A Visit to South Africa by Pamela Allara and the new opera Sibyl by William Kentridge

 

 

 

Some background information: in the 1980s, when I taught modern art history at Tufts, I was the academic advisor for the students in the MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. One of my students, Kim Berman, was from Johannesburg and she was very active in the anti-apartheid movement. Through her, I became interested in activist art, and contemporary South African art in general,

 

In 2000 I was appointed to teach at the Johannesburg Technikon. I have returned every year since for research, writing, and curating.  Obviously, no trip was possible last year, so I was especially excited to travel again, for two weeks this past April.

 

 

Susan has asked me to discuss my visit to William Kentridge’s studio, which took place right before I left, but I cannot resist briefly showing a few other highlights. One was an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery of the wire sculpture of Walter Oltmann, “Armour and Lace: A Bestiary”. In the photo above , Walter is on the right; David Paton, Kim’s colleague at University of Johannesburg on the left; I’m in the center.

 

Walter taught for many years at Pretoria University, and has recently retired early. Retirement is encouraged by age 65, as the South African government is eager to make way for non-white faculty.

 

Back in 2003, I included one of his life-sized standing armored figures in the Co-existence exhibition I curated at Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum). He is still working with those figures, although as the title suggests, he has also turned to wire lizards and other flora and fauna in wire reliefs. As always, the sheer volume of the labor involved was mind-blowing

 

I also visited Usha Seejarim’s studio on the other side of Johannesburg. Her studio does not seem spacious, but perhaps that is because her work is large. A line of red and yellow threads spread about 20 feet across the floor, which will be installed in the arts festival in Grahamstown, South Africa in June. Lying on the floor next to the thread piece were charming ‘spiders’ made from one iron plate with thin metal legs attached.

 

She is also constructing, with the help of one of her assistants, 8 metal models of the clothes peg, each about a foot high, that will be sold to cover the costs of fabrication and shipping of “The Resurrection of the Clothes Peg”, which will be the centerpiece of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada in July.

Her work draws from domestic objects like irons and clothes pegs . As she explained in a conversation with Robert Preece in Sculpture magazine

 

” The domestic objects in my work are, for me, somewhat metaphorical; I think about their function. For example, the clothes iron smooths out creases; its function is to make a shirt or other item of clothing neat and presentable. The clothes peg holds, clasps, grips, and embraces; the broom sweeps away dirt and clears a space. I am aware of how these objects and their use are associated with a female role. Thus, they become quite genderized. I have come to recognize the particular triangular shape of the iron and how that shape has a feminist/vaginal reference. So, the works do not refer to a specific context as much as they refer to the notion of domestic roles and how they are—historically, culturally, socially—assigned to or claimed by the female. I would like to think of these forms as universal symbols understood around the world.”

 

Usha was just back from Lagos, where the work is being fabricated. The final work will be about 40 feet high, and the most monumental piece at BM. She is now trying desperately to get a visa so she can be there for the opening.

 

 

 

Now on to the visit to William Kentridge’s studio. Kentridge is, of course, South Africa’s most well-known artist; recently, he has received The Queen Sonja Lifetime Achievement Award from the Queen Sonja Art Foundation in Norway. Kentridge also is a long-time friend of Kim Berman.

 

 

After her MFA studies in Boston, Berman founded the community printmaking studio, Artist Proof Studio, in Johannesburg in 1991. It is now a thriving center, offering classes in printmaking and professional printing services to artists such as Bokang Mankoe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APS had been downtown, but the city wanted its convenient location for its offices, so moved it lock, stock and barrel to a fancy shopping center. So the students must take a daily hike from the public transport downtown.  Because it was a holiday, only two of the printers were there when I arrived.

 

 

Kim and Nathi Ndladla, the head of the studio, were working on the giant Kentridge print, “You Who Never Arrived,” with its forest of trees. The work consists of about 12 prints attached to handmade paper that is then affixed to cloth, becoming a sort of tapestry. I was nervous about the two of them filling in the blanks across the spaces between the individual prints and touching up the trees with black ink, but Nathi and Kim clearly enjoyed themselves.

The next day Nathi, who had the Kentridge hangings carefully wrapped, drove me to William Kentridge’s house in the suburb of Houghton so he could sign them. I was sure that the source of his imagery was one of the trees on his property, but when I looked around I was clearly wrong.

 

William’s son had been married there in the garden the day before, and clean up was taking place. William was leaving for exhibits in London and Lucerne that evening, but took the time to show us the new video that will accompany a performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the London Symphony Orchestra (I think).

He also showed me the notebook where he jots down the quotes and phrases he uses in his artworks. He was remarkably gracious, given his tight schedule, but this is true of South Africans in general. Also remarkable is the lack of ‘artistic ego.’ After all, he is South Africa’s most well-known artist, with a huge retrospective planned in London next year. But clearly, he considered Kim and Nathi to be colleagues. I may be wrong, but I think many successful American artists would consider their assistants to be just that: assistants.  Not the case here, another reason why I enjoy going to South Africa and writing about the art there.

 

The political situation in South Africa is not the greatest at present, as Cyril Ramaphosa’s government is rife with corruption. The situation is also dire with museums; for example, the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s facilities are in terrible shape, with the collection in jeopardy. And yet, artists continue on, and good work continues to be made. Their continuing productivity is a source of hope in grim times.

 

 

Kentridge lives in the house he grew up in. His father, Sir Sidney Kentridge, defended Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trials that sent Mandela to prison for 27 yrs. His studio is the former garage on the property, now quite transformed! The collage of flowers and plants on the end wall of the studio he made for his daughter’s wedding a year ago, and re-installed for his son’s wedding, which had taken place the day before we arrived.

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Afterword by Susan

I was very fortunate to see the London premier of William Kentridge’s opera Sibyl  at the Barbican.

The artist himself was there in the audience!

