“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.” –Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle – Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of Movements.

The first time I set foot into an American jail happened in New York City in 1978, while accompanying lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights during a visit to a city jail with their clients. My familiarity with the German prison system had not prepared me for what I encountered on US soil in that and later visits, starting with the physical factors of overcrowding and horrid sanitary conditions alone and amplified by reports of continual violence both among those who were incarcerated and from those who guarded them. The memory was triggered, for one, by the fact that the New York City Council voted this week to close the abominable Rikers Island Jail complex, and secondly by a visit inside a prison, this time in Oregon, but for all intents and purposes on a different planet from Rikers.

Bureaucratic hurdles to enter the Northeast Portland minimum-security prison were surprisingly few; my pre-approved camera was checked both at entry and upon leaving, and the dress code requirements (no blues allowed, lest you couldn’t be differentiated) were minimal. For this one-time visit I did not have to undergo volunteer training, thus being spared the instruction not to be open to manipulation from prisoners, an aspect that always struck me as sowing suspiciousness and bound to instill an us vs them attitude right from the start.

What brought me to the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) was an invitation to attend the premiere of a video of The Inside Show, a variety show that was created, performed and filmed this summer by the men serving time at CRCI. The project was the brainchild of a gifted young woman, (Salty) Xi Jie Ng, a recent graduate of PSU’s Art and Social Practice Program, who directed, edited and co-produced (with Jacob Diepenbrock and Spencer Byrne-Seres) The Inside Show. The PSU program has been involved with bringing art and artists to prison through Columbia River Creative Initiatives, a series of artist run programs and classes held at this minimum security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

I cannot think of a better example of collectivity, defined as the experience or feeling of sharing responsibilities, experiences and activities, than the one provided in this collaborative effort between those imprisoned, those who come in from the outside to volunteer, those who deliver material support from the outside (the media arts center Open Signal and PICA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, among others) and an inside administration that sees the value of creative engagement and makes it possible. The notions of hope and optimism derived from collectivity were surely echoed in the conversations I had with those on the inside as well as with one man who is currently on a re-entry path on the outside who agreed to be interviewed after a second showing of The Inside Show, this time at PICA.

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“The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.” 
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The mess hall was filled with a big crowd, consisting both of those who had participated in the project and their friends, and those who were curious. There were certainly nowhere close to the 600 men currently serving time at CRCI (usually the last 4 years of a sentence,) but I cannot tell if for lack of interest or some administrative safety rules given limited space in the mess hall. Once the video was introduced by the hosts Christian (Scotty) Freeman, David (Ohio) Phipps and director Xi Jie Ng, the mood that seemed relaxed to begin with became truly upbeat. The hall was filled with loud laughter, mine included, since many of the skits were truly funny.

The variety show consists of five episodes that will be published via You Tube across the span of the next months. Central is a repeated segment, Microwave Magic, that deals with recipes that can be prepared with available ingredients from the commissary. It’s pretty ingenious with what talented cooks come up with under such restrictions; it is more poignant when you consider that food is one of the few “legal” sensory experiences available to those in prison, food that is not exactly meeting anything other than nutritional needs when delivered from institutional kitchens.

A sketch about carrots, Pocket carrots, also poked fun at the availability, or lack thereof, of food when you crave it.

Aspects of prison life are frequently targeted in those skits, in ways that make you wonder should you laugh or cry. Guest star Fred Armisen, who you might remember from SNL or Portlandia, for example, participates in a fashion show that drives home the point of prison dress code which eliminates all possibilities of individual expression.

There are musical interludes with pieces written and performed by the men,

interviews between buddies about the effects of military deployment in war zones and PTSD,

funny sports roundtables, stand-up routines with robots, and explanation and performance of Native-American drumming circles.

During the braiding demo – different styles of braids are preferred by different individuals – the barber made a point that was echoed by several men who talked to me about the art project: “I meet all kinds of people who I would otherwise have no contact with: Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, they all come to get their hair done.”

Even though segregation among different prisoner populations is much less pronounced at CRCI than, say, the Oregon State Penitentiary, the maximum security prison in Salem, OR, it still exists. Sign-up for participation in the production of The Inside Show crossed those self-selective barriers. That kind of collective integration was perhaps not the main goal, but surely counts as a positive side effect.

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Mark Arnold is a man so filled with ideas running at hypersonic speed in his head that he practically vibrates. Recently re-established outside prison walls, facing severe restrictions still for the next 4 months, he nervously paces before his Q&A performance at PICA, wondering how it would go in front of a live audience. His explanations of his creative process, the way the project came together, the impact it had on those involved turn out to be fluent, persuasive, emotionally touching.

Born and raised in Portland, he has by his reports filled many roles in life, as a sergeant in the National Guard, a general manager at McDonalds, a welder, a participant in radio broadcasts at KVAN in Vancouver, WA, and more. He was one of the main writers for The Inside Show, ideas flowing and put into form that were then meticulously rehearsed. The pure volume of output is matched by astute observation.

The day after the show’s outside launch, his stress now dissipated, Arnold returns over and over during a long phone conversation to what he considers the most important point. “There are many programs at CRCI helping to pass time, or encouraging you to do this or that with a particular rehabilitation goal in mind. THIS project allowed you to be creative in a way that expresses yourself, the way you are, and being seen for who you are. Having your humor or ideas acknowledged by others boosts your self-esteem. That matters, particularly when you are fighting life-long addiction.”

Agency, accountability, and the politics of responsibility come up a lot in my conversation with Arnold, and also in the short comments made by CRCI residents during the show’s premiere. The idea that people chose to commit crimes for which they will be locked up, and can learn to make better decisions to avoid recidivism in the future, puts the stress on individual behavior. What it omits is that structural obstacles interfere with the best of intentions, not to say justice. I, as an educated, older white woman, am less likely to be imprisoned than a young, poor person of color for the same crime. More importantly, if conditions at post-release do not provide necessary access to regular employment, safe housing, medical care that includes continued addiction prevention and/or treatment and re-integration into a community that is itself healthy at its core, re-offending is a statistically likely outcome for people with few means. To paraphrase Michelle Alexander from her book The New Jim Crow, the criminal justice system will be primarily concerned with the management and control of the dispossessed.

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Art as a vehicle to regain individuality and establish personhood lost in the eyes of a society that stares at the crime, but not the person behind it, is a focus not just of the incarcerated men, but also of those bringing art to prison in the first place. Harrell Fletcher, MFA Art & Social Practice Program director and Ausplund Tooze Family Professor of Art and Social Practice at PSU, is instrumental for the Columbia River Creative Initiatives. He’s been involved with numerous projects at the prison in the last few years, bringing his students into the process, starting comedy classes, and advising Answers without Words, a year-long collaboration between artists at CRCI and photographers around the world, initiated by German artist Anke Schüttler. In addition, The Inside Show co-producer Spencer Byrne-Seres has led a collaboration with Outerspace Gallery and Erickson Gallery to program group exhibitions and projects from artists both inside Columbia River and outside of the prison (the program is supported by the Regional Arts and Culture Council).

Fletcher is part of a skit trying to introduce conceptual art, quickly followed by one of the funniest bits of the evening, “art teacher” Ohio introducing a version of painting by numbers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With his self-deprecating wit and warmth, and quick retorts always at the ready, that man could hold his own at any given SNL performance.

