounts of the destruction of a comfortable middle class life for a larger purpose: freedom of expression. I found myself identifying with these middle class writers,and wondered just how courageous I would be if my door was knocked down, and I was taken to prison and tortured for what I was doing.

The moderator of the panel in London was Malu Halasa, one of the editors of the book. Halasa and her fellow editors, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud, have brought together an incredible collection of poetry, journalism, analysis, history, short stories, painting, pop music, graffiti, photographs, cartoons, installation, sculpture, printmaking, banners, film, stencils, and even finger puppets. Much of the work can be viewed online.

Schoolchildren began the uprising in Deraa, Syria by writing on a wall:  “Al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam” (“The people want the fall of the regime.”) one of the slogans from Tunisia and Egypt. The children were arrested and tortured, leading to the first protests and soon an uprising. In Deir al-Zour, in the stadium, a huge collective demonstration non-violently protested forty years of oppression. At the same time, the first creative expression emerged, banners by a collective Kartoneh, on black paper with symbols of the city and protest statements.

“For Mature Audiences Only: A disaster-struck city, 1 km ahead, Deir al -Zour

But the resistance and massacre of civilians in Syria did not begin in 2011. “Hama’82” with which the book begins, with both an anonymous image and a brief discussion, refers to the first massacre, by Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, who attacked the city in February of that year in response to violent resistance to Baathist rule by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The government slaughtered thousands and thousands of people. Public discussion of this massacre has been forbidden for forty years.  In Homs, in the recent uprising, the government once again struck brutally, bombing, among other places, an underground journalists agency filled with citizen journalists, and killing among others, the well known Marie Colvin, a journalist with the Sunday Times.  

At the panel in London, I sat next to a young woman from Homs. She was in Wales at a university, obviously to escape the nightmare. She said that her home had been entirely destroyed, and they had even taken the family photographs, a fact she repeated several times, as if she was still in shock. She had traveled all the way from Wales  to attend the panel. 

To understand the full context and history behind the current uprising from a cultural perspective, miriam cooke’s Dissident Syria, is essential reading. She outlines how intellectuals were in constant danger throughout Hafez’s rule, both being co-opted to support the regime, and trying to maintain a subversive dissident position. Many went to prison and died as a result. Her book examines the prison literature of the 1990s as well as film and visual art.

Syria Speaks, as a book, was preceded by two exhibitions organized in Europe, “Syria’s Art of Resistance,” and “Syria Culture in Defiance.” Here is the image from the second with the portraits of martyrs to the uprising and the cover of the catalog of the Art of Resistance, available as a downloadable pdf. 

Cover image for Syrias Art of Resistance by Yasmeen Fanari Vomit

Many of the artists included in these exhibition are presented in the book. One of the best known and most radical is Yousef Abdelke, his extraordinary paintings here presented as photographs with only the artist’s head, never full face, by Nassouh Zaghlouleh.  The painter was imprisoned in the summer of 2013, but was released after about a month, probably as a result of a huge international protest.

The poignent title of this chapter is “Youssef from the Inside: When you stab the ground a sparrow dies too”

But, rather than despair, there was an odd euphoria among these creative people, that they could finally speak openly -although still at great risk of imprisonment, torture, and death. One panelist is in prison and was represented by a photograph. He was Mazen Darwish, a founder of the bold Syrian Center for Media and Freedom, an organization that published banned documents from the outset of the uprising, and communicated with the international media. His letter “Letter for the Future” on receiving the Bruce Kreisky Prize for Services to Human Rights ( and smuggled out of a prison in Damascus). is included in the book, as well as a moving essay by his wife, Yara Badr, “Lifetimes Stolen”  on her own imprisonment, and her childhood memory of her parents’ arrest and torture.

Sulafa Hijazi provided some excruciating images in a separate chapter in the book, such as this one. She speaks of “growing up in a militarized society in which everyone wore military uniforms to school, where we learned to fire weapons. ”

Needless to say, the presence of the internet, especially facebook and YouTube has created enormous possibilities for making sure the Syrian uprising is visible. But even with all that, it is fading from people’s attention, as ISIS, an aberrant, aggressive, retrograde group takes over the news cycle, preempts twitter hashtags,( including that of the World Cup) and invades the fragile entity that is Iraq today. The fact that ISIS came out of Syria is the only connection that is made to the uprising there, as Assad’s greater power gradually and tragically wears down the resistance. Given his history, I hate to think of what is going to happen next.

