Creative Lving in the Cyclades

Of course everyone I spoke of in the last post was creative, archeologists at the museums and the Temple of Demeter, textile artists, potters, Kitron distillers.

In this blog post I am highlighting another creative person,

Sofia Gavala, partner in the stunning Amorgos beach hotel Lakki Village Family Beach Hotel 

This hotel is run by the Gavala family. There are five sisters. Here they are when their beloved mother was still alive. Third from  the left, near Calliope, the mother, is Niki, who is the business brains behind the Lakki hotel. It started as a vegetable garden then began serving a few drinks on the waterfront, in the early 1970s, next a room or two,  next a restaurant, and now it has 65 rooms, a swimming pool, and a delicious restaurant!!!!

Here is the entrance to the hotel, notice the ecological sun shade

We had the great good fortune to stay here for two weeks on our visit to Amorgos to have a memorial to Henry’s sister Carolina.

The hotel faces the beach and the sea, shaded by ancient tamarisk trees, so part of its special feeling is its  unique location, hopefully not endangered by climate change. The Aegean sea here is not at all tidal, and they have a high wall between them and the sea, but still the sea did come right up to it at times.

 

Before I share Sofia’s artistic constructions throughout the hotel, here is the “dining room”  and the beach right in front. Picture me on one of those chairs reading and swimming every day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the view from our room

 

 

This is the wing of the hotel we were in. I think it is a newer part,

and the swimming pool with a bar. Every comfort! Gianni, Niki’s son, who is bartender,  served me homemade ice cream by the pool.

Now onto the creative art by Sofia. Everywhere in the hotel were her sculptures made from natural materials.

Boats are a theme. There were two at Lakki, but I photographed boats everywhere on Amorgos, both real and models. The one below is a real boat no longer on the water.

The old waterwheel for bringing up water.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A giant root on top of a door

 

Everywhere we looked we saw signs of Sofia’s creativity, including in the dining room, where the lamps are painted with a Mondrian design

The landscaping was also creative

And of course the hospitality is unmatched. And the cooking delicious. Here we are with Henry’s family on our first night

And finally a walk on the beach at sunset with a view of the ferry coming in to the harbor. Since there is no airport on Amorgos, it still nurtures traditional culture often created by families who have been on the island for many generations. The younger generation is transforming those traditions as well, as I mentioned with respect to the music and the shoemaker’s granddaughter in previous posts.

 

 

Art, Culture, and Small Museums in the Cyclades

 

The tiny archeological museums on Amorgos and Naxos were filled with artifacts found on those islands. The intimacy of the spaces, the variety of different types of sculptures, the sense of discovery make visits to these museums delightful.

 

 

The first museum that we visited was the Archeological Collection of Amorgos, in the Chora,  the old and picturesque capital of the island.

Housed in a former Venetian style mansion, the artifacts documented  the long long  history of the island. In these photos you see the picturesque courtyard with various artifacts to discover. We even had a  guided tour of the inside rooms of the museum!

 

 

 

 

This is a fragment of a late Archaic grave stele carved by an artist  from Paros in the late 5th c BC!

Or below is a Roman relief found in the bay of Aigiali Bay at the other end of the island from the museum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is even a catalog of the museum by the outstanding excavator Lila Marangou

 

This map shows archeological sites on Amorgos ( hard to see)

And here is a diagram of a neolitihic site on Amorgos drawn by my sister in law Carolina who lived nearby.

Of course the most famous early Cycladic sculpture of all was found on the island of Keros near Amorgos. It is now in the National Museum in Athens, but there are many versions of it in the small museum on Naxos in their Chora

We also saw fragments  lined up in an even smaller museum in the village of Apeirianthos

All of these Cycladic women date to 2800 – 2300 BC. ! Their odd pose with arms crossed across their torso perhaps suggests protection.  Also odd is that the face only features the nose, no mouth or eyes.

These small museums also had other delights. In the Museum in Naxos we saw many octopus vases, one of my favorite depictions. 

 

 

We also saw real octopus in front of restaurants. Comparing them to the vase paintings, I think the one in the middle shows the Octopus organs that appear on the vase. Not sure about the anatomy of the octopus!

 

On Naxos we took a tour that allowed us to visit many villages.

Here is the map of the island.

Most exciting for me was the Temple of Demeter, the only temple we saw on the trip.

This is a map of the ancient area when the local agricultural people worshipped earth deities such as Demeter on the hill top. They worshipped in the open air with offering pits (brown on the plan.)

You can see the plan of the marble temple here in black,  built in the early 6th c BC when the community became more prosperous. Apparently it is an important example of an early classical ionic temple.

In the early Christian period the temple was converted into a church ( yellow on the plan)

The site was excavated between 1994 – 2000 sponsored by the University of Athens and Munich Polytechnic.

In addition to the temple, there was a small museum which I loved because they took a few pieces and showed us where they went, here on the body of a standing man and below on a pediment.

 

From this stunning temple, we went on to the village of Damalas

where we saw a restored olive press

 

Our guide explained how it all worked. People pulled the spokes that you see  in one photo. You also see the actual press and the pits where the olive oil was probably separated from the water.

 

I bought a smaller version of the pot he is holding up, apparently a traditional vessel for drinking wine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next a distillery for Kitron, in the village of Chalki. Kitron is a fabulously delicious liquor, I wish we had bought a bigger bottle. They had an intriguing logo of people on a small boat, not sure how that refers to distilling lemons.  It was founded in 1896

 

The next stopping place was Apeiranthos, of the small museum mentioned above. The taverna where we had lunch served amazing local rose wine and local cheeses at our lunch.

I copied the English and the Greek to practice my Greek.

These cheeses were incredibly delicious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the same village was a women’s cooperative preserving traditional  patterns and techniques. The Women’s Association of Traditional Art began in 1987. As the brochure says: ” the traditional cloth is woven on a loom ( seen in photo) with great pride, out of respect  towards their ancestors who passed on to them this technique practiced centuries ago, but which is still part of their culture today. ”

 

Our last stop was the famous so called Kouros still in the mountain side in Naxos. Although nicknamed a Kouros, it is actually an unfinished statue of Dionysus made in the 6thc BC.

 

 

 

 

We returned to the main center of Naxos for another wonderful day of walking ancient streets and seeing off beat sites. My favorite discovery was this tiny shop “Micraasia” high up on a path leading to the top of the town. She carries creative items such as ecoprint tee shirts and necklaces made from “happy beads” by contemporary artist Yiorgas Syrigas.

But every street is beautiful in the old city center of Naxos

 

On our last night out in Naxos we ate grilled calamari. Here we are on the way to that dinner.

and one last iconic image

A Memorial On the island of Amorgos in Greece 2021

 

We went to Greece to honor Henry’s sister Carolina who died on the Cycladic Island of Amorgos last October. She had a beautiful village funeral the next day.

 

 

 

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It is a steep road up from the sea to the mountain village of Langada  where Carolina is buried in a beautiful small cemetary. Here is her funeral in October.

Here we are gathering in July.

 

 

Our event was a memorial at her gravesite. Her gravesite was marked and maintained by loyal friends. It included Henry’s son and grandsons as well as several people from the island. His son made an amazing video of the whole event.

 

The recollections included that of Irini Giannakopoulos who was one of the young people that Carolina taught English to many years ago in exchange for food. Irini recalled that at that time there was no electricity on the island, and when Carolina tried to teach them the word for ice cream, they had no idea what she was talking about.

Irini is now the CEO and owner of a stunning five star hotel on the island. Two of her sisters run another wonderful hotel, Lakki Village, where we stayed. I will show those photos in my another post.

 

Another person who spoke was Vangelis Vassalos, also a student of Carolina’s so many years ago. He trained as a doctor in London and  is now an acupuncturist and herbalist in the village. He recalled his last night with Carolina, having a cigarette with her and a drink of retsina. He went home and she died in the night.

Henry spoke for himself and his sister in England who could not be there recalling some of their Greek adventures. His son Zac spoke for himself and his two brothers.

 

After we had a feast and an evening of traditional island music at  Nico’s taverna nearby.

The lute player is Giannis (right) and the violinist is Panagiotis. (left) Panagiotis is the youngest member of a musical family going back generations. He played  island  music with a contemporary interpretation.

You can hear it on the video. right at the beginning.

 

We spent two weeks on the island and Carolina was very much still with us. I could feel her presence so strongly. Here she is white washing a gateway of Henry’s house which gives you an idea of one of her talents, maintaining three very old stone houses.

She planted many flowers around all the houses

We remembered special times. Here is Henry dancing with Carolina in 1998 after a feast with friends in the platea, the area between the restaurants and stores at the center of the village.

Here is Henry on the terrace of her house on our last night. We spent many evenings at sunset with her here.

She had chosen this village on this island after visiting many islands. It is easy to see why. It is still beautiful and unique. Because it has no airport, it continues to be filled with local culture. Although many of the traditional ways are disappearing, some continue or are transformed by the next generation.

In Carolina’s village the granddaughter of the shoemaker/violinist Stefanikis continues to make shoes, but also designs jewelry .

Photos of her grandfather on the violin playing with Michalis, a dear family friend of ours.

Behind her are the shoe lasts her grandfather used and below is his sewing machine.

Look at the beauty of the streets near her shop.

 

 

Another special person is Vangelis, who came to our ceremony. His father was the town baker, his brother runs a wonderful taverna still attached to the bakery where we had our feast after the memorial.

