Theodore A. Harris, On the Throne of Fire, 2008, mixed media collage

I first came into contact with Theodore Harris when I was given the opportunity to moderate “Art as a Weapon: Critical Thinking and the Media,” the keynote event of Culture Shock 2011 co-organized by QPIRG McGill and the SSMU (Student Society of McGill University). Culture Shock is an annual series of events on McGill University campus focused on the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, communities of colour and indigenous people. This year’s keynote speakers were artists Sundus Abdul Hadi [i] and Theodore A. Harris.

I was born in the U.S. in 1966 to a biracial couple active in the civil rights movement. Our family moved from Boston to Montreal in the early 1970s; however I have always felt a strong cultural connection to Black America and some of my earliest, deepest impressions are of the 1960s in the American northeast, even though I was too young to really remember this time and place. I have found much inspiration in African American art history and especially in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and ‘70s.  My career has transitioned over the past 15 years or so, from social services to community work to a broader cultural work involving community art and education, situated within African diaspora histories of emancipatory education programs initiated from within the community, for the community[ii].

I immediately connected with Theodore’s art and saw it in the tradition of BAM, an impression that was reinforced as I discovered his collaborative work with renowned Black poet-playwright Amiri Baraka[iii].  Following the Culture Shock event in October, Theodore generously agreed to stay in contact with me and to discuss his work and ideas.  The following conversation represents some of the issues we have been engaging with by email and telephone in the past six weeks.

Rosalind: In addition to my appreciation of your artwork Theodore, my motivation for initiating this dialogue is my research, which explores the potential social, cultural and economic benefits of inter-generational art education that is critically and culturally grounded in the lives of Black community members.  My key interests right now are (a) understanding how the notion that visual ‘art isn’t for Black people’ is perpetuated both within the community and in art discourses; and (b) working with other community members to advance student-centered, critical multicultural approaches to art education that work to broaden conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘artist,’ and seek to examine and dismantle the powerful traditions of racism and ethnocentrism ingrained in the histories of Western art and art education.

Last summer I discovered a study by art education scholar William Charland in which he addressed what he described as the “Black avoidance of art as an area of study or career aspiration”[iv].  Charland examined the attitudes and behaviours toward visual art and the career identity of ‘artist’ of fifty-eight African American adolescents from four different high schools.  The teenagers were asked to describe stereotypes what they believed White people attributed to Blacks, and then later in the study were asked to relate widespread stereotypes that people have of artists.  Charland found, for example, a “startling overlap between informants’ understandings of society’s demeaning stereotypes of artists and African Americans” (i.e., both as poor, marginalized, moody, unable to function in ‘normal society’, etc), suggesting that “an African American adolescent who assumes the mantle of artist willingly takes on social stigma aligned with racial stereotypes as well”[v].  The teens also talked about family and community objections to an art career, something I hear often as well, suggesting that stereotype-informed beliefs about artists exist across generations.

So Theodore, given the exclusivity and elitism of formal institutions of art and what Charland describes can you talk about how you became an artist?

Theodore: First I want to thank you for moderating the keynote panel with the great artist Sundus Abdul Hadi and myself as part of the Culture Shock events at McGill University.

This is a great question and one that gets to the heart of some deep concerns for me. I was born in 1966 in Manhattan, New York City, but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother was a single parent with a drug addiction raising my sister and me, while my father was still in New York dealing with his own addiction (which he did manage to control enough to obtain a degree in social work from NYU).  I say all that to say with all of this dysfunction my parents respected the arts; my mother could draw and play the piano very well, so music was for the most part was dominant art form in our lives, not visual art.  Jazz was always playing and I am very grateful for that because it has had a great influence on my life and work.  You see, my mother also worked at Aqua Lounge Jazz Club on 52nd street in West Philly, where greats like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Art Blakey and The Messengers played and she also hung out with them.  My mom was into music in a deep way and I think music was the thing that made her the most happy.

As early as I can remember I was always drawing, whether I was in school or at home, and my mother always encouraged me to make art, but I don’t remember any one saying you should go to art school, or college period, and this is something I just started thinking about within the last few years—why wasn’t the idea ever put out there? The only person that was, somewhat, of a father figure in my life was my grandfather, who tried to discourage me from the arts.  He knew nothing about the visual arts and for some reason thought art was not reliable, in other words, ‘how can you make money from it?’  At this point I was into graffiti, so one thing he did because I guess he could see I was not giving it up, he got me a job working with a sign painter and sign builder named Mr. John Wilson and I loved it. Working with Mr. Wilson was the first time I ever held a paint brush.

Art is not promoted as a career choice in inner city public schools, which is why, among other things, I left school in the 11th grade and hung out in libraries and bookstores in the art history sections trying to figure out what life and art were about. My life is all about art, it is how I see life, I guess that is because it is the only thing I have that I think I do well. And although we lived below the poverty line, I always felt like with art I was intelligent and could make some kind of future for myself if I could stick with it. And as an artist you know what I mean, you eat and sleep art.

I am sure that reading about art and artists also improved my reading skills, because you are not just reading on the surface, you have to know what those words and metaphors mean and in turn you learn about the world through art and artists and come to understand that the block you live on is not the whole world. In my opinion this is why art is not taught in public schools in the inner city, because it teaches you how to think and understand images and that is what the business class does not want you to do; become a critical thinker and an intellectual. They don’t’ want another Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage. Because these visual artists and writers force you to see your self in the world, although you may disagree with what you see in the mirror they are holding up to you, you have to deal with it.

Yes, the art world is elitist and backward in its politics, because it is mostly managed by what Hans Haacke has called “Museums, Managers of Consciousness:” the 1 % class born into money who think that art is all about aesthetic pleasure, which is why war profiters see innocent people on death row or killed in war, as collateral damage.  And that drove Walter Annenberg and the blue bloods of the art world crazy: in their world art is used to disenfranchise people in the under class through promoting European art as the standard of what is human and intelligent and the rest of us as primitive and subhuman. My visual art became blatantly political after I heard and read the poetry of Sonia Sanchez; I think it was because her use of metaphors made me see what I could create with visual art, and the poetry was also a history lesson, that made me see myself in a new way.  After this I went right out and read more of her poetry and the writing of other poets and got into reading the literature and literary history of Black America and this opened up a new world to me.  I fell in love with literature and it inspired and added meaning to my artwork; before that I described my work as “just pretty colors,” I was painting mostly flowers, still life and art historical subject matter and was preoccupied with mostly formalist concerns.

The Charland study mirrors my experience, but some how I ignored the un-constructive things people would say to discourage my art and becoming an artist and kept going, because art was the only thing I had to hold onto and it kept me in museums, bookstores, libraries, and out of jail.

Theodore A. Harris, Postcard from Conquest, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: Can you talk some more about your early influences and mentors?  Did someone or something in particular teach you that a Black man could be an artist?