The driving, powerhouse force behind it all is Xi Jie Ng. Salty, as she is known, was born and educated in Singapore, to parents who valued rationality, tradition and caution – not necessarily in that order. The current detente between them and their daughter, an artist and rebel since childhood, is quite a remarkable achievement, with love extended from both sides. Salty applied to the PSU program three years ago after simply having googled art programs in the USA. Her accomplishments as a communications major and photojournalist assured acceptance into the program, which takes only about five students per year. As I write this she is on her way to an invited artist residency at UMass at Dartmouth, having graduated from PSU this year with an MFA in Art and Social Practice.

As director of the variety show, she had to be able to connect to the performers but also to call the shots in an environment that was often full of tension. As editor of the videos, she had to deal with a huge amount of material and cull it into something that was representative: not too sleek, but also providing evidence of the capabilities of those on the inside. The crediting process, listing all of the varying roles that contributed to the show’s success, will hopefully enhance the CVs of those soon to be looking for employment. In her words: “By pretending we were a functioning production team, we soon became one.”

I am always drawn to people who exhibit unusual combinations of traits. Salty scores high on that assessment scale. A tendency toward deep self-reflection is counterbalanced by a steely determination to guide her projects to success, unearthing and pursuing every resource possible, with promotional skills that equal her artistic creativity. Without a smidgen of savior syndrome or do-gooder mentality, she possesses a passion for working with populations who have reached the bottom rung of society’s normative scaffold. A serious, self-contained demeanor alternates with giddy bouts of participation in some of the show’s funnier skits. If she doesn’t burn out with her candle lit at both ends, she will go far. Can’t wait to see what she does next.

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“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!” 
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Caught in my very own stereotyping, I am surprised to hear Nathaniel Hawthorne referenced by a prison administrator when I try to get some answers to my questions. To use CRCI’s rehabilitation manager James Hanley’s own words:

“I think about Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was required to wear a scarlet “A” for the rest of her life in Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter. In his novel the “A” stood for adulteress. Our society places a scarlet “F” on felons. It’s hard for someone to rebuild themselves and their relationships with such a stigma.”  

A writer and poet himself, Hanley is convinced that the arts help people learn to navigate the world. He associates the opportunity to express oneself through art, music, poetry, comedy, and film with people’s ability to stay in touch with who they are, or in most cases, to find themselves. His own experience with art as a source of power and purpose is something he hopes the incarcerated men will come to share. The institution itself, with new leadership under Superintendent Nichole Brown, tries to provide community connections through a variety of programs that often depend on volunteers, including Arts in Prison, Living Yoga, Music Studio, Liberation Literacy, SAGA (Sexuality and Gender Awareness), Men’s Circle, AA & NA meetings, and Inside/Out classes.

The Inside Show was a core program – and the connectedness between Hanley (who is credited as executive producer) and the men he manages was palpable. They freely gave respect and gratitude to him, not just in public but also in the non-public conversations I had with them. This image among the performers describes it well.

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Countless films and TV shows are re-enacting prison experiences. Autobiographies by former residents of prisons tell their stories. I know of at least one  film made in prison, Madeleine Sackler’s O.G.., using those serving time as actors, narrating a story that describes familiar experiences in a penitentiary.

There is writing from poets who were sentenced to life without parole at age 16, like Oregon’s own Sterling Cuneo, who is a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow, a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow and a two-time PEN America Prison Writing Award winner for his essay Going Forward with Gus (2018); he is also co-author of the play The Bucket (2018.)

There are podcasts, like Earhustle, that describe daily realities of life inside prison by those living it, as well as stories from the outside, post-incarceration in St. Quentin.

The Inside Show differs in the sense that it communicates visually between actors and viewers, expressing ideas coming directly from the performers, not a film script written by someone on the outside.

Seeing and hearing a real person who resides on the inside while we are on the outside creates a relationship, however fleeting. It might challenge our stereotypes, reframe our perceptions and perhaps ease a path to engagement or a willingness to use our political clout to help change and improve society’s post-release conditions. This kind of communal involvement is expressed in the words of the American activist Eugene Debs:

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Just remember: Some of us can walk out of there. Others can’t.

Let’s face it: when I visit a museum showing contemporary art these days I might be challenged, made to think, dumb-founded, or roll my eyes – but uplifted I ain’t.

So it is all the more noteworthy when I stumble into an exhibit that elicits unadulterated joy. And this I did last week when visiting the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM.) Located in a building that is itself a calming environment full of light, and architecturally clever in providing small spaces without seeming small, I saw Color Beyond Description – the Watercolors of Charles Hawthorne, Hans Hofman and Paul Resika.

The title might contain the word color but really the impression was one of all light. And lightness. The watercolors floated on more than the paper, they emanated a joy about connection to the landscape they depicted – or so it seemed to this mind, itself primed by the beauty of the Cape Cod surrounds.

Hawthorne and Hofman both were part of the early Provincetown Art Colony, with Hofman teaching at his own school from 1935 to 1958 when he summered at the Cape. Landscape and nature-inspired abstraction were a main focus for him (and later his student Resika, a painter of the New York School. Here is an enlightening review of the latter’s contemporary work.)

Use of light, and even more so of abstraction, changes how we are able or encouraged to perceive the familiar in new fashion. Keyword here, though, is familiar: I think work that is descriptive of or alluding to something we know resonates in special ways. Instead of working on deciphering we can give ourselves to the joy of recognition, placing a bit of ourselves into the percept, forging a relation.

And play with light is particularly possible for those who KNOW the landscape, intimately and across time and season. I have been thinking about the concept of “the local” recently, spurned both by travel and by input from other domains: A recent reading at OJMCHE by Judith Arcana from her biography of Grace Paley revealed the latter to be determined to cling to the local: as a community organizer, an anti-war activist, and, eventually, a story teller. That decision made her effective in these various compartments of her life, even though it meant national recognition as an artist was late in coming.

The focus on the local cannot be defined too narrowly – both Hofman and Resika were living in multiple locales, and Hofmann’s European background surely influenced his explorations. It is more that familiarity with a given subject leads to expertise in this subject and thus fluidity in describing it, reflecting the changes it can undergo. Well, I am speculating. For an in-depth, knowledgeable and incisive review, you best go here. Clement Greenberg rules!

I am back in the landscape familiar to me, noticing the changes brought on by the season. I am working through the tension how I can always get so excited about all the new I experience, hear and see during my travels, and be equally thrilled when I encounter the familiar, be it of landscapes I frequently visit, or my very own at home. I guess, in the end, a sense of belonging trumps all. But excitement is next best!

And here is a special shout-out to the curator of PAAM who worked a miracle in creating a clever and actually coherent display of completely disparate art slated to be auctioned off for fundraising in early October. The museum deserves support.

Music today by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. About covers me and reviewing art…..

Sometimes I wonder if I am actually visiting the same exhibits that I have read about in the mainstream reviews. Take the Whitney Biennial, for example. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art. This year’s exhibit was reviewed as Young Art Cross-Stitched with Politics by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, explained by ArtNet’s Ben Davis as The 2019 Whitney Biennial Shows America’s Artists Turning Toward Coded Languages in Turbulent Times and featured by the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Plagens as Still Protesting, but to What End? (with an entry paragraph that describes the exhibition as filled with work expressing political and social grievances, but feels like it may be preaching to the converted.)

I won’t waste energy on debating if the time for protests is over or on wondering where you possibly find circles of “converts” at the WSJ.

I will also mention only in passing that the NYT review’s title sets a condescending tone that is utterly misplaced. Young art implies, however subtly, that maturation is yet to come, and cross-stitch is a stab at a predominantly female activity that amounts more to craft than art (with apologies to the embroiderers of the Bayeux Tapestries…) If he meant interwoven, a far more neutral term, he might have just said so.