As Malu Halasa stated “Dreaming comes at a high cost.”

The journalists speaking in London at another Pen sponsored event, “Translating the Syria News, May 29 at the Free Word Centre, London”  made it clear that ISIS is against everyone except their own extremist program. ISIS threatens intellectuals and creative people from one side, and Assad from the other.

The first speaker at “Syria Speaks” for the panel was award winning writer, Khaled Khalifa ( here photographed from my perch on a balcony). He read an excerpt from his 2013 book No Knives in this City’s Kitchens. The excerpt was then translated for those of us who do not speak Arabic. Khalifa is an internationally renowned poet, filmmaker and novelist, who has chosen to remain in Damascus, despite being attacked by thugs at a funeral in 2012. He stated “This is my life. When I stop writing I am dead. “

Khaled Khalifa’s book about the 1982 “events” in Hamas through the eyes of a young woman.

The next speaker was cinematographer/illustrator Khalil Younes. I didn’t realize until I looked in Syria Speaks, that I have included his work in lectures I have given on “Art and Politics Now”. He creates homages in pen and ink drawings to cultural leaders who have died in his series Revolution 2011. Here is one example of the singer Ibrahim Qashoush  the “nightingale” of the revolution. He was a fireman and a part time poet, when the uprisings began in Hama. He was deliberately murdered with his vocal chords cut out on July 4, 2011, just 3 years ago, the most explicit killing of a cultural voice in the Syrian uprising.

Portrait of the slain singer Qashoush by Khalil Younes.Qashoush inspired the masses with his music.

Other works by Younes are posted on his facebook

In the book,Syria Speaks, Younes also presented a short series of anecdotes that center around his long standing friendship with a young man who is part of the government forces. Although they are on opposite sides of the conflict, they are still friends. Younes left Syria in 1998, but has stayed in touch with him, as described in a story called “Chicken Liver.” ON the panel, Younes spoke of the complexity of loyalties in Syria as exemplified in this story. Families, friends, neighbors who have been friends for decades, are now separated by the uprising or fractured by violent death.

Finally we heard from the articulate journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab who spoke of how the narrative of the revolution has been lost in international media, mired in Orientalism. His brief comments echoed the longer, analytic discussion sponsored at the Free Word Center. The panelists spoke of the mold for the Middle East as the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the emphasis on sectarian conflict. In fact the non violent protests and citizen journalists are not necessarily identified by their religion. There are collectives of civilian photographers, many new citizen powered newspapers being published, radio broadcasts. Malu quoted from Syrian intellectual Yassim al-Haj Saleh :

“There’s an established approach in the Western media towards “the Middle East” in which journalists approach the region from a geopolitical perspective, treating it as an international stage for conflict. As a result, we don’t see the societies involved, and we don’t see ordinary people or their struggle to control their politics and their lives. Another approach looks at regional issues through the lens of religions, sects, and ethnicities, which are taken to be eternal, unchanging entities; to act as unified political blocs in all circumstances; and to be permanently fighting one another as well. There is also an inherent, fixed tendency towards Islamophobia and a false sympathy for “minorities,” who are seen as perpetual victims.

We can add to all this a view that is always confined to a narrow segment of the present, leaving no room for a historical perspective or for knowledge of the phases of history these countries have traversed, their conflicts, or their societies’ struggle for justice and liberation.

What completes this approach is a persistent preference for stability in the region, which means, in practical terms, standing with the powerful, who are capable of providing the goods of this stability.”

Wow, that really says it all. Now we have ISIS as news preempted by yet another brutal attack on Gaza by Israel as a result of three Israeli teenagers who were found dead ( I haven’t seen any speculation even on who killed them). Perhaps Israel thought their enormous brutality would be ignored as we worried about ISIS.

Syria Speaks (the link is to Saqi books the publisher, you can order it from them, I never link Amazon on this site) contains amazing art, writing, narratives, that moved me deeply. I felt my own incredible privilege and the need to immerse myself in these artists’ work, to not stand by as a culture is destroyed.