Theodore: Off the top of my head, it was that the more books I was exposed to with African American artists’ work in them and the more African American artists I met; that was how I knew I could pursue art.  Artists such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and always staring at those Blue Note [jazz] album covers reflected something back at me that was so powerful it even made me change the way I dressed; I started wearing suit jackets, dress shoes.  This in effect causes you to walk different and you take your self more seriously, you see yourself, community and world view differently and this shapes your art.  The more you know about the world the more you can teach yourself and your children to think globally.  That is why I refuse to be called a minority just because most of America claims the social construct of whiteness.  I am a citizen of the world and most of the world is made up of people of color, which makes them, the whites, the minority.

Theodore A. Harris, Assemblage for Decolonizing the Mind, for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I find this so important Theodore; it really underscores the significance of ethno-cultural influences, and how, even in the absence of direct mentorship, access to cultural history and art that we can relate to our own lived experiences can make all the difference in our lives.

I can see your concern with the global picture particularly in your anti-war pieces, and in the ways they raise questions about America’s place on the world stage.  Can you speak about the emotion and particularly the notion of violence for example, in the Collage and Conflict series?  I’m curious about whether you would describe art as a non-violent response to violence, and how you understand the use of art as a weapon.

Theodore: Yes, it is a non-violent response to violence in our homes and interpersonal relationships, but most of all it is a critique of America’s domestic and foreign policy, its self destructive militarism in the name of democracy. The Collage and Conflict series began as a compositional challenge to myself because I wanted to see what would happen. Working with the three panels all at once opened me up to experimenting with the surface, and I decided to attack it—to go to war on the surface by writing curses, setting it on fire, hitting it with a hammer, ripping it apart and putting it back together—and have figures in the piece attacking each other to raise the issue of ‘friendly fire.’  Bloody flesh wounds on the panels are meant to give the viewer a visceral feeling, as if they, their flesh, are being struck by a whip or a drone missile. And the blood that is spilled is a mirror in which I see the middle passage; our flesh in knots, fire-hosed with the slobber of biting dogs and pepper spray, under the orders of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, whose mouth is a little white tank moving backwards, camouflaged with Kara Walkers’ silhouettes.

I see art as an offensive and defensive weapon to defend your self and community, as it was in the great work Emory Douglas made for the Black Panthers’ news paper—I would say Emory is a Charles White turned up a few notches. Because of the influence of documentary film on my work, I would say the Collage and Conflict series are cinematic confrontational collages; cinematic because I see the juxtaposing and layering of images as creating a sense of movement as captured in film stills, and confrontational because of the weight of issues the work is dealing with. My work is about looking beneath the “Surface Politics” of aesthetics and formalism, to visualize a Black Aesthetic that is about “life over death” like Addison Gayle said.

Theodore A. Harris, Purple Hearts Bleed, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: I find collage to be somewhat of a ‘violent’ method in and of itself, in terms of the cutting, severing, disassociating and dislocating it involves.  I notice that you refer to it as ‘surgery’ and I find your work is similar to Wangechi Mutu’s, who has also described her collages as ‘delicate surgeries.’  Both of you also use wounds in your work in similar ways.  You describe war as a ‘map of wounds’ and have said that in your work the wounds might be from shrapnel, gunfire, friendly fire… I also think of those wounds in your and Mutu’s work as wounds of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And the violence in yours and perversion in Mutu’s work, for me, have so much to do with the violent distortions and perversion of these systems, the ways they act on human bodies—flesh and blood—and on human-ness overall.  I’m also very intrigued by your identification of the Challenger explosion as a starting point.

Theodore: As an artist the goal of my work is to get the ideas in your head, so I would say Wangechi Mutu, John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, and I are attempting a kind brain surgery on the mind of the viewer, to do what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed “de-colonizing the mind.”  And yes those wounds are the result of damage done to our minds and bodies under capitalism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex—a plantation with stock options in sizzling electric chairs…I wonder if an innocent prisoner on his way to the electric chair, who has exhausted all his appeals to a crooked court, I wonder if he feels ‘Post-Black?’

In the two person exhibition “War is a Map of Wounds,” Howardena Pindell and I had at New Jersey City University, I had this quote by Amiri Baraka on the wall of the gallery above my work, for the most part to be directed at the art students: “It is a new world we want not an endowed chair in the concentration camp…art must be our magic weapon to create and re-create the world and our selves as part of it…This is my motto and the standard on which I make my work as magic weapons, created in the ‘Black Labs of the Heart.”

But another way to view that blood is to see it as the artist sacrifice in sweat and tears, Augusta Savages’ tears when she could not get back her sculpture “The Harp” she was commissioned to make for the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, that had been inspired by the song ”Lift Every Voice and Sing” and was destroyed after the Fair.

I was frozen when I witnessed the Challenger explosion, the images were so powerful that I started to collage them with images of crying babies, this is how I got into collage. Then I went on from there to collaging the U.$. Capitol building by turning it upside down, first done in my collage Vetoed Dreams of 1995.  Some people have asked me will I turn it right side up because President Obama is in office.  Why, because he is African American?[vi] I say no way; its too early for that, like I said before the scales of justice are not blind and even, and that is why now a world wide struggle is exploding.

Theodore A. Harris, Iced Leaders, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I think that may be a critical note that we might end on for now: that while our conversation for this paper has been largely driven by our common concerns and interests in relation to Black learners and communities, and Black artists and their art work, we both understand that the issues are not just “Black and White”—critical thinking, like your collages, is always more nuanced, layered and complex than that.

Theodore: From the outset it has been so great talking with you and we need you in the university and community to debunk how we see and what we think about ourselves in relation to the arts.

Leo Caraballo had been diagnosed with cancer. After encounters with doctors, oncologists, medical institutions and medical insurance agents, her cancer went into remission.

Caraballo, who invited her doctors, surgeons, and bronze sculpture foundry workers to the opening, is a socially perceptive photographer. “Visitations,” her past work, faintly echoing Diane Arbus, documents aspects of death and the funerary rituals connected with this universal passage.

“Visitations” http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

Abouali Farmanfarmaian, has just completed his doctorate on cryonics; his dissertation, Secular Immortal, might have informed this project. He is also a film producer ( “Vegas: Based on a true story”: [2009]); and a calculating photographer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1283971/

caraballo-farman have made several projects together. This current collaboration, Extractions, is the height of their artistic production. Their stunningly beautiful bronze sculptures are unique in contemporary art world-wide. She is from Buenos Aires and he’s from Tehran, the center of the Axis of Evil.

Extractions evolved from diagnosis-conception to completion in about 18 months: caraballo-farman, like many critical artists in New York, have avoided the shallow ambition prevalent within the arts. The current work can be fully understood if one follows their production sequence: Leo Caraballo’s genetic code instructs her body to produce treatable cancer; after exhausting discussions with surgeons they convert the MRI images into 3D models, then they introduce medical scientific knowledge and imagery to bronze sculpture-making experts in a foundry. Imagine explaining to foundry workers who normally make Statues of Liberty to now make sculptures of tumors. I was told that the foundry workers got deep satisfaction from making their bronzes.

The MRI images are what fascinated them. They could now see her actual tumors. Historically, patients haven’t had an image of what is transpiring inside their bodies. The question emerged: Could they convert Caraballo’s cancer into art?

