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Art on the Road: Come for the Murals. Stay for the Mothers.

I BET THE BANK that not a lot of L.A. tourists make it out to Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley, one of the 88 cities comprising L.A. County. Which is too bad, given that there is much to learn and admire when looking at the history of the area. It is also a place where you can explore over 30 murals along a stretch of a busy through-fare, Van Nuys Blvd., the Mural Mile created by local artists who care about their community and acknowledge its history. The works shine like beacons along a neighborhood dominated by auto-repair or appliance repair shops, pawn brokers and payday-loan companies, small bars, pet groomers, florists, laundromats and churches, garages and places to send money back home to the loved ones you left behind in Mexico or El Salvador.

The area has been settled for more than 1500 years, early on by the Tatavians, a tribe with a strong sense of community and gender equality, from what the historians tell us. Disaster arrived in the form of Spanish colonialist destroying much of tribal land and culture.

Painted by the HOOD Sisters (Honoring Ourselves Origins Dreams)

By the late 1880, speculative investors descended in anticipation of the Southern Pacific railroad and a likely real estate boom. They hoped to lure wealthy settlers, but the area was prone to horrific floods and so ended up as an agricultural community, with many Mexicans and later Japanese immigrants doing the hard work. After Wold War II, with jobs provided by Lockheed and General Motors, a lot of Blacks were attracted to move to Pacoima, with a housing tract named after boxer Joe Louis, establishing a large middle-class community.

Today the population of around 90.000 people is about 87% Latino, 4% Asian and 3% Black. Poverty rates are high, crime rates higher than in almost any other community in the San Fernando Valley, and higher education levels way below average compared to the rest of L.A. County. There are reports that nearly 20% of the people in Pacoima live in rented rooms or converted garages. The hidden density extends to single-family houses that are often home to several families, trying to ease the burden of insane mortgage rates. (Ref.)

Homelessness here, as across L.A. County, has increased by over 70% across the last 6 years, with many families living in campers, cars, or tents. Makeshift memorials for victims of violence or the hardship of life on the street are ubiquitous.

The problem that compounds it all is the fact that Pacoima is by far one of the most pollution-exposed neighborhoods in all of California. It has one of the highest rates of air pollution and soil contamination due to the clumps of industrial facilities, garbage dumps, land fills, the small commercial Whiteman airport, Sun Valley Power Plant, a railroad line and the surrounding 3 freeways that enclose the city, I 5, 118 and 210. Diesel trucks emit diesel fumes into heavily residential areas, and weather patterns push and hold air pollution in Pacoima against the San Gabriel and Verdugo Mountains. The geography of the region, a valley, causes air-toxic chemicals, like nitrogen dioxide and ozone to settle near ground level.

Industries using chrome plating, among others, caused immense groundwater pollution, with hexavalent chromium doing its poisonous thing. Daytime heating patterns make it worse: the groundwater is vaporized during the day and then re-condenses at night, leading to the possibility for subsurface vapor intrusion into homes. There are now five Superfund sites in and around Paicoma: American Etching and Manufacturing, D & M Steel, Holchem, Inc., HR Textron-Glenoaks, and Price Pfister, Inc. The former Price-Pfister Faucet Plant Superfund site was recently redesignated as a Brownfield for redevelopment. The gas plant, it was revealed last year, has been leaking methane gas for long periods, affecting the area as well. The results of all this pollution is an unacceptably high level of respiratory illnesses, particularly asthma in young children, in the area and of course the potential that cancer rates are going to skyrocket among exposed individuals.

The skeleton is using an asthma inhaler…

***

THAT IS THE BAD NEWS. THE GOOD NEWS IS that Pacoima has a history of activism that unites many of its citizens in a fight for a better, or, in this case, healthier and more beautiful world, from tackling racist practices to now addressing environmental justice. In 1968 students from Pacoima staged one of the biggest civil rights protests in CA history, forcing massive reforms at the (now) Cal State University Northridge. It also paved the way for the school’s and state’s first Pan-African and Chicano Studies Departments.

Here is a great video introduction to their and others’ activism and a trailer to a documentary about the history of the town. Later, the NAACP and community churches organized and strategized to curtail police brutality and successfully spearheaded bans on the chokehold and use of the battering ram and focused on housing discrimination as well. Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, hails from Pacoima as well.

Shakur
Painted by Kristy Sandoval and the H.O.O.D. Sisters, this mural pays homage to Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother and once one of the FBI’s most wanted. 

It was five mothers from diverse backgrounds, however, who got together in 1996 to combat the literal toxicity of the place, founding Pacoima Beautiful, an organization that is now successfully fighting for environmental justice on a large scale. Just two months ago, their recommendations to close Whiteman Airport given the frequency of accidents and pollution issues, was heard. “The Re-envision Whiteman Airport Community Advisory Committee (CAC) voted at their final meeting to recommend the LA County Board of Supervisors pursue the closure of Whiteman Airport and immediately implement mitigation measures to prioritize public health and safety in the time leading up to airport closure.” Two years ago, their campaign against the Valley Gas Plant dangers helped deal with methane emissions. “As a result of our the community advocacy and organizing efforts, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has agreed to wean its use of natural gas and seek new opportunities for clean energy options at the site. Also there are plans to demolish the red and white smoke stacks.”

The non-profit organizes community clean-ups, Covid- outreach, electric bike programs, and nature access for kids. They also invest in arts education and local artists. Their ARTvertise program, together with OUTFRONT/JCDecaux, is designed to help transit riders experience art at bus shelters along the mural mile of Van Nuys Blvd. They show rotating work from local artists.

Their FaceBook site helps people figure out where to turn or where to participate, from offering opportunities to learn how to organize to announcement of life events of beloved community members. The organization also has 20 volunteer community inspectors who relate grievances to Clean Up Green Up, a 2016 city ordinance that prioritizes health and economic well-being for people living in some of L.A.’s most polluted districts. The ordinance ensures that complaints and violations raised by the inspectors are addressed and provides an ombudsman both for the area’s many industrial businesses trying to operate more cleanly and for the community members trying to enforce changes. (Ref.) All of this effective work to improve the health and living conditions of the community started by individual mothers having had enough. Deepest respect.

***

MANY OF THE MURALS I saw after driving out to Pacoima were produced by two artists, father and son, Hector Ponce and Levi Ponce.

Some are by younger artists, like Rah Azul and the gifted Kristy Sandoval. Some murals are easily accessible, others behind fences, on abandoned or guarded lots, respectively.

One friendly guard opened the electric gate so I could photograph a mural directly and told me that the depicted woman’s original cleavage had been so offensive to some part of the citizenry that it needed to be painted over. “Oh,”he said,”Ponce was going to come back and beautify the rest of the walls. I have to give him a call – we like what he is doing for the neighborhood. I have his number.”

Elvira painted by Hector Ponce

There are murals that link back to the history of the area,

“Forgotten Roots,” painted by Juan Pablo Reyes

some are addressing political issues of the presence. Some reference folktales, like the Mona Lisa now clad like La Adelita – the Mexican Revolution saw many women join as soldaderas who embraced the early Maderistas movement, with La Adelita representing them as a stand-in in a famous ballad.

Pacoima’s Art Revolution

Painted by Levi Ponce to declare an arts revolution in the area (during a time where painting murals was illegal in Los Angeles), it stands as a symbol of the fight for the arts.

Real-life luminaries include Danny Trejo, a formerly incarcerated man who became a famous movie star and now owns many local eateries. Some critics didn’t like what they saw as glorification of violence and crime, but Ponce wanted to reflect the community who, after all, had chosen Trejo as the grand marshal of Pacoima’s Christmas parade.

Then there is The day the music died depicting the most famous local musician, Ritchie Valens, who died with Buddy Holly and another bandmate in a plane crash in a cornfield in Iowa during a concert tour in 1959.

There are depictions of Latino culture,

and visions of a better future.

Without Boundaries

Painted by Sarah Ackerley and Levi Ponce.  This 33′ x 75′ mural inspires children’s imagination by blurring the boundaries of reality.  This variety of flying fish can actually be found off the coast of Santa Monica, CA.

A mural by Ignacio Gomez enumerating locally notable people and other folk can be found in the back of city hall,

while the front alerts to Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, the first Latina in the city’s history to serve on the Los Angeles City Council in 2017, to represent the 7th district she’s called home her entire life, an active supporter of the mural arts.

There is clearly an important and welcome attempt to protect the community from Covid, given the extra vulnerability of a population prone to pulmonary diseases from pollution,

and there are lots of banners alerting the community to the educational possibilities for the youth.

Some of the murals on view might not have yet reached the level that signifies muralism as an art form, I’m thinking here for example of the three great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1930s. But they are done in the same spirit: they keep significant history alive and memorialize the people who mattered to the community. They make public the concerns of a community (particularly when they are debated) and they can alert to the potential for change, when they depict alternate visions of what could be possible, particularly when they focus on inclusivity and are socially conscious. They are also creations of combined efforts of local artists, business people and other citizens, and kids who now own their participation in this community. A seminal essay by Judith Baca, Whose Monuments Where? Public Art in a Many-Cultured Society is well worth a (re)read if you are interested in the function and importance of community murals. All of this makes a difference.

Judith Baca has been one of the most prolific and recognized muralist in SoCal for the last 50 years. Her Neighborhood Pride program encouraged young artists to paint in ways that honor neighborhood history. Her Great Wall of Los Angeles, located just south of Pacoima along the Tujunga Wash and next to Coldwater Canyon Avenue in North Hollywood, is over 2,700 feet long and by far the biggest mural in Southern California. It was painted as “a bold illustration of the history of California from the state’s prehistoric past to the struggles of its ethnic minorities for civil rights and equality.” (Ref.) I have yet to visit. Many other public art projects in Little Tokyo and the Historic Core commemorating forgotten urban history were spearheaded in the late 1980s by yet another organization, The Power of Place, founded by Dolores Hayden, Professor Emerita at Yale University.