There are narratives of middle class writers, just like me, but they have stood against censorship and been put in jail and tortured. There are poems by Ali Safar, 28 short fragments of heartbreaking clarity, “A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky, or Death by Stabs of Sorrow”

“He didn’t die of a heart attack or cancer: he was killed by                  stabs of sorrow. ”

There are the finger puppets by Masasit Mati performing short satirical skits “The Syrian revolution is the only one in the world where humble finger puppets have become leading figures of opposition and dissent.”

There are horrifying photographs of devastation in formerly middle class communities and photographs of beautiful children, created by the Lens Young collective in various cities (see top of post)

Comic4Syria (another facebook site) creates comic books inspired by Manga that tell the devastating stories of the uprising. They are being read everywhere in Syria and in refugee camps.

And there are the caricatures by Ali Ferzat, renowned artist who had his hands smashed by the regime. As soon as they got well he did these two sardonic images

Stencils and murals are also part of the cultural resistance, as well as graffiti in general.

The image on the cover of the book of the boy with the sling shot originally drawn by  Mohamed Tayeb,  was adapted by the Syrian poster collective Alshaab alsori aref Tarekh after the Baba Amr massacre in December 2011 in solidarity with Syrian refugees.

Collectively Syria Speaks paints a picture of a people who are unbeatable, but who are in a vulnerable place in their cause now, as world attention has gone elsewhere, and Assad appears to be successful in beating back the uprising. The revolutionary non violent spirit is now replaced, as poignantly referenced in the book, by a simple need for survival in the midst of violence. At the same time, the digital journalism continues online both in the Arabic world and in the Western media. The space is opened. It will only close when the last revolutionary is dead.

As miriam cooke so eloquently states: with the kinds of images that were flooding our inboxes day after day – we couldn’t stand seeing yet another child’s mutilated body taking in its last breath – art has to come in and do something different so that we are not numb.”

On example mentioned is the work of Lebanese artist Rabih Mroue, whose “pixelated revolution” I have written about on this blog. His work is about a cell phone video which may be someone photographing his own death.

But the main message I took away from the panel discussion in London, was the sense of a surging creativity in Syria, coming from all segments of the society in many different manifestations.

One of the more intriguing essays in Syria Speaks outlined the work of a man in Dubai who actually bought the equipment being used and with a network of assistants smuggled it into the country. There were several provocative theoretical analysis in the book as well.

The panel was followed by a musical performance.

In the end I was left with a sense of the power of creativity in the human spirit. It is that power which I believe in against all odds, against the power of those who prefer arms, violence and death. In the end, hopefully, that creativity will prove stronger and prevail to create a new society in Syria.  (more…)

Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 “Changing the Way we See Native America”

Matika Wilbur, Darkfeather, Bibiana and Eckos Ancheta (Tulalip Tribes), 2014. Digital silver image, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Matika Wilbur’s “Project 562” currently on view at the Tacoma Art Museum until October 5, will eventually include every “federally recognized sovereign Native American tribe.”  562 was the total number when she started, now it is 566. (I wonder if she will also include unrecognized tribes like the Duwamish, tribe of Chief Seattle). So far she has visited one third of them. She declares: “For predominant society, Indians occupy a silent and isolated, covered over, virtually extinct existence, part of the grievous though inevitable eradication of ‘manifest destiny .’ . .But Native America is utterly enduring, alive, and thriving as part of the core concept and reality of America”

Matika Wilbur is from the Pacific Northwest (Tulalip and Swinomish). Here in the Northwest we are acutely aware of the vitality of contemporary native culture, including authors, filmmakers, poets, painters, sculptors, museum curators, architects, potters, weavers, beaders, basket makers, canoe makers, singers, drummers, and political activists (we just lost the famous Billy FrankJr., who for decades has been campaigning first for native fishing rights, then for the dangers of pollution and climate change).

In Seattle we have stores selling authentic native art and totem poles in many of our parks. We just dedicated a new totem to J.T. Williams, a seventh generation wood carver, who was shot and killed by a policeman. It was carved on our waterfront by his brother and extended family. We joined the procession carrying this immensely heavy sculpture to its final installation. Just north of us is Haida Gwaii, an extraordinary island that is a sovereign Canadian nation, who with many other First Nation groups, is fighting the new plans for oil pipelines and shipping. But this is Seattle. For the East Coast and the center of the country natives are ancient history, casino owners or contentious groups asking for their land (most of the continental US is stolen Indian land, we first leased it and then just stayed).