 

His other brother owns one of the best shops for buying real art, both traditional and contemporary icons, on the island, all three were English students of Carolina.

 

Vangelis daughter helps to run their shop that sells herbs and delicious mixtures for various purposes made from island ingredients.

Vangelis practices acupuncture here

and distills the herbs here

 

The olive trees still grow everywhere.  Figs also grow wild and sometimes their roots get into the cisterns and block them so they have to be cleared out.

But we also saw very ancient olive trunks holding up passages.

Right outside of the village are the donkeys used mainly now for helping with the olive harvest. They bring up the olives in baskets on their backs but live in these ancient stone shelters.

 

 

Going back to Carolina’s story, here is the approach to the beautiful house (on the left)  that she restored in the village of Langada and the view from her house to Henry’s house. below  you see Henry and Carolina outside his house ( it is actually the roof of the cistern that makes the “patio”.)

Henry and Carolina preparing a meal inside his house in Langada

 

Carolina  also restored another ruin in what was an abandoned village

 

She walked from her house in Langada to her house in Strombo, across a gorge You can see how rugged the landscape is!

 

Carolina was amazingly tough and persevering. Near the end of her life she did the walk with two crutches and it took her over two hours. Here is a close up of her house. Very small. Solar electricity!

We had many lovely lunches outside her Strombo house. Here is Henry with her and a view of Carolina emerging from the kitchen in her house

As I said her spirit is in the land here.

Here are the musicians playing in her honor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

who died on the Cycladic Island of Amorgos last October. She had a beautiful village funeral the next day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a steep road up from the sea to the mountain village of Langada  where Carolina is buried in a beautiful small cemetary. Here is her funeral in October.

Here we are gathering in July.

 

 

Our event was a memorial at her gravesite. Her gravesite was marked and maintained by loyal friends. It included Henry’s son and grandsons as well as several people from the island. His son made an amazing video of the whole event.

 

The recollections included that of Irini Giannakopoulos who was one of the young people that Carolina taught English to many years ago in exchange for food. Irini recalled that at that time there was no electricity on the island, and when Carolina tried to teach them the word for ice cream, they had no idea what she was talking about.

Irini is now the CEO and owner of a stunning five star hotel on the island. Two of her sisters run another wonderful hotel, Lakki Village, where we stayed. I will show those photos in my another post.

 

Another person who spoke was Vangelis Vassalos, also a student of Carolina’s so many years ago. He trained as a doctor in London and  is now an acupuncturist and herbalist in the village. He recalled his last night with Carolina, having a cigarette with her and a drink of retsina. He went home and she died in the night.

Henry spoke for himself and his sister in England who could not be there recalling some of their Greek adventures. His son Zac spoke for himself and his two brothers.

 

After we had a feast and an evening of traditional island music at  Nico’s taverna nearby.

The lute player is Giannis (right) and the violinist is Panagiotis. (left) Panagiotis is the youngest member of a musical family going back generations. He played  island  music with a contemporary interpretation.

You can hear it on the video. right at the beginning.

 

We spent two weeks on the island and Carolina was very much still with us. I could feel her presence so strongly. Here she is white washing a gateway of Henry’s house which gives you an idea of one of her talents, maintaining three very old stone houses.

She planted many flowers around all the houses

We remembered special times. Here is Henry dancing with Carolina in 1998 after a feast with friends in the platea, the area between the restaurants and stores at the center of the village.

Here is Henry on the terrace of her house on our last night. We spent many evenings at sunset with her here.

She had chosen this village on this island after visiting many islands. It is easy to see why. It is still beautiful and unique. Because it has no airport, it continues to be filled with local culture. Although many of the traditional ways are disappearing, some continue or are transformed by the next generation.

In Carolina’s village the granddaughter of the shoemaker/violinist Stefanikis continues to make shoes, but also designs jewelry .

Photos of her grandfather on the violin playing with Michalis, a dear family friend of ours.

Behind her are the shoe lasts her grandfather used and below is his sewing machine.

Look at the beauty of the streets near her shop.

 

 

Another special person is Vangelis, who came to our ceremony. His father was the town baker, his brother runs a wonderful taverna still attached to the bakery where we had our feast after the memorial.

 

His other brother owns one of the best shops for buying real art, both traditional and contemporary icons, on the island, all three were English students of Carolina.

 

Vangelis daughter helps to run their shop that sells herbs and delicious mixtures for various purposes made from island ingredients.

Vangelis practices acupuncture here

and distills the herbs here

 

The olive trees still grow everywhere.  Figs also grow wild and sometimes their roots get into the cisterns and block them so they have to be cleared out.

But we also saw very ancient olive trunks holding up passages.

Right outside of the village are the donkeys used mainly now for helping with the olive harvest. They bring up the olives in baskets on their backs but live in these ancient stone shelters.

 

 

Going back to Carolina’s story, here is the approach to the beautiful house (on the left)  that she restored in the village of Langada and the view from her house to Henry’s house. below  you see Henry and Carolina outside his house ( it is actually the roof of the cistern that makes the “patio”.)

Henry and Carolina preparing a meal inside his house in Langada

 

Carolina  also restored another ruin in what was an abandoned village

 

She walked from her house in Langada to her house in Strombo, across a gorge You can see how rugged the landscape is!

 

Carolina was amazingly tough and persevering. Near the end of her life she did the walk with two crutches and it took her over two hours. Here is a close up of her house. Very small. Solar electricity!

We had many lovely lunches outside her Strombo house. Here is Henry with her and a view of Carolina emerging from the kitchen in her house

As I said her spirit is in the land here.

Here are the musicians playing in her honor.

 

 

It is a steep road up from the sea to the mountain village of Langada  where Carolina is buried in a beautiful small cemetary. Here is her funeral in October.

Here we are gathering in July.

 

 

Our event was a memorial at her gravesite. Her gravesite was marked and maintained by loyal friends. It included Henry’s son and grandsons as well as several people from the island. His son made an amazing video of the whole event.

 

The recollections included that of Irini Giannakopoulos who was one of the young people that Carolina taught English to many years ago in exchange for food. Irini recalled that at that time there was no electricity on the island, and when Carolina tried to teach them the word for ice cream, they had no idea what she was talking about.

Irini is now the CEO and owner of a stunning five star hotel on the island. Two of her sisters run another wonderful hotel, Lakki Village, where we stayed. I will show those photos in my another post.

 

Another person who spoke was Vangelis Vassalos, also a student of Carolina’s so many years ago. He trained as a doctor in London and  is now an acupuncturist and herbalist in the village. He recalled his last night with Carolina, having a cigarette with her and a drink of retsina. He went home and she died in the night.

Henry spoke for himself and his sister in England who could not be there recalling some of their Greek adventures. His son Zac spoke for himself and his two brothers.

 

After we had a feast and an evening of traditional island music at  Nico’s taverna nearby.

The lute player is Giannis (right) and the violinist is Panagiotis. (left) Panagiotis is the youngest member of a musical family going back generations. He played  island  music with a contemporary interpretation.

You can hear it on the video. right at the beginning.

 

We spent two weeks on the island and Carolina was very much still with us. I could feel her presence so strongly. Here she is white washing a gateway of Henry’s house which gives you an idea of one of her talents, maintaining three very old stone houses.

She planted many flowers around all the houses

We remembered special times. Here is Henry dancing with Carolina in 1998 after a feast with friends in the platea, the area between the restaurants and stores at the center of the village.

Here is Henry on the terrace of her house on our last night. We spent many evenings at sunset with her here.

She had chosen this village on this island after visiting many islands. It is easy to see why. It is still beautiful and unique. Because it has no airport, it continues to be filled with local culture. Although many of the traditional ways are disappearing, some continue or are transformed by the next generation.

In Carolina’s village the granddaughter of the shoemaker/violinist Stefanikis continues to make shoes, but also designs jewelry .

Photos of her grandfather on the violin playing with Michalis, a dear family friend of ours.

Behind her are the shoe lasts her grandfather used and below is his sewing machine.

Look at the beauty of the streets near her shop.

 

 

Another special person is Vangelis, who came to our ceremony. His father was the town baker, his brother runs a wonderful taverna still attached to the bakery where we had our feast after the memorial.

 

His other brother owns one of the best shops for buying real art, both traditional and contemporary icons, on the island, all three were English students of Carolina.

 

Vangelis daughter helps to run their shop that sells herbs and delicious mixtures for various purposes made from island ingredients.

Vangelis practices acupuncture here

and distills the herbs here

 

The olive trees still grow everywhere.  Figs also grow wild and sometimes their roots get into the cisterns and block them so they have to be cleared out.

But we also saw very ancient olive trunks holding up passages.

Right outside of the village are the donkeys used mainly now for helping with the olive harvest. They bring up the olives in baskets on their backs but live in these ancient stone shelters.

 

 

Going back to Carolina’s story, here is the approach to the beautiful house (on the left)  that she restored in the village of Langada and the view from her house to Henry’s house. below  you see Henry and Carolina outside his house ( it is actually the roof of the cistern that makes the “patio”.)

Henry and Carolina preparing a meal inside his house in Langada

 

Carolina  also restored another ruin in what was an abandoned village

 

She walked from her house in Langada to her house in Strombo, across a gorge You can see how rugged the landscape is!