Here is the only photo I was permitted to take of the theater screen before it began

Here is great clip

From The Times Review Donald Hutera
Monday April 25 2022, 12.00pm, The Times

“The South African visual artist William Kentridge’s Sibyl is an extraordinary achievement, no matter how you categorise it. The work comes in two parts: an approximately 20-minute film accompanied by live piano and male chorus and, at double that length, a ritualistic chamber opera (originally commissioned by Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and created between 2016 and 2019) featuring more music, song and dance and the kind of multilayered stage imagery in which Kentridge specialises. To call it stimulating would be an understatement. It is also cumulatively, and sometimes almost inexplicably, moving.”

 

Here is a You Tube clip

 

It was a multimedia extravaganza of music, dance, costume, all performed by South Africans of incredible skill.

 

The theme was the unpredictability of trying to predict the future. The Cumaen Sibyl was a fortune teller who threw fortunes out at random on oak leaves and people had to figure out which was theirs, a metaphor for the unpredictablity of life and knowing the future.  So the opera had a lot of paper flying around, lots of fortunes.

But it also refers to our contemporary efforts to predict the future with algorithms

 

As one anonymous analysis explained

“Unspoken throughout but hovering over the opera is the notion that our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll get a bank loan, whether we’ll live to 80, what our genetics will be. This certainty of an implacable mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a more human connection to our destiny, an instinct to believe in the possibility of something other than the machine to guide us in how we see our future. The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in history, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed consciousness that makes us human.”

 

 

The evening began with a 22 minute silent black and white film The City Deep with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu leading a chorus of nine performers and and Kyle Shepherd, a leading progressive piano player from South Africa.  Above is a still from a the Kentridge film, The City Deep

 

As explained by the Goodman Gallery in NYC ( where you can see drawings for the film)

“In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place.

 

” The action jumps: the museum collapses, Soho comes face to face with his fate, whilst a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of the film’s creation, of the artist in his studio—always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny.”

 

” City Deep is the anticipated 11th film in Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection series, a collection of animated films drawn over 30 years, featuring the protagonist Soho Eckstein. South Africa’s political transition from the violent years of apartheid to democracy sets the scene for a saga of loss, love, anger, compassion, guilt and forgiveness. The films revolve around the power-hungry mining magnate Soho Eckstein, his wife Mrs. Eckstein and her lover, the solitary artist Felix Teitlebaum. As the story unfolds, Soho’s empire crumbles as he comes to terms with his own frailties and the first signs of mortality.

 

” Like previous films in the series, City Deep is grounded within Kentridge’s home city of Johannesburg and can be viewed as a counterpoint to the 1990 film, Mine, which depicts images of the deep level mining industry.

 

City Deep extends this depiction to the informal, surface-level “zama zama” miners of current day Johannesburg. Translated from Zulu as ‘try your luck’ or ‘take a chance’, “zama zama” is the name given to the miners who illegally work decommissioned mines on the edges of the formal mining economy. Manual labour replaces large machines, creating open scars in the Highveld landscape.

In City Deep, the “zama zama” miners and the landscape merge into artworks hanging in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, itself built during the heyday of gold mining in Johannesburg. Wandering the exhibition spaces is a deeply contemplative Soho gazing at the artworks and into vitrines. Towards the end of the film the gallery collapses in on itself, an imagined demise of an institution in a state of increasing dereliction.

 

The second part of the evening featured Waiting for the Sibyl, the opera. During the pandemic Kentridge published the libretto.

As Kentridge explains:

“The project at Rome Opera, Waiting for the Sibyl, comes from an invitation from the opera house to make a companion piece to the 1968 piece by the American artist Alexander Calder, called Work in Progress. The 1968 piece is a beautiful, whimsical almost-happening of the era, with mobiles slowly turning on the stage, and groups of bicycle riders; but the signature mobiles of Alexander Calder are the heart of the piece.

 

In responding to the invitation to do a second half of the evening, I wanted something that also had a sense of turning, of revolution, and of the lightness of the Calder. I was reminded of the image of the Cumaean Sibyl. My understanding of her story was that she lived in her cave near Naples; people would come to her with questions about their fate, and she would write the answers on oak leaves. There would be a pile of oak leaves at the front of her cave and people would come to get their answers.

 

But inevitably there would be a wind which blew the leaves around – so you never knew if you were getting your fate or somebody else’s fate. It’s a beautiful metaphor of not being able to predict our futures. This idea of leaves blowing and turning, and uncertainty, became the connecting point for Calder’s moving, turning mobiles and something that grounds the piece with that turning but hooks into questions that I’m interested in today.”

“I was thinking about the theme of fate and our future and the telling of our future, as the Sibyls did; this meets the work of Alexander Calder; and both of these come together in the material ways of working to make the piece.

The idea of turning leaves into pages, and the pages swirling around, brought together the turning sculptures of Calder, and the pages on which I had been obsessively drawing in the service of making films out of books. Part of the form became the projections of the texts and the drawings in the book and the shadow made in the book by the performer of the Sibyl. Different scenes were added. A scene in the waiting room for the Sibyl. A scene about which is the right decision and which is the wrong one. How do you know which is the chair that will collapse when you sit on it and which is the chair that will support you?”

 

There were a lot of people sitting on collapsing chairs in the opera. The multimedia made it overwhelming, stunning piano, singing, film, dance, costumes. The odd flat discs on people’s heads  I finally figured out connected to the Alexander Calder 

 

Here is another excellent You Tube video from the rehearsal for the  original performance in Teatro  dell’Opera Rome, September 2019, before the pandemic delayed it.

 

Even in the stills you can see the layers of complexity!

Photos by Stella Oliver and Yasuko Kasegama

 

Louise Bourgeois Goes Way Beyond Anyone Else

 

 

Louise Bourgeois affects us viscerally. The extraordinary physicality of her work outstrips any other art addressing the female body and its  excruciating alterations from pregnancy, childbirth,  parenting, sexuality,  abuse, aging.

 

I once met her in Houston at a conference of women artists who were marching for the ERA in 1975. She was wearing a many breasted Artemis dress.

 

But the works in “Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child.” at the Hayward Gallery, begun so many years later are not at all entertaining. They are not easy. This print is called Umbilical Cord dated 2000.