Wilbur’s project wants to help us to rethink the idea of contemporary Native Americans and what it means, as she asked, to be an Indian today. “What does contemporary Indian look like?” How can they be “Indian enough”? According to her audio introduction to the exhibition, she is honoring“cultural resiliency, celebrating heroes and changing the way we see Native Americans.”

As I walked into the exhibition I was immediately struck by the obvious fact that these modest sized sepia prints are a direct response to Edward Curtis’s North American Indian project created in the first two decades of the 20^th century. As we all know, Curtis set out to photograph “the vanishing race” at the turn of the century. He took 40,000 photographs and recorded 10,000 wax cylinders of audio, language, and music, from 80 tribes. We know that Curtis took a lot of liberties, he dressed his subjects in regalia from other tribes, for example, yet, we also know that today, this work is a treasure trove of information about much that was lost. Needless to say, the tribes did not vanish, although that was the plan of the white man.

Enter Matika Wilbur.She also accompanies her images with audio, a powerful component that makes the photographs come alive. Rather than impose herself on her subjects, she asks them how they would like to be dressed and where they want to be photographed. She invites them to discuss their present situation, their history, and their relationship to tradition. The very first photograph of Anna Mae Wescogone, age 62 of the Havasupai tribe in the Grand Canyon tells us of the past and present from her own experience: growing up with no electricity, building fires, telling stories, gathering crops, to the present life of flat screen televisions, and helicopter trips to stores.  A youthful Anna Cook speaks of the shock of racism when she went from her small tribal school to high school in a nearby town. The stories are compelling.

Yet, I was disappointed. It was too close to Curtis for me (who oddly is never mentioned in the gallery or the press materials). I understand the compulsion to erase the “vanishing tribe” idea. But why were virtually every one of these photographs in rustic settings, with no sign of modern life. A few wore contemporary clothing, but they were posed in a vacuum. Instead of suggesting the realities of contemporary life for Native Americans, as for example, Sherman Alexie does in his novels and films, in which he deftly combines tradition, spirituality, and current conditions, see, for example his film Winter in the Blood. In the selection that I saw in the museum there were no run down cars, no drug and alcohol references, no activists against pipe lines, or conversely advocates for uranium exploration. Looking online, her other photography, prior to Project 562, is certainly more contemporary. The Project itself has many more dimensions not included in this selection, including environmental activism here. Wilbur wants to abolish negative stereotypes and leave a legacy for future generations. Perhaps those realities of life and activism are too negative, but resiliency is certainly overcoming those realities. But the huge native American role in our current climate change fight is to be celebrated. I hope Matika presents it more frequently.  It is one of the key features of our contemporary world and personally, a major hope for our survival.  

Admittedly, as I said at the outset, in the Northwest we are immersed in contemporary native culture as part of contemporary culture, not a separate entity. The rest of the country does not have that rich component of day to day life. We are also acutely aware of how recently we took the land of the tribes ( 1855) I regret that Project 562, at least in the sample I saw at the Tacoma Art Museum, seems only to present a type of frozen romance. Oddly her stated goal is to get beyond “feathers and leather”, but she is certainly presenting that frequently.

Admittedly, I have not listened to every audio ( which you can do online here)., and the contemporary video of the artist on the road was not working. That would have given a sense of her process that would have been another dimension to these isolated figures.

Last, as an outsider, my perception is that Native tribal culture is a lot about community, family, friends, extended family, looking out for each other as strangers on the road, etc, yet all of these photographs, with only a few exceptions, are single isolated people. Perhaps that is the contemporary reality that she is actually revealing. For more images go to her blog and decide for yourself.

Feminism and Performance: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane

Gina Pane Action Escalade non-anesthétsiéé (Action non anaestheticized Climb) (April 1971). detail

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane on view at the Henry Art Gallery until June 18 is a rare opportunity to see two groundbreaking artists working with performance in entirely different ways.

