Black History Month in the Seattle Art Scene

The Ethnic Art Gallery in the Seattle Municipal Tower is on the third floor. It exists thanks to the hard work of a group of dedicated city employees. Esther Ervin curated the exhibition for Black History Month called Interpreting the Black Journey Eight Viewpoints. These are two of her works that were not in the show . The one in the foreground is called River of No Return and refers to Salmon runs.

There are eight artists in the exhibition. Yadisa Boija, Esther Ervin, Al Doggett, Eddie Walker, Sultan Mohammed, George Jennings, Donald Leonard, and Fasika Moges. How many of those artists have you seen shown in Seattle art galleries?They don’t fit the mainstream definition perhaps, their work is too realistic, or too abstract, or too personal ? There is a subtle difference between artists whose work is acceptable for commercial galleries and art that is not. Most of these artists went to art school, most of them support themselves in an art related field. But they follow their own paths. They are not trying to fit in with a current style or a current issue.

They are all artists of African American heritage. But there are other artists of African American heritge who show in commercial galleries also like Ron Hill and Marita Dingus, so this is not a simple question of racism. I will do an image gallery to show you all of their work. You can decide for yourself why they don’t swim with the famous fish of art.

Sultan Mohammed Riots 2007 This is the story of the revenge and rebellion of Queen Yodit (Judith)who ousted the ruler of the ancient Axum Kingdom. and ruled as a warrior queen for forty years, according to legend.

George Jennings NaKeesa A portrait of his wife

Fasika Moges Dawn Dancing
referring to women playing drums. Fasika is Ethiopian

David Leonard David ( as in David and Goliath- overcoming obstacles of his life)

Al Doggett Samburu Land -looking over his lost land. The guard in the exhibition told me how much he loved this work because he was from East Africa and was eager to tell me about the Masai who live there.

Eddie Walker, James W. Washington Jr. Working

Yadisa Boija Recession an artist from Ethiopia. He says “We hear about the struggles of corporate financial institutions. We worry about the spending habits of consumers, charts, polls graphs. But who cares about ordinary people?”
The title of this work is Invisibles and Boija’s label says that it “chronicles the life and struggles of immigrants new to their community and unaccepted in their homeland. They walk quietly unnoticed and unrecognized. “

Sanctions, Divestment to End the Israeli Occupation

That is eighty year old Judith Kolokoff next to me at what we called an informational demonstration at Trader Joe’s. We are nationwide and internationally joining people who are calling for divestment of Israeli investments and sanctions against Israeli products. Trader Joe’s carries cheese made on a farm that was land taken from Palestinians.

Liana Badr Eye of the Mirror

Howard Zinn

Irreplaceable, outspoken voice against fascism. He never stopped speaking up. He is an example for all of us. Like Edward Said, his voice will be heard through the next generation of people he inspired. Terrorism and War 2002 is the book I have read most closely. Written right after 9-11 it zeroes right in on the gigantic military budget and the fact that it has “absolutely no effect on the danger of terrorism. If we want real security, we will have to change our posture int he world – to stop being an intervening military power and to stop dominating the economies of other countries. “

Martin Luther King Day

This is the third year that my grandson Max and I have gone on the Martin Luther King Day March and he is only two years old!. The first year he was only two months old. I have a picture of that on my Flickr site. Last year he was just over one year, and I put that on my Christmas card This year as he marches along he makes it to the blog. His shirt and mine are supporting health care, education, housing and jobs, these are the same issues of economic justce that Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently about as the means of real equality for all races as Bob Herbert wrote so eloquently in his editorial today. As my grandson and I marched, we were surrounded by people who agree, who care, who are uplifted, as I am, every year, by this holiday. The march in Seattle always begins with workshops and a rally, it is more embedded in activism than the church concerts and community celebrations.

Joe Sacco Footnotes in Gaza

Joe Sacco is profoundly engaged with the experience of war in his new book. It is a major work of art, a telling of the Palestinian Israeli conflict from the ground in Gaza, a layering of time frames, a balance of personal ( not his experience, but that of fighters and families in Gaza) and political. I haven’t read the whole book yet. It is so important that I re-read most pages three times. First for the text, then for the images, then for the ideas. He alternates between large landscape scale images and close up heads of people he talked to, old fighters, survivors of massacres, from decades ago. Sometimes he has a sequence of smaller heads or a family scene. The scenes of families trying to live their lives in one room for twelve people, or having another child because the father may die are heartbreaking.