 

I felt drained after viewing this exhibition  It looks at her works using textiles that she began only in the mid 1990s when she was already in her eighties. We were thinking Oh textiles, pretty benign. But of course it was the opposite.

The first piece we saw as we entered the gallery suggests the process of the artist in creating these works. Apparently in the mid 90s she asked her assistant to bring all her old clothes down to her studio.

Of course her old clothes are a lot more interesting than our old clothes. Old fashioned undergarments hang on hangers or odd large bones  in a “cell”, as Bourgeois tellingly calls this type of installation marked private.

 

At the center of the cell is a small spiral staircase with a bed and a body from which threads emerge. If you look hard you will see a spider also.

 

 

 

As we went further into the exhibition we saw more old fashioned underwear now hanging on bones in the gallery, not in a cell. It was somehow more frightening that way.

In the next segment was another famous and terrifying work: the famous spider installation from 1997. A huge spider, called Maman, nine meters high, was featured in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern when it opened in 1999, and again was displayed outside in 2007 during a major retrospective of the artists work. According to the artist  ‘The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver … (she) was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

 

In addition spiders spin threads, and repair their webs when we destroy them. But they can also swallow insects easily.

 

In this version of Spider there are fragments of tapestry inside as well as other details of sewing. As we all know, Bourgeois worked for her family restoring tapestries as a child. She worked on details such as hands or feet. Here we see the spider that spins thread turns into a giant predator.

From the catalog essay “Weaving Materials and Metaphors,” by Lynn Cooke

 

“While the spider and unspooling thread were freighted with
personal signification for Bourgeois, both are replete with classical
allusions as she doubtless knew. In Metamorphoses, Ovid
provides an aetiology for the former in the tale of Arachne who
foolishly contested Athena’s pre-eminence in the art of weaving.
Enraged that she had been bested, the goddess transformed the
upstart maiden into a spider bound forever to spin and weave.
Thread lies also at the heart of a haunting myth featuring the
Three Fates who control the destinies of mortals. In Hesiod’s
version, Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos,

‘the inflexible one’, who terminates each human life with an irreparable snip of her scissors, all take the form of old women.”

 

 

Another installation Needle 1992  The gigantic weaving needle arcs from hanging yarn that spools on the floor. It has had an unavoidable sexual reference of invasion, but who is invading what. The oval shapes maybe ovaries? The sheer audacity of the piece is thrilling.

 

The exhibition included several series based on smaller embroidered works. As always, you think oh, small scale, but then pow.

 

Many of the works were figurative. Here is the incredible image of childbirth at the top of the post : Do Not Abandon Me 1992

These images really speak for themselves. They are all untitled.

1996

2007

2005

 

 

 

1996

 

1996

 

There were many other works in the exhibition, such as this one called Endless Pursuit from 2000.

 

Or this one  Cell xxi 2000 and  you see other cells aligned with it behind it.

The famous spiral woman 2003 but it exists in many variations of course. She looks like she is experiencing multiple pregnancies

Particularly painful Knife Figure 2002

 

The Mute 2002

And much much more. Incredible bodies intertwined missing some parts such as heads. Anonymous copulating that feels as though the two bodies are one single organism. For some reason I didn’t take pictures of those. Perhaps because they were all black and too dark in both their color and their mood.

 

A great deal has been written about Louise Bourgeois and she wrote a great deal herself. But in the end I am speechless at the sheer physicality of her work. So the woven head of the mute seems to be an appropriate ending.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hew Locke “The Procession” at the Tate Britain

 

 

On our trip to London one of the most exciting experiences was seeing Hew Locke’s “Procession”

filling the central court of the Tate Britain with its brilliant collaged figures entirely constructed from recycled materials.

 

The Tate is on the site of a former prison, which I wrote about in 2017. Now we see it as the product of capitalism and specifically the exploitation of black labor in the sugar industry. Henry Tate was a sugar magnate.

 

Hew Locke: The Procession “What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort-colourful and attractive but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time.”

 

The Procession has 150 figures, no two are the same

It includes painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture. It is entirely imaginary, there is no particular culture or mask quoted. The Procession can be almost a funeral.

 

 

Celebration, worship, protest, mourning, escape Imaginary people
Starting point Henry Tate, sugar refining magnate. “reflect on the cycles of history and the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power.”

The artist bought shares from dead companies included the Black Star line.

Text below is from Tate:

“The figures travel through

space but also through time. They carry historical and cultural baggage: the evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellishes their clothes and banners.

“Images of the colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood Guyana emblazon the flags and their bearers, its flooded fields and rotten wooden walls vanishing under rising sea levels. Despite this, their attire and stance suggest power and self-assertion.

Locke occupies a space that was founded from wealth derived form an industry built on the labour of enslaved African people and their descendants and which subsequently relied on the indentured labour of Asian people”

 

Here is a misshapen globe

 

Locke says he “Makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing it out of the walls of the building.”

“The Procession” also carries Locke’s own past artistic journey with imagery linked to his previous work incorporating statues, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

“While being marked by history, The Procession’s participants are not constrained by it. These fragments come together to usher new meanings and sensations, stirring collective memories, fears and desires.”

 

 

 

 

“The work evokes real events and histories and yet presents them as aesthetic fiction. As we join “The Procession” and Locke’s artistic imagination begins to work on us, the figures invite us to walk alongside them for a while, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.”

“The influences of both Indian and Indo-Caribbean culture can be seen in The Procession, as in much of Locke’s work to date. It is unclear whether the procession participants are wearing masks or if these are their true faces. Several figures and costumes within the Procession reference specific Caribbean Carnival characters from across the region.

 

These include Mother Sally in her voluminous dress, Midnight Robber, wearing a huge brimmed hat, Pitchy Patchy, dressed in a suit made of tattered, colourful pieces of cloth and Sailor Mas, inspired by British, French and American naval staff. Each has its histories and its portrayal differs across the Caribbean”

 

 

Churchill statue in background that artist has covered with graffiti

 

 

I will stop here. It is impossible to actually take it all in.