I do want to give reviewers’ claim of “(artists) turning to coded language or deliberate obscuring,” some closer inspection, though. Code has always been part of visual language, as anyone having taken Art History 101 or graduate seminars on Renaissance Painters, the old Dutch Masters or Expressionist Woodcuts – you name it – can tell you. What is obscuring code for one, however, is a potent signifier for another: it all depends on knowing the language immanent to the “code.”

And this is where the power of the exhibition kicks in: demonstrating the brutal division between those of us who are clueless about what many of the artworks imply, and those who get it the blink of an eye, being familiar with the expressed contents via the reality of one’s daily existence. We might share the same space, in world and museum alike, but we surely do not share a language or the experiences eventually captured by that language when it relates to race, gender, disability, and access.

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These attributes are not randomly chosen: Rujecko Hockley, who brilliantly co-curated the exhibit with Jane Panetta, described them in her catalogue essay as those, when made central, were the most relevant works found across the country. What the curators, in turn, made central in this first exhibit organized completely during the Trump-era, are women of Afro-Diasporic heritage, the majority of artists on display. They include Alexandra Bell, Janiva Ellis, Steffani Jemison, Tomashi Jackson, Autumn Knight, Simone Leigh, Jenn Nkiru, Las Nietas de Nonó, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Wangechi Mutu, Jennifer Packer and Martine Syms, among others. Smaller numbers of African-American and Hispanic men are also included, as are artists from the LGTBQ community or those living with disabilities, and the occasional white person, who convinced with equally intense and allusive works (Nicole Eisenman stands out in this regard, with a gargantuan, ebullient, scatological installation that I will try to decipher at another time.)

The exhibit is dominated, then, by work from artists whose daily experience is incomparable to that of us average well-to-do white folks visiting this show. The work alludes to the aggressive assaults on minority existence, both by individuals and state-sponsored power, in no uncertain terms. Nowhere could I detect “a retreat from clarity (… one of the hallmarks of the show,”) or “an emphasis on interior life rather than performing for an audience,” as stated by previous reviews.

Quite the opposite: all falls into place once you read the work in the context of its connection to or reflection of each respective community. Public exposition of dissent, not interior life, marks what is on display, once you put the work in the context of current expressions of resistance by groups of people who up until now did not show up in the halls of the elite art institutions, or only as token individuals.

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Let me make my point clear by juxtaposing some of the art I either particularly liked or found representative of racial discrimination in the show, with communal artistic expressions that I photographed during the 48 hours before and after visiting the Biennial, on the streets of Harlem and Bushwick, the East Village and Williamsburg, respectively, during my short visit to NYC. The call and response between art in the museum and community context outside of it will hopefully convey what I’m after.

Here is a Biennial sculpture by Simone Leigh, who has had a meteoric rise as an artist across the last years, with her sculptures and installations exhibited and collected by major institutions, including a major commission for the Highline. Leigh exposes and reframes assumptions about Black female experience, undermining the stereotypes at the same time as she describes them. (She also integrates her artistic practice with real-life engagement, having opened self-care centers targeted at minorities to counteract the health threats faced by women of color.)

The ceramic sculpture has the proportions and solidity of a tank which stands in tension with the transience of alluded housing materials reminiscent of the makeshift shantytowns of poor African or Caribbean countries, corrugated metal and thatched roofs. The face, as is often the case in Leigh’s work, lacks eyes. Another woman who perhaps does not want to see the world, which, to begin with, does not see her or gazes at her with racist or male contempt. The power emanating from the squatness of the Gestalt comes across as a summons to those of its likeness: strength exists, and it exist in you. The refusal to look hints at the possibility of choice: it is up to you to not grant eye contact to a world that has forever kept you from power and choices. The reference to poverty warns of the obstacles in the way.

The real-world counterpart, the daily experience of young women of color, is spelled out in a public display at W 125th St and Malcom X Boulevard. The power to choose, in this case softness, is impeded by various oppressive factors in the social realm, poverty included. Each female portrait has text on the reverse side, listing the impediments to a freely elected state of being. Inside and outside the museum, then, we are called on to acknowledge the obstacles for women of color that are not usually shared by their white counterparts. This is not about interior life, but about external constraints, and non-random constraints at that. Scientific studies by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality support this point. Read them and weep – maybe your eyes will be washed away, too.

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Then there is Tomashi Jackson’s work which focusses on NYC’s ways of taking away housing and buildings from African-American and Hispanic property owners in manners possibly illegal and assuredly immoral, throughout the history of the city – as early as 1853 when Seneca Village was dislodged to make room for Central Park to 2019 when whole suites of buildings were snatched to make way for gentrification in Brooklyn.

A detailed description of the artist’s approach and artistic decisions can be found here. Jackson encountered an investigative series in Kings County Politics describing the contemporary scandals around property theft and linked them to similar events more than 150 years ago. We are not talking about redlining, or similarly Jim Crow-inspired tactics, but actual confiscation of property through trickery.

The work is collage-like, merging time periods and representative faces into each other seamlessly, with gradations of color-induced abstraction to concrete representational photographs, buttons or other three- dimensional objects. In form it reminded me of the street collages you find in so many of New York’s doorways, layers upon layers of images and text merging into meaning; in content it is reminiscent of murals that depict ethnic connections to certain neighborhoods. Echoes of the core issue, housing scarcity and discrimination in exclusionary societies, can be found whenever you open a newspaper – if the topic still seems obscure, read this!

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The link to artistic preoccupations out in the community is perhaps best exemplified by a painter who started out as a graffiti artist, Pat Phillips. Born in England in 1987, he grew up in Louisiana with a father who was a corrections officer. His work focusses, often with a wickedly satirical bent, on Black experience through the lens of the history of racism and violence tied to or emerging from cultural divisions. His contributions to the Biennial consists of three works, one rather large, that connect the dots between slavery, imprisonment and the resurgence of symbols that originated with the Revolutionary War: the Gadsden flag. As symbols go, this one has seen many interpretations, but is generally embraced by Tea Party members, Second Amendment defenders—and even Libertarians who are perpetually worried about government overreach.

Phillips’ large painting, Untitled (Don’t Tread on Me) depicts someone’s hands nailing a snake skin with the first words of the flag slogan, with part of a weapon and a holster visible and a tear gas canister lettered Riot Control all stashed away behind a fence.

It hangs opposite to a painting called The Farm (the nickname for one of Louisiana’s most notorious prisons, the State Penitentiary named Angola) that contains references to agricultural slave labor seamlessly morphing into contemporary prison labor, field-bound as well. The third painting in the group, Mandingo (DON’T TREAD ON ME), combines the snake, prison uniforms, and a headless body trying to cut off the head of the snake, in the saturated yellows and blacks that we also find so often in large graffiti.

The paintings perfectly embody current developments resulting from anti-immigrant policies and a resurgence in racist practices: “Under lucrative arrangements, states are increasingly leasing prisoners to private corporations to harvest food for American consumers.” If you find this message obscure, may I suggest you crawl out from under your rock. Or better still, stay there and read Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope by former Angola inmate Albert Woodfox.

Opportunistic violence is part of both worlds, within the incarceration culture, and outside of it, both in the world of rightwing zealots and that of gangs or rivals in environments that foster toxic masculinity.

My community match was found in Bushwick, depicting hands, prominent in Phillips’ art, holding on to some type of tool or weapon,

and a large mural of Biggie (the notorious B.I.G.,) a.k.a Christopher Wallace, a pathbreaking Brooklyn rapper, who had seen prison multiple times from the inside, was heavily involved in the growing East Coast–West Coast hip hop feud, and was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1997.