Here some more murals from Pacoima:

Levi Ponce’s 2019 monumental mural Rushing Waters follows Baca’s model. It recognizes indigenous and environmental history, and depicts both natural and manmade landmarks in and around Pacoima like Hansen Dam, the Sylmar Aqueduct, San Gabriel Mountains, the Los Angeles River, Whiteman Airport and nearby freeways, with a 25-foot tall Tataviam Village woman pouring her bowl of water onto the land comprising the center of the mural. Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez provided funding, and the mural itself was on the drawing board for over four years, eventually executed by a team of nine artists under Ponce’s leadership.

***

AS THE LATE CULTURAL WRITER and Latino art advocate Ed Fuentes wrote before his death in 2019:

“Murals were designed to be art for the masses, and in the case of ethnic-based murals, spoke for those underrepresented. In Los Angeles, its own identity is lost because it’s a region people come to reinvent the city, and/or reinvent themselves. This current legacy of remaining murals, plus the manifesto of current artists, may not realize their work represents another undervalued voice: The city’s own history.”

You find murals commemorating alternative histories all across L.A., but many are disappearing. It is a nationwide trend – my city of Portland, OR, has seen similar developments. They are not just defaced by taggers or torn down by property owners. There is a whole development aligned with the gentrification of traditional neighborhoods, with newcomers either insensitive to the history captured in the art, or inclined to put up visuals that serve their own interests. A recent essay in The Guardian, Whitewashed: How gentrification continues to erase bold L.A. murals, describes the conflicts over murals between gentrifiers and inhabitants. They are fundamentally linked to other sources of tension, “property prices, the pace of gentrification, tenant evictions, the integrity of once-venerated local artists, and the ability of local city officials to act as honest brokers between the competing interest groups.”

Efforts to protect the history and the art form are direly needed. In L.A. they have the Civic Memory project, a project that pursues the preservation of community knowledge, playing an evermore important role. If you go to their website you find an astonishing volume of projects all interesting in their own ways, public art included, with in-depth debate of how to approach memorializing a past that had been submerged under representations by culturally dominant official” voices that pursued their own agenda.

Forgotten places, Pacoima included, can be resurrected via public art that is emerging from community-based vision, voices, recollections. All we have to do is visit and learn. As Ritchie Valens sang: Come on, let’s go!



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Art on the Road: History captured in LACMA Prints.

When you travel, even for longer stretches of time, you have to make choices. So much to explore, to learn in Los Angeles, this behemoth of a city – there has to be some selectivity, since not all can be fit in. My own selections are usually based on two basic considerations: get familiar with the history of the place and, of course, seek out stuff that feeds my specific interests, art and politics, as you well know.

I lucked out last week with these endeavors in more ways than one. To understand the history of the greater Los Angeles area, I had read Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990) and slogged through his last book, Set the Night on Fire. L.A. in the Sixties (2020), published before his death in 2022 and co-authored with Jon Wiener. Both are seminal works about the urban history of the place and the powers that shaped it since its inception. Cultural critic, environmental historian and political activist Davis described the intersection of land development and legal or functional racial segregation in Southern California in ways quite accessible to uninformed readers like me, basing his account on interdisciplinary sources, including American history, environmental history, Marxist philosophy, political science, urban geography, architectural and cultural studies. Both books introduce the forms of resistance to segregation in housing and education, from peaceful demonstrations to riots to the engagement of artists and other intellectuals, side by side with famous civil rights fighters, political organizations, union representatives, the ACLU and uncountable numbers of students as young as high school freshmen.

88 cities, approximate 140 unincorporated areas, and communities within the City of Los Angeles.

The author introduces us to the political economy that shaped the urban sprawl, the landscape transformation, resulting in increasing inequality of living conditions and incarcerations rates, making it a dystopian place for those who fell off the wagon of the American Dream, or shall we say, were pushed off by the interest of those defending Fortress L.A. from any influx of non-White and/or poor populations. Land, seemingly endless land was the commodity, providing the base for residential neighborhoods, industry, strip malls and freeways. Richer neighborhoods, in fear of losing their exclusivity, the down-town commercial district’s business owners and realtor- and home owners’ organizations collaborated with investors, local and state politicians, and even Roman Catholic church leaders to make decisions about land-use that protected the interest of the monied classes and ended up with unimaginable sprawl.

Even though fair housing laws existed, racism won when Proposition 14 was adopted by an overwhelming majority of California voters in 1964, scorning equality and discriminating against “undesirable” homeowners and renters who were now easily excluded. The vote allowed prior law, the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, also known as the Rumford Act, to be voided, creating a state constitutional right for persons to refuse to sell, lease, or rent residential properties to other persons. (The Supreme Court declared the Proposition unconstitutional in 1967. The current legal status can be found here.) It was a pivotal moment that brought the efforts of many organizations and individuals fighting for civil rights to a screeching halt at the time.

Later decades saw more subtle ways of achieving the same goals of segregation: zoning laws and security measures kept the poor away from affluent districts. Relentless and cruel, often violent policing kept particularly Black citizens and other POC in their allotted places, both literally and metaphorically. Zoning was also causal for pushing the non-White and poor populations to the perimeters of the county, within or adjacent to more dangerous environments when it comes to pollution, water shortage and now fire danger given climate change-enhanced droughts. I am summarizing these aspects of Davis’ books because it was striking for me to see the described social stratification play out in real space during a drive to East Los Angeles College, a public Community College in Monterey Park, CA.

East Los Angeles College, Monterey Park, CA.

I started in the heart of Pasadena’s historical district, a place full of beautiful, gorgeously maintained and lovingly restored mansions, then drove through the picture book landscape of Pasadena’s craftsman bungalows. 15 minutes later you come through small townships that still have single-lot houses, but now run down and clearly showing signs of economic distress. Another 20 minutes along, and you are surrounded by low income housing apartments. I parked in a strip mall adjacent to the college and was immediately taken in by a striking building that stood out against the dilapidated background: the Vincent Price Art Museum. Part of a Performing and Fine Arts Center that opened in 2011, the museum holds a permanent, major collection of fine art, with substantive work initially donated by actor Vincent Price (he of Hollywood Horror Movie fame, among others, but also a true friend to the arts and the educational efforts required to bestow knowledge of art and art history onto future generations.) By now the museum holds over 9000 objects and has hosted more than 100 shows, singular for a community college, its exhibitions thoughtfully and smartly curated.

I came to see one of them that seemed particularly aligned with the museum’s expressed mission and issues close to my own heart concerned with cultural diversity and critical thinking:

“The mission of the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College is to serve as a unique educational resource for the diverse audiences of the college and the community through the exhibition, interpretation, collection, and preservation of works in all media of the visual arts. VPAM provides an environment to encounter a range of aesthetic expressions that illuminate the depth and diversity of artwork produced by people of the world, both contemporary and past. By presenting thoughtful, innovative and culturally diverse exhibitions and by organizing cross-disciplinary programs on issues of historical, social, and cultural relevance, VPAM seeks to promote knowledge, inspire creative thinking, and deepen an understanding of and appreciation for the visual arts.

What Would You Say?: Activist Graphics from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a selection of political prints from LACMA’s vast archives. The exhibition, which opened March 25th, is free of charge and the visitor gets gifted with a high-quality brochure, covering some of the art with prints and explanatory (bilingual English/Spanish) text that I found helpful.

Graphic art has traditionally been a vehicle for change, challenging as well as influencing political moments. Rather than just depicting, the combination of image and word can inform, comment, persuade or be used for propaganda. It has been a key player in protests against injustice and oppression; the fact that it can be easily, widely and cheaply created and distributed has made it a form that helps to connect to people and promote social change. In the late 19th century, the technology for lithographic printing advanced, and the new power-driven presses, practical techniques of photoengraving and mechanical typesetting devices helped the medium to progress. We have now added photo-typesetting, offset lithography, and silk screening to the repertoire. It has also often been a communal effort, linking artists and participants with shared goals and interest, helping to organize and to educate.

The graphics on the wall ranged from the mid 1960’s to the 2020s, covering the Black Panther’s fight against police brutality and for the empowerment of poor Black neighborhoods,

Left: Emory Douglas Untitled (Sin Titulo) 1970 – Right: Rupert Garcia Libertad para los prisoneros politicas! 1971

the issues of incarceration of innocent people and Latino activism,

Yolanda M. López Free Los Siete 1969

Jessica Sabogal Walls can’t keep out Greatness 2018

the struggle of women and immigrants for equality,

Clockwise from upper left: Yreina D. Cervantez La Voz de la Mujer 1982 – Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Women in Design: The next Decade 1975 – Yreina D. Cervantez Mujer de mucha enagua 1999 – Krista Sue Pussy Power Hat Pussy Hat Project 2016 – Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Ayse Gursoz We the Resilient 2017

and eventually the protests over the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black people by police.

Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes of Dignida Rebelled and Mazatl My Name is Trayvon Martin and my Life Matters. 2013

The most dominant topic, however, is expressed in posters and prints protesting war; surprisingly, I could find the issues of racial segregation and land development, so central to the history of L.A. and S.F., only peripherally – one poster about evictions, and one about the displacement of first native people and then a Mexican American community from Chavez Ravine, land appropriated to build the beloved L.A. Dodger stadium.

Favianna Rodriguez Community Control of the Land 2002 – Vote Ik We are still here 2017

The reality of racism, however, is captured by several of the works in ways that hit you hard.