Joan Jonas was deeply inspired by the East Coast avant-garde interdisciplinary Judson Dance Theater environment of the 1960s. They are based, in part, on the ideas of John Cage with a focus on re-thinking process, movement, body, space, and gesture as an exploration in itself. Pane emerged in Europe at the peak of the Situationist movement based in a Marxist critique of capitalism. They believed that emphasis on commodity consumption instead of lived experience was leading to passivity and alienation. Situationists stated that this “spectacle” could be countered by “the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires.”  But those desires are political, not simply aesthetic. Frédérique Baumgartner explains in detail the ways in which Pane’s work directly corresponds to these principles in his lengthy article“Reviving the Collective Body: Gina Pane’s Escalade/non Anesthésiéé.”[i]

Currently in Seattle there is a large conversation going on among hundreds of women artists on Facebook about feminism and art. Also, recently, a “conversation” in John Boylan’s long running series focused on performance. So thinking about the role of these two artists in relation to feminism, performance, and the significance of this exhibition is timely. There is a direct connection to Seattle in the Judson Theater Group, in that John Cage taught at the Cornish College of the Arts and developed some of his formative concepts there. Not surprisingly then much of the conversation on performance  at the Vermillion Cafe on Tuesday night centered on that tradition of “process” oriented performance. On the other hand, that is by no means the only performance direction happening in Seattle. One could argue that the “Occupy” movement was street theater directly affiliated with the Situationist principles. And of course, a venue like “On the Boards”, includes a wide range of performance from all over the world, some of it very political.

Both Joan Jonas and Gina Pane were included in the important 2007 exhibition WACK, Art and the Feminist Revolution [ii] (the subject of my very first blog post!) “Parallel Practices” was curated by Dean Daderko, Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. I am going to focus here mainly on Gina Pane, as this is her first exhibition in the United States. Jonas is still working, while Pane died in 1990.

So as a starting point, let us return to those profound differences as a result of their context: Jonas is more involved with process and experimentation with media, Pane with content and presentation. I went to the show with two artists both of whom were mesmerized by Jonas’s work particularly the recent Reading Dante III (2010) a multimedia immersive environment that makes oblique reference to Dante with a drawing of woods that also appears in a video: (for clarification for those few non Dante experts, the quote is “nel mezzo del camino di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritto via era smarrita”  “midway in the path of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight path had been lost.” ) There are also video animations of the artist (whom we don’t see) drawing spirals that may suggest the circles of hell. The installation plays on our sense of reality and fantasy through games with photography, video, and animation.

Joan Jonas, Double Lunar Dogs (performance documentation).
Presented at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in conjunction with the exhibition Other Realities – Installations for Performance (August 1-September 27, 1981). Photo: David Crossley

What captured my friends was the immediacy of the act of drawing represented in the videos. In another work, Double Lunar Dogs, 1984, a video using state of the art techniques of 1984, engages with science fiction in an imaginary space trip in which the participants lose their way (it co-stars Spalding Gray!), but it is mainly funny and full of visual tricks. It was accompanied by a performance by the artist and some huge drawings she did as part of a performance.

Pane, in contrast, is not at all amusing or tricky. Her work is bloody, as a result of purposeful self-mutilation.  She is best known in the US for the single work Action Escalade non-anesthétsiéé (Action non anaestheticized Climb) (April 1971). It consists of a series of 69 photographs that document her increasingly excruciating climb up a specially fabricated “ladder” with steel razor blades on the widely spaced rungs. Beside it is the actual ladder which she climbed. We can see the projecting blades on the rungs which cut her feet and hands as she climbed, we feel her pain viscerally as we look at this physical artifact.   

Action Escalade non-anesthésiéé (Action non anaestheticized Climb was originally accompanied by a small typewritten statement by the artist which clearly states her meaning and purpose:

Stratégie qui consiste á gravir les “échelons”/L’escalade americaine au Vietnam/Artiste – Les artiste aussi grimpent/Douleur – douleur physique á un point ou plusieurs points du corps/Douleur interne, profounde, souffrance. Douleur (morale)/ Le contraire d’une escalade anesthésiéé.

(My) translation is
“Climbing” [the word also means escalation, as in a war} –assault [can be military or verbal,] of a position by means of a ladder
The strategy consists in climbing a ladder.
The American escalation in Vietnam
The Artist – the artists also are climbing
Pain- physical pain in one or many points of the body
Pain – internal, profound, suffering. Pain (moral)
The opposite of an anesthesized climb.”

In other words, Pane has a definite political intent in this work. She is responding to the apathy of the public, by arousing them through her action to the reality of pain and injury. But, the only way that we are witness to her performance is through the photographs, arranged as a rectangle exactly corresponding in size to the ladder, and the ladder itself. She scrupulously orchestrated her actions and controlled how they were experienced. In doing that, she chose to remove the immediacy of her own pain, to make it a document of suffering, much as we experienced the war in Vietnam. I can remember at that time feeling the same way: how can people sit and watch this terrible killing on television while they eat crackers and cheese. It horrified me and radicalized me. Gina Pane felt the same way, and, in the spirit of the Situationists, she tried to break through that sense of people being numb to violence. But why did she often chose to perform without an audience and give us only her highly controlled document of it?