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Current events, like the suffering and death brought upon Puerto Rico by 2017 hurricane Maria are evoked by Daniel Lind-Ramos‘, Maria-Maria (2019). A stylized Virgin Mary, clad in the traditional blue veil made from disaster relief tarps, coconuts, tubing and other materials, might be a spiritual beacon but seems, bent in grief, no good for practical relief. The lack of government intervention on any reasonable scale left humanitarian assistance to non-profits like Mercy Corps, who list the harrowing consequences of the hurricane now, 2 years later, here.

Puerto Rico, and echoes of spiritual longings, are remembered in the streets as well. Take this mural by the Italian duo Rosk&Loste which depicts a Hispanic young child surrounded by a halo filled with tropical ferns, holding what is perhaps a crisp but might as well be a communion wafer. The false promises of the Ray-Ban advertisement (more Magdalena than Mary) above it only enhances the sense of innocence and fragility of the young one.

If we open our eyes in the communities around us, we’ll be able to gather all necessary vocabulary to take back to the museum.

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Guggenheim fellow and National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi has a new book out – How to be an Anti-Racist – that invites contemplation of what anyone can do to move forward beyond discrimination and hate. The son of Kendi’s formidable literary agent, Ayesha Pande, told her and me over dinner how he and his classmates on their way up-town in the subway would always stand in front of a seated white person, knowing with certitude that the last ones would get up and leave by 96th street, freeing a seat for the rest of the ride into West Harlem. But a decade and a half ago, the worlds were strictly divided, known to a child. That might be different today with ever creeping gentrification, but little has changed in principle. Exhibits like the 2019 Whitney Biennial bring home the fact that race and class perpetuate separated space, with sets of knowledge confined to each community, and shared language still a missing link. We have to believe that it can be changed. Reading Kendi might be a first step. Learning to decode in front of marvelous, gut wrenching art might be another small move in that direction.

The Whitney Museum of American Art. 99 Gansevoort St. New York, NY 10014. The exhibit closes September 22nd, 2019.

Wouldn’t you know it. One of the kindest, least vain and most talented of my photographer friends is having a show opening at a time when I am not in Portland. I figured, absent my attendance which would allow me to write about his work, I’ll just introduce it here early, so at least some other people can show up and tell me about it later. All photographs today are from his series Mood Lighting – breaking my own rule to show only what I have photographed since I can!

I met Philip Bowser some years ago when I was a complete newcomer to the PDX photo scene. He warmly invited me in, despite the fact that I was doing work then radically different from the photography of most other people who met under his tutelage in various photo critique groups.

I was drawn to his work, and in fact bought or bartered for some of it, because it has the same quality as the man who produced it: the substance is not on a showy surface, but lies underneath, to be found at second and third look. The imagery is taken from quotidian observation, the corners of life you and I pass every day as well; he sees the beauty in snippets of it, where we rush along, practically blind.

There is a quietude and often inklings of happiness in the photographs that matches the man as well. Nothing showy, but nothing missed either by this sharp eye.

The photographs for the show feature qualities of light that set a mood or induce feelings, which minimizes the importance of the object illuminated. The series was recently seen in the Portland Photographers Forum Community Drawer in the Park blocks, and portions of the series have been on display at the ASmith gallery in Johnson City, Texas, the Black Box gallery in Portland, and the Lakewood Arts Festival in Lake Oswego.

An opening reception at Cafe Eleven will be held from 1~3pm on 9/7/2019 at the cafe on 435 NE Rosa Parks Way, Portland, OR 97211. (It’s about a block East of the intersection of Rosa Parks and 99E.) The work will be up during the month of September, 2019. So at least I’ll get a chance to catch it when I am back!

Phil is also trying to finish an augmented reality project that will make additional background info about each image appear in a floating banner. If not ready for the reception, it will occur later in the month.

Give it all a look!

And here is the music best mirroring the flow of light in these images:

“Truth-telling is often very unpleasant when it contradicts the opinion of the majority. Telling the truth can easily lead to a minority position and exposes the truth-teller to the pressure of the majority. To resist this pressure demands courage. Therefore, courage is not only the virtue of political action par excellence, but also quite evidently the virtue of truth-telling. To tell an inconvenient truth is not only a statement, but also an action.”

From: When Telling the Truth demands Courage Volume 1 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. (2018)

Courage was visible all around me during my recent visit to the Columbia Gorge Veterans Museum in The Dalles, OR, right next to American Legion Post 19. It was documented in displays about those who have served our country, both on active duty and back home supporting the soldiers during the many wars in recent history, displays that recalled stories of loyalty and sacrifice.

There was the courage of museum director Lisa Commander, recently and unexpectedly widowed, to establish and run a small museum (it opened but two years ago) in times as economically precarious as these.

The idea for the museum had been under discussion with Jean Maxwell from the Advisory Board of the non-profit Mid-Columbia Veteran Memorial Committee and folks from Legion Post 19 who had space. It took form when Commander, who holds an MA in International Policy Studies from the Monterey Institute for International Studies (now part of Middlebury,) inherited a large collection of military memorabilia from her uncle Tony Commander, a highly decorated Air Force veteran. During 2 tours in Vietnam he sustained multiple cancers as a pilot flying directly behind the Agent Orange dispense units.

There was the courage of a community committed to making this work; they included Oliver’s Floor Covering, which donated new flooring; The Dalles/Wasco County Library, which provided bookshelves; J.C. Penney’s provision of several mannequins, now dressed in military uniforms; Stratton Insurance with several file cabinets; and Northern Wasco County Public Utility District for $15,000 to pay for renovations such as sheet rock, lighting, new air conditioning, and construction of a conference room.

*

And then there was the courage of the truth-teller. I met artist, papermaker and printmaker Drew Cameron in my perpetual quest to interview all the artists involved in the Exquisite Gorge project by Maryhill Museum, literally three days before the scheduled printing day of 10 wood blocks that depict assorted sections of the Columbia River Gorge.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

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Drew Cameron was born on a military base in New Hampshire into a military family. He enlisted at age 18, fresh out of High School, where recruiters had found easy pickings, given that many of the kids were familiar enough with military culture that they did not find it alien or scary. He was on active duty during 9/11, preparing for Field Artillery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Fort Sill was established as an observation camp in Indian Territory and later served as an internment camp for the Native American nations displaced from their land. It is now an elite training facility.

New Hampshire’s motto of “Live free or Die” was engraved on a Zippo Lighter given to him by his brother when he was deployed to Iraq, for years his most cherished possession. When he left the service after the war, as did the majority of soldiers with only a few seeking longterm careers in the military, he earned degrees in forestry and ecology at the University of Vermont. His interests turned to paper making, and he co-founded Combat Paper, a collaborative project by veterans where paper is hand made from donated old military uniforms. His prints, portfolios and books are housed in over 40 public collections, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. He travels around the country for workshops and special projects. His most recent exhibition was in Chicago in the context of the National Veterans Art Museum’s Triennial this summer.

*

The name of that exhibit was Conflict Exchange (CX). It was intended to facilitate exchange and interaction between (former) soldiers and civilians to help understand the unresolved issues of post-conflict eras. Cameron had a platform designed like a small store, where he made paper on site and sold the hand-made books to raise funds going towards the restoration of the destroyed College of Fine Arts Library at the post-conflict University of Baghdad.

