The New Installation of the American Art Galleries at the Seattle Art Museum*
Outside the first gallery is this work by Nicholas Galanin, Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum), 2022, an appropriate commentary on removing stolen Native artifacts from the British Museum. Nicholas Galanin is one of the three consulting artists for the project, he will be installing another work in the Spring.
Community and Conversation highlight Capitalism and Colonialism in the American West in the newly created American Art installation at the Seattle Art Museum. In addition to the three lead artists, the museum worked with a team of community curators and artists. This was not an advisory committee that just met once, they met many times to think about how to reinstall the collection. Seattle is fortunate to have curators and artists from a wide spectrum of perspectives:
Rebecca Cesspooch, Northern Ute/Assiniboine/Nakota visual artist and educator
Juan P. Córdova, elementary school teacher at New York City Public Schools
Fulgencio Lazo, artist and co-founder of Studio Lazo
Jared Mills, librarian at Seattle Public Library
Chieko Phillips, cultural administrator
Jake Prendez, owner and co-director of Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery
Delbert Richardson, ethnomuseumologist
Juliet Sperling, Assistant Professor of Art History, Kollar Endowed Chair in American Art, School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington
Asia Tail, Cherokee artist, curator, and co-founder of yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective
Mayumi Tsutakawa, writer with focus on Asian American history
Ken Workman, Duwamish Tribal Member and descendant of Chief Seattle
Theresa Papanikolas, Curator of American Art, seen above, and Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art began to “interrogate and re-contextualize the collection” with the help of 11 community advisors and three artists in the summer of 2021. Certainly, the death of George Floyd, and the protests that followed sparked elite predominantly white institutions across the country to rethink their own unacknowledged racism.
309 and 310 galleries before the 2022 American Art reinstallation.
Consequently, the American art galleries formerly dark and dreary and filled with art by predominantly white artists, have been entirely transformed.
Barbara Brotherton, retiring curator of Native American Art declared that the museum is following a “dramatically different approach, bringing the historical American art collection into conversation with Native, Asian American, African American, Latinx, and contemporary art. This new interpretive framework brings forward historically excluded narratives and artistic forms. Instead of seeing these communities as parallel to the so-called mainstream history, the museum now is looking at intersections. “
No longer organized chronologically, “The Stories We Carry,” features five themes some with two parts: Storied Places,
Transnational/ Trade and Expanding Markets
Transnational/The Internationalism of Objects
Reimagining Regionalism
Ancestors plus Descendants/ Faces of America
Ancestors plus Descendants/Memory Keepers.
Wendy Red Star. “Áakiiwilaxpaake (People of the Earth),” 2022. Seattle Art Museum Commission Archival ink jet prints, dibond, LED lights, electrical components, wood, milk plexiglass, 84 x 62 x 12 in.
The first theme is “Storied Places”
At the entrance the delightful Wendy Red Star, one of the lead artists, confronts us with a large lightbox: Áakiiwilaxpaake (People of The Earth). Red Star humorously and seriously speaks of how excluded she felt from the American art galleries by the boring American art genres, portraiture, and landscape.
Portraits of 70 native women, youth and even babies stand in front of the Northwest icons Mt Rainier and the Space Needle. Contemporary Native people are front and center in the present and future, rather than their usual position in the past as a prelude to white America.
Shaun Peterson (Tulalip/Puyallup, Qwalsius)’s Song for the Moon (2022) presents the Puyallup creation myth in a banner like painting. The label declares: “Native philosophies offer different ways of knowing the land, including the belief that all animate and inanimate beings are alive and indivisible from the land. Nature and its many features are thought to be sacred, not scenic.”
Next to it is Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Mount Rainier, Bay of Tacoma – Puget Sound (1875) with tiny figures dwarfed by the landscape and its golden light. These paintings, as the label comments “cast the region’s original communities as characters in the myth of the American wilderness: wild, remote, and poised to be taken over. “
The next section is Transnational
2
It features the sculpture of George Tsutakawa as a connection, in a work inspired by kelp called Mo (Seaweed), 1977. It is based on the seaweed that we see just beneath the surface of the sea. Near it is a short video with an interview with Meg Chadsey, kelp specialist and Gerard Tsutakawa the artist’s son who assisted in the execution of many of the works and is an artist as well.
Transnational Trade and Expanding Markets native artists responding to colonizers artistic conventions. This exciting idea moves beyond the tired and condescding concept of “deriviative” to the idea of cross fertilization. In this section we see the eminent Charles Edenshaw’s argillite totem among other works. Only Haida artists can work in argillite, but Edenshaw was brilliant at adapting to Victorian conventions in his work ( not necessarily visible here). He was commissioned at a time when Native cultures were being suppressed, to create a totem for the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Below is a bottle covered with traditional cedar basketry techniques and a model canoe. Canoes of course are embedded in Native Culture, but this model would have been for sale.
The Internationalism of Objects white artists working with materials like Ivory from Sierra Leone, or silver from Peru both colonial extractive practices
Reimagining Regionalism
Inye Wokoma, the third consulting artist, worked as a curator here. He excavated works of art buried in storage to curate an entire gallery that “Reimagines Regionalism.” Then he wrote long interpretations with his insightful perspectives.
He is standing next to Marie Watt’s Blanket Stories: Three Sisters, Four Pelts,Sky Woman, Cousin Rose, and All My
Relations, 2007. Each blanket has a story.
Leading off is Roger Shimomura 1978, Minidoka Series #2: Exodus, 1978 from his first Minidoka series, in the Ukiyo-e style.
Next to him, the mid-century modernists Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Takata are finally given the prominent place they deserve.
My favorite juxtaposition in Wokoma’s gallery was the overlap of an elevator door of the Chicago Stock Exchange in front of a painting of Puget Sound by Albert Bierstadt. Apparently, Bierstadt never saw the Puget Sound, the painting is entirely fabricated.
Then Wokoma pulls no punches!
“The Indigenous figures along the dramatic shoreline seem inconsequential to the grand possibilities of the land: the subtext for this painting commissioned by a wealthy merchant. . . The elevator screen from the Chicago Stock Exchange (ca. 1893-94) by the “father of skyscrapers” Louis Sullivan is an utterly literal symbol of economic expansion, the overwhelming might of colonialism. Now installed so that visitors can move entirely around it and look through it, the screen offers an opportunity to consider what this gateway was leading to—and what it kept out.”
Regionalism Gallery Rudolph Franz
Zallinger
Northwest Salmon Fishermen, 1941
Kenneth Callahan building a logging railroad
Kenneth Callahan The Accident restoration project
Inye’s selection included several images of w orkers by Kenneth Callahan and other artists of the thirties, rather than the usual glorification of the Western myth of progress.