The stories that the old soldiers tell, of their house being invaded by Israeli soldiers in 1956 and the mass murder of young men, simply lined up in a square and shot, are horrifying. These men escaped through luck ( they didn’t quite die, when the Israelis shot them over and over, or they ran away), but so many didn’t. Sacco gives us the up close experience of war, hatred, civilian confrontation. Sacco offers no solutions, although he is obviously aware that these people are pawns in political power games, but in depicting the house on the inside, or in one case we are in the line up of the men about to be shot, or we are seeing the devestation from above, we are somehow there. Not really of course, but more than in a photograph, a novel, or a painting.

And I have only read the first 100 pages of 400 pages.

Joe Sacco came to Seattle to speak about his book. One friend of mine described his presentation well “he spoke with the precision of a diplomat, walking through a minefield with a book balanced on his head.” On my first impression, Sacco was understated and modest in his presentation, there was no heavy emotional load on the talk ( only one questioner said what we were all feeling, all the nightmare of the injustice). But then, I thought, he has so much in the book that he doesn’t need to be emotional, and if he were it would have killed him long ago.
His survival is based on his care. His care in research, in protecting his sources, in negotiating war zones, in his brilliant art.

This book is a must read. It is far more complex than his 1996 book Palestine, which was more personal and had moments of humor. This book is set deeply inside Gaza framed around two massacres that occured in 1956 in Gaza, in Khan Younis and Rafah, but giving us backwards and forwards the conditions on the ground for people in Gaza. It was completed before Operation Cast Lead, or at least that atrocity is not cited in the preface. But the devestation it depicts is the same as that of any military conflict of soldiers killing in villages.

The first shock was the image of people literally digging in the sand to find shelter in 1948 when the refugees first arrived. Then the image of them crossing over the lines of Israel to their former land and being called “infiltrators.” Then the fifties style development of housing by the UN, and now the seasoned soldiers who have fought continuously since the 1950s, understanding that the new battle today is beyond their human capabilities to fight, it is about the Israel/U.S. sheer technical killing power with machines.

Sacco wants to make sure that history is not entirely written by people who forget the early massacres that planted the seeds of hatred, as he puts it, quoting from one old man who was a child in the 1950s and saw his uncle die. As Sacco succinctly put it, it is as though the Battle of Britain has been going on continuously to the present day. There is no time for people to recollect, record, they have been in survival mode since 1948. He knows his book can’t really change anything. There are huge powers at work that he cannot affect. But at least we can all know more about the history of this horrible conflict, as the last escape hatch is being sealed by Egypt and Israel with a fence manufactured in the United States.

We all share in the war crimes. We are paying for the equipment. Our support for Israeli military operations this year is almost 3 billion.

Read this book. there are lots of reviews and discussions on line. Here is an example

Joe Feddersen’s Vital Signs

These are installation shots from Joe Feddersen’s exhibition “Vital Signs” which closes on Sunday at the Tacoma Art Museum. The exhibition sings with the artist’s poetry based on geometry and landscape. He celebrates ancient history as well as the contemporary land of today. The landscape of the Okanagan , shown in this detail of his wall mural of 500 separate pieces, is open and rugged. He refers to contemporary landscape destructions, like clearcutting, suggested in the brown triangles, and to geometric towers for the high tension wires that gallop across the open land in the center part of Washington State. The Okanagan is, for those who are driving to Spokane on the interstate freeway, a desolate empty landscape, made more desolate by the Grand Coulee Dam which was completed just after World War II. That dam destroyed the ancestral fishing streams of the Colville Indians, the Spokane Indians, and other tribes. There were no fish ladders at that time, the fish were completely unable to return to their spawning grounds.

Joe Feddersen is a Colville Indian. He comes from that land, it is part of him and his ancestors. After the dam was built, he worked for the power companies, a common occurance with Indians, whose only choice for a livelihood is the use of energy based on exploitation of their lands. But he knows those electrical towers, so when he includes them in a painting they are personal.

He has taught at Evergreen State College for the last twenty years and understands modernism, he understands color theory, his work draws on a sophisticated contemporary aesthetic, and materials- like the shining orange fish traps in glass, or the large vessels with reflective paint on which he has sand blasted the contemporary designs of parking lots and tire treads. In the exhibition he has also included some traditionally scaled woven baskets with tire track designs. He is commenting out of a deep silence and reverence, he accepts the present land, but he reminds us of where we come from, and suggests where we are now. He does not predict the future.