Communicating with the public about the implications of war is of utmost importance to Cameron. In direct conversation or through his art, the focus is on meaning and the use of symbolism to shape meaning in ways that often obscure the underlying factual truth. So much of veteran art has been interpreted as acts of healing, of working through trauma, of offering a subjective truth. This completely ignores, according to the artist, that these traumas are also a political phenomenon, often aggravated by the fact that service(wo)men feel that their war engagement is not justified, but unalterable given their devotion to being a professional soldier. Anti-war activism in all its form is only possible once you have left the military.

Iraq, for example was popularly referred to in the Army as “the Wild West,” with a tacit understanding that that did not only imply the violent ways of interaction associated with the original Wild West, but also the causes for the engagement, then and now: killing people for land or the resources buried in that land. The artist wants to bear witness and have us, too, look at the reality of war rather than look away. Paper made from uniforms reminds of the dual role experienced by our soldiers clad in those now recycled fatigues: victim and perpetrator, the ones who are maimed or maim others. Paper is fragile, just like the physical and psychological health of so many veterans, just like those uncountable lives lost in wars, on all sides.

*

The woodblock (Section 9, covering roughly the area from Roosevelt/Arlington to Hat Rock) that I saw emerge under Cameron’s carving knife bears witness indeed. It hints at what we find once we remove the flag, represented by stars on lifted folds: the physical bodies of those buried underneath. The river is symbolically reflecting parts of humanity – namely hands belonging to members of The Dalles’ community of veterans. The design reminds us of the physical existence of bodies that war threatens. The board is thus at once local, referencing the sacrifice made by so many in these areas, and also universal, asking us to look under the surface for the implications of what humans are doing to each other. Representing the river through human features also points to the urgent notion that we are part of it – tending to it means protecting ourselves.

Cameron quoted Howard Zinn’s famous dictum about the flag: “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”  It’s from Zinn’s 1986 essay, “Terrorism Over Tripoli,” and is even more powerful when you look up the whole thing:[Those] who defend this, tried to wrap their moral nakedness in the American flag.  But it dishonors the flag to wave it proudly over the killing of a college student, or a child sleeping in a crib. There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable.” Honor and dishonor, use and abuse can all be linked to the flag. Veterans who have become anti-war activists know this better than the rest of us, but that does not excuse the rest of us from not trying to understand the issues.

*

“Who says what is…always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning.” This was written by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Truth and Politics” from her Denktagebuch (Diary of Thoughts) 1950–1973.

The Columbia Gorge Veterans Museum is telling a story of what is and was: a story of service. Over 10 000 veterans live in the combined counties of Wasco, Sherman, Hood River and, across the Columbia River, in Clickitat and Skamania. They are over-proportionally decorated for their courage. Whether they desired to enlist or did for lack of better options, there is meaning to what they did. Whether we agree with the decision to go to war or not, their suffering deserves our unequivocal support.

Cameron’s work as an artist, wood block carving, paper making and all, tells a story. There is courage in the fact that the story deviates from the institutionalized narratives around war, soldiering and glory. His narrative provides meaning centered on the economically and politically driven causes of war, the reach of war’s consequences beyond the veterans themselves, into their families and networks, and across time, with decades needed to recover from destruction both on a personal and a public level.

My children have several cousins who were on active duty in the US Army until 2 years ago. I am the grand-daughter of a man who fought in WW I, the daughter and daughter-in-law of men who fought in WW II (on opposite sides, no less). The story of war was smothered in alcohol and silence by one, and remembered in eagerly anticipated reunions of his US Navy-crew by the other. War is formative. War is futile. War is horror. These diverse narratives provide insight to those of us who live once-removed from the experience.

During our conversation I was repeatedly thinking of a book by Berthold Brecht, Die Kriegs Fibel (War ABC) published in 1955, in which he juxtaposed photographs from the fascist reign with short poems while in exile in Denmark. Hans Eissler later set it to music – here is a link that has an English translation of the German songs and the photographs. One enhanced the other in ways that are hard to describe. I found this also to be true for watching the visual carving patterns emerge while listening to the thoughts behind it.

*

I should have known. It happened again. Every time I left after visiting an artist – 10 times in all – I thought: “It can’t get more interesting than that.” Wrong, every time. I am not talking about the quality of the carvings, being uniquely unqualified to judge those. I am not talking about the beauty of the boards – I found them all appealing and creative in their own ways.

I am talking about the window into the thought processes of these diverse printmakers, the way their art is shaped by their beliefs, their experiences, their hopes, their fears. They all share a deep commitment to protecting our world from destruction and exploitation, being stewards to the land however removed and however tangential the approach. Some are lyrical, some are didactic. Some spread happy optimism or excited curiosity, others stand by their worries, bordering on despair. All of their stories convey what IS – and thus create humanly comprehensible meanings.

And print day will get even MORE interesting that that!

*

I left The Dalles in pouring rain, dark skies, barely able to see the road even with the windshield wipers on high. Jefferson Starship’s If only you believed in miracles blared on Spotify. Maybe the art, I thought, once consolidated into one long print representing our beloved, endangered river, will produce a miracle: a successful call to action heard and followed by us all.

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively. – Wikipedia

Maps, you know, those paper things that half of us can read and half of us cannot: they pointed the way to our destinations before the arrival of talking machines that tell us how to proceed – and then reroute. Maps that were, in theory, supposed to adhere to “the empiricist paradigm of cartography”—that cartography’s only ethic is to be accurate, precise, and complete. Of course that’s not what many maps are about – instead they often serve as a tool for persuading us to accept a particular view of the world, and not just geographically.

Why am I thinking of maps? I met two artists last week hard at work finishing their woodblock carving for the Exquisite Gorge project at Maryhill Museum, printing day on August 24th now rapidly approaching. Their art made ingenious use of a topological map of sections of the Columbia River Gorge in ways that tell an important story.

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

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Matthew Johnston, Associate Professor of Art History and Department Chair, and his colleague Tammy Jo Wilson,Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager at Lewis&Clark College, worked together with a group of students to tackle the challenge of representing Section 2 (River Mile 110 to McGowans Light, roughly from Troutdale to The Bridge of the Gods.) Unfortunately none of the students – most of them art and art history majors in their senior year – were able to make it on the day that I visited. Many of them have to work during the summer months – probably a drop in the bucket for the $64,186 annual cost (or thereabouts) of the 4 year-education at the school. How we burden these young people, our future.

Wilson earned a BA in photography from PNCA and a MFA in studio art from San Jose State University. Her artistic practice covers a wide variety of mediums, including encaustic painting, ink drawing, photography and textiles. She also co-founded a non-profit organization ArtinOregon, working to build bridges between artists and communities. If you hurry, you can explore her work for yourself – she is part of a thought-provoking two-person exhibit, Biological Dissonance, that is on view at the Chehalem Cultural Center until August 30th. Worth the trip to Newberg!

Johnston received his BA in printmaking from Yale University and his PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. His focus is on modern visual culture, in particular nineteenth century popular media such as photography and print. He explores how certain kinds of print publications “used landscape images to motivate the expansion and development of the United States. In an era before film, such publications relied on inventive, sometimes pre-cinematic orchestrations of viewing and reading practices in order to make their ideological intentions more convincing and compelling.”

His book Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century describes how those who viewed landscape portraits accompanied by text narratives could be influenced to buy into certain ideas of “history, consumption and identity.” Said differently, citizens within a landscape undergoing massive cultural and economic change were subjected to manipulation of their perspectives. Travel guides, tourist literature, and federal expedition reports all played a role in this enterprise – as do, in general, maps, to get us back to where I started.