 

Carolina was amazingly tough and persevering. Near the end of her life she did the walk with two crutches and it took her over two hours. Here is a close up of her house. Very small. Solar electricity!

We had many lovely lunches outside her Strombo house. Here is Henry with her and a view of Carolina emerging from the kitchen in her house

As I said her spirit is in the land here.

Here are the musicians playing in her honor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a steep road up from the sea to the mountain village of Langada  where Carolina is buried in a beautiful small cemetary. Here is her funeral in October.

Here we are gathering in July.

 

 

Our event was a memorial at her gravesite. Her gravesite was marked and maintained by loyal friends. It included Henry’s son and grandsons as well as several people from the island. His son made an amazing video of the whole event.

 

The recollections included that of Irini Giannakopoulos who was one of the young people that Carolina taught English to many years ago in exchange for food. Irini recalled that at that time there was no electricity on the island, and when Carolina tried to teach them the word for ice cream, they had no idea what she was talking about.

Irini is now the CEO and owner of a stunning five star hotel on the island. Two of her sisters run another wonderful hotel, Lakki Village, where we stayed. I will show those photos in my another post.

 

Another person who spoke was Vangelis Vassalos, also a student of Carolina’s so many years ago. He trained as a doctor in London and  is now an acupuncturist and herbalist in the village. He recalled his last night with Carolina, having a cigarette with her and a drink of retsina. He went home and she died in the night.

Henry spoke for himself and his sister in England who could not be there recalling some of their Greek adventures. His son Zac spoke for himself and his two brothers.

 

After we had a feast and an evening of traditional island music at  Nico’s taverna nearby.

The lute player is Giannis (right) and the violinist is Panagiotis. (left) Panagiotis is the youngest member of a musical family going back generations. He played  island  music with a contemporary interpretation.

You can hear it on the video. right at the beginning.

 

We spent two weeks on the island and Carolina was very much still with us. I could feel her presence so strongly. Here she is white washing a gateway of Henry’s house which gives you an idea of one of her talents, maintaining three very old stone houses.

She planted many flowers around all the houses

We remembered special times. Here is Henry dancing with Carolina in 1998 after a feast with friends in the platea, the area between the restaurants and stores at the center of the village.

Here is Henry on the terrace of her house on our last night. We spent many evenings at sunset with her here.

She had chosen this village on this island after visiting many islands. It is easy to see why. It is still beautiful and unique. Because it has no airport, it continues to be filled with local culture. Although many of the traditional ways are disappearing, some continue or are transformed by the next generation.

In Carolina’s village the granddaughter of the shoemaker/violinist Stefanikis continues to make shoes, but also designs jewelry .

Photos of her grandfather on the violin playing with Michalis, a dear family friend of ours.

Behind her are the shoe lasts her grandfather used and below is his sewing machine.

Look at the beauty of the streets near her shop.

 

 

Another special person is Vangelis, who came to our ceremony. His father was the town baker, his brother runs a wonderful taverna still attached to the bakery where we had our feast after the memorial.

 

His other brother owns one of the best shops for buying real art, both traditional and contemporary icons, on the island, all three were English students of Carolina.

 

Vangelis daughter helps to run their shop that sells herbs and delicious mixtures for various purposes made from island ingredients.

Vangelis practices acupuncture here

and distills the herbs here

 

The olive trees still grow everywhere.  Figs also grow wild and sometimes their roots get into the cisterns and block them so they have to be cleared out.

But we also saw very ancient olive trunks holding up passages.

Right outside of the village are the donkeys used mainly now for helping with the olive harvest. They bring up the olives in baskets on their backs but live in these ancient stone shelters.

 

 

Going back to Carolina’s story, here is the approach to the beautiful house (on the left)  that she restored in the village of Langada and the view from her house to Henry’s house. below  you see Henry and Carolina outside his house ( it is actually the roof of the cistern that makes the “patio”.)

Henry and Carolina preparing a meal inside his house in Langada

 

Carolina  also restored another ruin in what was an abandoned village

 

She walked from her house in Langada to her house in Strombo, across a gorge You can see how rugged the landscape is!

 

Carolina was amazingly tough and persevering. Near the end of her life she did the walk with two crutches and it took her over two hours. Here is a close up of her house. Very small. Solar electricity!

We had many lovely lunches outside her Strombo house. Here is Henry with her and a view of Carolina emerging from the kitchen in her house

As I said her spirit is in the land here.

Here are the musicians playing in her honor.

Grief and Grievance at the New Museum in New York

 

 

 

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” ( New Museum February 17 – June 6, 2021) honors the brilliant Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor. Conceived and partially planned before his death in March 2019, the exhibition was realized by a team of curators at the New Museum.

 

The theme has only become more potent since the fall of 2018 when Enwezor was first invited to create the exhibition.

 

”Grieve and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” features thirty-seven artists from established to emerging presenting intensely confrontational works that expand the idea of grief in many directions. The partner concept, white grievance, emerges mainly in the catalog essays.

As stated in the press release the exhibition “brings together works that Address Black Grief as a National Emergency in the Face of a Politically Orchestrated White Grievance.”

 

“White Grievance” is a concept that we can think about. Enwezor starts from the perspective of the Gettysburg address by Abraham Lincoln. Gettysburg is the site of a major defeat of the Confederate army let by Robert E. Lee (July 1-3, 1863) that led to the victory of the Union in the Civil War. Enwezor quotes the entire address in his forward characterizing it as  “terse and succinct” in stating “that this nation, under God, shall have a new  birth of freedom “

 

But Gettysburg and the defeat of the Confederacy also set the stage for white grievance, giving birth to white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Trump held a rally there in October 2016 which Enwezor describes as “a surreptitious attempt to obscure and blur Lincoln’s statement and shape a completely new narrative of American purpose. . . . part of a carefully crafted strategy appealing to white grievance as part of his larger, divisive and white nationalist ideology.”

This clear analysis is further developed in all the catalog essays. First Judith Butler’s “Between Grief and Grievance, a New Sense of Justice,” lays out the gap between loss and the “appeal to repair and rectify that loss.” Butler speaks of the role of photography as a trophy rather than a proof of guilt in a crime. Enwezor refers to it as the “vampiric machine” in reference to pictures of starving children for example.

 

We have witnessed this year and in many recent years how photography has been used to commemorate and to protest: how it is cropped and edited can condemn or condone guilt, even as it irrefutably shows the facts.

 

 

 

Butler also addresses the difference of grievance for people of color and for white supremacists. For the person of color who is in danger, going to the law can lead to your own murder. The burden of the dangers of functioning without the protection of the law becomes an unbearable constant weight for people of color.   That theme is also in Claudia Rankin’s essay  “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.”

 

In contrast, as evidenced in the present moment, white grievance declares, as Butler puts it,
“loss of presumptive supremacy discounting the petition to justice in favor of its own challenged sense of power. “

 

That challenged sense of power, Enwezor argues, has its roots in the Southern defeat in  the Civil War.

Since Trump cultivated it  at his rally at the site of the Gettysburg loss,  it has metastasized all over the country most spectacularly on January 6, 2021. Armed resistance by militias in many states  have attacked the capitols of several states, and currently there are widespread efforts to severely limit access to voting for people of color and the working class.

 

 

Juliet Hooker suggests in “White Grievance and the Problem of Political Loss,” that Trump’s strategy is “driven by a specific form of racial nostalgia that magnifies symbolic black gains into occasions of white dislocation and displacement.” The result is that when white privilege is in crisis because white dominance is threatened, many white citizens not only are unable or unwilling to recognize black suffering: they mobilize a sense of white victimhood in response.”

 

Hooker points out that massive black losses lead to small symbolic losses for whites. So after the murder of eight people at a prayer meeting, the removal of a confederate flag followed.

 

This huge imbalance continues to the present: “As whites mourn their lost privileges, blacks mourn their dead. “

Hooker’s essay was published in 2017, long before the great outpouring in response to the irrefutably documented murder of George Floyd murder, yet her words are entirely accurate:

“Racial politics today seem headed for an intractable impasse. On the one hand there is highly visible black and nonwhite grief driven by acts of violence carried out by police and radicalized white supremacists targeting various racial minorities, as well as cruel state polities aimed at immigrants,Muslims and others. Meanwhile there is a large cross section of whites mobilized by a deeply felt sense of grievance and racial resentment. “

 

Ta Nahisi Coates ”The First White President” doubles down on white supremacism and Trump who “has made the awful inheritance explicit . . . To Trump white is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power”

 

But Coates goes much further than that. He speaks of the “bloody heirloom,” the inheritance of white privilege from the founding of the nation.

 

Then he points out how liberal politicians and journalists separate themselves from the white working class, and point to them as the Trump supporters. When in fact, Coates states, whites from all economic levels supported Trump. The myth of white anti racism is exploded by Coates and he implicates whites in enabling the election of an overtly  racist white man. Furthermore, in demonstrating that a demagogue can create havoc without punishment, the Trump example is dangerous (as we are seeing everyday).

 

But in the end, Coates declares that “there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder.  . . . I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal – a world more humane. “

 

These powerful essays together with those of many others in the catalog, constitute the articulate indictment of white privilege as the foundation of white grievance and where we are today.

 

At the same time that this catalog went to press in 2020, Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, exploded on the scene, tracing white supremacy back to the very first arrivals of Africans in the early 17^th century. No Europeans called themselves white until they arrived in America, where white became a racial invention to distinguish from black slaves.  Being white became the privileged caste from the beginning. It is the threat to that privilege that motivates white grievance today.