The Stonehenge Exhibition at the British Museum

Right after we arrived in London, we went to the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. I got free press passes for me, Henry and Henry’s sister, Imogen.

 

There were so many amazing aspects to this display that it is impossible to convey the depth and extent of the experience. Not to mention the complexity of the information provided.

 

Stonehenge was constructed at around the same time, 4,500 years ago, as the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

The exhibition spanned the

Mesolithic (c. 12,000–6,000 years ago),

the Neolithic (c. 6,000–4,500 years
ago) and

the Bronze Age (c. 4,500–2,800 years ago).

 

Here is the first image in the Stonehenge exhibition at the  British Museum. I took a still from the video that shows how many Neolithic sites have been found in the United Kingdom. The exhibition also includes work from Europe. This photo shows most of the 1300 sites discovered in the UK, it does not include Brittainy.  The first alignments with the solstice have been located as dating to 3700 BC

 

“Stonehenge’s significance changed enormously about 4,000 years ago, as it gradually became the central point around which hundreds of burial mounds were raised. Across Britain and Ireland during this period the importance of death and the role of grave goods in expressing ideas and identities reached its peak” cat p. 20)
The early societies were connected to nature, to the heavens and to one another.

 

 

There was an overall trajectory from peaceful, celestial worshipping communities, to, farmers, to guess what, social hierarchies based on wealth and then marking territory and warfare. the transition from stone to metal was a  key moment for the change from communal society to individualism.

Beautiful display of stone axes.

I realized as I was writing this that I visited a Neolithic burial site with my 87  year old mother in law in 1995 at Barclodiad y Gawres (Welsh for “The Giantess’s Apronful”) near Aberffraw in Anglesey

 

 

Elaborate relief incised into flint. These extraordinary objects were so beautifully displayed!

 

 

These incised stones were found in the open air,  not in a burial.

 

 

 

Now we move on to the age of metal and gold, a significant change in the society. Status comes in!

 

 

 

Those conical bronze shapes on the wall were placed on women’s stomachs in Scandianavian graves. THey are covered with symbols of sirals and sun motifs symbolizing regeneration and rebirth. The connical shape represents the center point of the sun’s power.

 

 

Here is the most exciting and beautiful piece in the exhibition!

This sky disc was one of the most exciting pieces in the exhibition

It gives us the subtlety of the early understanding of constellations, and in its materials, speaks of the exchange of goods over long distances, It included bronze from Central Europe.

 

 

 

The British Museum did a stunning job of installing, sequencing,  and explaining these sometimes esoteric objects. They carefully gave equal privilege to the humble works of ax heads and the gold necklaces. They also gave us a sense of what holds a  society together ( a shared belief system) and what makes it fall apart, land cultivation, property, then competition, individualism, and finally warfare.

 

But there were also protests. Shockingly there is a  plan to build a road under Stonehenge

 

As well as BP sponsorship of the exhibition and the British Museum in general On the right it describes how BP  while sponsoring this exhibition is simultaneously destroying indigenous Rock Art in Murujuga Western Australia 10 times older than Stonehenge

and much more: the issue of repatriation and the effects of the cllimate crisis on communities most affected by BP

 

 

The image behind the text is a reworking of BPs sunny greenwashing logo which is why this group is called behindthelogos.org

 

Just in case that isn’t enough bad news about BP, I read today on the site “We Don’t Have Time” a post that said

 

“BP to ramp up oil output, inaugurate U.S. Gulf platform in 2022 BP (NYSE:BP) expects to double crude oil production from its Thunder Horse project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and launch its latest production platform by the end of this year”

 

The company expects to produce ~200K boe/day by year-end 2022 from the current 100K boe/day at Thunder Horse, according to Starlee Sykes, BP’s Senior VP for the Gulf of Mexico and Canada.

 

BP (BP) also is preparing to start its fifth operated platform this year – Argos – the centerpiece of its $9B Mad Dog 2 project in the Gulf, but Sykes declined to specify in which quarter production would start.
“More Gulf of Mexico oil and gas helps improve emissions globally,” Sykes said, according to Reuters.

Last September, BP (BP) announced the start-up of Thunder Horse South’s phase 2 expansion and said a total of eight wells would be drilled to increase oil and gas production to ~400K boe/day by the mid-2020s.”

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As Neolithic Art  is an area far outside my expertise, it was fortuitous that as soon as I got back to Seattle, I went to a symposium about Nancy Holt’s Rock Rings 1977-78 at Western Washington University.,

which draw on her exploration of Neolithic sites that she visited with Smithson in 1969 as well as her interest in celestial constellations and stone construction. They were completed after her more famous Sun Tunnels, and only four years after Smithson’s death. They align with Polaris the North Star. Her Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, like Stonehenge, align with the Summer Solstice.

Rock Rings is constructed of Triassic era Schist.

 

 

 

 

The Mad Hatter Hotel in London

For my first blog post on our exciting trip to London I feature our special hotel The Mad Hatter! As we checked in we were welcomed by Alice through the Looking Glass, literally. her hand enters a mirror which reflects the check in desk. Behind the desk was a large hat!

 

So why the Mad Hatter.?  –

As this sign declares, “Southwark was the centrer of  hat production  for hundreds of years. Due to poor factory conditions hat makers were exposed to mercury in felt. Today we know that mercury poisoning causes dementia-lik symbtoms, but int he 19th century people assumed hat makers were all “mad” drunks, hence the phrase “mad as a hatter” which is wehre ourname comes from. This was famously satirzed by Lewis Carroll’s eccentric character The Mad Hatter. ”

On the ceiling of the dining room we had the Mad Hatters Tea Party

 

On one window the mural blocked the view of the construction nearby

 

In the pub each booth had a different topic

 

Near the elevator, the descent to the rest rooms

 

 

In our bedroom we had some playing cards over the bed

 

View out the window. Insane development of high rises near by and in every direction

The Thames River Walk was only a block away

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our little hotel amid the development around it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alms Houses overshadowed by giant skyscrapers

 

Another view out our window in another direction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This small hotel is holding its own amidst so much development. Be sure to stay there if you go to London! It is super well located with a short walk along the Thames to the Tate Modern and the Haymarket, not tomention the National Theater where we saw the play “Small Island”

Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water

Canadian (Musqueam First Nation) Susan Point’s The First People suggests one theme of the amazing exhibition “Our Blue Planet:Global Visions of Water” at the Seattle Art Museum only until May 30.