*

Cornell University has a wonderful introduction and collection of maps all sharing the purpose of persuasion. The topics range from religion, imperial geopolitics (think colonialism), slavery, British international politics, social and protest movements to, of course, war. The goal was made explicit in the 1920s (and later taken on in force by the Nazis) when in reaction to the shameful defeat in WW I German cartographers decided to go for the “Suggestive Map,” cartographic propaganda which they thought had given the British a strategic advantage.

“The goal of suggestive mapping was to achieve political objectives (while avoiding lies, which could be easily exposed) by appealing to emotions and rigorously excluding anything that didn’t support the desired message. Its maps were intended specifically to engage support from the general population, and they were often “shamelessly explicit. The movement produced “striking” results: by the early 1930s “there was a ‘virtual flood’ of suggestive maps in Germany; entire atlases were devoted to them, and they appeared in “every public lecture, every newspaper, and in countless books.”

Just like Johnston’s description of the landscape portraits, maps express particular viewpoints in support of specific interests. They can shape our view of the world and our place in it by selectively presenting information.

*

This modern insight led to the battle cry of The Map is NOT the Territory, which many readers might remember as the title of one of Portland Art Museum’s recent (terrific) exhibitions of regional artists giving their perspective on the place we live in.

The title was reportedly suggested by participating artist Mary Ann Peters, who had a gouache/ink drawing on black clayboard –slipstream (by the light of the moon– in the show. (I remember it vividly, it had a mesmerizing quality, inviting thoughts about watery surfaces. Peters’ projective plane seemed to contain the mirror images displayed in Rohrschach inkblot stimuli, but of course, on closer inspection, defied that expectation. Clever.)

The title was derived from Alfred Korzybski’s major publication: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1948.) He actually wrote, “The map is not the landscape, but if the map is similar to the structure of the landscape, it is useful“ which suggests a bit more than the general assumption that he referred only to the essential distinction between an object and its representation—or, more broadly, between our beliefs and the underlying reality. (You can read more about the exhibit, Korzybski and his link to Scientology as well as his thoroughly debunked General Semantics theory here.)

*

Johnston’s, Wilson’s and their students’ woodblock is carved with symbolic representations overlaid on a topographical map of The Gorge. It hones in on the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, delineating natural areas from those filled with man-made structures, depicted as burnt bark and steel train-trestles, respectively.

The wildfire, started by careless youngsters playing with fireworks, burned more than 48,000 acres in the Gorge and Mt. Hood National Forest. Hikers needed to be rescued, people lost homes and were evacuated. About 121 miles of national forest trails and the businesses of the area were affected during the three months duration of the fire and then some. Some trails, endangered by landslides, opened only years later. The artists’ “map” invites us to re-examine regional issues, and think through the history of the land. Cartographic suggestion, in other words, to contemplate the precariousness of the local ecosystem at the interface between urban areas and the wilderness.

Much research went into the planning of the design. The group hiked in the areas affected by the fire. They went to Corbett and interviewed people displaced by the fire and learned much about community building and neighborly help. This was particularly true for newcomers who buy property and build in areas previously unscathed by the expanding city lines and their support by those who were longtime residents and more familiar with protective practice against forest fires. People worked together to cut down brush too close to the houses, moved life stock and coordinated responses.

USGS geologist Steven Sobieszczyk was invited to give a lecture in the classroom and encouraged discussion with the student participants, which included Frankie Beilharz (responsible for a major part of the project, creating the photoshop documents for projection and transfer) and Shannon Drew, Anna Kahler, Iris Reidel, and Aiden Turlington. Photographs of burnt timber and bark formations were processed and used as models for the print design.

The visual appearance of the block is relatively abstract, regardless of its representational base. Just like fire destroys form, form in this depiction is reduced to patterned fields. I found this a clever echoing of the core of the narrative about wildfires. It is an invitation to rethink our usual categorizations. The perspectives of catastrophe, on the one hand, and renewal, on the other, are no longer quite delineated. Neither are the contours on the board. Just like “suggestive” maps can be tools of propaganda, they can be tools of contemplation, too, in this artistic form: a catalyst for reevaluating our approach to forest management and urban expansion.

*

Sarah Finger graduated from Whitman College in 2017 majoring in Geology. She also took many classes in the art department before her graduation, classes which exited her more than anything else. Like any true artist, she followed her calling and now has her own small print studio with a press and a drying rack (sacrificing half of her bedroom) and a day job at a brewery until she can earn a living with her art.

She was beyond thrilled when Nicole Pietrantoni called her this spring to rope her in for the Exquisite Gorge project, covering Section 10 (roughly Hat Rock to Snake River Confluence.) Pietrantoni, who received her MFA and MA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, is an Associate Professor in the Art Department with an artistic focus on the relationship between humans and nature. By all reports the students think she walks on water – I am eagerly anticipating meeting her at Print Day at Maryhill Museum. As someone with prior experience (she directed the Dia De Los Muertos Steamroller Print Project in Walla Walla, WA in previous years,) she will be hands on with the printing.

Finger told me that her former professor remembered her focus on geology and the two of them brainstormed about the design for the wood block. They talked about the dams and about the impact on tribal nations. It was only during a road trip along The Gorge on her way to pick up the board that she found herself pointing out to her boyfriend all the particulars in the geology of the region.

The ideas for the wood block were born: depict the cataclysmic force of the Missoula floods which periodically rushed across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge during the Pleistocene. Depict the giant granitic boulders carved by the water and the gravel bars that somehow ended up high on the bluffs, driven by the force of the flood. Unimaginably, the water burst through the base of the dam at a rate of ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.

Depict unique rock formations, like Hat Rock near Umatilla, Oregon. The basaltic feature is the result of the Missoula Floods stripping away the outer surface of material, leaving behind the 70-foot-high monolith. Or the Twin Sisters, a distinctive basalt feature within the Wallula Gap, a part of the massive outpouring of Columbia River basalt lavas which were eroded by the Missoula floods. Add to that small text boxes (hard to carve, true devotion!) and you have miniature maps and tables like in a college textbook.

During our phone conversation – I did not have it in me to treck up to Bellingham, WA in this last week before the end of the project, I admit – Finger emphasized how much she enjoyed a project that provided the opportunity to combine her two passions, art and geology, each informing the other. She told of a fantasy that allowed her to time travel and observe the Missoula floods from the perspective of a bird. I, on the other hand, fantasize about being able to get into the brains of all these amazingly creative people I’ve met during these months of interviews and map how their neuronal networks are firing – maybe some of it will rub off….

*

I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.

This is the last stanza in the last poem written by Wisława Szymborska before she died, titled Map (the whole poem, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh, can be found here.)

I would rephrase the sentiment, when thinking about the art I saw last week.

I like maps, because they offer an alternative. Because they give us access to a truth that’s our’s to create – to heal this planet and protect it. Because they spread a vision of a world that can be our children’s world.

Maryhill Museum’s planned print day of its Exquisite Gorge project is approaching fast. Hopefully there is a chance to portray each and every one of the participating artists and their work before August 24th. Let me introduce today another one of the print makers who I had a chance to talk to in the last several days.

——————————————————————————————————————

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

______________________________________________________________________________

Imagine being told since the time you sat on your father’s knees that you are a descendant of Lewis & Clark. Lewis AND Clark! Being regaled with lively tales of hardship and adventure, what is a little girl to do but fall in love with the outdoors and embrace most forms of risk-seeking ventures – it is practically written into your DNA. Well, perhaps not practically but theoretically. Who knows about the factual truth of the family lore?