Ancestors + Descendants
Faces of America
is equally radical, for example it juxtaposes paintings by such as the well known work of Thomas Eakins and John Singleton Copley with paintings by Kehinde Wiley and a talking tintype by Will Wilson of a Lummi violin player
.
Will Wilson portrait of Nicholas Galanin
Portrait of Gwen Knight by Augusta Savage
In the last gallery “Ancestors + Descendants/Memory-Keepers” includes the only Latinx artists Alfredo Arreguin, (above) acquired only this year, and Cecilia Alvarez,(below) a gift to the museum in 1992 and never before exhibited.
Danielle Morsette Colors of the Salish Sea: Coast Salish Hybrid Tunic Dress,
The grand finale is the extraordinary basket by Suquamish artist Ed Carriere. He recreates weaving techniques from thousands of years ago by working with archeologists to recover fragments from waterlogged sites. As Brotherton states “Carriere’s precise work challenges notions of artistic hierarchy and provides a nuanced view into the brilliance of transforming humble materials into works of memory and power.”
“The Stories We Carry,” entirely rejects traditional myths of the American West such as Manifest Destiny. Instead the stories told here by a diverse cross section of voices, explore questions of conquest and colonialism, as well as exchange and tradition.
* This model for the Seattle Art Museum is far more radical than that discussed by two NY curators in this NYTimes article
In Seattle, the curators collaborated with people in the community, as well as inviting artists as co-curators. Inye Wokoma is an artist, as well as founder of the institution WaNaWari, a vibrant cultural institution that hosts all media, predominantly by people of color. it was founded to keep African American presence and culture in the Central District of Seattle which was an historically black neighborhood now going rapid gentrification.
~Susan Platt, PhD
This entry was posted on December 14, 2022 and is filed under
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I start with a short clip of the wonderful musicians, especially the trumpet player who was music director. The musicians played parts in the skits and changed instruments ( the tuba player switched to a tiny flute for example and he was Bishop Romero) . You click on it and it downloads so you can view it.
musicians before
Here is a short clip of the opening
opening movie
Bread and Puppet amazing performance. They were last here in 2007 with Mother Courage honoring Rachel Corrie. Now they have the Apocalypse Defiance Circus that includes COVID epidemic, Palestine, exploitation by Big Dairy, Bolsonaro’s havoc in Brazil, history of reparations, and much more with insanely huge puppets great music and staggering energy.
Here are a few images
Women on stilts riding zebras! This is the crazy fun. The women on stilts started by reading the New York Times and throwing it down in disgust, then the zebras came in and picked them up. Our connection to nature and animals, that we need them to save us, might be a message here.
The weatherman predicting disasters, and monsters and devils threatening her
Supreme Court outlaws Circuses. A clever idea, instead of hitting on the actual cases, the nightmare of so many rights being lost. But the Supreme Court is set on by lions and lion tamers and ripped apart.
. 
Big Dairy trying to do away with workers by creating a self milking cow. Of course it doesn’t work and the workers come in and carry Big
Dairy away
Palestine and its tragedy.
This connected to the Rachel Corrie piece from 2007.
Assassination of Bishop Romero The placard says
“Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Formerly the School of the Americas) continues to train death squads from Latin America
Brazil 684,000 Covid Deaths, 23,000 killed by Police, 8,069,000 sq acres of Amazon destroyed
Relentless Covid Epidemic has a fight with underpaid nurses. They win at first but then death is brought back to life and comes after them again.
History of Reparations from Haiti to the present
The finale. I have a video with music also. Click on it and you can view it.
closing movie
Elka Schumann died August 2021, the brilliant creative brains behind it as well as all the administative work and ten other things. But they are certainly still going strong.
Bread and Puppet is also in Turkey at the Istanbul Biennial!! That’s a giant Mother Earth made in Turkey with collaboration of a famous contemporary puppet artist Cengiz Özek Follow the link for a larger image
This entry was posted on October 26, 2022 and is filed under
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“George Tsutakawa: The Language of Nature” at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art includes drawings, watercolors and sumi works as well as oil paintings, one of his famous fountains, several large photographs of others, and even his furniture.
The unique exhibition borrows many works from the Tsutakawa family that have never before been exhibited. The thoughtful installation emphasizes the interplay of two- and three-dimensional work.
But the dominating theme of the exhibition is the artist’s connection to nature. In a striking photograph near the beginning of the exhibition we see him sitting on the beach at low tide sketching the sea with his paper on the sand.
Tsutakawa explored both East and West aesthetics: his painting and sculpture are profoundly based in nature even when they appear abstract.
We see subtle observations in sumi sketches of shrimp, lobster, codfish, squash and leeks. birds, and trees. They are both filled with an abstract space and detailed in their realism. Tsutakawa observed the shrimp from many directions, as they gathered.
His watercolors of landscapes, particularly two of Mt. Rainier, one in transparent watercolor, the other in black, opaque sumi ink. demonstrate his close observation of changing light and atmosphere For all of us in Seattle who experience the constantly changing view of Mt Rainier, these two works resonate and represent two extremes of a spectrum from light to dark.
One of his favorite forms was the Obo, the rock that pilgrims in the Himalayas pile up to create a memorial. In his sculpture, you can see that reference, as he creates cedar or teak sculptures with both highly polished and carefully textured surfaces. These models and the painting are based on the obi shape. Once you see it you will recognize it everywhere.
Tsutakawa is best known for his bronze fountains of which there are twelve just in Seattle, and seventy-five around the country. The first and best known is “Fountain of Wisdom,” 1957–60, in front of the Seattle Public Library. These elegant metal sculptures subtly incorporate a water flow that interacts and completes their form. Here is our most familiar work, Fountain of Wisdom at the Seattle Public Library.
This entry was posted on October 21, 2022 and is filed under
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Women’s rights are front and center as Iran erupts in anger at its oppressive extremely conservative government after Mahsa Amini a young woman died from being beaten by the so-called morality police. Two 16 year old girls Sarina Esmailzadeh and Nika Shakrami, have also died in the protests.
In this country, the repeal of Roe v Wade led directly to ongoing protests all over the country. More efforts to govern our bodies.
Women’s rights have never been more on our minds.
Pakistani-born artist Humaira Abid created all of the work in “Fight like a Girl,” her most recent Seattle exhibition at Greg Kucera Gallery, before the current protests. But throughout her career she has taken a stand to speak out about issues pertaining to women that are rarely discussed.
Abid points out that the term “Fight Like a Girl” has been used to denigrate girls, suggesting that they don’t fight as well as boys, but her point of view is that girls are strong, determined, and fight for everything they get.
In Iran women by the thousands are leading the nation-wide protests, and they persist in the defiance of widespread violence against them by the government.
