Valentine's Day for All of Us

I created the Freedom to Marry Angel in 1996 as a gentle warrior, protective of lovers everywhere. Her shield is the pink triangle and her sword a bouquet of flowers. As a copyrighted logo she was printed on buttons and t-shirts, in which there was little interest at the time. Twelve years later I can see how naive I was in those days! I have great faith, however, in the young people who are transforming our country in so many ways. By the time they are in charge, all of this will be so ho-hum...

An Historical Footnote

“We don’t have school on Monday, because it’s Martin Luther King Day”, my six year old grandson announced. “Who was Martin Luther King?” I asked, curious what his first grade class was being taught. His eyes grew big. “Don’t you know who Martin Luther King was?” he said incredulously.

I told him that when his grandpa and I were married and his mommy was a baby, we were students at The Martin Luther King School for Social Change. As he gets older he’ll learn the rest.

It was a small school, a dozen or so students, founded by radical Quakers, American Gandhians, on the campus of Crozer Seminary outside of Philadelphia. It was an interesting place to be on April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated. It turned out that Dr. King was an alumni of Crozer Seminary, having gotten his Masters Degree there in 1951. The King School students, together with the Crozer Caucus of Black Seminarians (another dozen or so people), approached the Crozer administration to ask that Dr. King’s picture be hung in the Board Room. The room had a large rectangular dark wood conference table in the middle. The surrounding walls were hung with portraits of eminent alumni - all white.

Today this seems like such an obvious and certainly minimal request. In those days, it was controversial. They actually said no! It appeared that they were not proud of this alumni, that they did not want to acknowledge him as one of theirs, that he was too much of an agitator, a radical troublemaker. Negotiation and tense confrontation went on for a period of time.

Two years later, King School no longer existed and Crozer Seminary had merged with Colgate Rochester. On the present day website of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School they list an abundance of events for Martin Luther King Day, and talk about the life-changing legacy of the social gospel. Under history, the heading about Crozer’s move to affiliate with Colgate Rochester in 1970 reads “Martin Luther King, Jr’s Alma Mater Moves to Rochester.”

It is perhaps in the footnotes of history that its complexity takes shape. Crozer Seminary did want to be on the cutting edge of social change. That is why they shared their campus with The Martin Luther King School for Social Change in the first place. They appear to be carrying on that mission today, in their present incarnation. The people who made the unfortunate decision in 1968 are no longer around. We may never know the back story.

I hope that as my grandson grows older he will learn that Martin Luther King Day is about more than parades and a day off from school!

First Beach Walk of the Year

A little girl scratched "2008" in the sand with a stick, soon to be washed away by incoming tide. Couples of all ages strolled hand in hand at the water's edge, watching the sky change. Families posed for their New Year's Day snapshot in front of the spot where the sun was spreading a shaft of gold on the water. Children were everywhere: babies wrapped in blankets, toddlers on shoulders, older ones playing in the sand. There were only a handful of surfers and one lone fisherman. I was among the solitary walkers, since my honey had a cold. It was definitely a holiday crowd.

A foreign tourist, a woman walking south as I was coming back north stopped to greet me. "Where does it end?" she asked. I was startled by her question, given the vastness of the shoreline, but it was a language problem, so the answer was not "the tip of South America". I managed to suggest she walk down to Flat Rock and back, the same walk I had just taken.

I snapped this shot on my way home, of the lagoon flowing under the railroad trestle towards the ocean. A good way to start the New Year, with a fresh supply of sand now on the floor of my freshly washed car.

"Right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant"

Martin Luther King said so much more than "I have a dream". "Right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant" were his words that spoke to me most strongly when I visited the Martin Luther King Memorial recently in Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco. The visitor follows a path behind a waterfall flowing from high above, actually getting misted depending on the direction of the breeze. Behind the waterfall are several large plaques, beautifully carved with quotes from Dr. King in English on the top. Each plaque has a translation into a different language below the English. Reading the quotes literally from behind the rush of flowing water was a powerful experience.

As we are entering a New Year with yet another tragic assassination, that of Benazir Bhutto, may we take hope anew from the words of Dr. King: "Right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

The Missing Peace Project

I was fortunate to see The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on my recent visit to San Francisco. It is a multi-media art exhibition that brings together 88 respected artists representing 30 countries. With the full life of the Dalai Lama as inspiration, the intention for this project is to shift the world's attention towards peace.

Check out their website at www.tmpp.org, for a virtual tour and further info!

One of the most uplifting pieces for me was a continuous video loop by Marina Abramovic called At the Waterfall. Between the years 2000 and 2003, Abramovic collected 120 video portraits featuring the prayers of monks and nuns representing five Tibetan Buddhist traditions. All of these videos are projected simultaneously on a large wall with the sound of the overlapping prayers from different monasteries resembling a huge waterfall. Low red canvas chairs face the wall, so the viewer sits close to the floor, in a room darkened except for the wall of looping video. May I never forget what it felt like to be enveloped and transported by the cascade of sound...