Archie and Brad Boston For a Discriminating Design Organization 1966

David Lance Gaines Qui Tacet Consentit (Silence Gives Consent) 1969

The reality of the price of war, on the other hand, is brought home most strikingly in a print by one of the most famous of the artists in this exhibition, Sister Corita Kent, a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) before she was driven out by Cardinal Francis McIntyre (as were later 90 percent of the order in L.A, some 150 IHM nuns kicked out. According to a report in the Times, the Cardinal, by the way, uttered these words when confronted with his stand on segregation: “…it is not a racial or moral issue. A reason for discrimination is that white parents have a right to protect their daughters…”)

Corita Kent manflowers 1969

Corita Kent’s early silk screenings used bright colors, modulating the style and objects of advertising as stand in for religious concepts. They were shown in galleries and museums across the country, the MET, MOMA and LACMA included. She later moved to political topics, with more muted colors, including the Watts Rebellion and, after multiple encounters with anti-war activist Dan Kerrigan, the Vietnam War. The poster here shows two blinded soldiers, using Peter Seeger’s song lines in despair. Man-power is broken into two words, drawing attention to the single man, all the individuals that made ups the military power, paying with their bodies or their lives.

Posters on video display. The last one above: Primo Angeli/Lars Speyer The Silent Majority 1969

***

I wondered, a few days later, if the choice of concentrating on so many war/peace posters in the VPAM exhibition was perhaps linked to the choices made in another, simultaneous exhibition of graphics from the LACMA archives: Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany.

This exhibition is also shown in a gallery incorporated within an educational setting, this time the Charles White Elementary School on Wilshire Blvd. It presents political imagery that grew out of the reaction to war and revolutionary movements, from Germany’s political developments starting in 1918, to Mexico’s 1930s formation of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop) in Mexico City.

For me it packed an additional emotional punch – I have grown up with the art of Kollwitz, Grosz, Pechstein etc. in post-war Germany and the familiarity and reminiscence of what they meant then added a layer to taking the show in. To look at the warnings expressed by art in the 20s and 30s, to know that the world was dragged into the next war regardless, and to see all this while we are witnessing another contemporaneous war on European soil was unsettling. The unsparing depiction of oppression, violence and human suffering is also strikingly different from most of the American poster selection in the show discussed above.

Some of the graphics would benefit from explanations regarding the relevant language. Take Grosz’ Gesundbeter, for example, which has three titles in different languages (he used these inscriptions fully knowing that they were not translations but expressed different thoughts.) Crucially, though, the obscenity of the action becomes clear when you understand the acronym KV, central to the image. It stands for the German word Kriegs-Verwendungsfähig – literally usable for war or fit for action, applied by the Local Board, desperate for canon fodder, obviously even to corpses.

George Grosz Die Gesundbeter 1918

Here is another title – the German says sunshine and fresh air for the proletariat (a demand by labor unions and social activists for better housing and healthier working conditions,) depicting incarcerated people walking the prison yard.

George Grosz Licht und Luft dem Proletariat 1919

The parallels we see in the German and Mexican depictions originate both from shared experiences, but also an overlap of artists in each others’ spheres. Colonialism led to an entangled history in general, but during the 1930s many German artists associated with the Staatlichem Bauhaus Weimar emigrated to Mexico, welcomed by the government of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–1940) which built the most democratic state historically experienced in Mexico until the 1990s.

Clockwise from upper left: Alfredo Zalce En Tiempos de Don Porfirio 1945 – Alfredo Zalce La Soldadera 1947 – Käthe Kollwitz Losbruch 1943 – Leopoldo Mendéz Asesinati de Jesus R. Menendez en Cuba 1948 – Käthe Kollwitz Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht 1919-20.

The Cárdenas government sponsored educational program for workers and peasants, led by the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), an association of revolutionary writers and artists that grew out of the “cultural missions” charged with propagating the revolution’s objectives in murals, graphic art and theater productions. The Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) came out of this association, and was revitalized by the many migrants that came from Europe, other Latin American countries and the U.S., all adding their own cultural experiences, artistic styles, and preoccupations. In fact, Hannes Meyer, second Bauhaus director, was appointed as head of TGP in 1942.

Erasto Cortez Juarez, Jesus Escobedo, Leopoldo Mendez, Francisco Mora Calaveras aftodas con medias naylon 1947

Leopoldo Mendez En manos de la Gestapo 1942 – Constantin von Mitschke-Collande Freiheit 1919

Arturo Garcia Bustos La industrialización del país 1947

It is a stunning exhibition, offering diversity of depictions balanced by homogeneity of concerns. I was the only one there on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, except for a friendly guard, which was just as well given the tears that welled up. The reality of war, the repeat of history’s darkest moments seemingly unavoidable, some already here, some looming, the resurgence of fascistic ideas and methods seemed to pull the rug out from under the efforts of earlier artists to warn us of dangers and call for change.

Erich Modal Revolution 1920 – Max Pechstein An die Laterne 1919 – Unknown artist: So führt euch Spartakus. Brüder rettet die Revolution. 1919

And yet. There is reason to remain optimistic. Individual commitment to social change still exists. But not just that – in L.A. alone, there have been significant collective successes across the last years. In 2006, 500.000 people protested on Wilshire Blvd. demanding rights for undocumented immigrants, a march called by labor unions, endorsed by catholic Cardinal Roger Mahoney and Antonio Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor. In January 2017, 750.000 congregated downtown L.A. for the Women’s March. And in 2019, large coalitions of communities and classrooms, teachers and students joined in the successful teachers’ strike that focussed on overcrowded schools, educational disinvestment and drainage of resources to charter schools.

Leopoldo Mendez Retrato de Posada en su taller 1956

Elizabeth Cattle Sharecropper – 1952 – Alberto Beltran El problema agrario en América Latina 1948 – Käthe Kollwitz Poster excerpt

Max Pechstein Dont strangle the newborn freedom through disorder and fratricide, or your children will starve 1919.

Walking around the neighborhood after I left the exhibition, the occasional public or street art made it clear that activism is alive and well. A work in progress, standing on the shoulders of the many activist artists who came before. Grateful that decisive museal curation introduces and reminds us of the modernist vanguard.

What Would You Say?

  • Mar 25–Jun 24, 2023
  • Vincent Price Art Museum
    1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
    Monterey Park, CA 9175

Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany.

  • Oct 29, 2022–Jul 22, 2023
  • Charles White Elementary School | 2401 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90057
  • 1 – 4pm on Saturdays

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Art on the Road: The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

Ursula K LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986)

LeGuin’s essay on narrative theory is a masterful example of analytic prose describing different types of stories, explaining how and why archetypal heroic tales long held place of honor in our collective imagination. The analysis is interspersed with first person, sometimes lyrical, sometimes funny contemplations by a gatherer who with wit and expressed contempt compares stories of “killing” with stories of “life,” namely stories of origin, myths of creation, trickster stories, folktales or novels. These latter narratives can be seen as a carrier bag, the author argues, gathering up and distributing, saving and sharing, in a non-linear fashion and not necessarily tied to a hero who needs to prove himself in violent combat, linearly leading to victory or defeat, forever memorializing acts of war and destruction.

Barbara Hepworth Assembly of Sea Form, 1972

We need alternative stories, and we also need places that hold them, carrier bags of diverse kinds, museums being among them. At least that is what I thought when I approached the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena,CA, wondering if it was empty enough for me to dare enter, masked and all. I was in luck, on a late Thursday afternoon, after a Covid-imposed three-year hiatus of such visits, and, frankly, emotionally roiled by the simple fact that I would see art, and art new to me, in the original. So take subsequent ruminations with a grain of salt, they were affected by giddiness, no doubt.

Barbara Hepworth Four-Square (Walk Through) 1966

Parallels between the museum as a vessel and my own carrier bag, a small, beloved backpack given to me by a dear friend years ago, were easily drawn. Both are unpretentious, nicely segmented, and filled with an abundance of seemingly unrelated items. This is of course where the similarity ends – the museum scores with offering an impressive variety of art across several centuries, while my bag simply holds things that might or might not have predictable value. (You never know when that flashlight or that mini umbrella, iron reserve stale candies or a spare camera is needed.)

While the museum’s wings exposit orderly, period- or artistic style-based curations, chaos rules in Heuer’s pouch. Most importantly, the Norton Simon collection contains a mix of masterpieces, as well as an overall remarkable number of lesser, but important works that speak of the eponymous collector who knew what he liked, knew how to acquire it, and knew that the lack of specialization would make this a more, rather than less interesting collection. In contrast to your’s truly who is also an omnivore with regard to liking things, he knew what he was doing – and had the funds to do it.

***

Formerly the Pasadena Art Museum, the building was constructed by the architectural firm of Ladd and Kelsey, with the interior architecture changed in the 1970s by Craig Ellwood, after the industrialist Norton Simon had taken over, changes lost in the 1990s after Frank Gehry redesigned the interior with Simon’s widow, Jennifer Jones Simon, overseeing the renovations in tribute to her late husband. The outside is beautiful: a curvilinear complex of numerous modules, tiled with 115,000 Edith Heath-designed custom brick red and onyx glazed 5 x 15-inch tiles that reflect the light and colors of the surrounding.

The building is surrounded by a sculpture garden with a small pond and outdoors seating area and cafe. The inside contains major exhibition halls lit with skylights and a theater on the main floor, a basement devoted to the Asian art collection, which I did not visit.

You approach the building by running the gamut between rather tall, imposing males, bronze castings of multiple Rodin sculptures. Have your pick: expressions of fury, defiance, status, pride, or vanity in one’s intellectual or physical prowess are all on offer,

Auguste Rodin The Burghers of Calais, 1884-95

Auguste Rodin Monument to Balzac, 1897 — Jean de Finnes, Vetu, 1884-95

although the latter might be short-lived, as the shadow tells a foreboding story of crooked aging.