In contrast to other artists who have used bodily damage, most famously Chris Burden, who was very carefully shot in his right arm by a friend in a studio with a small audience in November 1971, Pane represents something which seems more radical and, to me, specifically feminist: she slashes her hands and feet with razors. She actively hurts herself. Razors  appear in several of her other performances as well, most notably, Azione Sentimentale (Sentimental Action) 1973 and Action Little Journey I (1977).

Gina Pane Little Journey, 1971 detail of photo collage created by artist, from a performance at the Pompidou Center

We associate cutting ourselves with razors with suicide or attempted suicide, particularly for women for some reason. Shooting guns is more male (and Burden carefully chose where to be shot, although likely his work was also a response to the Vietnam War). The extreme of sexual violence, domestic violence, or anguished isolation, have all driven women to attempt suicide, and this form of suicide is always enacted alone (and often unsuccessfully). It is not a topic which is found in other feminist performance art at this time.

But in the years 1969 – 73, many other women, among them the profoundly important Yoko Ono, as early as 1964 with the first performance of her extraordinary “Cut Piece,”[iv],  were putting their body in a vulnerable condition, often with layered political implication. But, looking at an early well known collection of feminist performance art, The Amazing Decade, Women and Performance Art 1970 – 1980[v] we see goddesses, we see mid life crisis, we see body issues. Most related, we see works about rape. But blood is not the result of self mutilation, but of menstruation.

Peggy Phelen in “The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances 1960 – 1980” emphasizes Pane’s influence on Marina Abramovic and Orlan, both artists who took body performance to extremes of damage to themselves in later decades, but with different dynamics. Abramovic has the audience chose how to hurt her, Orlan underwent painful plastic surgery.[vi] A later artist who dealt with blood as a direct reference to political nightmares is Regina José Galindo of Guatemala. In her performance, Who Can Erase the Traces (2003) which is about the violent dictatorships in her country; she carries a bowl of blood (not her own) into which she dips her feet, leaving bloody tracks on the street.

So Pane is unusual in her willingness to take self mutilation as a subject of her work and use it as a metaphor for political violence. She really goes beyond any performance by later artists in her willingness to not only hurt herself, but knowingly deal with that self inflicted pain as a protest of violence, This is what she said:  “ [The wound] is a sign of the state of extreme fragility of the body, a sign of suffering, a sign which indicates the external situation of aggression, of violence to which we are always exposed. It introduces the vaster phenomenon of the relationship between the external world and the psychological world”[vii]

Gina-Pane AzioneSentimentale,1973 photo collage

At the same time, her actions are personal. Azione Sentimentale(1973), as described in a handwritten narrative that accompanies the photographs, was a tribute to her mother.[viii] The narrative recalls a bitter sweet moment of both beauty and sadness, as she visits a cemetery with her mother. As a recording played of two women reading intimate letters, Pane carefully pierced her arm with eight thorns from a bouquet of red roses, then cut her palm with razor blades. She repeated the action with a bouquet of white roses, “then offered herself as a supplicant to the audience.”[ix]( In this case there was an all-woman audience).

The “supplicant” aspect is key to another dimension of Pane’s work, her identification with the martyrdom of Catholic saints. A few years later she created Partition, 1986 (San Sebastiaon, San Pietro, San Lorenzo), consisting of three circles which had tangible, but highly abstracted, icons referring to the martyrdom of the three saints.  She identified with them, who “like her, had voluntarily accepted suffering, hoping to transform their contemporaries and make them better people.“ [x]

But, my favorite piece in the exhibition predates all of these: Enfoncement d’un rayon de soleil (Burial of a Ray of Sunlight), 1969 is a simple action: the artist digs a hole, reflects the sun into it with a mirror, then strolls away. The principle of burying sun seems so pertinent to our current state of the world. Her parallel track of environmental works is barely referenced here, and this early work does not include the debilitating physical exertion of the Actions, nor the heavy philosophical significance of martyrdom, but in its simplicity, it demonstrates a profoundly creative mind and deep love of nature.