Iran, as Resa Aslan points out in his essay “From Here to Mullahcracy” has a democratic constitution that clerics discarded: “what had begun as a vibrant experiment in Islamic democracy…” turned into a “state ruled by an inept clerical oligarchy with absolute religious power.” Iran is not a theocracy, Aslan explains, because of that constitution which “enshrined fundamental freedoms of speech, religion, education , and peaceful assembly.“
It is those discarded rights that the people of Iran, both men and women, are demanding.
Humaira Abid’s trajectory through art schools in Lahore included overcoming a lot of sexism. She studied two completely different techniques, woodworking and miniature painting. The teachers would not let her study woodworking or sculpture in art school, it was believed that only men could make sculpture, so she went to traditional wood carvers to learn.
Along the first wall of Abid’s exhibition are protest posters rendered on meticulously carved pine that replicate the cardboard of protest signs. Carved on each one is a protest: “Blame Rapist not Victim,” “Enough,” “Tolerating Racism is Racism.”
Abid first seduces us with aesthetics and beauty, then gives us a punch in the face with specific imagery that speaks to the “issues people are afraid to talk about” in women’s lives both with respect to Islam and with respect to the concerns facing all women.
This exhibition includes works that address incestuous rape, miscarriages, breast feeding, and the fate of migrant women and children.
“Woman with a Breast Pump” outrageously connects the breast pump with the faucets for ablutions outside of mosques, in a tondo shape (as in a Renaissance Mother and Child): she surrounds a detailed painting of a breastfeeding mother (based on a photograph) with a halo of faucets in gilded wood.
In the series “Tempting Eyes” woman’s eyes look assertively from various Islamic head coverings on rearview mirrors (simulated in wood): the works comment on the driving ban for women in Saudi Arabia (lifted in 2017, but with other severe restrictions on women still in place). The law stands that declares that the eyes alone are dangerous and can violate the law with too much makeup. But these eyes defiantly stare right at us.
In “Woman in Black,” 2022, a small oval miniature painting of a woman covered in black holds a white rose. The stem of the white rose connects to a long chain (carved in wood) leading to a child’s head lying on the floor with a black bird sitting on it. In some ways this is the most frightening image in the exhibition: the long chain both restrains the woman and suggests an umbilical cord leading to the baby. The black bird suggest death. With the repeal of Roe v Wade the possibility of death from miscarriages has escalated.
Abid has long addressed refugees and migration, particularly the suffering of women and children, who experience rape and kidnapping. Here are images from her exhibition “Taboo” at the Bellevue Art Museum in 2017-2018
Borders and Boundaries includes a barbed wire fence entirely carved from wood. But the main point is that it makes reference to refugee camps. It is a poignant with the underpants stained red hanging on the fence. That red stain is precisely Humaira’s point about topics that are taboo, such as women menstruating while they are in the desperate straits of fleeing or in a refugee camp.
Fragments of Home Left Behind 2017 includes portraits of real refugees based on photographs
Left Laiba Age 6 Afghanistan photograph by Muhammad Muheisen Right Mona Age 5 Hassakeh, Syria photograph by Muhammad Muheisen
Sofia Hassan Mahmood and Isaac Mahmood, Ages unknown, Somalia photograph by Fazal Sheikh
The World is NOT perfect
In this pile of wooden blocks you see many different shoes each one suggesting a different identity, they refer to as the artist explained “gender, age, and culture, but also resonate on a universal level.’
That theme appears in three swings titled “This world is beautiful and dangerous Too.” On the seat is a miniature painting of a child happily swinging in what appears to be a fantasy land. But underneath threatening looking cactus grow. Abid explained that this series began when the Taliban killed 140 children in a slaughter in 2014 in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Humaira also pursues the theme of RED in many works that are bravely confrontational ( she had an entire exhibition with that title at Art Exchange Gallery who championed her work in 2011 when she was just beginning in Seattle.
The Stains are Forever
Aspect of Motherhood
All We Need is One Fertile Egg
Art Exchange also held a show called “Istri” , a long series of works with wooden irons and miniature paintings layering comments on violence and women. In Hindi “Istri means wife and woman 
and the same word means “iron” in Pakistan.
Finally “Honor’” written in carved wood chains says it all: the prison, the misuse of language, the oppression all in the name of ‘Honor.”
Abid’s beautifully crafted wood sculptures with their direct messages have never been more timely.
I wanted to add a brief note about a book I just finished reading called Women, Art and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora. While the author, Mehraneh Ebrahimi is writing about Shirin Neshat and the graphic novel Persepolis, among other books, her point also applies to Humaira’s work. She speaks of ethics, aesthetics and politics as way to humanize the Other. That is exactly what Humaira does, she is humanizing both the Other of Islamic women, as well as women in general. That is the importance of her work. The other point Ebrahami makes is the privilege of ex patriot women in their freedom to address the condition of women.
In “Romare Bearden Abstraction” the artist surprises us in every work. He constantly explores new media, color, and content. Here we see two paintings from 1959, Strange Land on the left and the Silent Valley of Sunrise on the right. Both suggest the shape of Africa, although according to the label it can be shown with either way up because the artist signed it on both ends. They are perfect examples of what I am exploring here, cloaked references.
These abstract paintings seem entirely different from his famous collage works such as Melon Season, 1967 or La Primavera 1967 , the two works here.
Or are they? Let’s look more closely. Notice the face in Melon Season is composed of many faces, you can identify at least five, suggesting many layers of identity that is a pointed variation on Picasso’s technique with split faces Her striped dress with strong parallel lines is the same pattern used in an earlier abstract painting
Untitled, Multicolored Stripes 1959
Look at the black and white patterns in La Primavera!
Here is a detail of Fish Fry, 1967 that clearly reveals the interplay of real objects, spoon and fork, with a complex built up pattern.
Romare Bearden began to add racially focused collaged figures to his abstract work starting in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights, following participation in the Spiral Group. Bearden founded Spiral in his studio after the 1963 March on Washington with artists, writers and poets, in order to discuss the role of representation of the African American experience in art at a time that abstraction dominated mainstream art. As a result he turned to figurative collage.
But looking at the abstractions and the figurative works in the current show we see that he was only rarely a fully abstract artist. Here are two examples that show his technical explorations.
Untitled, ca. 1956 Mixed media, newspaper and magazine clippings over watercolor and ink on paper [recto]
Looking closely I see not figures, but definitely content that connects to Bearden’s identity as an African American artist. The shades of browns, the layering from dark to light in the 1956 work is striking. As in African American’s specific and detailed description of skin color, ( look at Walter Moseley’s wonderful characters) here we have about ten shades of brown and tan. The artist himself was a very light skinned African American.