Auguste Rodin Pierre de Wissant, Nude, 1884-95

A fitting welcoming committee, one might argue, for the founder of this institution as it now exists, Norton Winfred Simon, a wealthy industrialist who discovered art in his 40s and never turned back from collecting it with a passion. Simon was born in 1907 in Portland, OR, into a family of European Jewish immigrants, learning business practices in his father’s store Simon sells for less, a profitable business that allowed Meyer Simon to build a big house in Portland Heights, and Lillian Simon to drive the first ever Cadillac in Portland, by all reports. (I am summarizing what I learned among others from a biography by Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture and from a 2009 lecture by the museum’s then chief curator, Carol Togneri.)

Norton Winfred Simon at work.

Equipped with a photographic memory and an uncanny ability to do complicated math in his head, the young Simon was fascinated by and stellar at acquisition: a life-long preoccupation developed with finding bankrupt, or weak, or poorly managed businesses, buying them on the cheap and turning them around with harsh reigns, radical cuts and minute personal decision making until he’d extract enormous profits. A 6 week stint as a college student at Berkeley, once the family had relocated to San Francisco after the death of his mother when he was only 14, was ended by Simon with the declaration that he could do without the education. Which turned out to be true. He became a tycoon, rising from scrap metal collecting business to building the Hunt Foods & Industries empire, quietly buying undervalued stock and winding his way onto Board of Directors to ultimately swallowing organizations whole, extending to truck fleets, real estate, cosmetic giants, and the publishing business in later years.

Staircase to the lower level.

Simon the art collector was clearly driven by more than Simon the businessman’s lust for acquisition and success, but the methods with which he built his collection were inseparable from those used to create his business empires. He was a demanding boss to his staff and advisors, requiring presence at all times and expecting tolerance for micro-managing each and every decision. He was a hard bargainer once he had caught the scent of something that he thought would enrich his collection. The purchases ranged from individual art pieces to the take-over of entire inventories, like the Duveen Brothers Inc. in New York for $15 million. Over the years he amassed close to 7000 pieces – but was as ruthless in selling what didn’t fit, as he was in using unusual methods to buying what he wanted (reports of episodes of aggressive, if not scandalous behavior during auctions abound.) Sales produced enormous profits – in turn, he was one of the first to establish several tax-exempt foundations to buy art for public display. Before he had a museum, he created a “museum without walls” that loaned works from the foundation’s collection that enabled traveling exhibitions.

Entrance Hall

His involvement in, build-up of and generosity towards the L.A. art scene was appreciated, and the fact acknowledged, that he offered one of the most important collections of the West Coast, but he did not necessarily make only friends. Controversy raged when he took over the museum we are looking at here, then the Pasadena Art Museum deeply in debt, and badly managed in his eyes. Supporters of the failed museum who saw their donated art sold at auction because Simon did not think they belonged in the collection were in uproar, with the remaining Board members resigning and former Trustees bringing a civil suit “charging Simon with cannibalizing the permanent collection and manipulating the museum’s assets for personal gain,” a suit which they lost. (Ref.)

Pablo Picasso Woman with a Book, 1932

The museum itself is no stranger to lawsuits either – there was a protracted multimillion-dollar battle over two Renaissance masterworks—”Adam” and “Eve”—painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and acquired by the museum in the early 1970s. The art was looted by the Nazis after their invasion of Holland, and the heir to the robbed art dealer sued multiple agencies, the Dutch government and the museum included. She lost her case after it was heard eventually at the 9th U.s.Circuit Court of Appeals 5 years ago, based on a legal technicality of U.S. Courts not being allowed to invalidate the official acts of the Dutch Government. “The act of state doctrine,” limits the ability of U.S. courts, in certain instances, from determining the legality of the acts of a sovereign state within that sovereign’s own territory and is often applied in appropriations disputes which immunizes foreign nations from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts when certain conditions are satisfied. (9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 16-58308.)The art stayed at the Norton Simon Museum.

The 1970s saw a few few years of personal upheaval for Simon, a divorce after 37 years of marriage, preceded by the suicide of one of his sons, a failed bid to be elected as a Republican for the Senate, a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a movie star, Jennifer Jones, and eventually being afflicted with Guillain Barre, a neurological disorder that confined him to a wheelchair. Why there isn’t a Hollywood movie depicting this quintessential (not quite)rags-to-riches American biography is a mystery to me.

***

The collection is truly impressive, much of it focussed on beauty rather than art historical education or particular fame or theoretical richness, although some famous paintings are present and admirably placed without ado or spot-lighting among the rest of the art (like Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy – Titus, for example.) The absence of fanfare allows for an unbiased approach and appreciation of those who do not know the genesis of these paintings. Distinguished paintings by pre-Renaissance and Renaissance artists, Old Masters, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, an extensive assembly of South Asian sculpture; monumental bronzes by Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore; bronze studies of ballet dancers and related works on paper by Edgar Degas are all placed in ways that signal the collector’s focus. As it turns out, during his life time Simon would often rearrange the curation by himself during visits, curious what would emerge in novel placements.

Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of a Boy, 1655-60 (Titus)

If we apply LeGuin’s distinction between literary fiction’s stories that “contain sticks, spears, and swords, the things to bash and poke an hit with, the long hard things,” and those about “things to put things in, the container for the thing contained” to the visual art on offer, Simon gifted us with a few types of the former and very, very many of the latter. Just as an example of the ancient hero worship template, we have Peter Paul Ruben’s 1618 painting of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar. Plenty of long hard things to poke and bash with, plenty of embedding in a cultural scaffold that needs to be known in detail to makes sense of the scene opening up in front of you (predictably triggering my “oh, another Where’s Waldo?” association that tends to rise up when I see these kinds of mythological depictions.

Peter Paul Rubens Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, c. 1618-19

As an example of visual narratives that rely on your emotional reaction, rather than your cognitive assessment or general learnedness, we have many to choose from, including renaissance still lives, some fine Lionel Feiningers (I’m partial – here a street scene from Weimar:)

Lyonel Feininger Near the Palace 1914-1915

and the one I eventually settled on, painted by American painter Sam Francis in 1956: Basel Mural I (and two fragments of Basel Mural III.) These paintings are containers that invite you to fill them with new kinds of stories, offering to hold your spontaneous experience. You project your interpretation, if one emerges, or simply your feelings about the beauty that surrounds you into the empty or, perhaps more accurately, quiet spaces of these vessels, spaced that leave enough room next to the configured patterns to hold your connection and absorb it. The beauty loosens something, granting the freedom to abandon demands for deciphering. You can immerse yourself and be moved, without fear of appearing moronic to self or others, because you are unfamiliar with the canon.

Sam Francis  Basel Mural I 1956-58

Released from analysis you tend to be more open for surprises – the discovery, for example, that in the clouds of primary colors of red, blue, yellow hovering over the white negative spaces all kinds of dots and spots and sparks of other colors hide, including purples and turquoise darkening into some shade of cyan, joyful hints of a diverse universe to be found by looking closely. New stories unfold – well, I am describing my own reaction to a painter I had never seen before outside of print.

More information and exposure will be available to people in this area when a new exhibition, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with the Sam Francis Foundation, opens on April 9th at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum: Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing, organized by yet another Portland-linked person, Richard Speer, who also wrote a book about the Painter: The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan.

Sam Francis Basel Mural I Excerpt and Basel Mural III, 1956 – 58, Fragment

Norton Simon, who died in 1993, was after beauty, and knew when he found it. He was also aware what beauty does with people, what it teaches them and how they are able to change under its tutelage. To accomplish those interactions was the core goal, and ruthless methods of amassing the necessary funds can be forgiven, in my book, when building a brilliant collection, and endowing organizations like the museum to display and share it, serve that goal.

“Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.”

The collector would have probably agreed with this closing sentence of Ursula LeGuin’s essay, forever searching for the seeds of beauty, perhaps these days collecting them in bags among the stars, riding on the extraordinary Bird in Space by Brancusi, one of the central sculptures in the museum’s collection. We are quite fortunate to be able to experience what he left behind.

Constantin Brancusi  Bird in Space 1931 Excerpt

The Norton Simon Museum

 411 W. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91105

Hours: 12-5 pm Sunday Monday, Thursday, Friday. 12-7 pm Saturday. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Detailed visit information here.

Peter Voulkos, Black Butte Divide 1958
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Intermission

Don’t you believe everything you read….nothing is closed, things are just going to switch to travel mode. I will be reporting from the road, intermittently first, then hopefully on a more regular schedule again.

***

In the meantime you have several cultural riches to choose from in March:

Do NOT miss the special showing of our newest documentary at Cinema 21:

  • WHEN: March 12, 2023 at 3-5 p.m. Informational tables start at 2:30 p.m., film starts at 3 p.m.
  • WHERE: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, Portland, OR 97209
  • TICKETS: Tickets can be purchased in advance or at the door (https://www.cinema21.com/movie/atomic-bamboozle)

I had written about the project and shown part of my set photography here along the Hanford site at the Columbia River earlier. Below is the official description from the film makers:

ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE is a feature-length documentary which exposes the claims of the nuclear energy industry to be a cure for the climate crisis.

This film grew out of the NECESSITY project @necessitythemovie as tribal communities raised concerns over false solutions to the climate crisis being presented in the form of small-modular reactors and a renaissance of nuclear power. Members of the core NECESSITY team found a need to share the story of nuclear resistance in the Northwest and chronicle the development of advertising aimed at convincing the public to trust nuclear power.