The artists got a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

caraballo-farman describe their process for the Eyebeam section of their exhibition:

“Ruins (Carcinomas), highlights breast cancer’s links to carcinogens in our everyday environment. Depicting fallen urban landscapes over-run with tumors, the pieces are based on breast cancer tumor forms, imaged and “digitally removed” through a special process devised by caraballo-farman, that combines Magnetic Resonance Imaging and rapid prototyping. The grey ‘support material’ used by 3D printers to build up a form is generally meant to be removed. But [we] used Eyebeam’s 3D printer in such a way as to maximize the architectural form of the printer’s support structures and then hacked at the structures to partially reveal the white tumor embedded.”

They were stopped in their tracks when they considered the entire image of the plastic surrounding a model of the cancer tumour inside. In not removing the 3D printer support structures, the artists faced something they did not predict: clear and direct models of high-rise buildings resembling the World Trade Towers during 9/11. With screw-drivers and other instruments, the buildings were artistically pock-marked.

The Eyebeam Window Gallery exhibits a white field filled with these high-rise towers (20 x 27 cm) with hidden models of tumors inside which we can’t see due to the faceless, horrifying, opaque grey plastic. Depending on one’s point of view, this unpredictable metaphor is accurate, or inanely simple. I walk away from the window feeling unsettled: I am a Canadian-Pakistani looking at models of buildings being 9/11-ed.

Their project comes to fruition at Ramis Barquet Gallery, 532 West 24th Street (very near Eyebeam Window Gallery).

The intelligence of “caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer” is to have installed their total exhibition in three contiguous galleries. One sees the metaphor of  9/11 devastation at Eyebeam; then one has to walk outside for about 300 meters to see the larger tumor sculptures at Ramis Barquet Gallery. What was inside the grey models are now larger bronze sculptures, approximately,  40 cm x 50 cm x 25 cm. The gallery swarms with 8 such pieces.

And,  just 30 meters west of Ramis the artists have set up a one-stand jewelry shop at Sebastian+Barquet Gallery, 544 West 24th Street. The tumor necklaces and worry beads are about 6 cm x 6 cm x 1.5 cm. To magnify the irony of  selling tumors to America, the artists formed a company, Object Breast Cancer, and chose a loquacious blond to do the sales pitch. I chatted with her while looking at the sharply lit jewelry. I liked her fresh, blue sky attitude. An intellectual from Haifa, standing nearby suggested that these jewels were the 21st century’s equivalent of The Evil Eye. A percentage of sales goes to cancer research.

At Ramis Gallery, I face the bronzes with fear and confusion. Am I actually going to see beauty in all this? If so, why? What could be the point of using one’s cancer to make art?

The edgeless bronze sculptures, set in front of white walls sit under the bathetic gallery lights. The tribe of metal totems hover over their stands; most have a solid, super-heavy mass core with voluminous wings of thick-and-occasionally-thin chapati-like appendages jutting out into space; there are solar flares ejaculating into the sky; there are things that flutter out of caves like waves of smooth endoplasmic recticumlum which, as one walks around, become multiple heads of Rabelaisian Canada Geese. There are holes in the cores from which there mightn’t be an escape; we see a diagram of CERN traced in a flying arm of deep brown metal; and, here is David’s finger extending out to the cool North Atlantic; in adjoining sculptures I see faces in the shapes of maps of Afghanistan and Tajikistan staring into celestial history. And, more holes, and more caves.

Cancer flows around and around these rewarding sculptures. But what’s the reward? Is the reward to know that some thing beautiful comes from something nasty? This isn’t very deep, is it? A chicken is a beautiful bird. So is roast chicken. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940), said this about things that are beautiful:

“The assets of culture are not only a document of culture without being at the same time a document of barbarity. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”.

There is a reason why these artists have calibrated walking time breaks from one exhibition space to the other. Roughly 100 – 300 meters separate the exhibition spaces. This physical spacing gives the beholder time to understand roast chicken and its discontents, or to connect barbarity with civilization. One walks out into the smiling crowds visiting hundreds of other openings in the area. We’re all having a smoke outside. It’s Thursday night in Chelsea, a light drizzle infects the October evening. I’ve walked from models of 9/11-ed buildings to the Bronze Age.

The last time I had such a shock of beauty was when I saw American film-maker Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Eye, (1971: 32 minutes); a documentary shot in a Pittsburg morgue. As with Brakhage’s work, one can’t escape the root source of beauty – dead bodies which become mysterious things hovering in introspective, resplendent space. With precision, his camera trembles over the cool bodies, some with three-degree burns; some car crash victims; some bodies pock-marked with gun shots. The master’s documentary states: please, try not to run from the death that I’m showing you. If you walk out of the cinema, you might lose an appreciation of elegance; lose a sense of elegance and you’ll gain a sense of empty ambition.

caraballo-farman, have guided the audience in a similar way but without being as confrontational as Brakhage: Brakhage used a projection booth, an audience sitting in a darkened room, and a white screen on which to view the slow, methodical cutting open of dead bodies flickering by at 24 frames per second. The only way the beholder could wipe the trance would be to leave the darkened room.

caraballo-farman have, with unusual expertise, made their challenging project relevant to gallery curators, as well as oncologists, surgeons and doctors. The beholder can break the trance proposed by these two artists also: just walk out of the galleries, eat a street-cart meal made by The Halal Brothers and the viewing experience will go into remission. We’re ephemeral entities: these bronzes have a decay rate, but a slower rate than the authority of the flesh that produced them.

Julian Samuel is a friend of caraballo-farman.

www.julianjsamuel.com

caraballo-farman sites:

http://objectbreastcancer.tumblr.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Object-Breast-Cancer-by-caraballo-farman/258608990849813

http://eyebeam.org/events/window-gallery-ruins-carcinomas

Regarding the Horror

http://www.caraballofarman.net/moving/horror/index.html

Visitations

http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

caraballofarman.net

Gallery locations:

caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer:

Ramis Banquet Gallery

532 West 24th Street, New York, NY

Extractions

Opening Night Performance and Reception

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8 pm

Eyebeam Window Gallery

540 West 21st Street, New York, NY

Ruins (Carcinomas)

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8pm

Sebastian+Barquet

544 West 24th Street, New York, NY

OBC Jewelry Launch

October 13th, 6-8pm

Jason is a 36 year old male.  Thoroughly addicted to pushing charcoal and ink around paper, he is also the co-creator and director of EN MASSE, a large-scale collaborative drawing initiative based out of Montreal.  Graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design in 1996, with distinction.

You can see other works by Jason Botkin at: http://www.jasonbotkin.com

and for En Masse:  http://enmasse.info/

Artist Statement:

These images reflect reflection, looking in and looking out.  It is the essence of otherness, of being apart and yet, also of coming together.  Each image is a composite of smaller ones and the completion of the parts create the whole.

BY WHOLE

CLOUDS-LINES

Fridge

Looking in

Plant

POLE AND WIRE

The expression “motion photographer” came to me spontaneously since movement is the basis of my work: I am constantly in search of a perspective that will transmit both the beauty and the speed of the world in which we live in.
 I am amongst those who decided to devote their time to transpose their vision into images and I am dedicated to make the necessary efforts for my vision to become a reality. 
Thus I hope to follow my own path while remaining off the beaten tracks.