 

Made of red and yellow cedar the piece seems to speak to us of both survival and sorrow, as these faces, each one distinctly different, call or perhaps sing to us with their rounded mouths as they float in interconnected streams.

The artist states:

“I am mostly inspired by nature and our connected human spirit. I try to illustrate our need to protect and restore our natural treasures and bring reflection and awareness to issues of concern in all our lives.”

 

“Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water” suggests that as it encompasses 92 works of art from 17 countries and seven native tribes.

 

During the pandemic three curators at the Seattle Art Museum assembled “Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water” with 74 artists from 17 countries and seven Native American tribes. It draws entirely from the museum’s permanent collection and loans from local collectors.

 

The curators, Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art, Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art, and Natalia Di Pietrantonio, newly appointed  Assistant Curator of South Asian Art, created ten themes that refer to water as necessary to life, as pleasure, as law, as mythic and as desecrated. They encompass celebration, poetry, ritual and catastrophe.

We are greeted at the entrance with a video of Ken Workman, a direct descendant of Chief Seattle, welcoming us, in the Lushootseed language.

It is moving and appropriate that he is standing on the shores of the Duwamish River as he greets us, the river of plenty before white colonizers arrived, and now a Superfund site and industrial wasteland.

 

Immediately after Workman’s greeting we look up to see Carolina Caycedo’s fifty-foot banner that charts the change in a river from healthy to polluted, signaling the theme of the exhibition in one dramatic statement. Caycedo considers rivers as living and spiritual.

Caycedo’s video “A Gente Rio: We River” 2016 brings us the voices of the people living on the Paranà River as they explain their traditional ways as well as the devastating impact of the Itaipu Dam on the border of Brazil and Paraguay, completed in 1984. But these people have also protested. They know exactly why the dam was built: the result of corporate impunity.

 

Nearby is a hammerhead shark, hung at our eye level so we can look right into the eyes of its hammer shaped head. The Ghost Net Collective on the Erub islands (Northeast of Australia) call attention to the lethal presence of the nets with these sculptures.

 

Here are the ten themes of the exhibition.

 

“Rains that Flood and Hypnotize”

“Rivers and Canoe Journeys That Sustain Life”

“Oceans with Bodies Like Our Own”

“Pools of Pleasure and Reverence”

“Patterns of Water”

“Future Waters Through the Eyes of Women and Children”

“Where Water is Law in Northern Australia”

“Sea Creatures that are Honored and Endangered”

“Tragic Memories of Global Trade”

“Mythic Vision form Water’s Creation to Regulation”

“Desecration of Our Troubled Waters.”

 

Speak them out loud and they form a poem to water and the ways it intersects our lives, present, past and future. I will touch on a few of them here.

 

 

“Rivers and Canoe Journeys That Sustain Life”

As we enter the next gallery, we are greeted by the regalia created by  Danielle Morsette “Colors of the Salish Sea Ensemble” . It is to be worn for an honorary stop on a canoe journey.

Here in the Northwest we have joyfully welcomed the return of the canoe journey beginning in 1989 . Tribes travel the ancestral sea routes of their cultures to a  host tribe. It has particularly revitalized the youth in many native cultures. Twice I have been lucky to be visiting a Native Community as it formally welcomed participants on the journey with music, dance, and shared food.

 

Three videos by Tracy Rector (Mixed race/Choctaw/Seminole) Managing Director of Storytelling, Nia Tero Foundation celebrate indigenous resilience and the beauty of the land, sea and sky, their music, their poetry, their regalia. The artist states:

“80% of all biodiversity is on Indigenous-held territories. The world is healthiest where Indigenous People are actively living, thriving and being ‘in community.’ This [stewardship] is essential in saving the health of our planet.”

 

“Rains that Flood and Hypnotize”

Rain is both a blessing and a threat. It sustains us and our food, but it can overwhelm us as we have seen increasingly often. In this section the images include a compelling photograph by Raghubir Singh of four women huddled together in a monsoon downpour, that particular type of rain in India that is welcomed, but also frightening. We see an image of flooded fields nearby by Raghu Rai After flash floods near Jaipur, as the label states “The water rapidly gathers in shapes like lightning across the ground and around stunted trees, devastating the environment.”

 

But another work from South Asia in the indigenous Mithila style by artist Amrita Das depicts the dramatic effects of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka as people’s villages are wiped out entirely ( For a literary description of this same tsunami read Amitav Ghosh, “A Town by the Sea” in Incendiary Circumstances, 2006)

 

Patterns of Water

 

Claude Zervos gives us the Nooksack River in cathode ray tubes, suggesting its underground networks. Zervas has spent years next to this river and watched it degrade as it was dammed.

 

“Waves” by Ogata Korin a large Japanese screen  evokes the rolling sea

“The Roar of the Sea” by Suzuki Masaya suggests the sound of the sea through an intense process of laquering mother of pearl.

 

 

“Oceans with Bodies Like Our Own”
Seeing global nomad artist Paulo Nazareth’s lying on a beach suggests the peace that we all experience, lulled by the sound of the sea. But he is only briefly resting on his year long journey walking barefoot from Brazil to New York.