We are pleased to bring this story to the big screen with the premiere of ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE at @cinema21_portland. Join us for the premiere which will include a screening of a short film by Vanessa Renwicke, as well as a panel discussion to follow.

These are the slated speakers:

  • Jan Haaken, director, professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker
  • Lauren Goldberg, executive director for Columbia Riverkeeper with over a decade of experience advocating for Hanford Nuclear Site cleanup 
  • Lloyd Marbet, executive director Oregon Conservancy Foundation and longtime anti-nuclear activist
  • Cathy Sampson-Kruse, associate producer, enrolled member of the Waluulapum Tribe of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, retired social worker, and a champion in protecting clean water from fossil fuels and nuclear waste 
  • Greg Kafoury, attorney in private practice with Kafoury & McDoougal Attorneys, served as Co-Director of Don’t Waste Oregon
  • Moderated by Dr. Patricia Kullberg, former medical director of Multnomah County Health Department and member of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility

Again, tickets can be reserved here, proceeds will be shared with the Columbia Riverkeepers.

***

Also in March you can visit Bonnie Meltzer’s newest show tied to water and land, providing a retrospective of 15 years of work.

And if you happen to live in the NorthEast: God made my Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin would be my first choice of all there is to explore:

https://www.amherst.edu/museums/mead/exhibitions/2023/god-made-my-face-a-collective-portrait-of-james-baldwin.

“This group exhibition is a special iteration of God Made My Face, originally organized by Hilton Als for David Zwirner Gallery in 2019. It presents works from iconic artists such as Richard Avedon, Marlene Dumas, and Kara Walker alongside archival materials in order to explore the life, work, and legacy of James Baldwin (1924–1987). Baldwin’s ways of seeing and being evolved through his relationships and exposure to the work of visual artists, during an era when the harsh realities of racial oppression were confronted with aesthetics emphasizing self-love, pride, and validation. God Made My Face explores Baldwin through his words, relationships, and the works of other artists produced during his own lifetime and today.  

Unbeknownst to many, Baldwin served as professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at UMass Amherst from 1983-86, finding a home within the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and teaching students from across the Five Colleges. This period of Baldwin’s life highlights how far his reach extended beyond the cultural capitals of Paris and New York, where he resided for much of his life, as a writer. Baldwin’s engagements as an educator convey his legacy as a mentor to generations of intellectual and creative communities.”

In the meantime, I’ll be sending dispatches from the road, and eventually L.A. if all goes according to plan. Stay tuned!

Music appropriately Mahler’s songs of a wayfarer (one of my favorite song cycles of all time.)

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Learning (from) History.

Ferocious, complicated, brave women. 

Also: resilience, clarity, decisive action.

⅔ into Black History month I figured it’s time to contemplate cultural offerings that embody what’s encapsulated by the terms above. Coincidentally, my friend Catón Lyle posted photographs I had taken of him and his students 8 years ago this week on Facebook, images of people I deeply care about and worked with, now likely strong and resilient young adults either in Highschool or off to college. Institutions where Black history is no longer guaranteed to be taught across the country.

Catón Lyes, drummer extraordinaire

Let’s look at possibilities to learn about Black History outside of the educational settings, then. When it comes to ferocious women, none portrays them better than Viola Davis in her magnum opus, now on Netflix, The Woman King. The actress is a marvel (in everything she touches). Here she was training in her late 50s for a physically demanding role as an African warrior leading an army of women in the State of Dahomey (now Benin) in battle and for the political future of a kingdom contemplating to step away from participating in the slave trade.

The film is an epic mix of action movie, intergenerational, intra- and inter-tribal conflict, serious depiction of slavery, with a hint of romance thrown in, involving a non-African man at the behest of the studio bosses who wanted a White man role for sales points and settled for someone with a White father and a Black mother. Various, really numerous, subplots tug on every emotional register imaginable.

Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood together with screenwriter Dana Stevens had to fight for 6 years to get this film made, and only got green light after the success of the Black Panther pointed to the possibility of having this kind of film be a box-office success. It was “the product of a thousand battles.” The obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women and a State that celebrated gender equity until the French colonialists crushed it, are at length described in this review in the Smithsonian. The public reaction to the finished product has also been fierce: the extremist Right condemned it for Black women killing White men. Some Black organizations found fault with the depiction of African nations actively participating in the slave trade, which is of course historically correct, and brave to be acknowledged in a Hollywood film that wants to convey history, if you ask me. But the worry remains in the eyes of many, that it partly absolves the Euro-American slavers from their responsibility.

Then there is the complaint that the film’s narrative alters what actually happened, making the Kingdom of Dahomey into a place that abandoned the slave trade, when it actually didn’t. A general complaint regards the fact that a major Blockbuster Movie could have chosen a positive event in Black history, rather than one marred by complexity of historical trade alliances.

The film’s take on history is indeed stretched and to be taken with a grain of salt, or with the understanding that movies need to entertain, and have some lines that help us identify with good or evil. The choice of featuring a female standing army, the historically real Agoodjies with all their strength and complicated lives, though, should be a boost to a current generation of women who are searching for role models in an era that is dead set to roll back both women’s and civil rights (not necessarily in the setting of the military, but fighting everyday challenges.) If you want to learn more details about the actual history of the Agoodijes, there is a smart guideline, The Woman King Syllabus, provided by a group of US-based historians, Ana Lucia Araujo, Vanessa Holden, Jessica Marie Johnson and Alex Gil. 

***

When it comes to brave women, do I have a book for you. Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing is a stellar compendium of sources that help us understand the Black radical tradition, from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. If we can, for a moment, put aside our immediate reaction to the term “communist” in the title, still associated with extreme negative reactions, we might particularly benefit from the section that exposes how White supremacists have always successfully used the tool of the communist specter as a weapon in their political crusade. The book, edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, also teaches a lot about the fight against fascism on the one hand, and organizing of labor on the other, both topics of obvious contemporary relevance.

***

And last but not least, when we look for resilience and decisive action, there is a new, digitally available, resource that I strongly urge you to sign up for: Hammer and Hope, a magazine of Black Politics and Culture, founded by Jen Parker and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Or at least read the poem, Come In, by Ashley M. Jones, the current poet laureate of Alabama, in call and response with an image by photographer and performance artists Carrie Mae Weems, who was born in Portland, OR 69 years ago and is one of our most impactful and famous contemporary artists. It sets the tone and invites all of us to cross a threshold into a community of diverse backgrounds but shared goals.

The name for the new magazine, suggested by Derecka Purnell, a brilliant young lawyer and abolitionist, is a riff on a book, Hammer and Hoe, by Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of American history at U.C.L.A.

The goals could not be clearer and more decisive:

“….a hammer to smash myths and illusions.”

“And our hope? It is not the false optimism of liberals or the fatalism of armchair revolutionaries or the pessimism of pundits waiting for the end of the world. James Baldwin understood hope as determination in the face of catastrophe: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” … victory is never certain but if we don’t fight, we can only lose. Hammer & Hope is here to fight.”

Music today is the soundtrack for the Woman King.

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Love shown around the World.

Real love at home, virtual love that is exhibited around the world, what more could a person want for Valentine’s Day, you ask? To be honest, being able to see in person what’s shown out there wouldn’t be half bad. But I am content for now to help those who are still able to travel to visit some promising shows.

Love has, of course, been a topic for artists since time immemorial. There are some artist/wife/husband/partner relationships that have been famously immortalized.

Many paintings capture an astounding amount of details emanating from relationships.

Suzuki Harunobo Lovers Beneath an Umbrella in the Snow, 1764-77
Pablo Picasso Figures on a Beach, 1931
Kerry James Marshall Still Life with Wedding Portrait, 2015, (Harriet and John Tubman)

There is photography that floors me. Every time I look at it, I am in awe of skill with which it insinuates that which is not immediately visible.

Josef and Anni Albers at Black Mountain College, circa 1935. Photographer unknown.


Ellen Auerbach Elaine and Willem de Kooning in New York, 1944.
Florence Homolka’s “Double Wedding Portrait (Man Ray, Juliet Man Ray, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning),” 1946
Painters Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight photographed by Irving Penn in New York, 1947.

Here is a whole series that lovers took of each other.

***

This spring offers a variety of exhibitions that are concerned with love or its trappings.

One might first travel in March to Tokyo, to see Painting Love in the Louvre Collections, a show of 73 paintings carefully selected from the vast collections of the Musée du Louvre, exhibiting Western artists from the 16th century to mid-19th century.

Alternatively, you could visit Greece and go to the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ). Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) is o display until the end of May, a major group exhibition which focuses on digital technology and its influence on intimate human relationships. In the curator’s words:

The subtitle of the exhibition is a reference to Eva Illouz’s book, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, which argues that these relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) explores the state of love and human bonds in the age of the Internet, social media, and high capitalism, probing how the digital sphere, the impact of technology giants, and neo-liberal practices have transformed love, social relations, and the way we interact with one another.

Here is a short teaser video – the show looks thought-provoking and the array of internationally curated artists is impressive.

Of course you know me. Won’t offer the joys of love without the caution of what comes after the happy – or not so happy- ending. Aiming at balanced reporting, after all…

Off to London, then, where you can take in Natasha Caruana’s Fairytale for Sale at the Centre for British Photography until April 22, 2023.

The artist connected with women advertising their used wedding dresses for sale on the internet, with photographs that block out their faces for privacy.