I want to explore this idea of certain colors, especially shades of brown as a metaphor of African Americans, by looking at another painting Robert Duncanson’s, Still Life with Fruit and Nuts from 1848
This painting was extensively discussed by the eminent John Wilmerding in the Wall Street Journal as “out of many parts, one painting” but what I see is the prominence of brown raisins in the center of the work, as the dominant motif; the green raisins are set aside. There are also cracked brown nuts, in other words a subtle palette that can contain many metaphors. I use this comparison to support my idea of hidden content in Bearden’s work by his use of specific shades of tan and brown.
Old Poem, ca. 1960
Oil and ink on linen
In this case, the work looks more like a spider web of lines, again on a tan surface. As we look at it though it does seem like an old page, but also a geologic formation, or an indirect reference to calligraphy released from forming characters. He studied Chinese calligraphy and sumi painting technique in the late 1950s.
His exploration of technique, experiment with pigments, global span of sources, historical studies of old masters, all appear in these abstract works. At the same time, as we look at the figurative works we can see that all of these qualities continue as the foundation for his well known works after 1965.
For example in River Mist, 1962 he works with oil on unprimed linen, casein and colored pencil cut torn on painted on board. Key to his aesthetic is his dark brown underpainting . In other words he layers and layers going from dark to light, from one medium to another. Lurking in this particular work are silhouettes that can evoke rising mists, architectural elements, facial profiles, archeological formations, or celestial events.
That fluid movement between different ways of seeing appears in most of these abstractions.
Then we have the change in 1964 in a work like 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue of a gelatin silver print (photostat) on fiberboard or its small partner and source of the same title, made with layered collage, that suddenly gives us faces. To me it evokes Cezanne’s cardplayers, three people sitting around a table playing cards. But they are embedded in a complex abstraction of shades of brown, and white that make the faces pop out. Two men and a woman.
As Bearden worked with collage imagery in complex layers ( this is Explusion from Paradise, 1964, a very odd image, a monkey lower left, a reclining blond center, a colonial soldier and a goat right), the figure ground relationship, the scale of the figures, the utilization of abstract form, constantly shifts. As we look at these works through our exposure to his abstracted experiment work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, we see both the subjects, and the abstraction.
Sometimes an entire landscape takes over and the figure is embedded in it. In another example, the landscape is composed of figures, bound together by a subtly low key palette of yellow and greens. Looking at the subdued close valued browns, blues, mauves, yellows and reds of his abstract painting I feel they have an affinity to his African American identity, in some cases he uses at least ten shades of brown!
Even black and white suggests so many tonalities, here in Spring Way, 1964
I want to end though where he began, because the earliest works such as The Blues Has Got Me, 1944 immediately reveal his sophisticated transformations of established styles such as cubism and expressionism. This is before he went to Paris in 1950! The work incorporates music as a direct reference (he composed music after he returned from Paris). an aspect of Bearden that certainly refers again to the abstract.
Ralph Ellison said it best as quoted in the book, Memory and Metaphor, The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987 ( Studio Museum, 1991) Ellison declared that Bearden conveyed the “sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and Surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history”
This entry was posted on September 21, 2022 and is filed under
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FOONG Ping, Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art here introduces her new show “Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese artists on the Classical Forms” to our press corps in Seattle. I have to warn you that I am a Ping groupie, I think she is really brilliant based on her lecture to members and her interpretations of the shows and installations she curates with Xiaojin Wu, the Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, and most recently with Natalia Di Pietrantonio, Seattle Art Museum’s first curator of South Asian art.
This particular exhibition has another exciting resonance, it was developed in collaboration with the students of “Exhibiting Chinese Art,” Spring 2020 Zoom seminar, University of Washington.
“Beyond the Mountain” gives us six contemporary Chinese artists who negotiate, alter and reinvent some of the deeply classical traditions of China. Ink painting is a central theme in two of the artists.
Ink/Protest
We begin with Chen-Shaoxiong (1962 – 2016) His video assembles hundreds of ink paintings of protests around the world, based on images he downloaded from the internet.
Here we have the most deeply revered technique of Chinese ink painting used to present the resistance to authority from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong. He depicts the protestors resisting police everywhere. the artist simply calls his works Ink Media, a clever ploy that ignores the imagery for authorities who might object?
The artist clearly has a dazzling facility with ink painting, but he is also deeply political. With Liang Juhui 梁矩辉 ( 1959-2006), Lin Yi Lin 林一林 (1964 ), the group Big Tail Elephant protested the rapidly urbanizing Southern city of Guangzhou with performance, photography, installations, and video placed in parks and other public places.
Landscape/Cityscape
The Departure
Yang-Yongliang evokes ink painting in state of the art digital works. Song dynasty monumental landscape paintings celebrated nature and the idea of slowly moving through it as we looked at the painting. Yang-Yongliang ( born in 1980) studied traditional Chinese painting. His videos, like Song landscapes, demand long slow viewing. As we look we begin to see that these are not natural mountains, but actually dense skyscrapers that build up into a mountain. A slow movement of water, as well as tiny people, and cars on highways, slows us down to wait for an event which never comes. We see the water flow, but it never arrives in the sea. we see the dog run, the man fish, the car arrive, but nothing happens, it is an event without an event.
As the press release states eloquently “The aesthetic expressions of old master paintings require close, patient attention to their rich detail, as they mimic traveling at a slow pace to places where the body cannot follow. The purpose of Song painting was twofold: rejuvenation—to relieve stress by countering the chaos of daily life with uplifting, virtual experiences of nature—and contemplation of human (in)significance in the face of nature’s inexorable forces. ”
But these paintings tell us a different story as we are mesmerized by their slow slow movement. We stop, we look, but now we see that while we are insignificantly small, we are destroying the earth. Here
I include an arm of a viewer to give a sense of the scale
the Return
artifact/culture
The gallery between these two experimental artists features two familiar works, one by AiWeiWei. Ai Wei Wei’s 2020 gesture in putting contemporary garish enamel colors on what appear to be old clay pots, is one of many of his outrageous acts over the years. It is less inflammatory than many though. For those of us who have followed his career for many years, this early work is pretty benign, but as you think about the reverence that classical pottery holds in China (perhaps not anymore, and certainly not during the Communist era when classical art was often destroyed) it still carries a lot of content. But if you are not Chinese, or versed in Chinese art, it might not come across as more than pots with bright paint messily applied.
The other work by Zhang Huan. “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous
Mountain,” 1995 is a well known early work by a well known artist.
He piled up bodies on a mountain and added one meter to a vast landscape, again suggesting the insignificance of humans in the scale of nature and the Chinese proverb “Beyond the mountain, there are higher mountains yet,”
landscape/escape
The final room of the exhibition by Lam Tung Pang is by far the most
difficult to understand. Created during the pandemic, it is about being isolated and enclosed and finding a means of escape through fantasy, imagination, and technology. An enclosed space that we are not allowed to enter has a projector that sends various images onto the walls of the enclosure as well as around the room. we become part of the show sometimes. Images include someone gazing at a huge ball of sun or earth, a girl riding a blind-folded donkey, a goose plummeting to the ground ( you can barely see that here) and many other elusive details.