 

Let us turn to the exhibition itself, which is entirely the work of African American artists of all ages.  All of them address grief, but in many ways.

The exhibition centers around several anchor works ( as cited in the catalog, although that is not evident in the installation and other works are equally important)

 

 

 

Jean Michel Basquiat’s Procession

 

 

Nari Ward’s Peace Keeper,

 

 

Daniel La Rue Johnson, Freedom Now Number 1,

April 13 ,1963 -January 14,1964  includes a broken mouse trap, a fexible tube, and a FREEDOM now button, from the Congress on Racial Equality. collected as he travelled through the South “these objects are traditionally used for trapping, cutting and hacking, functions that suggest dismemberment and fracture ” ( catalog p 249)

 

Jack Whitten’s Birmingham, 1964 (to which I return at the end of the post), aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking and oil on plywood

 

 

Ward’s Peace Keeper originally created for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and re created for this exhibition, deeply inspired Enwezor, according to Massimilliano Gioni.

 

A giant memorial in the form of a hearse covered in tar and peacock feathers inside a cage, the metaphors are unmistakable.

 

Mufflers hang in a cloud above it, and rusted metal pipes surround it on the floor, the whole imprisoned in a cage.

 

Enwezor called it a “tour de force” melding of materiality and spirituality, a combination that Enwezor saw as central to discussion around mourning in African American culture” (paraphrased by Massimilano Gioni). He planned to give a series of lectures on the intersection of black mourning and white nationalism, a crucial concept that has escalated dramatically in the last two years.

 

 

Thinking about the rapidly evolving role of photography in the documentation  of black death, the photographers included in “Grief and Grievance” offer a nuanced expansion of the public media’s narrow focus on murder and grief.

LaToya Ruby Frazier descends from generations of her family who lived and worked in Braddock Pennsylvania, the home of Andrew Carnegie’s first and last steel mill.  LaToya‘s  grandmother, who raised her, was born in the 1940s when the town was prosperous; her mother in the 1960s, the era of Reagonomics; and she herself in the 1980s, when the war on drugs decimated her family.

LaToya’s series “The Notion of Family”  (2001-2014 above) intimately offers us both the love she experienced, and the illness both she her family suffer as a result of toxins in the air and water near the steel plant.

Carrie Mae Weems series “Constructing History” stages famous Civil Rights events with art students. She calls attention to the generic media perceptions of these moments of intense grief and resistance by themes “The Assassination of Medgar, Malcolm and Martin” above or the “Endless Weeping of Women” Clearly contrived images, as is the public understanding of the depth of the feelings that permeated the events, Weems give us grieving as a construct, to underscore how little it is understood.

 

 

The ground floor of the museum provides intense juxtapositions of media and content that begin the immersion in both grief and resistance throughout the exhibition. Adam Pendleton covered lobby walls in graffiti-like writing that screams at us in messages repeated over and over. “As Heavy as Sculpture” includes words like ACAB (all cops are bastards) and other words taken from protests, combined with his own slogans and photographs of masks and figures to suggest the fragmentation of visual and verbal communications in protests that becomes a type of street poetry.

 

 

Also on the entrance floor is Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death first launched in 2016-17 ( detail above) as an extraordinary seven minute homage to black life. Created in rapid jump cuts from many sources, it jolts us between the joy and nightmare of being black in the U.S, set to Kanye West’s gospel “Ultralight Beam.”

 

Not far away is musician Terry Adkins’ hugely enlarged xrays of memory jugs, vessels with personal mementos such as rings, watches, jacks, and spoons attached to their outside.  Originally physical grave markers, these looming photographs now embody both the ghosts of the original owner of the objects, the ghosts of a long-gone life and ritual, and the ghosts of our contemporary world.

In the same gallery an actual cattle squeeze painted black The Full Severity of Compassion, by Tiona Nekkia McClodden presents its horrifying function, to squeeze cattle before they are killed, like a satanic hug. The psychic and physical immediacy of the squeeze cannot be avoided, even as we recognize a metaphoric level that refers to black lives.

On the second floor, in addition to Ward’s overwhelming sculpture, we see the work of Sabie Else Smith, tiny polaroids immersed in black grounds referring to the photos visitors make of their family members when they visit them in prison.

 

A video on the ground floor Alone by Garrett Bradley also speaks to the same subject, expanding the experience of visiting a prison to a deeply moving narrative of the life of a young woman left alone, separated from her beloved fiance.

 

Dawoud Bey’s large paired black and white portraits from his Birmingham Project, 2012 presents one young person at the age of the the four young girls killed in the bombing of the 16^th st Baptist Church, and two young men killed in protests that followed. The second image is an adult of the age these young people would be were they still alive. Instead of a one dimensional victim, Bey presents people who are looking straight at us, alive and strong, at the same time that we see the deep pain inside the bodies of both young and old.

 

Moving to the third floor, where Basquiat’s Procession, a reference to a jazz funeral, greets us first, then a room full of Kerry James Marshall’s layered collage/paintings that honor the dead. His untitled (policeman), of a black policeman speaks of the contradictions at the heart of survival for black people. Here is a securely employed middle class black man, who is part of an oppressive state sanctioned system.  His posture with one hand on his  hip, the other on his knee as well as his gaze away from us into the middle distance, as though he sees his own death there, suggest his own fears as well as his professionalism.

 

Near the stairwell to the fourth floor is Howardena Pindell’s 1988 Autobiography, Water(Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts which I consider one of the benchmark historical works although it wasn’t cited in the catalog.  It looms above us with a  life size figure multiple arms flailing in water filled with the eyes and heads and hands of so many others. Beside the figure Pindell quotes a document that states that a black man who intervenes when a white man is raping his wife will be killed.

 

Hank Willis Thomas’s 14,719, hangs in the stairwell –long blue banners covered in stars, each one representing a death by gunshot in 2018. The sudden switch in meaning from an American flag so often used in  commemoration of death, here to speak of an almost invisible slaughter, turns a memorial into a scream.

 

Of course it is impossible for me to write about all the work in the exhibition, much as I would like to enumerate every one. What is striking is the synergy among the works, each speaks to the other, in a continuous narrative. At the same time, these artists all speak of survival, resistance, and defiance. Black grievance emerges as the larger arc of the exhibition, as these works speak out against injustice, invisibility, and the incomprehensible.

 

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” pays fitting tribute to Okwui Enwezor.  It also stands as a celebration of black creativity and the power artists have to make a stand against the staggering racial injustices of this country.

 

Writing this on the Fourth of July, I can’t help mention the irony of the celebration of independence that was for white men only:   “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—”

 

By 1776 over 67,000 Africans already had been brought to the US, the first declared to be a slave rather than an indentured servant in 1654 ( the total would rise to 305,000 by 1876). Apparently Jefferson called for an end to the importing of Africans for slavery in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence: “ He(King George) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

 

It was removed in deference to the many business men benefitting from slaves.

 

I conclude with this early work of  Jack Whitten, Birmingham 1964 with a photo of police brutality appearing behind peeling aluminum foil a reference to the town Bessemer Alabama, the town where Whitten grew up. The artist left the South shortly after he made this work to have a dazzling career in New York City.

Out of this darkness came light, as I talk about in my review of his show at the Met Breuer  in 2018

Let us hope that continues to be the case for this country. Out of our darkness can still come light.

Jacob Lawrence and “The American Struggle” at the Seattle Art Museum

 

 

Looking at this single image of the Boston Tea Party the no 3 panel in Jacob Lawrence’s “Struggle: From The History of the American People” we see how radical Lawrence is in every respect: composition, space, color, subject matter. In stark contrast to his well-known “Migration” series, the work from “Struggle” includes dynamic thrusting diagonals and horizontals that shoot across the picture plane, in this case a shallow space. The colors are also striking: neither realistic, pretty or even believable, they tell us of conflict, red, green, of harsh confrontation. The fragmented robes, recalling cubism in the fractured surfaces, also speak of conflict. Nothing in Lawrence’s work is a formal device used for its own sake. Looking more closely we see huge brown hands grabbing the heads of three “Indians.”

All of this in a small panel measuring 12 x 16″.

 

The caption reads: “Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes and tell King George we’ll pay no taxes on his foreign tea.” First, although it was a non violent protest,  Lawrence reinterprets it as an intense struggle with axes and fists. the caption is from a 1773 protest song. based on the “tea party.”

 

The so called Sons of Liberty (perhaps a group called that now?) dressed as Mohawk Indians (!) see above, and dumped hundreds of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. The tea was from the East India company, so also the product of colonization. Dressed as Mohawks meant the Indians could be blamed, and the actual participants melted into the community.

 

The exhibition of Lawrence’s “Struggle “series couldn’t have been better timed at the Seattle Art Museum. We saw it not long after the January 6 insurrection in the Capital which attempted to overthrow the election and throw the government into turmoil.

 

That recent struggle invoked the terms of our early struggle for independence from Britain, militia, patriots, minutemen, and it too was motivated by economics. You may recall that the so-called Boston tea party was because Britain wanted to impose “taxation without representation.” Britain wanted to be paid back for helping the colonists during the French and Indian wars. But of course the colonists, like all groups that seek independence, wanted to keep their money and spend it the way they wanted to. They didn’t want anyone taking away their money ( or in our recent case, “their” election)

 

The rethinking of history in this series begins with Panel no 1 of Patrick Henry. In this incredible image of Henry reaches a long hand over a crowd he roused with equally long arms, saying ” is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? ( 1773)

 

 

Henry is better known for his “Give me Liberty or Give me Death”  (from the same 1773 speech). By choosing this quote Lawrence immediately reframes the image and the speech as a collective struggle, not that of one person, the energy of the arcing hand seems to radiate toward the crowd, but in the dark sky are drops of blood.