 

 

“Pools of Pleasure and Reverence”

The dramatic image of Kurtal by Australian aboriginal artist Ngilpirr Spider Snell  represents a spirit snake who “lives in a sacred waterhole called a jila. This desert spring is the only reliable source of water in all seasons . . . Kurtal is the moral protector of the right to use it and the land around it. …”

For a visit to Kurtal with Spider Snell, watch a trailer of Putuparri and the Rainmakers, by Nicole Ma

 

“Future Waters Through the Eyes of Women and Children” has some of the most provocative imagery in the exhibition. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video imagines a future world in which children collect the detritus of what we have left behind and create rituals with them. Here a child speaks to a head which becomes human, then a head again, and she takes it into the sea and burns it.

 

 

 

Also in this segment a still and a film by Ethiopian Aïda Muluneh,  reenacts the process of getting water for survival in  Dallol, northern Ethiopia, one of the hottest and driest places on Earth. Here is a view of it

 

As Muluneh explained:

“While travelling across Ethiopia for my work, I often encounter streams of women traveling on foot and carrying heavy burdens of water . . . women spend a great deal of time fetching water for the household.”

 

“Where Water is Law in Northern Australia” highlights four works on found aluminum by well known aboriginal artists, a dramatic departure from traditional eucalyptus, only seen here. The abstract patterns refer to law, ritual, ancestral power, clan designs, and, of course, the patterns of water.

 

“You are paper. We are sacred design. You make paper. Your wisdom is paper. Our intellect is sacred design, homeland, and ancestral knowledge of ancient origin. By painting these designs, we are telling you a story. From time immemorial we have painted just like you use a pencil to write with.” —Dula, Nurruwuthun (1936–2001), traditional leader of northeast Arnhem Land, 1999

 

Here you see Garrapara2018 by Gunybi Ganambarr,

Australian Aboriginal, Ngaymil clan, Northeast Arnhem Land. Ganambarr began painting after being told by an elder, “This is my wisdom. I’ll hand it over to you. Take it! Sit with us and live this life.” He says, “Soon I was learning the Yolngu side of deep significance… the foundations of the deep identity of the world.” The wavy designs refer to a specific bay and speak of clan affiliations.

Learn more here

 

 

“Sea Creatures that are Honored and Endangered” The Mask of Ḱumugwe’(Chief of the Sea) from the Kwakwaka’waka rules over the water and this section that includes a sea turtle, a hammerhead shark  (seen in the opening gallery), a sea bear and a sawfish. Both the shark and the saw fish are created in three dimensions from the fishing nets that are choking the sea.

 

 

 

Nearby is a bronze turtle called Dadu Minaral (turtle), 2007 by Dennis Nona from the Torres Straits (48000 kilometers, 1200 coral reefs at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia). Here the artist represents an historic initiation rite, by impaling the turtle on poles, but today the Torres Straits indigenous peoples are pioneering ecological partnerships to preserve this huge marine ecosystem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love this image of the whale fish  vomiting Jonah by Jarinyanu David Downs

And here is the sawfish  by Syd Bruce Short Joe . It is also endangered  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The highlight of “Tragic Memories of Global Trade” is the reinstallation of Marita Dingus’s intense homage to the slave trade- 200 Women of Afrrican Descent and 400 Men of African Descent. The artist created each headless body over year and a half as a meditation on the atrocities of slavery. The work as been reinstalled to correspond to the diagram of The Brooks, a slave ship on the late 18^th century.

 

Not far away is an installation by Claire Pardington of two elegant 18^th century figures drinking tea surrounded by slaves and sailors. She suggests the different status with two techniques, Limoges and porcelain, as well as the cost in human lives for the tea trade and the thirst for Chinese ceramics.

 

“Mythic Vision from Water’s Creation to Regulation” features Raqib Shaw’s The Garden of Earthly Delights V” showing an underwater world that is both beautiful and frightening in its fantasy and riff on Bosch’s famous painting. According to the curator “Beneath Shaw’s kitsch aesthetic lies his personal sorrow and his memories of fleeing Kashmir with his family. His idea of paradise is thus grounded in the physical and real space of Kashmir.”

 

“Desecration of Our Troubled Waters”

Among these works is a photograph by La Toya Ruby Frazier of the horribly polluted Braddock, Pa. where  she grew up.  Her Ted Talk  talks about her work in Flint Michigan.

 

John Feodorov’s dramatic painting Desecration no. 2, represents pipe lines spilling pollution on native lands. Master Weaver Tyra Preston created special plain white Navaho rugs for the artist on which he painted, with some trepidation given the rugs’ powerful importance as metaphor of land and culture.

 

The exhibition includes so many more works that we see with new eyes from various parts of the museum. The rethinking of the idea of an exhibition  brings together different cultural expressions to demonstrate that water is our shared concern, and necessary to our shared survival. In that way, the Indigenous voices are the most resonant in their respectful and deep understanding.  But seeing their work and their voices placed among so many other cultures demonstrates the interconnectedness of everyone on the planet.

 

Finally, the curators reach out to our community:

 

“Our Blue Planet” is truly a groundbreaking exhibition.

Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time at the Asian Art Museum

 

Natalia Di Pietranto, the new Assistant Curator of South Asian Art at the Seattle Art Museum  explains her first exhibition “Embodied Change, Asian Art Across Time” as follows

“I wanted to . . . explore how the body is a site of both personal intimacy and possibility for change. . . I hope that visitors come away with a sense of how these artists are boldly imagining personal, political, and social change.”

 

The selection of artists covers a vast time span from the Indus Valley/Harappan era ( 3rd century BCE to 2nd Century CE) to the present moment. And in the first gallery, we see that time frame immediately,  juxtaposed by the artist Chitra Ganesh, who selected early female goddess figures to be shown with her 2022 video Before the War. She is celebrating the transformation of  historical goddesses into contemporary questing women in  her video

(see top of post and below), drawn from comic books she read as a child on Hinduism.

 

In the next gallery, a startling series of works includes Humaira Abid’s wonderful carved wood sculpture with a political punch. Here you see a suitcase made of wood with two shirts, a skull cap and prayer beads, as for a religious traveler. Beside it is a gun. The piece is called Sacred Games. The gun sits there silently,  unrelated to the peaceful suitcase and  yet awaiting our own interpretations and anxieties.