Over the Border

It was a relief that yesterday's bus trip to Tijuana and Rosarito, "Artists of the Border," sponsored by the Atheneum Music and Arts Library, http://www.ljathenaeum.org, wasn't cancelled because of the fires. My daughter and I had been looking forward to it, and now it was even more welcome. The high winds, falling ash, and poor air quality of the last week had no respect for national boundaries, but the worst was behind us. I had not been to the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) in several years and was amazed by the building boom in the whole surrounding area, including now McDonalds and Starbucks. Fortunately it also includes a new building going up at the Centro that will house an International Gallery built to museum standards, putting Tijuana on the international circuit of traveling exhibitions. Amazingly, this is sponsored by the National Council for Culture and the Arts: the government!

We also visited the Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, a state sponsored gallery which promotes the work of emerging, even edgy and controversial artists, as well as established artists. My daughter expressed a desire to purchase a small print. The gallery Director took her name and email address to pass along directly to the artist. "You can do business directly with each other" he said. It took me the whole day to wrap my mind around that. The gallery didn't take a percentage of sales, because their overhead is paid by the government. Not worried about survival they can take risks in who they show. As far as I can tell, their role is to provide exposure for the artists, be a cultural resource for the public at large, and connect potential collectors up with the artists. WOW!

I took the photograph above through our bus window, showing a section of the border fence in the upscale gated community where one of the artists we visited lived and worked. The neighboring home had a tree house in the backyard from which one could see over the fence into the United States. My understanding and appreciation of what it means to be part of this vital and rich border culture was deepened on many levels. The dance of inside/outside, who influences who, and just what is a border anyway, became more intricate.

Firestorm

I thought I would be writing about having pieces in two wonderful shows. Our San Diego Chapter of Women's Caucus for Art is having a show together with the Women's History Museum, www.whmec.org, - hopefully a first annual event. And Studio Maureen/Next Door Gallery, www.studiomaureen.com, is having its fabulous annual Dia de los Muertos exhibit. I am happy to be participating in both shows.

The raging firestorm throws this into quite a different perspective however. We are evacuated, camping out at my daughter's house, who fortunately lives in a safe area. When packing up the car, after selecting photos, videos of family, hard drives, legal & financial papers, and my grandmother's Sabbath candlesticks, which had survived twenty moves in two years in the Old Country before making it to America, I realized I hadn't packed any art. I quickly threw in the CDs of all the digitized slides of my work from 1984 to late 90's. There wasn't room for much. I had no hesitation about packing the wonderful collage by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith which has hung over my work table for many years, giving me joy and inspiration. It was a vote in favor of new work to come, made on a new work table, if necessary. Of my own work, I grabbed the photo etching "She Came to me in a Dream", which includes passages of the Kaddish prayer along with an image of my grandmother. It was close at hand, not too big, and two dimensional - easily packable. And it deals with loss...

Newer work not yet photographed, our collection of other peoples art - mostly friends, some of it trades, and our folk art collection - hopefully will all still be there awaiting our return home. I have complained in the past about my limited studio space - one bedroom chock full of supplies, old work, new sketches. To others it may appear to be a jumble. To me, I know exactly where things are, organized according to my own quirky catalog of visual images. All I have to do is putter in it, attempt to clean it up, and new sketches spring to life. The thought of losing it all is horrifying. I cherish my limited work space, not to be taken for granted. If I had larger space I would enjoy doing larger work, but I have never cherished what I do have as fully as now.

I also packed a piece of melted glass from James Hubbell's former studio which was destroyed in the fires of four years ago, along with a slender book of watercolors he painted after the fires. These amazing watercolors embody the continuity and resurgence of an artist's creative impulse despite losing so much, and his ability to see beauty even in destruction. Some of them were exhibited at the Oceanside Museum in 2005: http://www.oma-online.org/james_hubbell.html

A plastic container with my journals from the last three years or so managed to fit in the back seat. Amazingly, it also included my very first journal, from 1971. All the rest, continuous during the intervening years, are in a box back in the garage. I had been reading a book called Harvesting Your Journals, by Rosalie Deer Heart and Alison Strickland, which makes me appreciate my years of journaling in a way I hadn't fully before. Furniture and clothing can be replaced. Thirty-five years worth of journals can't.

I feel calmer today, because of being with loved ones in a safe area, no longer wondering if or when we will get the order to evacuate. The air here is not too sooty and doesn't sting the throat and eyes. The grandchildren, who are bouncing off the walls with no school today, are a welcome diversion. It definitely beats watching flames on television.

Addendum at 9:00 p.m.: The winds have shifted and the evacuation order lifted. We are deeply grateful to be home again, smoky air and all. As I unpacked the car the first thing I did was hang the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith collage over my work table again.