“ The images reveal the fantasy, performance and trophy moments of the traditional big day. The smiling faces of the bride, groom and their entourages’ are blocked out in white, cloned over, smothered in blue tac or scratched off in a bid to disguise and make anonymous their private day now in the public arena. What remains are bizarre theatres of marriage; white-faced performers have taken to the stage and act out emblematic scenes. The brides reveal that the artefacts of the big day are being discarded; sold for money to de-clutter the wardrobe, make space for births or in some cases because the dresses are now tainted with divorce. Their words punctuate the images.“

And if we want to know what happens when things really got off the rails, there is always the option of visiting Zagreb or Los Angeles to go to the Museum of Broken Relationships (MBR). On display are items that anyone can provide to express their heartbreak or to get rid of emotional burdensome artifacts. And in case you think this is a joke,” it is a global, crowd-sourced project that gathers anonymous donations and stories of experience with love and loss from around the world. While MBR has a brick-and-mortar museum in Zagreb, Croatia, MBR’s co-founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubištič regularly travel to places around the world to create community-based, local exhibitions that each blend community donations and themes with those from other countries in thought-provoking ways. Each exhibition becomes a unique exploration of love, loss, and growth by merging individual, communal, and universal perspectives.”  

Indiana University’s Museum Study Department in Indianapolis is currently partnering with MBR to create an interdisciplinary project featuring an exhibition and related public programs that will open at the Herron Galleries at IUPUI and at sites around Indianapolis in early 2023. Stay tuned! (And in the meantime marvel at the artifacts in the collection, many virtually accessible. )

Wishing you, Valentine’s Day or not, a sense of connectedness, to whoever or whatever in the universe! No heels or other props required.

Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer seem appropriate today.

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Pet People.

Have you ever talked to your pet? “I know what you’re thinking! Some more of this sad face and she’ll relent and give you dinner early…quit manipulating!” Or have you ever yelled at your car that wouldn’t start, “Don’t do that to me! Don’t hate me! Not today! You know I can’t be late!” Or have you ever prayed to a God or Gods, with the plea that “You have the wisdom, you have the power, you can decide to act – please relieve this suffering?”

Most of us do this, at some point or another, attributing human characteristics, emotions, or behaviors to an animal, particularly domesticated ones, to objects, or even invisible entities. It’s not something new, just think of fairy tales, the pantheon of Greek and Roman Gods who were believed to share human foibles, enhanced by divine powers to the nth degree. I’ve been mulling about this, though, because it seems that the diet of anthropomorphic animals on social media, from talking dogs to willful emus, is steadily increasing. Admittedly sucking me in at times, too many times, really.

Seeing the third review of decidedly anthropomorphic art by the same painter within the span of a few years in one of the most popular art magazines, I decided to look at what we know about anthropomorphism and why it is so seemingly attractive. Matthew Grabelsky is currently showing the newest iteration of portraits of human subway riders equipped with animal heads at the The Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, California, until the beginning of March. Riders consists of hyperrealistic oil paintings that are often witty, and appeal with the dichotomy of surrealistic appearance anchored in totally familiar, mundane environments. If you see a few of them they impress, both with painterly skill and the immediate recognition of chosen symbolism, although once you check out a lot of them they start to appear formulaic.

(All painted images by the artist, Matthew Grabelsky)

The artist, who graduated Cum Laude in both, art history and astrophysics from Rice University, explains his intentions:

“I have long been enthralled with the ways in which mythologies from different cultures make use of animals and animal/human hybrid characters to represent the mysterious nature of the subconscious… the paintings are not intended to be viewed as fantasy or as allegory, but rather as a blend of everyday experiences with the subconscious. They are enigmatic and create dream-like worlds that invite viewers to form their own interpretation of the imagery presented.”

Whatever his intentions might be, what are our own when we start to anthropomorphize? (I’ll summarize main points from a long review article by researchers at University of Chicago and UC Berkely here.)

For one, we are a species thriving on social connection. We certainly want to connect to people and we might want to extend that connection to animals or inanimate objects. It is no surprise, then, that the data show that the lonelier people are, the more they tend to anthropomorphize. It also makes sense that we tend to anthropomorphize things more when they already display some recognizable human features – a small kitten or a panda bear are more likely subjects than rats or trees or mechanical gadgets like clocks, although all of the latter can also be objects for our decision that they have a mind of their own – there is simply a gradient.

Secondly, we have a natural inclination to make sense of the world and to find ways to control it, a motivation to be able to explain and predict others’ actions so we can react appropriately. When the world is presenting us with unexpected hick-ups or unpredictably putting obstacles in our way – the car won’t start – we increase anthropomorphizing. Predictably, there is a correlation between personality traits and the inclination to anthropomorphize: people with high needs of control tend to do it more often.

Basically, then, it looks like anthropomorphizing is triggered by distinct motivational states, the desire to connect and the need to find an explanation when a situation is different from expectations.

Are there consequences to anthropomorphizing beyond our appreciation of art or desired emotional connection to pets? Well, if we imbue non-humans with human characteristics, it might raise our empathy levels, for animals perhaps the decisive factors of how well they are treated. It might help us feel protected by a higher power given that we associate them with parental qualities. Also think of the consequences for policies and laws. If you declare a non-human entity (corporations) with person-like traits it can (did) influence legislation around campaign contributions. If you imbue a non-sentient, non-sensory entity like a cell cluster (at conception) with human-like experiencing of pain and emotions, it will (did) affect abortion laws.

It also helps to sell goods. Think of all the advertising campaigns you remember that have anthropomorphic animals in them, geckos included. It also manages, in some cases, to shape social behavior. The most successful government advertising campaign of all times was Smokey Bear affecting wildfire prevention. (Successful, that is, in accomplishing its goal to reduce wildfires. That reduction, it turns out, was a disaster in the long run by adding fuel loads that are now leading to catastrophes.) These days researchers are trying to figure out if providing us with anthropomorphic stimuli of gadgets helps shape social causes like conserving energy. The data are mixed.

Some studies found the upper left image to be most effective.

Anthropomorphizing clearly affects us, whether we feel less lonely, are amused, are concerned with animal welfare, find a target for our frustrations, explain the unexpected, get sucked into consumption, change our behavior or be subjected to legislation.

For me, the most important point, however, lies in the fact that people have understood the principles at work in humanizing and have applied them, in inverse order, to achieve effects through dehumanizing. In other words, treating pets like people and people like animals (stealing this from the title of the research paper) gets you something. Some forms of dehumanizing might be related to apathy – you are not interested in other people’s mind outside of your own group or from the perch of a higher societal status, dehumanizing them by thinking of their minds as inferior, or not worth thinking about at all. Some of it might be motivated, linked to hatred, or a convenient tool for scapegoating – think of race relations, strife between religious groups or fascism’s tool kit.

Psychologically, dehumanization is “the perception and/or belief that another person (or group) is relatively less human than the self (or ingroup)”(Ref.) We animalize others, and not just with language that links them to specific animals like rats, or apes, cockroaches or lice, or general groups of animals like vermin or parasites. Dehumanizing also occurs when people categorically believe that members of other groups have fewer developed, specifically human emotions, like shame or remorse or guilt. Animalistic dehumanization is often reserved for ethnic minorities, by racial origin or religion. A more mechanistic dehumanization (e.g. cold or empty, like a machine,) often happens with out-group members that have a different status, either above or below the dehumanizing person.

“Dehumanising discourses and conceptions have been identified in almost all major mass atrocities, prominently including those of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Japanese occupation of China. Often, outgroup members (or victims-to-be) are even compared with toxins, microbes, or cancer, suggesting that they are polluting, despoiling, or debilitating the entire in-group—leading to particularly prominent recurring demands to ‘purify’ groups or societies from the supposedly toxifying elements.”

Which brings us back to where we started namely looking at what the social media provide. Ain’t just talking animals. It also provides a deluge of dehumanizing speech, often incited by images like these – and not removed from FB or Twitter, even before the Musk takeover.

Facebook Posting

Value neutral language is often used in the headlines to help avoid detection and removal – the dehumanizing language subsequently erupts in the comments, and shapes people’s perceptions that way. Those lesser than human don’t deserve the same rights and protections. If they breed like animals, treat them like that.

From perceptions to (violent) actions is but a small step.

Too much to think through? I’ll give you a full week – I’ll be taking Wednesday and Friday off for the blog because I have to finish a larger writing project.

Predictably, it’s Camille Saint-Saëns for music today.

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For the Departed

Again we are numb when thinking about the number of people ripped out of life by gun violence and mass shootings in the U.S.

In January of 2023 over three thousand people already lost their lives to murder, accidental killings and suicide (up to date daily statistics here.) As of the 26th, the NYT reported on 39 mass shootings for this month alone, with 69 people killed and more wounded.

Today we are not digging into the causes for gun violence – you know my opinions! but just in case here is a link again to an essay in the Washington Post on how the normalization of gun violence paves the way for authoritarianism. Instead I was wondering about how people who were not famous, not on anyone’s radar other than family and friends, just everyday people like ourselves, are remembered. Once the “here are the victims” profiles have disappeared from the media who jump on the wagon of public attention after each egregious new massacre, how is the departed’s memory honored? What will remain of the mostly anonymous ones?

I am surely not the first nor the last one to think along those lines. But some do it with stunning creativity, like Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo. She started a project in 2005, Minimum Monument, that concentrated on small, ordinary men and woman made from ice. The 20 cm tall figures are spread out in public places to melt away, the opposite of static memorials to the famous. As she explains on her website (all images in this section from her website) :

In a few-minute action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice; in the place of the monument scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Middlebury, Vermont (2018)

Here is a short video of the work process. The work has been shown in cities around the world.

The project, originally an attempt to elevate the memory of the defeated, the unknown, and to make us think of mortality rather than the immortality of fame, has evolved to embrace a larger issue as well. The climate movement has coopted the symbolism of these melting ordinary men and women, alerting us to the threats and dangers of global warming, the potential disappearance of human life.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Rome, Italy (2020.)