The exhibition has a curiously calming effect, as though we have gone into the landscape to meditate. I could feel his energy flowing through the exhbiition, as the various media, scale, colors, and geometries interacted. He is a master printmaker, a weaver, an artist of sand blasted glass. His connection to time immemorial is moving through all of the works. They are objects for sale now, not integrated with daily use, but they speak of their former functions. Since natives see our relationship to nature, to history, to prehistory, to each other, to animals as all part of a continuous non hierarchical flow of energy, these paintings and other objects suggest that idea as well. Abstract modernism has been re energized with its real sources of power in ancient abstractions.

And a tribute to the Gaza Solidarity marchers

From 42 countries 1300 people came to honor the nightmare of Gaza and the Egyptian government closed the border at Rafah, the only point into Gaza not controlled by Israel. Some are on hunger strike in Jordan. We are all with them. Last year there were marches all over the world in support of the horrors of the Operation Cast Lead. This year people have gone there in support, spurred on by a call from Code Pink and other groups, but are being barred from entering. Protest in NYC . Michael Ratner spoke of the fundamental violation of human rights by Israel in Gaza. He went to Gaza with his family. Currently a few hundred people from the international delegation were allowed to enter, but it was regarded as not enough and an effort to divide the delegation. Thousands gathered on either side to honor the dead and to call for an end to the blockade. In Cairo Freedom Marchers were brutally attacked by the police.

Honor the Iranians

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y98r5CVP7U
There are several moving slide shows on You Tube of which I am giving a link to one. The photographer Farhad Rajabali has courageously signed some of his photographs. We see so many different people. It is incredible that Ahmadinejad can attribute their activism to Israel and US who have every reason to keep the current government in place as an easy enemy to target.

On this New Year’s Eve we must honor the young Iranians who are showing so much courage in protesting the fascist regime in Iran. It no longer has anything to do with religion, it is a police state. These young people are resisting on so many levels.

Do we have the courage to do that in this country? It is striking to compare the police confrontation in Iran with the one in Copenhagen, young people being arrested by police. But behind those police uniforms are mostly more young people. And in Iran there are also the Basijis the young paramilitaries in the pay of the government who beat up their contemporaries.

The People’s Summit in Seattle and Climate Change in Copenhagen

Two weeks ago in Seattle there was a group of people who were preparing for Copenhagen – they were looking back to N30 ten years ago in Seattle and looking to the future planning for the planet. Alli Chagi -Starr told us about her Art and Revolution Another World is Possible Road Show that promoted the anti globalization protest in Seattle. That is her giant puppet above from the original Seattle anti globalization protests. It represnets an corporate octopus that has been muzzled. There were dozens of giant puppets there.

Dena Hoff as a farmer talked about La Via Campesina, the international peasants movement for food sovereignty, a group that is in Copenhagen joining the mass actions as seen in this image

Also speaking was Jihan Gearon of the Indigenous Environmental Network. Jihan is a young woman who is with that group’s Energy and Climate Program and networks with tribal nations to give them support for better solutions and green economic opportunities (instead of the historical opportunities for indigenous peoples to destroy themselves and their culture through accepting jobs in mining coal, oil, and uranium on the reservations). Jihan is talking about where we are now. As she said, we are all going to have to face the lies: we cannot buy our way out and we cannot stop climate change without changing our lifestyle. We must move away from greenwashing ( like carbon offsets) and toward protecting what we have left. The Indigenous Environmental Network is much in evidence in Copenhagen. Thank goodness. They really know what they are talking about. One of the big campaigns is against Tar Sands in Canada.Watch this amazing video. There was a die in in Montreal. to support them.

It is hard to believe how violently the UN and the Danish police are treating both protestors and legitimate participants in the Climate Change conference. This bear is from the Backbone Campaign in Seattle, but the fact that thousands of protestors are being arrested and legitimate groups like Friends of the Earth International are being expelled from the conference, is hard to understand. Could the UN be afraid of the people of the world?

Olivia Zaleski has some good posts about the conference covering youth, grassroots organizing, and exactly how the anarchists were simply a small group who were intentionally disruptive.within thousands of peaceful protestors Amy Goodman has interviewed NNimmo Bassey, Nigerian leader of Friends of the Earth International as he was being expelled from the conference. Today was a plan to “Reclaim Power”.

Is this what it has come to, complete alliance with corporate interests and despoiling the environment? And what about Denmark, it has entirely lost its image as a happy place with socialist leanings ( it was pretty shaky already after the incident of the Mohammed comic book a couple of years ago). We see fascist looking police beating up and putting plastic cuffs on protestors, preemptively arresting thousands. This is incredible. The future of the earth is obviously in the hands of the corporations who have no concern at all except their own profits. They don’t seem to get the fundamental principle that the earth is finite.