Perhaps it was this work with mirrors that led the curator to pair Pane with Joan Jonas, who frequently uses mirrors in her work. Likewise both were pioneers in the use of video. But unlike Pane, the mirroring and video is an end in itself and self referential for Jonas.  She is interesting, even poetic at times, but without a larger significance, I find her work far less moving than Pane’s.

By comparison, Pane, who would have benefited from a lot more explanation in the gallery, is a major contributor to early feminist performance art. It is amazing that this small display is her first in the United States. It also has an odd conclusion which seems to be the antithesis of her highly controlled early work: a large scrawled drawing sent to Franklin Furnace for a performance in 1979-81. Action de chasse, C’est la nuit Chérie (Hunting Action, It’s the Cherished Night) is a giant messy sketch, that again seems to superficially connect the artist to Joan Jonas, whose big rough outlines of drawings for “Lunar Dogs” are in the next room. But this work, remotely assigned to others to perform, seems the antithesis of her principles, as well as demonstrating how much her art changed.

Pane’s pairing of performance involving extreme pain with carefully controlled aesthetic presentation has failed to resonate for audiences in the U.S. because, for all our ability to spread damage and pain around the world, as well as at home, we still have our utopian illusions and a low tolerance for witnessing actual pain inside of an art venue, even in Pane’s carefully orchestrated presentation. Pane failed to wake us up from our numb state, but she certainly succeeded in creating a ground breaking art form that demonstrates her own deep concern about the world.

Carletta Carrington Wilson “Unchain My Heart”

At the outset of her poetic presentation, Carletta Carrington Wilson declared that her exhibition “Unchain My Heart” (listen!) is a testament to mystery. Her exhibition at Art Xchange Gallery included selections from three series of works, “constellation of shadows and leaves” (2006) “Orange You Mingus” (2008-9), and “book of the bound” (2011-12). The artist explained that as she prepared her exhibition she realized they formed a triptych that was unified by the theme of chains, chains as shackles, as ornament, as connections.

Carletta Carrington Wilson kiss of air, tongue of fire, 2006,fabric, beads, paper, found objects, © Carletta Carrington Wilson photo by Ken Wagner

“constellation of shadows and leaves” begins the theme of chains (here one appears to mark the coast of Africa) as well as the articulation of the role of cloth in the slave trade. The works here are referred to as maps by the artist; these maps invoke the sites of slavery through fabric, beads, found objects and chains, most of all though fabrics.

“kiss of air, tongue of fire”:  the strange jolt of the title suggests the contradictions of eighteenth century life. The map appears in the center, as an early cartouche of Africa, inscribed in Latin with the trading of humans as a decorative surrounding. Around the cartouche, and easily overlooked, are several tiny figures cut out  from a cotton shirt making reference to the labor of the cotton fields.

The rococo era to which these decorative colors belong is France in the 18^th century, as well as the height of the American colonies connection to France. Think of those movies with the elegantly attired women dancing formal patterns with equally elegantly attired men as their partners. All of that elegance was born in the slave trade, in the shipping of humans, in the harvesting of cotton, in the milling of fabric. Wilson has researched the slave trade deeply, and she has here created a subtle map of it, evoking the act of slaves through fabrics created by slaves as well as embedding references to it in snakes that penetrate the scene. Here is Carletta Carrington Wilson speaking about these works:

constellation of shadows and leaves

“My fingers move across silk, wool, gabardine, mohair, brocade, chiffon, crepe, seersucker, cotton. Sometimes the cloth is solid an occasional stripe, but mostly, and foremost floral.

“I chart cloth’s language, its artifice, mimicry and mischief mirroring the worlds we discover and rediscover in skin.”**

Wilson emphasized that the slave trade was not over, in fact it is much larger and more invisible than it was in the period of the African slave trade.