***

L’expression « motion photographer » m’est venue spontanément puisque le mouvement est à la base de mon travail : je suis constamment à la recherche d’un point de vue qui me permettra de transmettre à la fois la beauté de ce qui nous entoure, et la vitesse propre au monde dans lequel nous vivons.

Je fais partie de ceux qui ont décidé de consacrer leur énergie à transposer en images leur vision, et surtout à prendre le temps et à faire les efforts nécessaires pour que cette vision devienne réalité. C’est ainsi que j’espère suivre mon chemin tout en demeurant en dehors des sentiers battus.

Interview :

MS :  In our latest issue of Montreal Serai, we are covering the theme of the City, its changing landscape, its changing cultural and political intersections and so your latest work is intrinsic to the theme. Welcome to Montreal Serai! Serai is an old Persian word, which means a resting place or a place of transcience.   Why is your latest work, an absolutely ethereal transformation,called City Limits?  What was on your mind when you gaveit that title?

DB: My goal was to show the duality between city and nature. It seemed like a fitting title.

MS:  Some of the transitions go outside Montreal, Toronto-the Lakeshore and perhaps New York. What made you cover these cities?

DB: These cities were the biggest but also closest to my hometown of Quebec city. Also, I wanted to showcase the North-East portion of (North) America.

MS: Tell us something about your technique? Do you station the camera for several hours on selected high perches? Do you come back and re shoot? Do you edit?

DB: All locations in my video are available to the public. No special permits were needed. I just did a lot of research on finding good locations for what I wanted to express.

Shooting is not the hard part. I put a lot of effort in the editing of my material and finding the right music for the project.I shot this timelapse montage from late 2010 through early 2011. One year in the making.My goal was to show the duality between city and nature.

Locations include :

- Montreal, Quebec, Canada

- Quebec city, Quebec, Canada

- Toronto, Ontario, Canada

- Manhattan, New York, USA

- Chicago, Illinois, USA

MS: Describe some of the train station shots. I suppose one is at Grand Central? How did you manage to pull that off?

DB: Again, just a lot of research and planning

MS: It seems movement in the skies, in the clouds, in the highways and amongst people are the most electrifying aspects.There is an interstellar metropolis feeling that develops and then suddenly it cuts to the ships passing under the bridge and finally the capsized boat. What does it signify?

DB: I like to let people make their own understanding of it all. That is what art is all about in my opinion.

MS: Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to interview you and to reproduce your latest work.

DB: Thanks a lot to everybody for watching and sharing my work.

———-

Dominic’s website website : www.dominicboudreault.com

email : dom@dominicboudreault.com

Follow Dominic on twitter : twitter.com/​d0minicb

Follow Dominic on Facebook : facebook.com/​pages/​Dominic-Boudreault-Motion-Photographer/​126369427437180

Here’s a video interview that Dominic did for MSNBC : on.msnbc.com/​juqWHz

———-

Keena was born to a Mohawk father and French-Canadian mother in 1949.  She was given up to be adopted and, until she was a young teenager, grew up in an orphanage. She was taken in as a foster child to a strict French-Canadian home.  She always knew she was native although she had never been told this. Keena said she was from the bear tribe. She began working with red clay when she was in her twenties and this small beginning translated into creating a world of colourful figurines in different tribal costumes. A favorite theme of hers was mother and child and she eventually had three children herself. She often incorporated this into her bigger sculptures with other creatures like the wolf, the eagle, the bear and the turtle. She hand-sculpted vases and decorated them with ceramic paints and she created a multitude of multi-faceted masks to ward off evil.

In 2005, one of her Nativity scenes was used on a Canadian 85 cent stamp and this year another of her Nativity scenes is being displayed at St. Joseph’s Oratory.

Keena Bear Vase

Keena Goose Vase

Keena Wolf Vase

Chief in Orange Headdress

Chief in Orange and Yellow

Mother and Child unglazed

Woman in Feather Cape

Woman with World

Mother and Child

Keena Stamp

Permission to show Keena’s works by her daughter, Yanishka Beljaars.

Printed originally by Viewpoints, The State of the Arts in the Middle East: Volume IV, The Middle East Institute, Washington, DC, March 2010.  Reprinted with permission.

*******

The visual art of Emily Jacir, « Where We Come From » (2003), and Eman Haram’s photo exhibit, «Involuntary Memory» (2006), inscribe a memory that resists the systematic effacement of collective history, and a loss inherent in any displacement.[1] It is a memory that is intimate and plural, fluid and performative, that spans across many displacements and transformations. Rather than preserving a memory of what was, loss emerges in their work as continuous, not an event passed. Memory, however, rooted in the present, opens onto a future. Through different media, their work becomes a conscious intervention to counter such historical erasure and violent fragmentation. A dynamic search for form that could speak to the loss reveals how the political need not be at odds with the aesthetic. The human dimension of loss transcends any particular identity in their work without eliding the historical.

Palestinian artists are creating new transnational networks, languages, and identities, in the way they employ mass culture, performance art, and media. Their art is in turn pluralized by this use. It is a cultural expression marked by unique images and language. Like the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and the stories of Ghassan Kanafani, this art resists the erasure of Palestinian history, but it ultimately transforms and reinvents tradition through medium, image, and language. It also transforms prevalent notions of identity and of belonging. Henceforth, « dislocations felt by displaced subjects towards disrupted histories and to shifting and transient national identities» will constitute this belonging.[2] As exilic identities they are “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformations and difference.”[3]

Eman Haram, “All the Erased Faces Haunt My Remembrances,” 2006.

In the last decade, Palestinian esthetic production, local and diasporic, has gained increasing visibility and recognition on the international scene. (Emily Jacir’s prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2008 and Sharif Waked’s exhibits in the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim are but the latest examples). This attention is testimony to the innovations of the young artists and is crucial to the dissemination of an artistic experience that has historically remained on the margins. It also points to a wider and more extensive experimentation that is taking place in the Palestinian cultural scene. Have the 1990’s heralded a new period of creativity in the wake of Oslo, and “as a result of the decentralization of the Palestinian political scene,” as Ilan Pappé argues?[4] Kamal Boullata notes the number of women among the leading innovators and points to the challenges of tracing developments in Palestinian art « across disconnected territories and different cultural environments.”[5]

Eman Haram, “Untitled,” 2006.

Marked by its diversity, whereby dispersal and rupture, which began in 1948, become points of inscription, this esthetic corpus does not relate a unified story of the Palestinian experience. While each artist interrogates identity in a unique manner, it is the negotiation of the personal and the collective, the historic and the esthetic that they seem to share.[6] This diversity also manifests itself in the use of the medium, in the creation of a new language in the visual work of art (photography, spatial installation, video, personal performance). Boullata argues, however, that “memory of place” unites Palestinian artists of the post-Nakba period, despite their dispersal.[7] More than individual visions, this art has incorporated aspects of global culture to affirm its national belonging as it addresses Western audiences and as it remains deeply rooted in Palestinian life. More importantly, Palestinian identity is revealed in these works as plural and dynamic.