In this gallery are F.N. Souza’s Self Portraits and Adeela Suleiman’s  amusing helmet that includes a tiffin (lunch) box.

 

The Pakistani artist Nazia Khan has a Cage-corset, 2007 corset as well as photos of a performance in which she wears various corset like garments.

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I loved the video by Bani Abidi Death at a Thirty Degree Angle. It gives us the art studio of a long time maker of commemorative statues, here filled with various stages of creation. In struts a local politician ready for his statue. As he poses with arms thrust up ( and talks on his cell phone at the same time), a local artisan sketches his outline, and other workers are creating other sculptures. Here we see the politician trying out various badges for his outfit. The artist uses split screens to enhance the off balance and humor as well as the skill of the artist himself.

 

In the third gallery of the exhibition are  familiar contemporary artists such as Rekha Rodwittiya

 

N. Pushpamala’s  Motherland – The Festive Tableau, from the
Mother India project, 2009. Both Rekha and N. Pushpamela are redefining the historic goddess into contemporary women. In the case of Rekha she gives us an ordinary woman sitting with a powerful presence. In the case of Pushpamela she sends up the kitsch images of Mother goddesses in a hilarious historical recreation.

 

Mithila images  by Jagadamba Devi of the the serpent goddess Naga Kanya suggest an entirely different perspective, more traditional as  she is surrounded by her long serpent tail, but also very much  in her own environment.

 

The quintessentially Indian Goddesses win out in the end with this gallery that spans tiny historical miniatures of dramatic scenes in which Durga takes on warriors and wins ( which were not allowed to be photographed). The contemporary artists images descend directly from those goddesses.

 

Outside the exhibition a scary neon Kali by Chila Kumari
Burman on the wall glows brightly

 

But the curator chose this image by Mithu Sen Miss Macho (Self Portrait), 2007 as the representative work for the exhibition.

Clearly a contemporary image of a trans woman, who looks out at us with her bold and beautiful eyes. By choosing this work the curator tells us that all that is new is old, and all that is old is still current in South Asian art. The concept of embodiment, of fluid gender, of powerful women has been around for a long time there, as well as all the social constructs that contradict that fluidity. While women in India may cover their heads with saris, they are some of the most powerful women I know. They still have Kali and Durga running in their veins.

 

Asian Art Museum open 10-5 Fri – Sun

Michelle Kumata

 

this article originally appeared in a shorter version here

http://www.artaccess.com/articles/12634620

 

Bonfire Gallery “Michelle Kumata: Regeneration” to March 26

 

We are compelled to enter “Regeneration,” Michelle Kumata’s exhibition at the Bonfire Gallery by the banners in the gallery windows.

 

In the exhibition, Kumata is addressing the difficult subject of the long term legacies of the illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

 

On the left of the entrance hangs “American Tragedy”, two banners depicting barely referenced facial features against a vague gray background behind real barbed wire. One has the face split between two banners, much as the experience of incarceration split the lives of those who were sent to those remote camps for up to four years.

In the facing window, the banner “Shine” in brilliant color, suggests flying through the air, the Regeneration of the title of the exhibition.

Also in the window paper butterflies, made by a young Gosei (fifth generation) artist flutter toward the ceiling.

Inside the gallery “Butterfly Sun,” features a face that rises up

between butterfly wings.

 

Nearby “what We Carry” also soars toward healing.

You can just see their luggage outlined in the wings.

 

As we watch the Ukrainians leaving their country with a single bag, it reminds us that they are being as brutally uprooted as the Japanese in 1942.

 

 

Michelle Kumata a three and a half generation Japanese American artist, explores the long term effects for her parents, the Sansei generation, who were born in incarceration during World War II as a result of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. This generation is the last to have a direct connection to this abrupt violation of human rights.

 

It is a cautionary tale that refers directly to contemporary racism, forced exodus, and migration because of climate change.

 

“Regeneration” poignantly explores the ways in which incarceration survives into daily lives: the Japanese American community continues to be affected by the conditions that led to the incarceration.

 

Michelle Kumata offers a multimedia approach to recovering memory and experiencing loss after decades of suppression. The largest expression of that, at the back of the gallery, is the lower section of the artist’s trademark work “Song for Generations.”

The entire banner represents a dignified husband and wife at the top, with their lush fields behind them, cleared from forest; in the next panel, strawberries fall to the ground and a house is burning. The bottom section, in the Bonfire exhibition, dramatically represents the ongoing pain of the incarceration with barbed wire in the open mouths of two Nikkei and flames around their heads. The strawberries become children, those born in the camps amidst barbed wire, but at the very bottom, a girl lets fly away a paper crane. You can see the whole mural in a small print nearby.

The next section of the exhibition features photographs of the artist’s maternal and paternal grandparents that document their lives before, during and after incarceration. The artist’s mother and father were born in the camps. These touching images speak to the real family stories of immigrants who had businesses and lives destroyed in 1942.

A similar feeling comes from paintings based on formally posed portrait photographs from the Takano Studio Collection from the late 1930s to early 1940s, called here “Nihonmachi portraits”

( Nihonmachi is the name of the Japanese business area of the International District before the incarceration.) The artist recreates a selection of these dignified portraits as paintings, again referring to lives before the camps.

Facing these is a creative expression of memory: handkerchiefs with inscriptions such as “Generations were taught to keep your head down, study hard, and not be in front.”

Nearby are “furoshiki” traditional Japanese wrappings for packages, here holding unspoken memories. Over generations as the artist states “the knots slowly loosen, releasing the pain, shame and anger. And we allow ourselves room to carve and define our own unique identities, to transform and fly.”

In addition to all of these thoughtful approaches, a slide show of photographs alternates with quotes from a broad selection of members of our contemporary Japanese American community. The destruction of the heart of the Japanese community, Nihonmachi, and the unwillingness of survivors to speak of it are two major themes.

 

 

Bellevue Art Museum “Emerging Radiance, Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue” to March 13

Michelle Kumata has a second major installation at the Bellevue Museum of Art “Emerging Radiance, Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue.”