Two other works in the room suggest space flight, Someone a Day 521
and crashing into a mountain, in Echo ( a tiny astronaut is suspended from the ceiling and his shadow appears on the mountain)
and a 2013 work called “When the Time Comes” features a type of bizarre Noah’s ark image of animals marching out of an envelope
All together the installation suggests anxiety, instability, and a search for something solid. It feels like the isolation of the pandemic left the artist floating in mid air like the astronaut that approaches Echo
The exhibition as a whole provokes us with its dialog with history, but most of all it speaks to the present and our current planetary crisis. Disruption of history is where we are now, and destruction of the planet is ongoing. Our small presence within this extraordinary home of ours is creating an outsized impact.
This entry was posted on August 30, 2022 and is filed under
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Hats off to Bonfire Gallery for another cutting-edge exhibition with two of the most outrageous artists in Seattle. Deborah Faye Lawrence and Nancy Kiefer both push the boundaries of what is acceptable, but in strikingly different ways.
The title “Still Hung Up,” refers to a phrase that used to refer to passionate affairs gone wrong. But now it means the artists’ obsession with creativity.
Nancy Kiefer Eye Rise 22” x 30” mixed media in paper
Nancy Kiefer has a long career of creating insanely confrontational, close up images of women. They are sassy, angry, beautiful, naughty and, recently, tragic in her mothers of the disappeared from her “Fierce Woman” series. These are not easy to look at, the colors are harsh, highly saturated and discordant. Kiefer’s use of black line is aggressive.
But what immediately almost overwhelms us is the power of all of these women, whether they undulate like a flame as in “Eye Rise,”
Nancy Kiefer Gorgon (protector)Oil on canvas
offer protection with a flip of a long nailed hand in “Gorgon (Protector)”,
Puppet Oil on wood 12” x 9”Nancy Kiefer
or hold a terrifying witch mask in “Puppet.”
More anguished are the faces of the mothers of the disappeared: they convey a psychological reality of screaming suffering with gaping mouths, yellow streams that could be tears flowing from all directions, wisps of white cross a face like a ghost passing.
Kiefer is a storyteller as well as a painter, and we see stories in these faces. She exposes the grotesque in our public world with these private women. I am reminded of both Jean-Michel Basquiat’s rawness and Picasso’s portraits that layer emotional states from outside to inside. But Kiefer boldly strips away the outside and gives us only the inside and it is, of course, also her own intense emotional experiences that inform these works.
Deborah Faye Lawrence disrupts us with collaged images that create unexpected juxtapositions paired with an intense choice of words and references. Like Kiefer, her women are strong and naughty. In “Hen Party” four rooster headed acrobats perch on others only partially seen. They triumphantly hold at bay an intense onslaught of pointed streamers from every direction, each with a different barbed expletive for women.
“Psychic Revolution” features a busty woman built up from multiple robot-like pieces. She holds out her arms as if to present herself to us but she also holds at bay dozens of smiling teeth filled mouths.
Lawrence frequently uses tin tv trays as the ground for her complex collages. The oval format reinforces the image of the many crescent shaped mouths. The text, collaged from cut out words, reads “In 1985 a psychic told me that in all my past lives I was a man.” So we see the figure at the center now as androgynous and dominating all the teeth and mouths out to eat her up.
In “Fluid Self Portrait,” another collage on a tray, a 1950s woman with pearls and heavy glasses balances spherical wooden tops on two fingers of each hand. Her body is an unstable stack of plates balanced on another top, in a landscape of tops. The whole suggests an impossible situation even as the woman beams a huge cheerful smile. The message is clear.
Lawrence has been making powerful collages for decades. She addresses specific political events, feminism, and personal history, as she undermines cliches and takes on causes. Her sardonic humor wakes us up.
BONFIRE’s small gallery in the International District explodes with feminist energy. These intense artworks show us how to resist the multiple abuses of women’ rights world-wide. Here in our country, of course. we have the imminent loss of the right to an abortion.
These artists tell us we are already angry and outrageous, now we need to act on it!
This entry was posted on August 25, 2022 and is filed under
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“Midtown Square at 23rd and Union is a major destination for outstanding public art.
The overall theme of all the panels is “Reverence and Discovery.” Although not planned, all the art work is unified by similar colors such as purple, yellow, orange, pink, black.
Barry Johnson specifically explains why he chose the unusual colors for the abstract panels on Union Street near 23rd street:
“This work on the outside of the building is about overcoming a documented history of red-lining in the Central District. I used lines and movement at the forefront of the design as a way to demonstrate how we’ve moved beyond the confinement that was placed around us. The lines are also a head nod to pathways that slaves would use to escape. The bold change in colors are about injecting new perspectives into the city. Black and Brown people have not been given opportunities to offer our views on Architectural Design across the city. Seattle is mostly composed of greens, tans, reds and orange for building colors, so I wanted to do something that was completely different and challenge every colorway used on a building in the city.”
Hanging below Barry Johnson’s brightly colored panels, Yegizaw Michael creates a Central District timeline with similar colors alternating with patterns in hanging strips of wood.
On this same façade Adam Jabari Jefferson chose to create black and white photo-based murals with in large vertical strips: “Been Here” “Neighborly Day” “Land Earth Legacy.” As he writes
“The images explore connectivity to both land (the Central District) and community. As the CD demographics continue to shift, these portraits are a declaration by the dispersed social networks that composed the neighborhood, by necessity, for generations. We are still here. Digital photography and mixed media comprise the series to portray iconic and dignified people.”
James W. Washington, Jr.
Not far away is the restored James W. Washington, Jr sculpture “Fountain of Triumph.”
Barry Johnson also created the bronze portrait statue of James W. Washington Jr.. Johnson’s sculpture of Washington holding a small carving of a bird, one of his characteristic expressions. He faces the restored Washington sculpture, “Fountain of Triumph” which was originally installed on 23rd and Union.
Washington explained:
“As the salmon starts back on its physical trend to complete the cycle where life began, so it is with Blacks of the racial trend on the American scene who have struggled like the salmon to reach his or her pinnacle of life and the free spirit again . . . This is the goal of the African-American women and men: To pass on to their offspring the energy in their body and recycle their physical remains in Mother Earth to be used again.”
Near to Johnson’s statue of James W. Washington Jr., is the metal sculpture by Juan Alonzo of four leafy hollyhocks that climb up the wall. Alonzo honors a native plant of the community with the poem “In once neglected soil /I will thrive Because I am deeply rooted here/ I was able to grow tall and strong.”