Emily Jacir’ “Where We Come From” speaks of the fundamental link of memory and loss, life and art, the collective exile and the personal displacement: It is « coming from my experience of spending my whole life going back and forth between Palestine and other parts of the world.”[8] “Where We Come From” performs both the displacement of Palestinians and the restrictions on their movement. The artist herself, an American citizen, is able to travel. In this work, she carries out personal requests of Palestinians who cannot go home, or cannot cross certain borders of their country to see friends or family, who ask her to visit particular places and people dear to them. In documenting her visits in photographs, she reveals the absurd and abject circumstances in which Palestinians often find themselves, conditions in which they lack freedom of movement among others. She states: “I have seen the deliberate fragmentation of our lands and the isolation of our people from each other by the Israelis. This is an extreme form of violence. For me, this piece was a dialogue between ourselves across these artificial islands and borders that have been created. I conceived of this piece for Palestine. »[9] Her photos reflect the dispersion that she tries to overcome: images of absence mark incomplete lives, and yet they create links with others.[10]

One such wish is from Jihad, identified in an Arabic-English bilingual text as “Born in Shati Refugee Camp, Gaza City/Living in Ramallah/Gazan I.D. card/Father and mother from Asdud/ (exiled in 1948).” The text reads: “Visit my mother, hug and kiss her…Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a bit…enough. Am I greedy?…I left Gaza for Ramallah in 1995 and cannot go back. I also cannot move to any place in the West Bank because of the Israeli restrictions….” A note is included at the bottom describing the visit, how they had tea, how the mother inquired after Jihad. The color image next to the text shows the back of the artist as she holds and kisses the mother who is closer to the viewer.[11]

Jacir’s work testifies to irrecoverable loss and to a belonging that persists against all fragmentation. Ultimately her images are a “memorial to untold stories”[12]: « anti-images, unspectacular private pictures,» « a self-portrait which also speaks collectively of a people, » a « personal archive as a proxy for the disappearing archives of Palestine. »[13] The artist nonetheless recognizes certain paradoxes of her art project: « Where We Come From is a failure in some way. I am not sure how to reconcile the notion that non-Palestinians are being entertained by our sorrows and dreams… »[14] Yet, consequently, she is no longer allowed to go to Gaza and to certain parts of the West Bank: « Jacir could not create this work today. »[15]

Eman Haram’s « Involuntary Memory» also ruminates on the process of loss but as erasure, sometimes due to the nature of memory but more significantly as historical effacements, a process where memory nonetheless also persists. Involuntary memory represents “the more indirect and deep sense of personal experience (times, places, feelings, and situations) that are not subject to immediate recall but instead are involuntarily triggered by objects or events associated with that experience. »[16] Calling her photographic experiments “ongoing explorations,” and “disconnected lives,” Haram suggests in this series how history is intimately at the heart of her art, where the self also issues forth a collective experience, where memory recalls a forgetting. Her photos expose the effacement, and by so doing also resist it.

Eman Haram, “Erasures,” 2007.

“Untitled” (composite digital photo, 2006) uses language in conjunction with image to clearly evoke historical erasures of identity, of the past, of collectivities. The fading, blurred images of faces recall the inscription of effacement. The black and white seems to evoke the past, as the image’s grainy quality evokes a negative of a receding original. The words too are faded, to differing degrees: “colonized” and “erased” alluding to the past, while “occidentalized,” “occupied,” and “justified” in bold, suggest the present. The word “erased” echoes with each historical violence named. An accusation and a judgment frame the words, “colonized. erased.. occidentalized.. erased.. erased.. occupied.. justified.” Language provokes, by what remains essentially unsaid. The rhythm of language coincides with the image and forcefully drills against that vanishing. Just like the suspension points, the image remains an overture rather than a foreclosed conclusion. The English words target an audience. The word “occidentalized” is used rather than “westernized,” which is an anglicized rendition of the French word. Such use further performs this process of erasure in the layering of identities: the Palestinian-American artist now living in Francophone Montreal (having lived previously in the United States, Syria, and Lebanon) has been further estranged from the English she uses. The artist’s language occupies the position of « in-between » many languages, revealing a critical posture, and “the continuous quest for a language of self-expression.”[17]

“All the Erased Faces Haunt my Remembrances” (2006, constructed digital photo) reveals the blurred images of women’s faces turned to the viewer as they advance forward.  In contrasting black forms to white headscarves, the remembrances have clearly turned to haunting, and the group of passersby strangely inhabit the self. The haunting of collectivities in both images are projections of the intimate self, the past that continues to inhabit the present. The haunting of that which should no longer be there seems to work counter to the erasure, even while defining its nature (i.e. that the haunting is that of all erasures of selves, whether political or social). The encompassing “all” embraces a collectivity of women without losing the singularity of the self.

Eman Haram, “Erase the Oblivion,” 2006.

In “Erasures,” (composite digital photo, 2007) schoolgirls are photographed from the shoulders down, in uniform clothes and postures. As education is primarily concerned with the mind, the absence of heads implies effacements by a process of education. As in the artist’s history of growing up attending a protestant school, education is linked to Western missions. The ex-ray dimension of the image exemplifies a photographic exploration of the self where the object becomes elusive. Memory captures a searing image. One panel bordered and colored arbitrarily marks a self.

“Erase the oblivion” (2006, constructed digital photo) presents a likely family photo, and a seemingly natural process of fading away juxtaposed to the torn borders between the women, as if in panels, and the angst of the appeal to “erase the oblivion.” The series seems to enumerate various erasures, from the historical and the social to the seemingly natural, that occupy the self.

 Uneasy with solely political interpretation of their work, Palestinian artists also resist the eliding of its political dimensions.  While art may contribute to healing social and historical wounds, both artists are vigilant to the way art can be easily recuperated for the enjoyment of others without registering the protest.[18] This art has in its very constitution challenged such recuperations. In Edward Said’s words, this art becomes a “defiant memory,” “unwilling to let go of the past,” while being marked by change. It is devoid of “sentimental homecoming,” reflecting “a state of lucid exile,” that “offers neither rest nor respite.” [19]

—

[2] Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 15.

[3] Stuart Hall, « Cultural Identity and Diaspora, » in Diaspora and Visual Culture : Representing Africans and Jews, eds. Sydelle Rubin and Nicholas Mirzoeff (NY : Routledge, 2000), cited in Fran Lloyd, Contemporary Arab Women’s Art : Dialogues of the Present (London : Women’s Art Library, 1999), p. 34.

[4] Ilan Pappé, The Modern Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2005),  p. 216.

[5] Several studies on Palestinian art have appeared in the last years, most notably Kamal Boullata’s Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (London: Dar Saqi, 2009) and Gannit Ankori’s work, Palestinian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). See Boullata pp. 30 and 28.

[6] See Ankori, pp. 8 and 217; see also Boullata’s work. 

[7] See Ankori, pp. 21, 18. Narratives about Palestinian art tend to locate its beginning in 1948, although many acknowledge that a vibrant art movement existed before the Nakba and is now difficult to trace.

[8] Jacir, in an interview with Stella Rollig, Belongings, p. 9.

[9] Jacir speaking to Rollig, p. 9.