 

Almost every image in “Struggle” has drops of blood, wounded men, wounded horses, or as here, the sky rains blood.

 

The struggle is never peaceful. Only death and defeat are quiet.

One of the most poignant images is 

number 5 with the caption “We have no property! We have no wives! No children, We have no city! no country!” from a petition of many slaves 1773. This outcry before the revolution underscores that “liberty” is only for the elite few.

 

It reminds us of the cruelty of slavery in, among many cruelties, breaking apart families  (much as the previous President did to immigrants).

 

Jacob Lawrence started thinking about the theme of Struggle in 1949. He pursued research for five years and started painting in 1954 perhaps not coincidentally just as the high pitch of the McCarthy era was winding down. He planned it as McCarthy was accusing hundreds of Americans of being communist, ruining their careers and their lives. He began to paint in the same year as the Brown vs Board of Education decision , in May, and continued to paint as Emmett Till was lynched in August 1955 and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in December 1955 and Martin Luther King leads a bus boycott .

 

He spoke of the series as a history of “all the peoples who emigrated to the “New World.” By transforming it conceptually from his first idea of the history of the Negro people to that of all those who contributed to building the United States, he wanted to show a “constant search for the perfect society.”

This newly recovered image of Immigration (Panel 28) has the caption “Immigrants admitted from all countries: 1820 – 1840- 115,773”

 

Again, how timely. This is an early era of  migration before any restrictive laws began. The first  “Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain laborers from immigrating to the United States.” These laws were aimed directly at Chinese laborers building the railroad to prevent them from bringing their families. As those of us who live in the west know well, Chinese laborers were forcibly expelled from towns all over the West.

 

Lawrence brilliantly rethought the history of America, taking familiar events like the “ride of Paul Revere” and re interpreting them, as well as elevating events we may not have known about.

 

For example

here is another panel (no 16) recovered as a result of the exhibition  with a label that sounds like a comment from last January

“there are combustibles in every State which a spark might set fire to – Washington 26 December 1786”. Here we see a confrontation between farmers ( in brownish, green and yellow ) and the federal government (in blue), perhaps the Shays rebellion, in which impoverished farmers and veterans protested taxes on them to pay for war debt. Again money, again echoes of today.

 

One favorite of mine is no 18

This is an image of Sacajawea ( in red) reuniting with her brother (in blue). Sacajewea had been kidnapped from her tribe the Lemhi Shoshone and enslaved as a child.  Here she meets her brother who is chief of the Lemhi Shosone, an emotional reunion recorded in

the journals of Lewis and Clark.

 

 

This image (no 21)also addresses Natives with the caption quoting from the famous Shawnee Chief Tecumseh ” Listen, Father! The American have not yet defeated us by land; neither are we sure they have done so by water – we therefore wish to remain here and fight our enemy”(to the British, 1811)

Tecumseh lost, and is memorialized as a dead chief in a marble sculpture in Washington’s Smithsonian Museum of American Art, but here we have the background to the ending, the moment of courage, with again the thrusting diagonals in the foreground of American soldiers in blue set against the Native fighters.

 

And here (panel 23)a moment of defeat in the war of 1812 against the British:

“….If we fail let us fail like men, and expire together in one common struggle,….” Henry Clay 1813 this is during the fight with the British on Lake Erie. The image focuses on just one dead soldier amidst a sea of abstracted white sails, even as the quote speaks of the collective.

 

 

Finally, one more image, the final image in the series

 

“Old America seems to be breaking up and moving Westward,”

 

We see not the cliche pioneers in their wagons, but a pair of overburdened oxen dragging a wagon.

 

Lawrence throughout the series focuses on the courage, the suffering, and the contradiction of accepted history and the reality of the conflicts.

 

In addition, working at the height of Abstract Expressionism in art, he transformed his own art into a dynamic, energized imagery, which he alternated  with static works. Although the installation of the series with individually matted and framed works and large captions, breaks up  the larger experience of rhythmic subtleties that move from one panel to the next, that is one aspect of his work, an almost musical tempo. (This insight came to me from Diane Tepfer, an art historian who helped install the Migration Series in Washington DC).

 

So Lawrence took abstract expressionism, also a response to McCarthy that cleansed art of figuration and political content, and reinterpreted it with dynamic figures and confrontational content.

 

Each image in the series gives us struggles, of Native Americans, of slaves, of working class whites, of soldiers, of farmers, of immigrants.

Although he planned to have sixty panels, he stopped working on it in 1955 for various reasons.

 

But he continued to address struggle in later works that make direct references to the Civil Rights Struggle. I wish we had the other thirty works. Ending with the beginnings of the Movement West is tantalizing, when we think of the struggles to come next, more forcible displacement of Native Americans, struggles over slavery, the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad built by Chinese labor, the “Red Scare”, the Depression, the New Deal, the Japanese incarceration during World War II, and on and on.

***

I have taken the rare opportunity to see this exhibition four times, and still have not absorbed all of its insights.  Lawrence is making a radical statement as a testament to the  foundations of our country in bloodshed, conflict, betrayals, and suffering.

 

It is also an homage to all of the courageous ordinary people who survived.

 

“Lifting Up From the River”

 

Preston Singletary honors his father Shaa-Héen-Kaa, who died in November at the age of 80, in “Lifting Up from the River” (at the Traver Gallery until the end of April).

 

Death has been affecting all of us this year. We are experiencing so much loss in our lives, whether from COVID or other causes. In my own family we have lost 4 close relatives. One of my oldest and dearest friends is heading for his sunset, as his daughter so beautifully expressed it.

 

So viewing this exhibition has special meaning for me. I wish I could think of such deeply thoughtful and spiritual expressions to honor those whom I have lost.

 

Morning River is an homage to his father’s love of starting early in the morning to go fishing. There are various works referring to fishing in the exhibition. There are also glass room dividers created in collaboration with Dick Weiss that suggest flowing water.

 

 

But for me the heart of the exhibition was the expression of transition from life to death. His father is called to this transition by spirits that raise him up in Levitation

 

 

The installation includes several stages  of transition

Preston: “As we float down the river, Shaa-Héen-Kaa’s health shifts and becomes vulnerable with age. “Ashes From The Fire”,[Ash Moon] “Lightness Of Being”, and “Shaman Wakes” are all part of this transition.

 

 

“Shaman Wakes” symbolizes the shaman calling on his spirit helpers, the Land Otters, to help Shaa-Héen-Kaa with understanding this transformation that he will undertake, of transitioning to the other side.

 

 

“Lightness Of Being” attempts to animate the idea of contemplating life and preparing for the transition of passing into the next realm. The mobile symbolizes the universe and the arc holding the wire and branches represents a fishing rod.”

 

 

 

Here is another image of transition “floating backward up the river” It suggests his father is “experiencing visions” as he floats.

What a beautiful way of expressing the passing of someone we love.

 

 

“Levitation” refers to my sister Rachel who had a dream shortly before our father’s death. In the dream a tall slender man came to the front door of our father’s apartment looking for him
and went to retrieve him from his bedroom. Our father emerged from his bedroom fully dressed to go fishing and silently followed the man out the door. In this piece two spirit figures are ascending into the heavens to go fishing together.”

 

It is appropriate that the ghost like spirit figures in the vertical white shape that resembles a sail on a boat, is not really visible here.

 

All of these works are made from blown and sand carved glass. We think of glass as transparent, but in Preston’s works it is a magical material that transforms, creates mirror images, ghost images, and opacity all at the same time. It is the perfect material to convey transition from life to death.

And  “Safe Journey” lighted from within with the universe

Preston again “this box is a metaphor for the treasures that our father gave us in the form of inspiration, knowledge and intelligence. These boxes are sometimes referred to as treasure boxes or boxes of knowledge. They can be used to store precious objects or Att Owoo, our cultural heirlooms. In some cases they can be used as burial
containers. In this case, I decided to animate the box with light from within representing the universe.”

 

This is only a selection of the works in the show, there is a wonderful otter, many fish, and totems in glass that also suggest transformations, myths,  and magical events.

One of the more familiar is “Raven and the Box of Daylight” here presented in a brilliant orange glass totem. Last year Preston held a complete exhibition around this story at the Museum of Glass. 

In the same room are several other totems and many baskets, grouped around the blue box that glows with treasures and secrets. These feel like totems and containers that are guarding the treasure at the center.

 

I took this last photo at the far end of the gallery from the entrance.  The  glass totems are seen in reverse, but appear to be three dimensional. It is a special quality of the glass that as the artist worked the image on one side in low relief, the negative image appeared on the other as though from inside the sculpture. I like this idea of both the illusion of presence, and the mutability of reality. Is that not what life and death are all about?

Breathe! at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and several provocative new shows at the Henry Art Gallery

 

Art urging us to think about our disrupted world is everywhere this spring.

 

“Breathe” the current group show (until May 30) at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (free, open daily!) addresses civil rights issues in every work by twenty-one artists.