As we walk along 24th avenue we come to an entrance into the central square with a mural by Perry Rhoden that leads us into it.
She tells us what she was thinking about as she painted it:
“The doorway into the Square from 24th Avenue is similar to the first impression you experience when walking into someone’s home for the first or one-thousandth time. The energy of the home fills your body with peace, warmth, and belonging. This is the feeling I want the community to experience when they enter the Square.
The large abstract lines sweep from the base of the mural and move the viewer’s attention deeper into the corridor. The lines vary in width and color to create dimension and pattern. I focus on bright and bold colors. Placement of the lines will cause the viewer to question whether the woman is inhaling or exhaling ultimately drawing viewers into the square.
I want to create this mural as a visual reminder to breathe. Breathing centers me to the present when I am reminded of how gentrification has changed the Central District. Breathing is what empowers us to accomplish even the most unfathomable tasks. Breathing calms the central nervous system. And, we have the ability to breathe new life into the future of this corner.”
Following Perry’s mural, we enter the Central Square where the huge mural by Takiyah Ward stretches across the entire facing wall. It is a tour de force by an artist who like Perry Rhoden, was part of the team that created the Black Lives Matter mural on Pine Street during the Occupy movement (you can still see it there).
Takiyah Ward describes her striking mural in the central courtyard of Midtown Square as follows:
I consider this mural a visual timeline of the history of the land. The story is told from right to left, North to South, past to present. And it begins with the land. Next, you notice a portrait of Chief Seattle as representation of the Indigenous people being the first people of this land. From there we travel through time to the present, highlighting the people, places and events that I felt played impactful roles on the trajectory of the Central District. As someone born and raised in Seattle, I have my own history here. I did much research to build a thread that to me made sense and highlighted the colorful history of the CD.
The figures are ingrained in the mountain range background, a local Mt Rushmore if you will. The midground, or hills, are decorated with places or centers of community that are pivotal to the peoples lives. Finally the foreground or low hills are covered in visual depictions of events that represent an illustrious history of art, culture, activism, and accomplishment. My goal with this mural was to spark conversation and curiosity. To be a beacon of reverence for our past, cement our history and ensure it’s never forgotten.
Traversing another passage leading from the main square to 23rd street, we see glass lanterns above our heads. Henry Jackson-Spieker in collaboration with KT Hancock lanterns ornamented them with portraits and icons referring to historic figures such as artists James W. Washington. Jr., Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight and the photographer Al Smith, along with musicians and other cultural contributors.
And finally, as we turn north along the façade on 23rd street, we see the vivid portraits by the artist Myron Curry.
Here is his description:
I’m born and raised in the Central District so I am familiar with a few of the iconic community members from our past. I am also very proud to be a part of a project that highlights our culture in such a vibrant way. My grandfather is 91 and has lived in the Central District for the majority of his lifetime. He was very instrumental in my extensive research and discovering so much more about the history of the Central District.
I definitely wanted to highlight the thriving arts and music scene as well as the pioneers of equitable rights and entrepreneurship. Edwin Pratt, Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, Jimmy Hendrix and Ernestine Anderson were perfect for the development of historic arts and music within our community. De Charlene was an obvious choice for pioneering so much change in equality, black woman entrepreneurship and more. I also wanted to include the youth, which is our future and how we need to nurture them.
My creation to visually represent this was loving hands holding a baby. I hope this sheds some light on how I chose who to represent within my murals.”
Gallery Onyx
Gallery Onyx Midtown will be anchoring the ArteNoir space,adding a second venue to its Pacific Place anchor. Headed by Ernest Thomas, the first exhibition will be based on their portfolio of art by Pacific Northwest, Truth B Told showcasing 276 pieces of artwork by 74 artists of African descent. Gallery Onyx believes in inclusivity on a grand scale! But the plan is to also begin a new direction with one person exhibitions.
So the vision to create sustainable community through art comes alive at Midtown Square in multiple ways. Yet there is also a poignancy to this magnificent project that includes so many different cultural expressions as a way to reassert the African American presence in this historic location.
Arté Noir is a distinct contrast to the former businesses of the Central District. It is a new and stunning expression of contemporary Black culture today. But it embraces history even as it transforms it.
Across the street from Midtown Square, the Liberty Bank Building is another success in revitalizing the Central District with its many works of public art and thriving black businesses. Here is the stunning entrance with Al Doggett’s amazing mural.
Realized by Africatown-Central District Preservation and Development Association, who are committed to community-led development, the same group is developing one quarter of the Midtown Square block.
The site is under construction. At the dedication Africatown leaders declared:
“Africatown Plaza will continue a legacy of community building on the site of the former Umoja PEACE Center, the grassroots, Black-led community organization where the Africatown Seattle movement began over a decade ago.”
Most of the participants in this project grew up here. They know what they have lost. They recognize that this new iteration is not the same as what they remember. But they do believe in community, and in that idea there is hope that this part of the city of Seattle can keep its soul.
This entry was posted on August 23, 2022 and is filed under
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Professor Kim Berman and Pontsho Sikhosansa work on a Ramarutha Makoba print in the Newtown studios. Photo supplied
Some background information: in the 1980s, when I taught modern art history at Tufts, I was the academic advisor for the students in the MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. One of my students, Kim Berman, was from Johannesburg and she was very active in the anti-apartheid movement. Through her, I became interested in activist art, and contemporary South African art in general,
In 2000 I was appointed to teach at the Johannesburg Technikon. I have returned every year since for research, writing, and curating. Obviously, no trip was possible last year, so I was especially excited to travel again, for two weeks this past April.
Susan has asked me to discuss my visit to William Kentridge’s studio, which took place right before I left, but I cannot resist briefly showing a few other highlights. One was an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery of the wire sculpture of Walter Oltmann, “Armour and Lace: A Bestiary”. In the photo above , Walter is on the right; David Paton, Kim’s colleague at University of Johannesburg on the left; I’m in the center.
Walter taught for many years at Pretoria University, and has recently retired early. Retirement is encouraged by age 65, as the South African government is eager to make way for non-white faculty.
Back in 2003, I included one of his life-sized standing armored figures in the Co-existence exhibition I curated at Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum). He is still working with those figures, although as the title suggests, he has also turned to wire lizards and other flora and fauna in wire reliefs. As always, the sheer volume of the labor involved was mind-blowing
I also visited Usha Seejarim’s studio on the other side of Johannesburg. Her studio does not seem spacious, but perhaps that is because her work is large. A line of red and yellow threads spread about 20 feet across the floor, which will be installed in the arts festival in Grahamstown, South Africa in June. Lying on the floor next to the thread piece were charming ‘spiders’ made from one iron plate with thin metal legs attached.