[10] T. J. Demos,”Poetry’s Beyond,” The Hugo Boss Prize 2008, p. 59.

[11] See Belongings, n. p.

[12] Cited in Demos, p. 59.

[13] Andreas Bauer and Roland Wäspe, Installation Shots at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, pp. 9-10.

[14] Jacir speaking to Rollig, p. 10.

[15] Demos, pp. 61, 62.

[16] Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2007), p. 122.

[17] Ankori, p. 173.

[18] For a discussion on the cooption of Palestinian art, see Yara al-Ghadban, “The Ghost in the Art Work,” blog posted by Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Blog at 5:05 AM, September 10, 2009, can be accessed at http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/.

[19] See Edward Said, “The Art of Displacement: Mona Hattoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables,” in The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), pp. 7-17, Cited in Boullata, p. 176, and in Ankori, p. 154.

Bio:

Sandra Levy, originally from Montreal, now resides in Victoria, B.C. She studied art at Concordia University, École des Beaux Arts de Montréal and Arizona State University.  She also did graduate work in biology at Concordia University.  She taught art for many years at Dawson College.  She has exhibited in Montreal, Ottawa, Drummondville and Victoria and has many works in private collections. 

Artist statement:

As a scientist, I recognize trees as the lungs of the earth, purifying the air and playing a large role in energy and nutrient cycling.  As an artist I am sensitive to the magnificence, grace and power expressed in their forms, even when they are reduced to stumps. 

The titles come from the location where these works were painted. Copsewood Pond is a small, natural area, part of a nature trail. The trees are remnants of Douglas Firs after the elements and insects have reduced them to skeletons.

Tanglewood Stump, 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches,Charcoal 2010

Tanglewood Stump, 27 x 27 inches, Oil 2010

Thistlewood Stump, 18 x 24 inches, Charcoal 2009

Carolwood Maple, 19 x 25 inches, Oil 2009

Garry Oak, 24 x 24 inches, Oil 2010

Copsewood Pond, 22 x 24 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood Pond Stump, 27 x 30 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood, 24 x 22 inches, Oil 2009

Edited by Susan Dubrofsky

Has the work of artists who are women been attributed incorrectly more frequently than that of artists who are men? Has there been some kind of blatant disregard, or disinterest, or prejudice against the study of art that has been done by women?

Sofonisba Anguissola (1535 – 1625)

            Sofonisba was educated by an enlightened father, praised by her contemporaries, well-paid, widely-traveled and twice married to supportive husbands.

            She painted her family in ordinary scenes because in the rigid patriarchal society, women were expected to be devoted to family, motherhood and beauty and chastity and passivity were admired. Female deportment did not include four-to-ten year apprenticeships in painting. Talented women not woman-like at all.                         

            Sofonisba did more self- portraits than other comparable artists – thirteen still exist.

Self portrait 1554

Lavinia Fontana (1552 – 1614)

            Lavinia Fontana was the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, of the School of Bologna, who was her teacher. She painted in many genres but she was most famous for painting upper-class Bolognans, male and female nudes and large religious paintings.

            Fontana married Paolo Zappi in 1577 and had 11 children.  She painted to support her family. Zappi took care of the household and served as painting assistant.

            Her self-portrait was perhaps her masterpiece.

Self-Portrait Lavinia Fontana

Artemisia Gentileschi  (1593 – 1652)

            Artemisia was praised and disdained by contemporary critics, seen as genius and yet monstrous because she was a woman exercising a male talent.

            Gentileschi was the daughter of a painter who introduced her to artists of Rome, including Caravaggio, whose chiaroscuro style influenced her.

            Artemisia accused the Florentine artist Agostino Tassi of raping her.  He was convicted and spent a year in prison, only to be invited later into the Gentileschi household by Orazio.

            Artemisia was the first female artist to paint large-scale history and religious pictures, subjects considered off-limits to women. Her stories of rape and vengeance – from a woman’s viewpoint – marked a breakthrough in art.

Beheading Holofernes Naples

Elizabetta Sirani  (1638 – 1665)

         She was an Italian painter whose father was the painter Giovanni Andrea Sirani of the School of Bologna.

            By 17 she was a full-fledged engraver and painter and had over ninety works. By the time she died at 27, she had eighty more. Elisabetta ran her family’s workshop. When her father became incapacitated, she supported her parents and her siblings through her art. The stress with such heavy responsibilities may have caused her early death. She produced some 200 paintings, drawings and etchings. She painted themes such as the Virgin and Child and self portraits, and used dramatic light and great movement of the Baroque style.

Self-portrait 1660

Judith Leyster (1609 – 1660)

            Leyster and her work were largely forgotten after her death for over two centuries until 1893, when a painting acquired by the Louvre was found to have Leyster’s distinctive monogram. A 1993 retrospective exhibition of Leyster’s paintings helped restore her place in art history.

            In 1633 she was a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, the first woman admitted. In 1636 she married Jan Miense Molenaer and they moved to Amsterdam until 1648. She bore five children and the demands of marriage and motherhood replaced her opportunity for painting.

            Her paintings have a moral and humorous quality.  Along with tavern scenes and domestic pieces, she liked musical subjects.

Self Portrait

 Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717)

            At thirteen Merian was interested in the insect and plant world. She created the first European drawings and water-color paintings of them, despite that interest in insects was unusual. At 28, she published her first book “Neues Blumenbuch” and later her caterpillar book.

            With eight years preparation and financial assistance from the city of Amsterdam, Merian and her daughter traveled three months by ship to Suriname. For two years Merian documented tropical butterflies and insects for her major work, “Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium” in 1705. It contains figures of tropical plants and animals, which were still completely unknown in Europe.

            The register of death lists her as a pauper.

Painting by Maria Sibylla Merian

Mary Beale (1633 – 1699)

            Beale, the first professional female English painter of the 1600′s, became a semi-professional portrait painter by 1650.  

            Her father and husband were amateur painters and she knew the artists Nathaniel Thach, Matthew Snelling and Peter Lely.

            Moving Hampshire in 1665 due to financial difficulties and the Great Plague of London, she returned to London in 1670 to establish a studio, with her husband mixing paints and keeping accounts. She became reacquainted with Peter Lely and her later work is influenced by Lely, being mainly small portraits or copies of his work. Her work became unfashionable after his death in 1680.

Aphra Behn

Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755 – 1842)

            A stylish portrait painter on the eve of the French Revolution, Elizabeth was a star of the Salon, specialising in portraits of courtiers, their children, and her friend the Queen. Like Marie-Antoinette, Elizabeth attracted gossip that she slept with the men she painted. There was a new cult of masculinity in art, exemplified by Jacques Louis David’s paintings of Roman heroes where the most noble thing a woman can do is kill herself.

From her diary:

At the first sitting the imposing air of the Queen at first frightened me greatly, but Her Majesty spoke to me so graciously that my fear was soon dissipated. It was on that occasion that I began the picture….

Marie Antoinette

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749 – 1803)

            First trained under a miniaturist, she gained Académie Royale membership on the same day in 1783 as her rival, Vigée-Le Brun.