It would not matter, in any case, in my opinion. Aren’t many of us guided by narratives that make perfect sense of our lives and motivate us, regardless of being based on facts? Who needs 23andMe – there is power in (potential) myth!

(There are, of course, also facts in the history books – Lewis never married and had no children, and died as a suicidal alcoholic despite having been awarded the governorship of the Louisiana Territory after the successful mission of surveying it from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Not exactly great-great-grandpa material. Maybe he had siblings?)

The person I am referring to is Molly Gaston Johnson, an accomplished artist and educator who has at least two things in common with Lewis & Clark for sure: she, too, traveled here from the East coast to see new vistas and she never shied away from challenges that life threw her way. She had never been to the West coast before and was eager to explore yet another natural and artistic environment within a short window of time before she had to return to send off her firstborn to college.

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The woman, based in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, is a fascinating study in contrasts. I met her in the courtyard of Hood River Valley High School on a day where blustery winds twirled dust all around us, momentarily cooling an intense sun. Sitting in limber posture on her wood block, the ease with which she bent her spine was the antithesis to her steely concentration on the carving. Unassuming, warm, seemingly lacking in any vanity, she did not reveal spontaneously that she has a rather stellar set of accomplishments. I had to pry, the not so subtle art of interviewing.

Educated at James Madison University under the tutelage of renowned artist Jack McCaslin she received a full fellowship to study and earn her MFA in printmaking at Ohio State University. Here is a condensed bio that shows her impact on art and education ever since:

“She has worked in museum education at Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, taught printmaking to graduate students at Virginia Tech’s school of architecture, worked at the National Endowment for the Arts managing federal partnerships focusing on youth and prevention issues, and currently teaches art history, treks all around New Jersey as a teaching artist, and is developing an Art and Literacy initiative in a partnership between the Newark Museum and the Newark Public School system. She has received many awards including recognition with a New Jersey Governor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Artist in 2012.”

Much of Gaston Johnson’s work has been concerned with helping other professionals, at institutions as well as in educational settings, to embrace art and art making as a teaching tool, even in domaines that are not necessarily thought to be related to art. From plugging artists into prison education, to persuading traditional STEM classrooms that art can help to communicate concepts, she has focussed on education as well as the professional development of others. Details about the YoungAudiences program that makes use of her talents can be found here.

Her own printmaking studio, Social Animal Press, in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, where she practices woodcut, lino-cut, silkscreen and intaglio forms of printmaking, is just one part of these diverse endeavors, some more unusual than others. After Hurricane Sandy, the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, for example, she received an individual artist grant by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Arts Horizons for an art project placing handmade tables throughout the devastated city of Ashbury Park for providing spaces to talk and grieve together. 

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There is a stillness in and around the artist when she is at work that stands in stark contrast to the whirlwind mobility required in her professional life, raising two daughters while trying to make a living as an artist. A semblance of this contrast can be found in the design of her wood block which depicts swirls of wind, a fluidity across scalloped rather than straight edges, compared to the solidity of the region’s mountains, the rigidity of some lines of speech incorporated throughout and, of course, the unperturbed flow of the Columbia river.

There is a subtle sense of humor hidden within various symbols which are also exploring contrast. The viewer is invited to discover, as one example, the dipper bird who can fly, but dips for food under water, placed above the constellation of the Big Dipper. My kind of stuff, in other words, as anyone who has ever seen my montages will remember, some more appreciative of this streak than others…

*

Gaston Johnson’s section 3 of the Columbia river includes the Bridge of the Gods. Here, too, we find a juxtaposition, one of formation and dissolution. In geological terms, it was a landmass created by a landslide in between 1100 and 1250 AD, functioning as a massive dam that connected what is now Oregon and Washington. During the last Great Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake in the 1690s – folks we are due for another one, don’t postpone dealing with that earthquake kit which has been on your list for ages! – the bridge collapsed, creating the Cascadia rapids that we see today.

The Native American narrative around the Bridge of the Gods has a more poetic explanation, involving love triangles among the region’s mountains, feuding competitors, doomed brides, a guard on the bridge who could not prevent disaster and the eventual downfall of it all. A detailed telling can be found here.

Nature forms, nature dissolves; art can document if the artist is sensitive to change and the power that comes with fluidity, even in the context of eons of geological rumblings. Gaston Johnson’s woodblock wonderfully reminds us of this heritage.

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The words included in the carving were selected from many insightful haikus offered by some 70 or so students at Hood River Valley High School, the community partner for this portion of the project. Guided by Carol Birdsell, Art, English and Humanities teacher, the students shared their perception of the area and what those environments mean for them personally.

Birdsell was at work as well on the Sunday I visited, trying to perform miracles in the few days left before school starts, to get the new classroom set up and emptied of chaos.

Wandering through the deserted building I was once again struck by how much individual contributions of teachers and staff affect successful education. There was much in the room and hallways that spoke to this point.

There were also the rules for traffic etiquette – I guess a lot of kids drive themselves in an area where they are widely dispersed.

Everywhere, though, there were signs that indicated how much this educational environment is trying to empower students. It also looked like art is taken seriously.

I have no knowledge about this particular school, but in general art and art history (as well as music) education are among the first subjects to get the axe when financial strain for an institution becomes overwhelming. Some teachers simply pick up the slack, others are too overworked or administratively hampered to do so. But the burden rests with them.

Even though the public generally agrees that art instruction is a necessary part of overall education, fewer and fewer students are exposed to the arts. An NEA report from almost a decade back confirms the shrinking numbers, and it has only gotten worse since. The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) already confirmed that those worst affected are – surprise – schools with higher percentages of minority students and those designated under NO Child Left Behind. Newer reports show this disparity as well.

This is true despite the fact that we have now scientifically controlled studies that confirm our intuitions, providing some hard data for the people holding the purse strings (for the full report go here):

“Through our partnership with the Houston Education Research Consortium, we obtained access to student-level demographics, attendance and disciplinary records, and test score achievement, as well as the ability to collect original survey data from all 42 schools on students’ school engagement and social and emotional-related outcomes.

We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others.”

The fundamental purpose of education goes beyond the basic areas of instruction. True education helps to create citizens who can think independently, critically, and place themselves in a historical context that defines what values we hold or should pursue. People like Gaston Johnson who work in dual roles of artist and educator know that all too well. I wish she didn’t live so far away and could bring her expertise to bear on our own rural or urban communities with underserved school districts and join those already at the frontlines here.

During a time where intolerance is on the rise and democratic values are clearly under attack worldwide, we should be particularly intent on providing the best possible education for all. Art is part of that endeavor. Let us not hesitate to support it.

Last week I met a guardian of both the past and the future.

A conversation with Greg Archuleta, artist, educator and now Cultural Policy Analyst for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde made his calling abundantly clear. On the one hand, as an artist and educator, he is focussed on preserving the traditions and knowledge of the past. On the other hand, he is also intensely engaged, both as an educator and a community activist, in protecting conditions needed to extend that past into the future.

We met at the Portland offices of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in the context of looking at his and his students’ work on a wood block carving for the Exquisite Gorge project put on by Maryhill Museum. He and several of his fellow carvers will be among all those who gather on August 24th at the museum for the public printing of the aligned 4×6 blocks by means of a steamroller, if the weather complies.

——————————————————————————————————————–

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

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Archuleta was born in Portland and grew up on unincorporated farmland near Gresham. He hails from the nations of Clackamas Chinook, Santiam Kalapuya, and Shasta, and is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (CTGR). After receiving his degree in journalism and political science from the University of Oregon he worked as a consultant in various positions for the CTGR and developed his artistic practices. An accomplished artist, he has had his work shown in various galleries and notable exhibits, including at the Portland Art Museum.