She is also constructing, with the help of one of her assistants, 8 metal models of the clothes peg, each about a foot high, that will be sold to cover the costs of fabrication and shipping of “The Resurrection of the Clothes Peg”, which will be the centerpiece of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada in July.
Her work draws from domestic objects like irons and clothes pegs . As she explained in a conversation with Robert Preece in Sculpture magazine
” The domestic objects in my work are, for me, somewhat metaphorical; I think about their function. For example, the clothes iron smooths out creases; its function is to make a shirt or other item of clothing neat and presentable. The clothes peg holds, clasps, grips, and embraces; the broom sweeps away dirt and clears a space. I am aware of how these objects and their use are associated with a female role. Thus, they become quite genderized. I have come to recognize the particular triangular shape of the iron and how that shape has a feminist/vaginal reference. So, the works do not refer to a specific context as much as they refer to the notion of domestic roles and how they are—historically, culturally, socially—assigned to or claimed by the female. I would like to think of these forms as universal symbols understood around the world.”
Usha was just back from Lagos, where the work is being fabricated. The final work will be about 40 feet high, and the most monumental piece at BM. She is now trying desperately to get a visa so she can be there for the opening.
Now on to the visit to William Kentridge’s studio. Kentridge is, of course, South Africa’s most well-known artist; recently, he has received The Queen Sonja Lifetime Achievement Award from the Queen Sonja Art Foundation in Norway. Kentridge also is a long-time friend of Kim Berman.
After her MFA studies in Boston, Berman founded the community printmaking studio, Artist Proof Studio, in Johannesburg in 1991. It is now a thriving center, offering classes in printmaking and professional printing services to artists such as Bokang Mankoe.
Banner by Bokang Mankoe monoprint
APS had been downtown, but the city wanted its convenient location for its offices, so moved it lock, stock and barrel to a fancy shopping center. So the students must take a daily hike from the public transport downtown. Because it was a holiday, only two of the printers were there when I arrived.
Kim and Nathi Ndladla, the head of the studio, were working on the giant Kentridge print, “You Who Never Arrived,” with its forest of trees. The work consists of about 12 prints attached to handmade paper that is then affixed to cloth, becoming a sort of tapestry. I was nervous about the two of them filling in the blanks across the spaces between the individual prints and touching up the trees with black ink, but Nathi and Kim clearly enjoyed themselves.
The next day Nathi, who had the Kentridge hangings carefully wrapped, drove me to William Kentridge’s house in the suburb of Houghton so he could sign them. I was sure that the source of his imagery was one of the trees on his property, but when I looked around I was clearly wrong.
William’s son had been married there in the garden the day before, and clean up was taking place. William was leaving for exhibits in London and Lucerne that evening, but took the time to show us the new video that will accompany a performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the London Symphony Orchestra (I think).
He also showed me the notebook where he jots down the quotes and phrases he uses in his artworks. He was remarkably gracious, given his tight schedule, but this is true of South Africans in general. Also remarkable is the lack of ‘artistic ego.’ After all, he is South Africa’s most well-known artist, with a huge retrospective planned in London next year. But clearly, he considered Kim and Nathi to be colleagues. I may be wrong, but I think many successful American artists would consider their assistants to be just that: assistants. Not the case here, another reason why I enjoy going to South Africa and writing about the art there.
The political situation in South Africa is not the greatest at present, as Cyril Ramaphosa’s government is rife with corruption. The situation is also dire with museums; for example, the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s facilities are in terrible shape, with the collection in jeopardy. And yet, artists continue on, and good work continues to be made. Their continuing productivity is a source of hope in grim times.
Kentridge lives in the house he grew up in. His father, Sir Sidney Kentridge, defended Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trials that sent Mandela to prison for 27 yrs. His studio is the former garage on the property, now quite transformed! The collage of flowers and plants on the end wall of the studio he made for his daughter’s wedding a year ago, and re-installed for his son’s wedding, which had taken place the day before we arrived.
____
Afterword by Susan
I was very fortunate to see the London premier of William Kentridge’s opera Sibyl at the Barbican.
The artist himself was there in the audience!
Here is the only photo I was permitted to take of the theater screen before it began
Here is great clip
From The Times Review Donald Hutera
Monday April 25 2022, 12.00pm, The Times
“The South African visual artist William Kentridge’s Sibyl is an extraordinary achievement, no matter how you categorise it. The work comes in two parts: an approximately 20-minute film accompanied by live piano and male chorus and, at double that length, a ritualistic chamber opera (originally commissioned by Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and created between 2016 and 2019) featuring more music, song and dance and the kind of multilayered stage imagery in which Kentridge specialises. To call it stimulating would be an understatement. It is also cumulatively, and sometimes almost inexplicably, moving.”
Here is a You Tube clip
It was a multimedia extravaganza of music, dance, costume, all performed by South Africans of incredible skill.
The theme was the unpredictability of trying to predict the future. The Cumaen Sibyl was a fortune teller who threw fortunes out at random on oak leaves and people had to figure out which was theirs, a metaphor for the unpredictablity of life and knowing the future. So the opera had a lot of paper flying around, lots of fortunes.
But it also refers to our contemporary efforts to predict the future with algorithms
As one anonymous analysis explained
“Unspoken throughout but hovering over the opera is the notion that our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll get a bank loan, whether we’ll live to 80, what our genetics will be. This certainty of an implacable mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a more human connection to our destiny, an instinct to believe in the possibility of something other than the machine to guide us in how we see our future. The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in history, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed consciousness that makes us human.”
The evening began with a 22 minute silent black and white film The City Deep with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu leading a chorus of nine performers and and Kyle Shepherd, a leading progressive piano player from South Africa. Above is a still from a the Kentridge film, The City Deep
As explained by the Goodman Gallery in NYC ( where you can see drawings for the film)
“In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place.
” The action jumps: the museum collapses, Soho comes face to face with his fate, whilst a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of the film’s creation, of the artist in his studio—always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny.”
” City Deep is the anticipated 11th film in Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection series, a collection of animated films drawn over 30 years, featuring the protagonist Soho Eckstein. South Africa’s political transition from the violent years of apartheid to democracy sets the scene for a saga of loss, love, anger, compassion, guilt and forgiveness. The films revolve around the power-hungry mining magnate Soho Eckstein, his wife Mrs. Eckstein and her lover, the solitary artist Felix Teitlebaum. As the story unfolds, Soho’s empire crumbles as he comes to terms with his own frailties and the first signs of mortality.
” Like previous films in the series, City Deep is grounded within Kentridge’s home city of Johannesburg and can be viewed as a counterpoint to the 1990 film, Mine, which depicts images of the deep level mining industry.