            Adélaïde’s portraits were unpretentious, perceptive and displayed a subtle sense of color. Her Self-portrait with two women pupils at the Salon of 1785, has been interpreted as propaganda, arguing for the place of women in the Academy.

            When she supported the French Revolution, she lost her clientele.  The revolutionaries made her destroy the unfinished painting of a monarchy-related subject on which she had labored for over two years. With the painting’s destruction came the end of her hopes that this painting would win for her the Academy’s highest rank of history painter.

Self portrait 1785

Marie Bracquemond (1841 – 1913)

            Marie was described as one of the “le trois grandes dames” of Impressionism. Her omission from books on women artists indicate the success of her husband, Félix Bracquemond, to thwart her as an artist. His objection to her art was not on gender but on the style she adopted, Impressionism.

            Overshadowed by her famous husband, Marie’s work is considered to have been closer to the ideals of Impressionism. In 1890, Marie, worn out by marital friction and discouraged by lack of interest in her work, abandoned painting except for a few private works.

            She died in Paris in 1916.

Marie Bracquemond in Sèvres

Rosa Bonheur (1822 – 1899)

            As a child, Bonheur sketched animals in the wild. In 1853, she achieved international acclaim with The Horse Fair.

            Recent scholarship claim Bonheur expressed her frustrations with social convention by painting animals free of such constraints, subject to only the laws of nature.

            She dissected animal parts, sketched from life and attended horse fairs, not an event attended by women. To avoid taunts if she were seen at a horse fair, Bonheur applied for permission from the police to dress in men’s clothing and received it. Bonheur wore her hair short, rode astride, smoked cigarettes in public.

            Near the end of her life she speculated that “her critics could forgive her everything but being a woman.”

Horse Fair 1835

Evelyn De Morgan  (1855 – 1919)

            Evelyn was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter of upper middle class and homeschooled, starting drawing lessons at 15. In 1873 she enrolled at the Slade School of Art. Her uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, was a great influence to her works. Evelyn often visited him in Florence where he lived. This also enabled her to study the great artists of the Renaissance, particularly Botticelli, which influenced her to make her own style.     

            In 1887, she married the ceramicist William De Morgan. They lived together in London until he died in 1917. She died two years later on 2 May 1919.

The Gilded Cage

Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862)

            Elizabeth was a dressmaker’s assistant where she was discovered by Walter Deverell and introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a model. For Millais’ Ophelia Siddal lay for hours fully clothed in a tub full of water.  She fell ill afterwards. From 1852 she studied with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose model and mistress she became.

            Her exhibition debut was at the Pre-Raphaelite salon in 1857.

            In 1860, she married Rossetti in London where she worked on romantic-medieval watercolours, helped decorate William Morris’s Red House and planned to collaborate with Georgiana Burne-Jones. A stillborn daughter in 1861 was followed by post-natal depression.

            Siddal died from an overdose of laudanum in 1862 within two years of marriage.

Self-portrait

Marie-Guillemine Benoista (1768 – 1826)

            Marie -Guillemine was a French neoclassical, historical and genre painter.

            Her work, reflecting the influence of Jacques-Louis David, tended toward history painting by 1795. In 1800, she exhibited Portrait d’une négresse in the Salon. Six years previously, slavery had been abolished, and this image became a symbol for women’s emancipation and black people’s rights.

Portrait d'une negresse

Edmonia Lewis (1840 – 1909?)

            A minority female with limited training and experience, in a male-dominated field, she became a skilled and imaginative sculptor. She remains mysterious, little known about her early and late life, with a scarcity of surviving sculpture.

            With a black father and a part-Ojibwa mother, she was orphaned in childhood.

            Lewis’ early Italian work, Forever Free (1867), portrays a black man who has broken the manacles of slavery and a black woman celebrating the news of emancipation.

            Lewis’ works depicted Native Americans as proud, dignified people, unlike the stereotype of the Indian as an untamed savage. 

            Edmonia lived in Rome until 1909 but her later years are shrouded in mystery, including where and when she died.

Hiawatha

Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895)

            Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. Undervalued for over a century, possibly because she was a woman, she is now considered among the first league of Impressionist painters.

Le berceau (The Cradle) 1872

Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926)

            Mary Cassatt, member of the Impressionist circle in Paris, was a master printmaker. With the recent discovery of more than 200 “lost” prints and drawings from the artist’s studio, we comprehend Cassatt’s contribution. A master colorist, she continually experimented with printed inks.

            Cassatt was welcomed into the French avant-garde. She was the only American (and of three women) to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris.

            Cassatt is best-known for her paintings of mothers and children. With a progressive attitude toward women and children, she displayed it in her art and her private comments. Cassatt never tired of representing the moral strength that women and children derived from their essential and elemental bond.

The Letter

Marie Bashkirtseff (1858 – 1884)

            She was a Ukrainian-born Russian diarist, painter and sculptor.      

            Born to a wealthy, noble family and educated privately, she studied painting in France at the Académie Julian, one of the few establishments that accepted female students.

            Dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bashkirtseff lived just long enough to become an intellectual powerhouse in Paris in the 1880s. A feminist, in 1881, using the nom de plume “Pauline Orrel,” she wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert’s feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. One of her famous quotes is: Let us love dogs, let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures.

Marie Bashkirtseff In the Studio

Camille Claudel (1864 – 1943)

            Claudel was rediscovered in 1982 with a major exhibition in Paris and Poitiers. Claudel’s legend began and, with it, the misunderstandings.

            Camille was beautiful, talented and independent; connected to artists and writers and a romance with August Rodin. Her statues at twenty showed her skill and Rodin employed her after seeing them.

            Claudel broke with Rodin, around 1893, to escape his influence and to concentrate on her art.  Her love for the human form resulted in sculptures that the state and press censored as overly sensual and inappropriate for public display.

            After her relationship with Rodin ended, Camille showed signs of paranoia and became introverted. She created sculptures in a state of euphoria and destroyed them when depressed.  Camille was 45 when her mother and brother committed her to a lunatic asylum. Camille’s mother and sister never visited her there. Camille remained confined for 30 years, until her death in 1943. She was not allowed to practice her art.

Camille Claudel

Cecilia Beaux (1855 – 1942)

            She was an American society portraitist, in the nature of John Singer Sargent. She was a near contemporary of better-known American artist Mary Cassatt and also received her training in Philadelphia and France. Her sympathetic renderings of American ruling class made her one of the most successful portrait painters of her era.

Dorothea and Francesca 1898

Bloomsbury Artists

Dora Carrington (1893 – 1932) 

            In 1910 Dora entered the Slade School of Art in London. The painter Mark Gertler introduced her to the Bloomsbury group. Strachey Lytton met Dora at the home of Virginia Woolf, attracted to her androgynous appearance. Lytton was a confirmed homosexual and said they had found a love that suited them.

            Carrington met Ralph Partridge who fell in love with her. Accepting her love for Strachey and her life with him, still married her in 1921. In 1924 he and Strachey purchased the lease to Ham Spray House and all three lived out their lives there.

            Theirs is one of the poignant love stories of the last century.