Here is the artist’s statement:

The issue of global warming and the threatens posed by climate change on the planet that shows us an interdependence between different humans and puts us all in the same condition and in the face of a planetary urgency. This urgency requires a paradigm shift in the development of governments of all nations to think of another model of development outside the current level of consumption. These threats also finally put Western man in his place, his fate is along with the destiny of the planet, he is not the “king” of nature, but a constituent element of it. We are nature.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Paris, France (2015) and Kendall Castle, GB (2016.)

***

Closer to home a colleague and fellow Oregon Art Watch Board member, Michael Griggs, died a death of more natural causes this week, an unsung hero of the Portland theater world, as someone called him. Rest in power.

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Electra (12.22), 2022

There is another project embracing the beauty of ice and snow in all of it ephemeral instantiations that I rather like and I think Michael might have as well, given its theatric nature. Instead of standing in line at the pearly gates, waiting to cross into another realm of promised beauty and eternity, one might like to cross through these thresholds, where there is no change in locale, no upper- or under-world, no hell, just soft light.

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds, Maya (2022)

The gates were erected by Sabine Mirlesse on top of the Puy-de-Dôme volcano, home to the ruins of the Gallo-roman Temple of Mercury in the Massif Central, about 7 miles from Clermont-Ferrand (Auvergne, France.) The project, Crystalline Thresholds, was inspired by shapes from the temple door and research notes from the artist’s grandfather who investigated the properties of ice on airplane wings at this very site in 1936/37. The sculptures are exposed to the winds and weather in this micro climate, accumulating ice that will be melting by March or April.

Before and after the ice accumulated – Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Maia and Taygeta (12.22), 2022.

The ephemeral land-art installation consists of seven thresholds oriented to mirror the constellation of Pleiades and four pathmarkers for the cardinal directions. From what I learned from the press release (source for the photos in this section as well as the artist’s website):

Her research is centered around the visibility of thresholds and the interiority of landscape, with a particular interest in how geological sites are divined, interpreted, and recounted.… Her creative practice is rooted in her background in mysticism and literature.

The majority of religions and thought systems across the globe do assume that after crossing the threshold of death there will be an extension of consciousness or some circular continuation of some kind after dying. There is the vision of eternal, experienced life in paradise, or that of rebirth, or the belief that an ancestral spirit is still able to commune with the living.

The walkway along the rim of the volcano and the installation.

I, no surprise, adhere to a more limited view of things to come: eternal oblivion, also referred to as non–existence or nothingness, alternative to an extended conscience, possibilities already considered as early as the writings of Socrates and Cicero. That does not prohibit fantasizing, however, that, newly impervious to pain and cold, one might sail through these thresholds of otherworldly beauty, before the welcome nothingness sets in. We will, of course, never know. Or, to put it more cautiously, you are unlikely to read about it here….

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Celaeno (12.22), 2022.

Temperatures are supposed to fall into the low 20s beginning this weekend, with snow possible for Wednesday. Thus music today from Schubert’s Winterreise (full cycle), song III. Frozen Tears and song IV. Turned to Ice.

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Past, Present and Future: Thoughts at the Time of the Lunar New Year.

“Our mission is to collect, preserve and share the stories, oral histories and artifacts of Portland’s Chinatown as a catalyst for exploring and interpreting the history of past, present and future immigrant experiences.” – Portland Chinatown Museum (PCM) Mission Statement

The Lunar New Year – The Year of the Water Rabbit – started yesterday and the Chinese government expects about 2.1 billion journeys to be made in Asia during a 40-day travel period around the celebration as people rush back for the traditional reunion dinner on the eve of the new year. I took a short trip to Portland’s Old Town Chinatown instead on Friday, an annual pilgrimage to admire the beauty of Lan Su Chinese Garden with its festive decorations for the occasion.

This year I added a second stop, a first visit to Portland Chinatown Museum (PCM,) which is just a block away on NW Third Ave, and not too far from the Chinatown Gateway. The museum opened in 2018 and did not appear on my radar during the pandemic years. I cannot recommend a visit strongly enough: opening hours are limited from Friday to Sunday, and the current temporary exhibition will close on January 29th. So if you can, make it down there next Friday or Saturday between 11 am-3 pm, there is some revelatory art on display.

The history of the museum’s founding can be found here. Like other Old Town institutions devoted to collecting and preserving immigrants’ histories, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education among them, PCM offers a permanent exhibition depicting the lives and plight of the Chinese immigrants. Beyond the Gate: A Tale of Portland’s Historic Chinatowns provides a comprehensive look at historical artifacts, some arranged in diverse dioramas, and guides you through the various aspects of the immigrant experience with informative exhibition texts and archival photographs.

***

Two separate galleries provide space for the work of contemporary Asian American artists, currently showing Illuminating Time, installations by three different artists-in-residence working with different media. The exhibition is exquisitely curated by Horatio Law, one of the PNW’s premier public art and installation artist who serves as the Artist Residency Director. It echoes the permanent exhibitions’s themes of loss, hope and belonging, so familiar to all immigrants.

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一方有难,八方支援 “When trouble occurs at one spot, help comes from all quarters.” – Chinese Proverb

The theme of community, integral to collectivist cultures and so prominent in the museum’s permanent exhibition of historic Chinatown’s structural support systems, is picked up by Alex Chiu. Known to many of us for his vibrant murals that can be found across PDX, he undertook a series of ink drawings of community members that are displayed in the entrance hall of the museum. Placed against the backdrop of a stylized rendering of the Chinatown gateway, they depict a range of characters of all ages and degrees of visibility, pointing to the diversity of Portland’s Chinese population. Expressive and detailed, these portraits are a lively counterpart to the archival photographs of the Chinese ancestors who set foot here in the 1800s.

The juxtaposition between the traditional valuing of community and the artist’s modern ways of portraying individuals reminded me of the current trends in social psychology exploring the status of young Chinese who grow up in a world where the traditional collectivism of their culture and the modern demands and offers of Western individualism intersect. It is interesting work, based on spontaneous recollection of Chinese proverbs by these college students, reflecting which values come to mind first and how they are weighted. A changing world, yet heavily anchored still in tradition.

Clockwise from upper left: Portland Chinese Community Portrait Series: Billy Lee, Beatrix Li, Roberta Wong, Terry Lee.

***

“Take care of each other. Take care of the soil.” Shu-Ju Wang, in conversation.

Off to the side of the front venue is a room dedicated to Shu-Ju Wang‘s exploration of the history of Tanner Creek and its connection to the Chinese laborers and farmers who tended to its surrounding fertile soil to grow vegetables for both, sale and consumption. Her installation consists of multiple parts, prominently displaying a wooden slide constructed to represent the topography of the waterway with its angles and gradient. It is actually a marble run, and visitors are invited to play around, connecting through interaction. Above it hangs a mobile, made from silkscreen and gouache with a top part that was embroidered on paper tinted with gouache as well. It represents rain drops, a sense of fluidity enhanced by the aqua color range and the lightness of the material that slightly trembles in the draft. The sturdiness of the wood and the fragility of the paper assembly complement each other, rather than being opposed, representing aspects of nature that remind us of its power as much as its vulnerability.

Wang’s interest in and facility with science is evident in the exhibition posters that provide facts about the history of the creek within the build-up of Portland, the encroachment endangering the creek’s initial free run and displacing those human communities that had respected natural cycles of flooding necessary for fertile ground. Creatively, these narrative are told in letters from the creek to us, making a personal statement in a voice that I can see as particularly effective for young minds, children feeling addressed and drawn in. That said, it sure got my attention. The remaining walls are hung with the artist’s recent paintings and printings of nature-related topics, the theme of the need for environmental stewardship pervasive, meticulously and insistingly expressed.

Left to right: A fold-up book Castor and Sapient; A Study of Home (2021) Silk screen, pressure print and collage; a basket by Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) woven from native plant materials to catch the marbles.

I walked out with a plant cutting in hand, small annuals which are offered for free – by March, when this part of the exhibition is likely still on, it will be vegetable plantings to connect to the Chinese farmers’ history at Tanner Creek.

***

” …and someone far away will see flight patterns,” – excerpt from Sam Roxas-Chua’s poem Please Be Guided Accordingly.

If we link the immigrant experience to the past, present and future, as the museum intends to do, then Wang’s depiction of the past and Chiu’s capture of the present is joined by Roxas-Chua’s work incorporating the future. That might seem counterintuitive given the prevalence of allusions to memory, including the title for some of the major works.

Yet I was flooded with an impression that the work was about opening towards something, with the release that comes with the acknowledgement and acceptance of grief.

Detail: Gold Lighting and Lullaby Scripts

Part of that might have been triggered by the realization of the ephemeral character of both materials used and conceptual expression. The artist will destroy all that was presented by the end of the exhibition’s run and bury it at its source, the places in nature from which materials for the ink and paper were borrowed, and from which the inspiration was drawn. What is gone makes room for the new.

Left and RightL Gold Lighting and Lullaby Scripts. Center: Stone Satellites over an Excavation Site in John Day, Oregon.

Part of it can be found in the way Roxas-Chua’s calligraphy is open to interpretation. The technique of asemic writing that he uses is a form of communication that is unconstrained by syntax or semantics, an aesthetic rather than a verbal expression. It is the perfect medium for someone who is overburdened by the demands of too many languages (In Roxas-Chua’s case four) or too little rootedness in each.

Excerpt: Three Oranges and Blue Mountains Moon

For the viewer this opens space to connect to the calligraphy in ways unrestricted by formal demands. Unsurprisingly for me, who has spent her scientific research years studying memory, the art appeared as patterns of synaptic connections, but also of plaques causing retrieval failure, of parallel processing and encoding bias. The malleability of memory was perfectly caught in the flow of these marks, the way how present context is re-shaping, even altering what is remembered, ultimately influencing an assessment of the future.