 

Humaira Abid created a hand carved wooden chain for the title ”Breathe.” It suggests both entrapment and escape here, but how many other references are contained in that one word!

 

In Linda Wolf’s black and white photographs, Caravan Asylum we see people surviving the huge challenges and risks of travel to the US in hopes of a better life (a belief that has surged since Biden came into office).

Nearby “Field Notes,” mixed media fiber collages by Carletta Carrington Wilson, quote from formerly enslaved persons in the subtitles, such as “I was plowin long and a thinkin.” Embedded in the textiles is an “x”, honoring the fact that ninety percent of slaves were illiterate.

Throughout the exhibition selections from the extraordinary book art collection of Cynthia Sears address potent issues:  Native American displacement (Fred Hagstrom);

 

 

writing and art by prisoners (Beth Thielen); anti-semitism (Diane Jacobs); white supremacism in a Klan car rally in 1965 that led to the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzza (Tyler Starr);

 

 

gay marriage (Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry).  Each artist brilliantly concentrates a huge topic in an experimental book format.

 

Roger Shimomura and Michelle Kumata address Japanese Internment.

Kumata’s Song for Generations, 2019 hangs in the multistoried window of the museum. At the top are two farmers, one holds strawberries, the other a house in flames, below are two adults with painful barbed wire in their mouths, and children in the lower left born in internment (as was Kumata’s mother).

 

Shimomura’s poignant portrait of an American Alien and the anxiety of waiting in Nightwatch continues his life-long exploration of the theme of internment. Given the upsurge in hate crimes against Asians, these works remind us the long history of Asian abuse in the US.

 

Also on display is Paul Rucker’s “Forever” homage to Civil Rights martyrs in the form of “forever” stamps for the post office with biographies of people such as Medgar Evers and Edwin Pratt. In large scale are the four young girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham Alabama in 1963.

 

More artists books appear in a separate show “Water” and upstairs are Kimberly Trowbridge’s landscapes based on her residency at the Bloedel Reserve. In short, you can see an astonishing breadth of issues and styles at the Bainbridge Museum of Art, many from the museum’s collection.

 

 

 

 

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington also challenges us with difficult topics.

 

In the lobby “Hostile Terrain, HT94),” from the Undocumented Migration Project, outlines a border in Arizona with hundreds of tags hanging on it – volunteers documented each person who died crossing the inhospitable desert with the condition of the body and location. That act means that participants feel these deaths directly as do we.

 

Nearby, a project by La Resistencia gives us access through QR codes to appalling stories of the detainees in the Northwest Detention Center. Here is their call to action “Free Them All,” with template letters to Patty Murray, Adam Smith, Jay Inslee, Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards, ICE field office director Nathalie Asher.

 

 

“Illustrating Injustice: The Power of Print” curated by Nina Bozicnik and Ann Poulson provocatively pairs Danny Lyons’ prison photographs (Conversations with the Dead (1971) with prints by Honoré Daumier lambasting the legal system of 19^th century France.

 

The show also includes moving prison newsletters from the Washington Prison History Project.

 

 

Commissioned by the Henry “We Own Our Words” is a contemporary zine project with deeply expressive essays and poems by women in the Washington Corrections Center for Women. You can download a digital copy here.

 

By the same dynamic curators “Plural Possibilities and the Female Body” explores the female body beyond the reductive binaries of gender and fixed ideas of beauty. The breathtaking selection of artists ranges from Ana Mendieta and Kiki Smith to Zanele Muholi and Mickelene Thomas.  Presiding over the gallery is a lush painting by Dominican Republic artist Firelei Báez The Right to Opacity that fuses Saartjie Baartman (the so-called “Hottentot Venus”) with ciguapas, a mythical fearless woman of the forest.

One of the most fascinating works was this work by Ria Brodell from the Butch Heroes series. It also connects to an upcoming exhibition at the Washington State History Museum, “Crossing Boundaries, Portraits of a Transgender West, May 29 – December 12, 2021 as well as Donald Byrd’s recent amazing piece choragraphed for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, “And the skies are not cloudy all day”

 

 

For those who like the bizarre, don’t miss “Bambitchell: Bugs and Beasts Before the Law.” A video highlights animal trials in medieval and early modern Europe based on a 1906 book Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. I watched the trial of a cock who laid an egg and was tried for sodomy. Perhaps the larger context could be that because of climate change we are putting animals to death all the time without any trial.

 

 

And finally, “Viewpoints: A Dialogue Between Jean-François Millet and Jeanne Dunning” a single gallery exhibition juxtaposes Jean Francois Millet’s images of women working (at home) in the 19^th century to a video of a woman’s head being covered with cake frosting by Jeanne Dunning! Go see it to understand it.

 

So something for everyone! The Henry exhibitions end on May 9. It is FREE until the end of June although limited hours Saturday and Sunday 10 – 5 with a reservation.

 

And since I went there they have already opened two more exhibitions Gary Simmons: the Engine Room  and Elaine Cameron Weir, Star Club Redemption Booth. Be sure to get there as soon as possible!!

Port Townsend marks its history with Indigenous groups

And what a horrifying history it is ! The  čičməhán (Chetzemoka) Trail. named after čičməhán(Cheech-ma-han) the great leader of the Klallam  tells that story in all its vivid detail.  Here is an overview of part of the trail. It includes most of the sites that we found ( we were driving and walking). But aside from the natural beauty of Port Townsend, it was quite a revelation to read this history.

The first site we went to was at the North end of downtown Port Townsend

It told the story of “Chetzemoka’s Big Heart, a story by Mary Ann Lambert of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s Lambert/ Reyes family (1879-1966, also the author of The 7 Brothers of the House of Ste-Tee-Thlum).  It illustrates Chetzemoka’s heart, and the power and respect he commanded.”

 

An army garrison was built on this site in 1856 ( see next sign, this was one year after the Treaty of Point No Point) to “quell Indian rioting” As it turned out it was the soldiers who created the problem:

“However, the soldiers were known to frequent the saloons of Port Townsend and overindulge. One day two drunken soldiers, realizing they had overstayed their leave, stole an Indian canoe from the S’Klallam village at Point Hudson, and subsequently drowned when a southeast squall arose across the bay.

 

Townspeople assumed that the soldiers had been killed by Indians, and when a youth named Tommy Shapkin found one of the soldier’s bodies on the shoreline and donned his cap and jacket, he was accused of murder. He was jailed and a hanging scaffold was built. When the youth was brought to the platform, another S’Klallam youth ran to find Chetzemoka.

 

Forcing his way through the dumbfounded crowd, Chetzemoka approached the scaffold. Without a word he mounted the steps and reaching into his belt the Duke of York [as he was nicknamed] withdrew a knife, reached up and cut the knotted noose and threw it upon the ground below. Then removing the blindfold from the boy’s eyes, he said “Go, my kinsman. You are free!” Turning and facing the astonished crowd, Chetzemoka said (in Chinook), “Friends, this is Indian Country, our country. There never was a time when it was not our country. We are Klallams. Once we were strong, proud people. Because of sickness and death, we have diminished in numbers until now we are no longer a strong people.

 

But we are a proud people. We will not be the first to spill Boston blood upon our beloved land. You Bostons are a strong people. Do you wish to be the first to spill Klallam blood upon this soil which once belonged to us? Have you no pride?” “Bostons,” he continued, “We have been friends. Let us remain friends. If this unwise act which you were about to commit is what you call civilization, then give us back our way of life. Oh, White People, our brothers under the skin, do not let this happen again.”

 

The site where he stood was an Indian village until white men arrived. This sign at the point reads

“Before the shoreline was altered to create the marina, Point Hudson was a popular clamming beach for S’Klallams and a landing point for tribes from locations across the Olympic Peninsula.

 

Change began as soon as settlers arrived, but grew harsher after čičməhán (Cheech-ma-han) and many other S’Klallam sub-chiefs signed the Treaty of Point No Point in 1855. It was not ratified by Congress until 1859, and through the 1860s, the Natives waited for financial compensation from the government, but they were not paid. In 1867, the City of Port Townsend passed an ordinance prohibiting any Indian housing, tents, mats or fires in the downtown area, and in 1871, their village was destroyed by fire, by order of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

 

In the 1890s, Makah and other Tribes used Point Hudson as a camping site on their way to and from the hops fields near Puyallup, where they were seasonally employed as hops harvesters.” On the link to the text are old photographs of tribal groups camping on the point in the late nineteenth century, after the original village was destroyed by fire.

 

 

As we headed downtown, we saw a new totem created in honor of the creation of the trail outside the Northwest Maritime Center. It gave a lift to our spirits from the sad story of the destruction of the villages on Hudson Point

 

Here the sign reads

 

“The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, like the Northwest Maritime Center, is a contemporary organization with a tremendous appreciation of our seafaring history and respect for those who have preserved and shared their knowledge throughout the centuries.

 

The sea is all around us on the Olympic Peninsula: the sound of the tides and seabirds; the salty aroma in the air; the edible abundance that has sustained us for millennia; the navigable waterways that allowed us to move freely among and between our villages and our neighbors. For the S’Klallam people, the sea is a major character; the backdrop of our lives. And we know that we share that deep sentiment with those who have devoted themselves to creating and sustaining the Northwest Maritime Center

 

It is with that sentiment of shared vision that the Tribe and the Center agreed that a totem pole and a canoe carved of Western Red Cedar, and an interpretive sign about Coast Salish Canoe Culture were appropriate symbols of our shared interests and ongoing partnership in the 21st century.”