            In 1932, Strachey died. In March, Carrington planned a trip to France and her friends relaxed, but she also borrowed a neighbor’s gun. In March, she shot herself fatally. Found before she died, Ralph and others arrived in time to say good-bye.

Dora Carrington

Vanessa Bell  (1879 – 1969)

            Vanessa Bell had a more fortunate life. Leonard Woolf courted her and her younger sister, Virginia, but Vanessa accepted art critic Clive Bell’s marriage proposal. Vanessa flourished, bearing children, painting pictures, decorating her home. Clive, feeling neglected, turned to Virginia. Though Virginia was more comfortable with affectionate words and petting, their flirtation wounded Vanessa deeply.

            On a trip to Italy consisting of the Bells, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, Vanessa realized that she and Duncan were alike.  Duncan was a free spirit, a perfect creative partner for the reserved Vanessa. They forged a work and living space together. They had a daughter, Angelica, joining the sons she had had with Clive.

Virginia Woolf

 Lilla Cabot Perry (1848 – 1933)

            Lilla, an American artist, worked in the Impressionist style, rendering portraits and landscapes in the free form manner of her mentor, Claude Monet. Perry’s early work was shaped by the Boston school of artists and her travels in Europe and Japan. She was also influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophies and her friendship with Camille Pissarro. At thirty-six Perry finally received formal training but her work with artists of the Impressionist, Realist, Symbolist, and German Social Realist movements greatly affected her style.

Autumn Afternoon Giverny

Emily Carr (1871 – 1945)

            Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Emily studied art in San Francisco, London, and Paris. Discouraged by lack of public interest, she stopped painting for years while she managed a boarding house, raised dogs, and made pottery. Her work was exhibited by the National Gallery in 1927, when she travelled east and met the Group of Seven, with Lawren Harris, who encouraged her to paint again.

Ill health caused her to turn to writing in later years.  Klee Wyck, published in 1941, won the Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction and was followed by The Book of Small, 1942, and The House of All Sorts, 1944, as well as other works published posthumously.

Strait of Juan de Fuca

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

            In 1925, Frida, on a bus returning to her village, was found, naked, bloodied and and impaled by a heavy rod. The rod entered her at the hip and exited her vagina. Other injuries she incurred included several pelvic fractures, fractures of the spine, a dislocation of her elbow, and complications which included peritonitis and cystitis.

            These injuries impacted her entire life, along with her inability to carry a child to term, which laid the groundwork for the 32 surgeries she was to endure.

            Kahlo’s works speak of loneliness and vulnerability.  Kahlo’s imagery reflects a preoccupation with the exploration of love and its connection to pain. She had many lovers, both male and female, and was married twice – first in 1929 and again in 1940 – to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

            The apparently naïve drawing, bright colors and dramatic and fantastical images reflect her inspiration in native Mexican art.

Self portrait

Anjolie Ela Menon (b. 1940)

            One of India’s leading contemporary female artists, her paintings are in several major collections. Most recently (2006), a major work “Yatra” was acquired by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, California. Her preferred medium is oil on masonite, though she has worked in other media, including glass and water colour. She is a well-known muralist. She was awarded the Padma Shree in 2000. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 – 1941)

            Amrita, the daughter of the wealthy and aristocratic parents, started drawing and painting at 5. In 1929 they moved to Paris where Amrita thrived in the social milieu.

            Women figured in her work, portrayed in their loneliness with their fears and secret longings.

            In India in 1934, she proclaimed, ‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.’

             Her mission ‘was to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians, pictorially’.

            In 1938 Amrita left for Hungary to marry her cousin only to flee from Fascist Hungary and the war to Majithia’s property in India. In feudal extravagance but lacking stimulating company and ideas, depression descended in 1940 and she died before 29. Her doctor husband attended her but few believed his diagnosis of dysentery.

Two Elephants 1940

Zaida del Río (b. 1954)

            Zaida is a woman artist, a tireless, fervent exponent of Cuban fine arts, and defender of femininity mostly via her poetry. She gets her inspiration from her most profound desires for an equitable world in balance with Mother Nature. Dancing figures, in which femininity is a principle element, navigate through dissimilar worlds and universes. The skill and grace of her brush take over her shapes, with a combination of spirituality and hedonism, that become melded into one.


Cuadro Cubana

Rocio Garcia (b. 1955)

            Rocío teaches at the San Alejandro School of Art in Havana.  Rejecting images of Cuban women that maintain a sexist or racist stereotype, Rocio uses the geisha – the masked woman – as a mirror to reflect on sexuality in Havana, where pleasure and danger, money and spiritual longing coexist uneasily.     

            Before the 1959 revolution, Havana was a haven for gambling and prostitution.  Around 1990 the revolutionary project had unraveled and Cuba had to enter the global capitalist economy. Tourism returned becoming the government’s main financial source.

            Now Havana is called the Bangkok of the Caribbean. Rocio’s painting, Little Pieces of Me For Sale, shows how prostitution has become a sad metaphor for the rampant merchandising of Cuba. Cuba, once a proud revolutionary warrior, has become a woman who cuts pieces of herself to sell.

Alica Leal Veloz (b. 1957)

            She graduated in 1980 from Havana’s San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. She has had one-woman shows in Havana, Matanzas and Sancti Spíritus; Kuala Lumpur; Kingston; Houston and Berlin, and she has taken part in collective exhibitions in numerous countries. Her work forms part of permanent and private collections in many countries internationally. She has illustrated a number of Cuban and foreign books and cultural magazines.

Lois Mailou Jones  (1905 – 1998)

            Jones was a grande dame of American art as a painter, designer and teacher spanning 75 years. With graphic design, fabric art, oil and watercolor, she created cworks from experiences in Europe, Haiti, Africa, and the United States. Queen Mother of African-American art, she was the last woman artist providing a living link with artists of the Harlem Renaissance which, in the 1920s and 1930s, was a flowering of African-American social thought expressed through the visual arts, music, dance, theater and literature.

            In Paris, she created and exhibited unfettered by racial bias.  Her signature work, Les Fetiches, started her stylistic interest in the iconography of African art.

Elizabeth Catlett  (b. 1915)

            Catlett from Washington, DC, the granddaughter of former slaves was refused admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because of race.  Catlett enrolled at Howard University, studying painting and design with Lois Jones. She created images that championed poor and working people of all colors, both in the United States and Mexico, where she was a professor until  1976.

            Since the 1940s, Elizabeth worked in art education and appreciation for African-Americans. “…I wanted to do art that black people would relate to…I would also like to have them come into art galleries and museums, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since.”

Mother and Child

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930)

            During the 1960s and the 1970s, Faith’s paintings were overtly political – a critical reappraisal of the American dream. She used the story quilt—a craft associated with women’s communal work that has roots in African culture. She collaborated on the quilt motif with her mother, a dressmaker and fashion designer in Harlem. Her great-great-great-grandmother was a Southern slave who made quilts for plantation owners.

            Tar Beach depicts the spirited heroine Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who, on a summer night in Harlem, flies: “only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life.”

Tar Beach © Faith Ringgold, 1988. Acrylic on Canvas

For more information on Faith Ringgold, please go to http://www.faithringgold.com/

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