Much of his time and efforts as an educator went into developing the Lifeways program, an immersion program into the culture and history of the tribes of Western Oregon. This is also where fellow award-winning artist Greg A. Robinson (Chinook) teaches, who participates in the project as well; you might have admired his recent public works – a five foot diameter bronze medallion and two basalt carvings representative of the ancient traditions of the Chinookan people – which adorn both sides of Tilikum Crossing in Portland, Oregon.

The Lifeways program offers hands-on cultural learning covering many aspects of life essential to Native American culture; Archuleta teaches traditional skills and cultural knowledge, from ethnobotany, carving and cedar hat making to Native art design and basketry. A notable range, if you ask me.

Many of these topics appear in the design of the wood block that represents Section 1 of the Columbia River Gorge, at the confluence of the rivers so vital to this region. The plants that were essential staple for the tribal diet, the Camas and the Wapato tubers, found their way onto the board. The fish, salmon and lamprey eels, as well as clams can be spotted. Often you see a depiction of any of these coupled to a reverse appearance in space – a traditional representation of the real world and the spirit world.

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Plant identification, instructions about traditional use and food resourcing are an important part of the curriculum at Lifeways. Archuleta is a soft- spoken, reserved man, but becomes very animated when the conversation turns to the ways in which this knowledge is of utmost importance and essential to preserving tradition. Moreover, the foods in question are all imperiled in one way or another.

For one, there are the fish and the dams. Or is it the dams and no fish? The dams were erected during a time when economic pressures called for cheap electricity (among other to produce aluminum) and reliable water levels for commercial barges to navigate the river. Roosevelt’s signing of the Bonneville Project Act in 1937 gave the facility administrator (under the control of the United States Department of Energy) the authority to take any steps necessary to complete the dam and ensure its efficiency, “by purchase, lease, condemnation, or donation” (United States BPA, 32). The decisions regarding the disposal of personal property rested solely on the judgement of the dam’s administrator. This clause of the Act made the destruction of forty traditional Indian fishing sites as well as homes and towns possible. And the dams killed the fish, precursor to other ecological disasters.

The devastation to fish runs was lasting and eventually acknowledged; in the last decades the BPA has invested heavily in fish restoration, which has not yet worked enough for the wild life to be lifted out of the Endangered Species Act. For a more recent, detailed, terrific summary article go here.

Salmon are also negatively affected by the steady increase in temperature in the Pacific waters to which they return. In addition to global climate crisis, local issues with land use contribute to the disaster. Runoff from farms and poor forestry practices lead to diversion and disruption of stream flows, and increased sediment in streams where salmon spawn, reducing their odds of survival when they reach the ocean.

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Important plants are endangered as well. Traditional staples like the Camas lily (Camassia or Quamash) have been under siege from invasive weeds, and the bulbs may have stored toxic residue from pesticides used to combat reed canarygrass and meadow foxtail that engulf the fields. Archuleta works with METRO to apply traditional ecological knowledge to fight the invaders – actively seeking to guard the food supply for future generations.

Then there is Wapato, a sacred first food found in wetlands, swamps, marshes and along the rivers. It once grew in abundance in our region; if you find it now you might want to have it tested before you eat it: The USDA lists it as not palatable for human consumption because it absorbs metals and other pollutants in the water.

Long years of industrial activity have contaminated the lower Willamette River with PCBs, PAHs, dioxins/furans, pesticides, and metals. The affected ecosystems, so important to Native American nations, are in dire need of restoration. The most polluted stretch of the river was designated a Portland Harbor Superfund Site in the year 2000. Several tribes – the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe work with consultants, the EPA, the City of Portland and the DEQ on site cleanup – a process that has at times faced serious obstacles.

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Students were busily at work at the wood block, ranging in age from 19 to somewhere north of 70, from beginners to experienced craftspeople. The carving session was interrupted by frequent visits to the communal table laden with food. Everyone brought something, from self-caught wild Alaskan salmon to the first huckleberries of the season, from pizza to donuts, wild rice and grapes – a feast.

I envied the ease and visible friendship of members of a group dedicated to making art – as a group for whom the representations held shared meaning. Much laughter and teasing, helpful instructions about process, and even a rare, brilliant smile by Archuleta when newly arrived students entered the room and were greeted after a long absence. The sense of community was palpable; the devotion to the task at hand equally strong.

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In something of a comedy of errors and numerous mixed signals, I had gone a week earlier out to Grand Ronde thinking I would meet the artist there. It was a fortuitous mistake since that way I had time to visit Chachalu, the tribal museum and cultural center of the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde. Just like the Lifeways program, the museum is part of a cultural development project, trying to conveying the history, traditions and cultural knowledge of the past, and guiding next generations to their future. (I have written about the current exhibition here.)

The museum does – and does well – what is so direly necessary: change the dominant narrative about Native Americans and their history, a narrative that is often derisive or objectifying (think mascots!) and built on stereotypes and half-truths about the 5 million Native Americans across more than 600 sovereign Native nations among us.

In the voice of Suzan Shown Harjo, (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee,) a long-time policy advocate: “Narrative change is necessary today! Without it, we remain erased, invisible, out of sight, mind and heart. With it, we gain visibility, contemporary understanding, greater voice and respect.

The museum houses exhibits, archival material for research, rooms for conferences and workshops. Here we can learn about the strength of tribal history, the values central to the way of life – the attachment to place and tradition – and the resilience of a culture that has seen more than 500 violations of treaties through the ages, by federal and state governments, corporations and individuals. We can witness the revitalization of a nation after the loss of land, forced relocation, and assault on their language and ongoing destruction of their sacred places.

And speaking of a new narrative and museums: A new exhibit – This IS Kalapuyan Land –  opens on Thursday, August 15, 2019 at the Washington County Museum. Guest-curated by Stephanie Littlebird Fogel (Kalapuyan, Grand Ronde), it is meant to point to the differences between Native and non-Native versions of history. From the press release: The exhibit questions what information is presented as “fact” and how the museum context shapes what the audience learns. “Ultimately, I want to challenge the way we recall our shared histories,” states Littlebird Fogel, “and examine how biased narratives can be perpetuated through archeology and academic institutions like museums and universities.” Among the contemporary artists who will be displaying are:

Carol Haskins (Grand Ronde)
Don Bailey (Hupa)
Nestucca (Grand Ronde)
Nicole Haskins (Grand Ronde)
Jason Cawood (Klamath)
Derrick Lawvor (Klamath)
Angelica Trimble-Yanu (Oglala Lakota Sioux) , Phillip Thomas (Chickasaw), DeAnna Bear (Eastern Band Lenape)
Jana Schmieding (Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux), Whitney A. Lewis (Chehalis), Tincer Mitchell (Navajo)
Lindsea Wery (Chippewa)
Joni Millard (Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Crow) Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe)

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The art which emerged in front of my eyes during the carving session contains all the elements needed to gain a better understanding of Native American culture. The focus on place is shared with many of the other representations of the various sections of the Columbia River Gorge in the Exquisite Gorge project. The symbols of sacred foods and representations of origin stories provide an exclusive narrative of strength and adaptation. It echoed something that Archuleto had impressed on me repeatedly during our conversation: “My people are not stagnant. They always knew to adapt and incorporate objects and practices that allowed them to survive.”

I left that evening thinking that I hope the rest of us, those who are non-Native Americans, can adapt too: let go of our stereotypes, don’t undermine binding agreements, protect sacred sites, become allies.

Art might help pave the way.