 

From the website

“Outside the Northwest Maritime Center you will see the 26’ totem pole carved by Dale Faulstich, Andy Pitts, Tyler Faulstich, and Tribal citizen Timothy O’Connell. You will also see the Coast Salish Canoe Culture sign, and a traditional canoe hanging in The Chandlery.

The totem pole pays homage to millennia of finely crafted wooden boats and the artisans who built them. It features, starting at the top, the Supernatural Carpenter, the Spirit of the Cedar Tree, čičməhán with his arms in the welcoming posture, standing on Sentinel Rock.”

 

The next site was called “The Village at Memorial Field.” Today it is near a playing field. It is the site of the original village

 

“The village of qatáy once sat near the bluff at what is now the corner of Monroe and Water Streets. It was the principal village of S’Klallam people at the time of the treaty signing, and home to their Chief, čičməhán (Cheech-ma-han).

 

James Swan’s 1859 census showed “300 whites and 200 Klallams” living in Port Townsend. qatáy village was burned on August 23, 1871 by order of the federal government, prompted by complaints from the settlers. Destruction of the village of qatáy forced many of the S’Klallam to move to the Skokomish Reservation, Port Gamble, Port Discovery, or to join family in Dungeness (stətíɬəm), who would purchase land at Jamestown in 1874. Others, including cicm?hán and his family, moved across Port Townsend Bay to Indian Island, where villages had been located for hundreds of years.

 

Many S’Klallam adjusted to non-Indian communities, working at local mills, on farms, fishing and providing water transportation to settlers on land and waters that had always been Native homeland.”

For more details on the destruction and removal of the Indians in the village in 1871 see the website. text for this site. It is full of horrifying details as well as photographs of the era.

Nearby is the “Fowler Building.”

 

“Port Townsend’s first stone building was completed in 1874 for Enoch S. Fowler.

 

Fowler was a ship captain who transported Governor Stevens and his treaty negotiators from place to place, including Point No Point in 1855, where Stevens, Fowler and čičməhán (Cheech-ma-han) convinced the Natives to trust the whites and affix their “X” mark to the Treaty. Under considerable pressure, the tribes ceded their rights to nearly 440,000 acres of land, receiving in return a 3,480-acre reservation on Hood Canal, the “right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations,” and $60,000 payable over 20 years.

 

When čičməhán died on Indian Island in June 1888, his sons brought his body into town by cedar canoe. Townspeople honored their old friend, who had prevented conflict to save his people, by laying his body in state in the Fowler Building’s main parlor for two days, where settlers paid their respects prior to his burial at Laurel Grove Cemetery.”

 

But it gets worse. After removing the Indians to Indian Island, they were then removed from Indian Island at the beginning of World War II.

The next stop was called Union wharf/Indian Island

 

“Looking south, view Kilisut Harbor and Indian Island (now Naval Magazine Indian Island). Archeological evidence shows that Indian Island was an important location to the ancestors of the S’Klallam and Chimacum people for over 1,500 years. For many centuries, sea level was as much as 7 meters lower than today, making the harbor a fertile wetland.

 

In 1870,čičməhán (Cheech-ma-han) met with a Territorial delegate, asking that the Tribe be given Indian Island as the S’Klallam reservation, but that request was denied.

 

čičməhán and his family, including his two sons Charlie Swan York and Prince of Wales, moved to the village at the northeast corner of Indian Island called šéʔnək^w, after being forcibly removed to the S’Klallam Indian Agency (the Skokomish Reservation in Hood Canal) from Port Townsend in 1871.

 

Real estate records show that in 1887, a parcel of land was sold by Catherine McCurdy to pačwíɬəs (Prince of Wales) and Charlie York, the sons of čičməhán, and to James Webster (Chimacum Jim) and his wife Louise, whose descendants are citizens of today’s Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. In 1888, pačwíɬəs purchased additional land at šéʔnək^w from Ms. McCurdy and maintained ownership and residency there until 1941.

 

Indian-owned lands on Indian Island were lost when the federal government took it through the Eminent Domain process in 1939-41, to convert the island into a Naval base.”

 

It is still a military zone today.

 

We missed a site downtown here near the ferry dock, but we went to the Post Office where the chief and his family are incised in the capitals of a Richardsonian Romanesque style post office. Here they are from website:   

 

I find this a little grotesque, that after destroying their culture they put them into stone capitals, another form of colonization.

“čičməhán (Cheech-ma-han) inherited his role as chief when his brother Klow-ston left the area, and he was officially recognized as “Chief of the Klallams” by the federal government in 1854.

 

When settlers Hastings and Pettygrove first arrived in 1851 and met čičməhán, they sent him to San Francisco to reinforce his understanding of coming changes (in population and technology). His tour guide was James G. Swan, with whom he became a lifelong friend. In 1859 Swan wrote that čičməhán returned from San Francisco “with very enlarged views of the number and power of the white man.” The trip provided by the new settlers seemed to sober the Chief, who tried to mediate between the whites and Natives from that point on.”

 

The post office was built five years after his death. I wonder how much he lived with regrets for trying to “mediate” with whites who betrayed his people over and over.

 

From downtown we went to Fort Worden, Point Wilson, where  Admiralty Inlet and the Straits of Juan de Fuca collide. A dramatic tale of a whirlpool awaited us there.

 

From the sign you see Henry standing near.

“There is a whirlpool on the side of this lighthouse point. Some people from Hadlock were over at K’l’w’l’’m, and a girl there met a monster (he was a shark and she did not know it). She fell so madly in love with him that she used to go down through that whirlpool to visit him. She used to come back at times to visit her folks at Hadlock. When she would come to visit her folks, she would bring home all varieties of food from the bottom of the bay; big swells would come ashore with her, and it wasn’t until kelp was growing on her forehead that her father told her not to come back any more. Before that, her folks had permitted her to come, for she had brought them food at times.”

Next we went to North Beach where we had lunch and learned that the Indians carried their canoes around this dangerous point.

The last place we went to was qatáy (kah-tai) Valley,

 

 

“This site is the last remaining vestige of the natural prairie that spanned the qatáy (kah-tai) Valley, between wetland areas. Relatively dry, upland areas of the valley provided camas bulbs (qwɬúʔi in Klallam and Camassia quamash in Latin) for S’Klallam people to eat. The 1.4-acre camas prairie was officially preserved by the Olympic Peninsula Chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society in 1987.

 

Camas harvesting was done by women, who broke ground with digging sticks (generally made of fire-hardened Ironwood, or Ocean Spray). They had to be well aware of the difference between blue and white (death) camas, in order to harvest only the edible variety. They turned over a section of ground, pulled out the largest camas bulbs, and returned the earth to its original spot to continue growing.

 

The bulb of blue camas, a main carbohydrate of the S’Klallam diet, was roasted and ground into a starch that could be stored for winter. Radiocarbon dates from camas ovens at Ebey’s Prairie, on Whidbey Island directly across Admiralty Inlet from Port Townsend, suggests these traditional cooking methods are at least 2,000 years old.”

 

There were six other sites that we missed for various reasons. You can read about them all on the website. 

 

Over all it is a story of terrible betrayal. I can no longer look at the Victorian architecture of Port Townsend. All I see is the death and destruction of a culture that laid the foundation for the death and destruction of our planet that we are dealing with today. Apparently though Chetzemoka has dozens of descendents today, so the Natives survived through incredible odds. Here is what was placed on his gravestone:

Chetzemoka (Duke of York)
June 21, 1888
The white man’s friend;
we honor his name.

 

 

 

 

Selma Waldman More Important Than Ever in 2021

“Lust for power and territory is the same lust that kills man, women, children and the land itself” Selma Waldman 2002

 

What would Seattle’s deeply political artist Selma Waldman think of our current catastrophes?

 

On a bitter winter day in January 2008, I accompanied Selma Waldman to the last demonstration that she attended before her death in April. “Shut Down Guantanamo” began with a demonstration of waterboarding. A young man, tied face down on a board, had a wet towel over his face and water poured over his head into a bucket. Even in the simulation, the volunteer felt as though he was about to drown.

During the speeches that followed by politicians and political activists, we held up enlarged images of one of Selma’s explicit drawings of waterboarding from her long series Black Book of Aggressors. They scrupulously depict in her expressionist drawing technique, several means of waterboarding, with detailed text taken from newspapers. Selma urgently said in my ear, “But it shouldn’t be only Guantanamo, what about the black sites, the other places of torture.” She always understood that one place is connected to so many other places; one manifestation of torture connects to the will to power everywhere, the will to oppress, the desire to destroy the human spirit.

 

 

“A Conversation in Time and Space” presents thirteen of Selma Waldman’s  monumental drawings at the Center on Contemporary Art partnered with nine brave COCA members responding to her forceful work and statements with their own art and commentaries (all of which can be seen and read on the COCA website https://cocaseattle.org/time-and-space until February 20).

 

Waldman’s art embraces the classical tradition of Käthe Kollwitz in her expressionist line. The materials of chalk and charcoal were part of her politics as well, a metaphor for the fragility of life.

 

How ironic that this timely exhibition cannot be visited in person. The current disasters we face, COVID-19, climate change, homelessness and hunger, intersect with the abuses Waldman addresses: torture, detentions, endless wars, starvation.