Carletta Carrington Wilson, Unchain My Heart, 2009, Fabric beads, costume jewelry, found objects, © Carletta Carrington Wilson photo by Ken Wagner

In 2009 Wilson held an exhibition called “Orange You Mingus”, making reference in the titles of the works to the music of the 1950s. “Orange was the Color of Her Dress,” is the title of a Charles Mingus piece. “Unchain My Heart” is of course, a Ray Charles Song. In this stunning collage “Unchain My Heart”, and the title work of the exhibition, we see a vinyl record embedded in the piece, and a red heart from which chains extend in many materials layered one on top of another, making it difficult to penetrate the surface both literally and metaphorically. There are also layers of transparent fabrics suggesting the swing and rhythm of music, veils, fifties and sixties fashion and much more.  Here is what Carletta Carrington Wilson wrote about this exhibition:

“At heart is a linking of love and loss. Vein, thread, vector of the connector, a chain lies between the two like a noisy road.” In each link’s metallic moment, a papery passageway, a threaded trail stitched upon lips in chains of thought, lingua franca of this forged union. What love-lost ties the trying line together? Is mid-point of oppositional forces? What lock unlocks the language that created the key to the mystery of what holds the holder and the held tethered, kept, yes, claimed.

“It was not meant to be, was not meant to come to this unwieldy conclusion. Like unlikely love, like ill-matched mating, enslavement binds bodies, slaver to slave, in an unholy matrimony of ring upon ring upon ring. Wedded to want, betrothed to the unyielding length’s grasp, the wedding march accompanied by an interminable din of clinks and clanks. Let us thank the rank music that was born of these unions, unions that are yet to be reconciled to their fate. Let must be music the key to set free, body and mind, from our unharmonious history. Unleash we from the bond of bondage in which they were taught to be the buying and th bought for is not this the woe we’ve wed. Oh, set we free … please… set/we/free.”**

This particular work addresses the fact of miscegenation, the entrapment of slaves by their masters, the wedding of the two bodies, then the music as a means to freedom. As the artist poetically read this introduction, I, as a white person, suddenly truly felt for the first time, my own connection to slavery, we were all intertwined.

Carletta Carrington Wilson, Night in Tunisia, 2008, Fabric, beads, costume jewelry, paper found objects, photo by Al Doggett ©Carletta Carrington Wilson

Another musical quotation is “Night in Tunisia.” A lush collage, it suggests elegant, mysterious nights as in the Ella Fitzgerald song (do listen while you look!). But a camel at the center, framed with several borders, evokes, the Arab slave trade, crossing the desert, the northern route in the Ottoman empire. The artist’s poetic words bring us to the music itself “Sound spins round, dizzy as a bird. Holler, moan, croon-cry rising in every moon-wide-eye. Jazz be this, razz, dzz a woo-dop-di-wop be bop . . .” **and much more.

So the evocation of music in the art work and the poetry  is a reference, for Wilson, to the life of African American slaves as well as proud African Americans and music as a means of freedom.

The third section of the exhibition includes some examples from “book of the bound” a 2012 exhibition that I have written about previously on this blog. In the current exhibition, it is represented by examples such as“the old chain,” and “between innocence and morning fire”.

Carletta Carrington Wilson, between innocence and morning fire, 2011, altered book-mixed media collage, fabric beads, costume jewerly found objects, paint, oil pastel © Carletta Carrington Wilson, photo by Susan Platt

Both are created from books, covered with layers of ornate fabrics and chains of various sizes. In the first, we see elephants, who are, the artist emphasized, victimized still like the slaves in present day trade; in the second, we see the blue of the sea and the pearls of the ocean. “book of the bound” honored the silent slaves who never were able to tell their stories. The title of the exhibition refers to those who were bound; Wilson’s books are given as a gift to them.  she found this quote for that exhibition, which makes an astonishing simile:

…for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, like books upon a shelf….

John Newton (18th Century sea captain.  Slaver and composer of the song “Amazing Grace.”)

“The narrative of an individual captured into slavery, however, is cut out, torn off, written over and, summarily, silenced.”**

To present Carletta Carrington Wilson’s work is always daunting for me as a writer, since she is one of the most eloquent people in her own voice that I know. Her poetry, her narratives, her deep commitment to presenting slavery from so many different perspectives, all come together to create a compelling exhibition and performance.  Her own voice speaking poetically is a partner to the visual art and cannot be separated from them.

And she also includes the voices of others. In an impromptu paper chain she encourages us to write our own messages to the distant slaves. The moving result, the poetic messages, hang from a corner, and spill into our hearts with their heartfelt emotions “ To the Distant Relatives who faced the Door of No Return, I have tried to represent you and will continue to thank you for surviving the best way I can.” That is only one of the many links in this chain.

**Note: All quotations from poetry © Carletta Carrington Wilson are used by permission of Carletta Carrington Wilson