City Deep extends this depiction to the informal, surface-level “zama zama” miners of current day Johannesburg. Translated from Zulu as ‘try your luck’ or ‘take a chance’, “zama zama” is the name given to the miners who illegally work decommissioned mines on the edges of the formal mining economy. Manual labour replaces large machines, creating open scars in the Highveld landscape.
In City Deep, the “zama zama” miners and the landscape merge into artworks hanging in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, itself built during the heyday of gold mining in Johannesburg. Wandering the exhibition spaces is a deeply contemplative Soho gazing at the artworks and into vitrines. Towards the end of the film the gallery collapses in on itself, an imagined demise of an institution in a state of increasing dereliction.
The second part of the evening featured Waiting for the Sibyl, the opera. During the pandemic Kentridge published the libretto.
As Kentridge explains:
“The project at Rome Opera, Waiting for the Sibyl, comes from an invitation from the opera house to make a companion piece to the 1968 piece by the American artist Alexander Calder, called Work in Progress. The 1968 piece is a beautiful, whimsical almost-happening of the era, with mobiles slowly turning on the stage, and groups of bicycle riders; but the signature mobiles of Alexander Calder are the heart of the piece.
In responding to the invitation to do a second half of the evening, I wanted something that also had a sense of turning, of revolution, and of the lightness of the Calder. I was reminded of the image of the Cumaean Sibyl. My understanding of her story was that she lived in her cave near Naples; people would come to her with questions about their fate, and she would write the answers on oak leaves. There would be a pile of oak leaves at the front of her cave and people would come to get their answers.
But inevitably there would be a wind which blew the leaves around – so you never knew if you were getting your fate or somebody else’s fate. It’s a beautiful metaphor of not being able to predict our futures. This idea of leaves blowing and turning, and uncertainty, became the connecting point for Calder’s moving, turning mobiles and something that grounds the piece with that turning but hooks into questions that I’m interested in today.”
Photo by Yasuko Kagayama
“I was thinking about the theme of fate and our future and the telling of our future, as the Sibyls did; this meets the work of Alexander Calder; and both of these come together in the material ways of working to make the piece.
photo Stella Oliver
The idea of turning leaves into pages, and the pages swirling around, brought together the turning sculptures of Calder, and the pages on which I had been obsessively drawing in the service of making films out of books. Part of the form became the projections of the texts and the drawings in the book and the shadow made in the book by the performer of the Sibyl. Different scenes were added. A scene in the waiting room for the Sibyl. A scene about which is the right decision and which is the wrong one. How do you know which is the chair that will collapse when you sit on it and which is the chair that will support you?”
There were a lot of people sitting on collapsing chairs in the opera. The multimedia made it overwhelming, stunning piano, singing, film, dance, costumes. The odd flat discs on people’s heads I finally figured out connected to the Alexander Calder 
Here is another excellent You Tube video from the rehearsal for the original performance in Teatro dell’Opera Rome, September 2019, before the pandemic delayed it.
Even in the stills you can see the layers of complexity!
Photos by Stella Oliver and Yasuko Kasegama
This entry was posted on June 14, 2022 and is filed under
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Louise Bourgeois affects us viscerally. The extraordinary physicality of her work outstrips any other art addressing the female body and its excruciating alterations from pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, sexuality, abuse, aging.
I once met her in Houston at a conference of women artists who were marching for the ERA in 1975. She was wearing a many breasted Artemis dress.
But the works in “Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child.” at the Hayward Gallery, begun so many years later are not at all entertaining. They are not easy. This print is called Umbilical Cord dated 2000.
I felt drained after viewing this exhibition It looks at her works using textiles that she began only in the mid 1990s when she was already in her eighties. We were thinking Oh textiles, pretty benign. But of course it was the opposite.
The first piece we saw as we entered the gallery suggests the process of the artist in creating these works. Apparently in the mid 90s she asked her assistant to bring all her old clothes down to her studio.
Of course her old clothes are a lot more interesting than our old clothes. Old fashioned undergarments hang on hangers or odd large bones in a “cell”, as Bourgeois tellingly calls this type of installation marked private.
At the center of the cell is a small spiral staircase with a bed and a body from which threads emerge. If you look hard you will see a spider also.
As we went further into the exhibition we saw more old fashioned underwear now hanging on bones in the gallery, not in a cell. It was somehow more frightening that way.
In the next segment was another famous and terrifying work: the famous spider installation from 1997. A huge spider, called Maman, nine meters high, was featured in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern when it opened in 1999, and again was displayed outside in 2007 during a major retrospective of the artists work. According to the artist ‘The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver … (she) was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”
In addition spiders spin threads, and repair their webs when we destroy them. But they can also swallow insects easily.
In this version of Spider there are fragments of tapestry inside as well as other details of sewing. As we all know, Bourgeois worked for her family restoring tapestries as a child. She worked on details such as hands or feet. Here we see the spider that spins thread turns into a giant predator.
From the catalog essay “Weaving Materials and Metaphors,” by Lynn Cooke
“While the spider and unspooling thread were freighted with
personal signification for Bourgeois, both are replete with classical
allusions as she doubtless knew. In Metamorphoses, Ovid
provides an aetiology for the former in the tale of Arachne who
foolishly contested Athena’s pre-eminence in the art of weaving.
Enraged that she had been bested, the goddess transformed the
upstart maiden into a spider bound forever to spin and weave.
Thread lies also at the heart of a haunting myth featuring the
Three Fates who control the destinies of mortals. In Hesiod’s
version, Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos,
‘the inflexible one’, who terminates each human life with an irreparable snip of her scissors, all take the form of old women.”
Another installation Needle 1992 The gigantic weaving needle arcs from hanging yarn that spools on the floor. It has had an unavoidable sexual reference of invasion, but who is invading what. The oval shapes maybe ovaries? The sheer audacity of the piece is thrilling.
The exhibition included several series based on smaller embroidered works. As always, you think oh, small scale, but then pow.
Many of the works were figurative. Here is the incredible image of childbirth at the top of the post : Do Not Abandon Me 1992
These images really speak for themselves. They are all untitled.
1996
2007
2005
1996
1996
There were many other works in the exhibition, such as this one called Endless Pursuit from 2000.
Or this one Cell xxi 2000 and you see other cells aligned with it behind it.
The famous spiral woman 2003 but it exists in many variations of course. She looks like she is experiencing multiple pregnancies
Particularly painful Knife Figure 2002
The Mute 2002
And much much more. Incredible bodies intertwined missing some parts such as heads. Anonymous copulating that feels as though the two bodies are one single organism. For some reason I didn’t take pictures of those. Perhaps because they were all black and too dark in both their color and their mood.
A great deal has been written about Louise Bourgeois and she wrote a great deal herself. But in the end I am speechless at the sheer physicality of her work. So the woven head of the mute seems to be an appropriate ending.
This entry was posted on June 2, 2022 and is filed under
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