 

So we can answer the question: she would immediately call attention to these intersections all seated in an obsession with power, what she called “Naked/Aggression.”

 

Rainer Waldman Adkins carefully selected the works to touch on large themes in his mother’s work: the Holocaust series called Falling Man Suite from 1966, The Man and Bread series, featuring extreme desperation in famine, police brutality in The Thin Naked Line, drawn after the 1999 World Trade protests in Seattle and the aggressions of war, in nine images from the over 80 works in the “Black Book of Aggressors,” in the long cycle called Naked/Aggression-Profile of the Armed Perpetrators first begun in the late 1990s.

 

Waldman grew up in Kingsville, Texas, deep in South Texas, where everyone was employed by the mighty King Ranch. The giant cattle ranch employed hundreds of Chicano workers. She belonged to the only Jewish family in the town. Although her own family was middle class, she learned about oppression as a way of life in her early years from Chicano/a friends.

 

When Waldman was on a Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin, she was profoundly affected by the 1960 documentary Mein Kampf. She began a series of drawings of dehumanized and distorted figures based on images and accounts of the Warsaw ghetto. These are the first works on the Nazi holocaust by a Jewish American artist to be acquired by a German museum.

 

Collectively titled Falling Man, the ninety drawings are near life-size representations that were dramatically hung from the ceiling and stairwell of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.   This is the source of the Falling Man Series, represented with one huge drawing at COCA called “The Doll.” The helplessness of the naked figure brings us directly to our current crisis as so many people lose their homes and live in the streets in desperation.

The “Man and Bread” drawings of the late 1960s take the Falling Man series to brother against brother, a fragment of the wretchedness inflicted on so many masses of people. The two Bread drawings in the exhibition come from a group of more than 300 works (of which 25 are in the Collection of the Memorial Terezin Ghetto Museum). Waldman based the imagery on Elie Wiesel’s descriptions in Night (Bantam Books, 1960) of the struggle for food to the death in concentration camps.

 

 

On March 21, 1960, Selma Waldman saw the front page photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre, in South Africa. She was so shocked that she decided to more deeply commit her art to a “struggle to end genocide and racism.” We can draw a direct line to our current atrocities in the United States and elsewhere, by the military, the police and most recently armed militias, many of whom are psychologically damaged war veterans.

1. 

Police brutality in the large drawing Thin Naked Line, 1999-2002, based on press photographs, gives us the faceless mass of the Seattle riot police who attacked the anti-World Trade Organization demonstrators in 1999. But the drawing refers to mass police assault anywhere.  They are dehumanized warriors who advance toward us as a group.

 

 

 

Finally, her last series Naked /Aggression: Wall of Perpetrators IV-V, The Black Book of Aggressors (I-IV) (2005-2006) bears witness to the degradation of human beings and the systematic abuse of power in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Left unfinished at the time of the artist’s death in April 2008, the Black Book of Aggressors would have included two hundred drawings and eight walls. For the final wall, she planned to reconfigure Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1820 – 23), The Colossus (1808-1812), and other black paintings, to address atrocities world-wide.

 

As she wrote

“the cycle ‘corrects’ the mythic profile of the invulnerable warrior-hero, born to fight and trained to win – and reveals it as a reckless existential lie and an obscene fraud without which battles could never be engaged- confirms it as the fool’s proof of manhood, the lifeblood for fascist, the main meat dished out to defense profiteers, and the first refuge for scoundrel fanatics.”

 

What could be a more timely statement given what we have just witnessed in the US capital!

 

Every detail of Selma Waldman’s life carried her strong spirit of resistance and her belief that creative voices could win over forces of oppression. In her small home in Rainier Valley every wall was covered with art, texts, poems, posters, prints, photographs.  There were photographs of singers, dancers, gymnasts, poets, and writers, as well as quotations, and her own writings. Every wall and most of the floor space was filled with books.

 

But two facts emerged clearly for me as I spent more time in her house in her last weeks. First, her witness to depravity and the abuse of power was paired with a celebration of the human spirit in all of its glorious powers of creativity and resistance.  Second, Selma herself, lucid to the end, was immersed in a continuous remembrance of the holocaust itself, the initial horror that she experienced not first-hand, but deeply, at a critical time in her life.

 

She spent her life searching for archetypes that could represent the underlying loss of humanity that leads to such abuse.

 

Selma Waldman would answer the question with which I began by speaking of  the intersections of past and present, all seated in an obsession with power manifested as racism, fanaticism, and inhumanity.

 

But she always paired her witness to depravity and the abuse of power with a celebration of the human spirit in all of its glorious powers of creativity and resistance.

Iran US Collaboration: Emotional Numbness: The Impact of War on the Human Psyche and Ecosystems

 

 

“Emotional Numbness, the Impact of War on the Human Psyche and Ecosystems”

 

This exhibition is in Tehran, Iran, but available to see anywhere!

It is a collaboration between US based group WEAD, Women Eco Artists Dialog and artists in Tehran, Iran.

You can see two excellent online tours of the exhibition  here is a direct link to one from the WEAD website : a simulation of the gallery that enables you to stop at each work and learn about it, the second is a physical tour of PLATFORM 3 Gallery in Tehran.

 

Two curators one in Oakland, Minoosh Zomorodinia and one in Tehran, Atefeh Khas, collaborated on the complex logistics required to put the exhibition together. The physical exhibition is in Tehran, the WEAD artists sent their work there, and surprisingly, almost all of them made it through to the show.

 

“Emotional Numbness” includes over forty artists. Their work is intense, given the theme of the exhibition. They include many two dimensional prints (given the limitations of shipping to Tehran), videos, sculpture and installations.

 

To name just a few: there is an interview with a 95 year old holocaust survivor (Kolya Grokhovsky The Future is Bright). ( the woman on the right in this video screen shot, she tells a story of how she survived barely, when many in her family did not.

 

an homage to the artist’s grandmother and a young man who died in the Iran/Iraq war. (Sara Madander  In Memory of Aziz). The installation shot here gives the flavor of the Tehran gallery as well as the several parts of this installation which included the carpet and a video as well as an image of a window with a lacey curtain. The video of the full installation is on the artist’s website. Aziz is the artist’s grandmother and the artist’s mother kept her mother’s home just as it had been when she died. The portrait is of the artist’s uncle Ahmed, who disappeared into the war at the age of 17, leaving without saying good-bye after being brainwashed, as the artist suggests, in school.

What we see here is a  haunting segment of a recreation of her grandmother’s home.

 

Artists Beyond Borders collaborates with other artist in projects world wide that address the impact of war.

Here they present people of Myanmar displaced by war  carrying gigantic bullets as they flee. This artist partnership ( Pamela Blotner and Mie Preckler) believe that art must bring more than “Awareness to the table, that if humankind is to take a part in averting war. …we need to have a collective effort”

 

Seattle-based artist Alice Dubiel addreses sexual violence on military bases Alice Dubiel  Domestic Violence/The War on Terror: Military Archeology 2 (JBLM);”The US Military maintains over 800 bases world-wide . . . the text consists of geography. social context, history and description of Join Base Lewis McChord.  . .   reports of detailed domestic violence are particularly graphic. ”

 

 

Nazli Abbaspour honors soldiers who die in wars.

In the installation video you can see a brief haunting close up of some of the photographs of soldiers taken before they go off to die.

 

 

Gazelle Samizay and Labkhand Olfatmanesh in Bepar call attention to the impact of war on children’s play, in this case hopscotch. As a young person tries to play hopscotch, the sounds of war, the impact of war, and the destruction of war surround and overwhelm her. The artists use various metaphors to suggest the violence.

 

Farzaneh Najafi creates this compelling installation of oil drums focusing on  “Oil, this black gold is the motive for seizure and plunder of many lands all over the world.” She includes emphasis on the devestation of the environment of Iran, and the related economic impacts of sanctions .

Verona Fonte’s dramatic image with its hands grasping a wire fence in the foreground conveys to us the desperation of refugees. The lives of these people is hard  for us to grasp in its deprivations.  “the images reflect the tribulations and tragic circumstances faced by the multitudes of people displaced by war, poverty and global warming” You can see the rest of her series here. https://veronafonte.jimdofree.com/portfolio/fine-art-digital-prints/

 

 

Wilkinson speaks forcefully to many of the issues in the show:

I depict a world filled with blood, lit by a sun that has become a source of darkness rather than light . . . a benumbed child stands on rocks that have become cold and sterile under his feet, his world no longer one of sustenance and color, but depleted and drained. This is how I see the earth and our place in it as wars, weapons, pollution and the greed that drives all these forces to grow and proliferate. It’s as if we are filling the earth with our blood while draining our own existence of life and light.”

 

There are many more incredible works in the show. The range of aesthetic approaches united by this powerful theme tells us the universality of the theme and the nightmare we are in today as Congress passes another 740 billion dollar defense bill that is beyond our understanding in its colossal size. The 908 billion stimulus bill for the current COVID catastrophe is a little larger, but in limbo. Wouldn’t it be  exciting of the defense bill monies went to correcting the environmental catastrophes caused by war and specifically the US military.

 

And as I write the escalation of rhetoric about Iran and military “preparedness” in the Gulf, is also horrifying.

 

As our public media demonizes Iran, the dialog between these Iranian and American artists on the healing power of art is inspiring. I cannot recall another exhibition that brings together war, the military and violence against both women and the planet.