It features an immersive mural that uses augmented reality that enables us to actually hear three Nissei farmers of Bellevue tell their stories. The stories are based on interviews recorded in the Densho Digital Archive an incredible online resource that expands our understanding of the lives of those who were incarcerated.

YOu can hear the testimonies on her website

 

Michelle Kumata boldly experiments with representing the ongoing psychological damage of the original historical event of Japanese incarceration. She creatively makes audible what has been unspoken and makes visible what has been buried.

 

 

Kenjiro Nomura American Modernist

 “Kenjiro Nomura American Modernist, An Issei Artist’s Journey” (Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, to February 20)

Kenjiro Nomura (1896 – 1956) came from Japan to Tacoma at the age of ten in 1907. while living in Tacoma as a child, he attended a Japanese Language school where he was fortunate to have a skilled teacher who taught him “graphic skill and developing aesthetic sensibility that served him well in adulthood.” ( Barbara Johns  Kenjiro Nomura American Modernist p 14)

 

When he was barely seventeen his parents returned to Japan leaving him to fend for himself. He managed to not only survive but to find art training and then to be recognized as an artist.  He moved to Seattle from Tacoma when he was 19 and began to study art with Fokko Tadama who had recently relocated from New York City bringing East Coast styles with him.

 

 

Nomura supported himself with his own sign painting business in the Nihonmachi, the heart of the Japanese immigrant community. As discussed in Barbara Johns excellent book of the same title as the exhibition, Nihonmachi provided a rich cultural environment.

Nomura made a major contribution to American scene painting with his 1930s urban street scenes. He carefully observed complex intersections in such familiar locations as 4^th and Yesler.

By the end of the decade Nomura was acknowledged as a major artist. His original take on the idea of American scene with its complex composition and spatial relationships makes his work distinct and in some ways more sophisticated than his contemporaries like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Although here we see no obvious reference to his Japanese heritage, early training in Japanese painting affected his way of seeing in subtle ways.

But suddenly it came to an end when on February 19, 1942, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the infamous executive order 9066 authorizing the relocation of all persons considered a threat to national defense from the west coast of the United States inland.

The order fell like an ax on the lives of people of Japanese descent regardless of whether or not they were citizens.

 

This February is the 80^th anniversary of that order.

Nomura and his family were forcibly incarcerated along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry. They first went to the State Fair Grounds in Puyallup,

 

 

then to Minidoka, in desolate Hunt, Idaho.

 

But Nomura never stopped painting! He made over 100 watercolors of the buildings, the people, and the natural environment in the camps. They remained rolled up in a closet until the 1990s.

Nomura’s son, George, brought work out of storage about 1990. It was shown at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle in 1991 and toured for twenty years.  Curator David Martin carefully chose twenty of them for this exhibition and orchestrated their donation to the Tacoma Art Museum.

 

 

After years of internment, Nomura returned to Seattle. He then confronted severe personal challenges, most tragic of which was his wife committing suicide.

But with the encouragement of friends and probably also his second wife, he began painting again  His work transformed completely, perhaps not surprisingly after so many traumas, into dynamic abstractions that he created up until his early death in 1956.In this too, he demonstrated a completely original approach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All images from the incarceration on in the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum.

Christina Reed: Confronting Whiteness and its Exclusions

 

 

Christina Reed’s exhibition  “Reckoning” confronts us with our own whiteness and oblivous racism head on and with ingenuity.

 

The exhibition consists of three parts. The first is Reflection, a wall filled with large black and white prints based on historical photographs of white people: juries, business men, families, picket fences, interspersed with the words of the declaration of independence, maps of redlining.

The white people are passive, but collectively they create a wall of oblivious privilege. Interspersed with the images are repeated quotes from the declaration of independence underscoring the racism of the white founders as they wrote of equality even as slavery was perpetuated and black people denied all rights.

Inserted every few feet is a mirror. We can see our own white faces as part of the white racist gaze, or for a visitor of color, surrounded by this wall of privileged exclusion.

 

 

 

We turn from this immersion in whiteness to the second part of the installation, Regard: White Gaze. Thick glass squares hanging from the ceiling painted with blue eyes that gaze directly at us.  A literal white gaze, the glass feels claustrophobic as we observe it more closely, suggesting the feeling of being watched, judged, monitored, and even threatened simply by the act of looking. It is very difficult to walk through this intense forest of glass panes, another wall of privilege, so we walk around it.

 

 

The third part of the installation Repair suggests actions to counter racism. There is going to be a closing on February 17 5-7 pm(hopefully) in which people wear signs that have references to various aspects of ways to counter racism. On one side of the sign is an oblique reference. You have to turn the sign over in order to know what it means. In other words you have to do more than look at the sign.

 

Then once you turn it over a wide range of possible ways forward are offered some educational, some personal, some joining with others.  They include references to the 1619 project, a history of slavery and the roots of racism. Another explains red lining, a third “12 out of 18” lists the 12 Presidents out of the first 18 who owned slaves. Other actions suggest observing microaggressions, euphemisms. And of course speaking to our elected representatives about racism is one of the suggestions and supporting diverse cultural organizations. Revolution is not included but volunteering on projects related to the Criminal Justice System is one of the more specific community actions.

 

 

 

The Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery Seattle Central College 1701 Broadway, 2BE2116 Seattle, WA 98122

206.934.4379 Hours10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday Admission is free. They have briefly closed because of COVID concerns but new dates are  February 8 – March 24 

 

Christina Reed received support for this project and did much of her research at the historic home and library of the James and Janie Washington Cultural Center 1816 26^th ave in the Central District. If you want to know more about this important artist, come to the unveiling of a bronze statue of Dr. James W. Washington and the restored “Fountain of Triumph” Washington’s last public monument. The “Fountain,” formerly located on 23^rd ave, addresses salmon migration as a metaphor of the difficulties of survival for African Americans. The Event will be at 24^th and Union part of the newly built Midtown Center,  February 26, 2022, 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Call the Washington Foundation for Information 206-709-4241.