How we approach the future is not just guided by how much our memory has changed over time, shifting away from facts and towards a narrative that helps emotional adaptation. How much any of us can remember the specifics of our past also plays a big role.

In many realms, all of our thinking about the future is rooted in memory. Policy planners, for example, routinely contemplate past patterns as a way of anticipating things to come. At a much more personal level, researchers suggest that a sense of hopefulness, or its lack, depends on how specifically we remember the past. Think about someone saying, “I cannot see how that could possibly happen,” or the opposite, “I can easily imagine how that can come to be.” That step of imagination is arguably central to how hopeful someone will be about the future, or not. And that ability to project is clearly linked to the specificity of your memory of how things unfolded in the past. Remembering opening the path to hope.

Excerpt: Three Oranges and Blue Mountains Moon

For the artist it was perhaps a way of connecting to the various landscapes and human sources that linked to the past of Chinese immigrants, from John Day to Astoria, where he interviewed people and recorded soundscapes of the environment (QR codes direct you to a listening experiences that captures these sounds, or music, or the artist’s poetry, providing additional levels of experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the totality of each artwork.)

Loss and re-emergence are central to the work. It was, I believe, most urgently captured in The Weeping Script. Please Be Guided Accordingly, the poem that accompanies the calligraphy, seizes the stages at which death rips a loved one away from you, bit by bit. There’s a release provided by inklings of hope and uplift in the future, though tempered by the knowledge that it will be a cold, lonely run. Maybe not the entire three year mourning period proscribed by Confucius, but the concession that grief exists and yet can be turned around. It calmly points to opening of new horizons.

For anyone mourning it will be brutally moving, and yet it is incredibly beautiful, hopeful work.

***

And now we turn to the elephant in the room. If the consummation of loss is part of the art inside the museum, wait until you see it instantiated in the suffering of the houseless in real life outside. The many houseless in the neighborhood, their tents, their misery, their detritus, are something the Old Town businesses are trying to deal with.

City plans almost a decade in the making have not yielded visible results, even though the mayor’s office claims progress. In October 2021, spurred by the rise in crime, violence and public camping in the Old Town neighborhood, the leaders of four cultural institutions — Lan Su Chinese Garden, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and Portland Chinatown Museum — wrote a joint open letter asking each city and county commissioner for immediate help. In March of last year, Old Town Community leaders unveiled a plan to repair and reopen the neighborhood, which included goals like reducing 911 call answering times, improving lighting in the area, and reducing tent camping by one-third.

The right words were said: “As Portland’s oldest neighborhood, home to immigrants who overcame decades of discrimination and indignity, and today, home to so many who are fighting just to stay alive, we must to whatever we can to respond to the crisis of humanity unfolding around us. And we must do it today,” said Elizabeth Nye, the executive director of Lan Su Chinese Garden, “the local government’s inability to safeguard Old Town disrespects its history.It is particularly devastating to our houseless neighbors who deserve more from their government.”

Mural on NW Davis St

The subsequent reality, however, amounted to an exponential increase in sweeps of the neighborhood. The 90-day “re-set” led to a particular form of camp removal, structure abatement sweeps, that can be ordered by the police chief or engineers in two different bureaus overseen by city commissioners. The standard Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, or HUCIRP, sweep provides at least 72 hours’ notice to unhoused Portlanders so they can gather their belongings and voluntarily move before city contractors remove them from a given area. The structure abatement approach extends 1 hour warning, if that. If you happen to be away from your tent or belonging, all is lost. (For a detailed description of the way things unfolded last summer, here is a report by advocates from Streetroots, an organization where I taught writing workshops for the houseless until the pandemic started.) Shelter referrals given during or after sweeps are not enough – you can stay for one night, after having been completely uprooted. Many feel unsafe in shelters even for that one night, or can’t apply because they have pets.

Mural on NW Davis St depicting the view South on NW 4th Ave

Do these sweeps help solve the situation? Of course not. They clean up the streets for a short time or for a particular event, while making people less stable, re-traumatizing them, and shifting the entire problem just to a different location. Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan’s five October 2022 resolutions on homelessness included a ban on unsanctioned camping and the construction of compulsory mass homeless encampments, which would host up to 250 people. This can only be seen as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision letting the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals re Martin v. Boise decision stand, stating that a houseless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in absence of alternatives.

Mural on NW Davis St

Of the six promised safe-rest villages only 2 have opened so far. Evictions from rental properties have skyrocketed since the renter protection during the pandemic was lifted – in the first 10 months of 2022 alone there were 18.831 evictions, as reported by a PSU research group. According to the 2022 Multnomah County Point-in-Time Count report, 24% of those experiencing unsheltered homelessness reported COVID-related reasons as the cause, adding to increased inflation and rising rent costs. Despite the stereotype, these are not all people with criminal records, or mental illness, or living with substance abuse problems. And even if they were, they would have the same human right to shelter as we all do. On top of it all, Senator Wyden’s DASH Act, (Decent, Affordable, Safe Housing for All) languishes in committee, even though it has support from all sides, business owners, land lord organizations and advocates for the houseless included.

I completely understand the need for businesses and institutions to be able to function in a safe environment and one that does not interfere with business under the specter of violence and crime. But let us acknowledge that the reaction so far has been to try and disperse the unhoused, without providing sufficient, actual housing, the only permanent solution to homelessness.

Archival photograph of NW Fourth Avenue

Until something changes structurally and expediently, I fear museums like the Portland Chinatown Museum will not get the exposure they deserve because many people hesitate to visit Old Town. It is truly sad, given what is on offer. But it is heartbreaking to see the suffering and loss in the surrounding streets, with poverty levels probably comparable to those experienced by the very first Chinese immigrants that came to seek a better life in a new home, leaving famine and disease behind. Past, present and future connected at the most basic level of human experience, daily survival.

Portland Chinatown Museum

127 NW Third Avenue
Portland, OR 97209

Friday – Sunday
11:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Docent-led group tours are Friday through Sunday by reservation only.

Current exhibition Illuminating Time closes on January 29th.

Join the museum on Saturday, January 28 at 10:00 a.m. for the seventh annual Lunar New Year Dragon Dance Parade and Celebration, presented in partnership with the Oregon Historical Society. 

The 150-foot dragon will be celebrating the holiday with lion dancers, performers, and a lively community parade through Old Town, Downtown, and up to the Oregon Historical Society Park 

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Henk Pander – The Ordeal

Ordeal: any extremely severe or trying test, experience, or trial. Synonyms: agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation – Thesaurus.com

Here’s the funny thing: when you look up the definition of ordeal, the word judgment is entirely missing from the dictionary listing, and yet that is the etymological root of the term: in Old English it was ordāl, in Dutch oordeel, and in German Urteil.

Why do I care? So many thoughts emerged about the concept of judgement after visiting an exhibition, titled The Ordeal, of recent paintings by my friend Henk Pander in the Alexander Art Gallery at Clackamas Community College. Let’s disentangle them one by one.

First of all, as a friend I cannot objectively judge the artwork, but I can certainly describe my reactions and put them in a context of what I know about the artist, which might help to understand what propels the art. Then again, it might be pure speculation, but that is the bread and butter of the critic. I certainly hold with Oscar Wilde’s notion, expressed in his preface to his 1891 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.”

Henk Pander photographed by me in his studio in 2017 during a double portrait session

Experience first.

The college’s Alexander Art Gallery, located in the award-winning Niemeyer Center that opened several years ago, is a windowless, effectively lit space that reminds of a sheltered cove, an impression fostered by a brown, highly reflective floor which resembles the surface of water mirroring the paintings on the wall.

It is a place of calm, until you lift your eyes and look at the walls: then all hell breaks loose.

The power of fire and brimstone, skeletons, skulls and wrecks, mythological creatures bent on destruction and barely human figures dancing on the ruins, all in intensely saturated, vibrant colors momentarily takes your breath away.

Henk Pander Rising Water (2015)

I was familiar with many, perhaps the majority of these paintings, having encountered them in the artist’s studio. The effect of seeing them grouped together, undistracted by any other visual input, precisely and mindfully lit, sequenced in a way where all are directionally anchored in relationship to their neighbors, elevates the work to a whole different dimension.

The exhibition consists of 8 enormous oils on linen, and 6 large pen-and-ink drawings which thrive on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings.

They also provide material for teaching about artistic practice: some of them are studies or just alternate versions of the oil paintings. Here is one example (referencing Rembrandt’s Night Watch, linking to art history as well).

Henk Pander Dawn (2017)

Thoughts next.

What drives a life-long preoccupation with apocalyptic scenarios and mythological narratives that predominantly reference death and destruction? Why remind us of threats to nature, of plane disasters, with pilots deliberately drowning themselves and their plane’s human cargo, or warmongers shooting planes down? Why dwell on the violence of man killing man, or mythological creatures symbolizing sudden, inevitable harm? No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand. Or so one thinks at first glance.

Henk Pander Abyss (2015)

A possible explanation could be guided by the very first painting in the round, if you start with a clock-wise exploration of the art on display. The canvas unveils an autobiographical scene from the artist’s childhood, being shipped off to a region of Holland where food was still available during the hunger years under Nazi occupation. The existential horrors of war and deprivation, imprinted on a young child that saw death on a daily basis and witnessed the fear, despair and other intense reactions from the adults in his life, might guide an artistic exploration of the topic. Given the continuing abundance of existential threats to individuals and/or our planet, the sensibilities of the adult artist might be used to draw parallels.

Henk Pander The Skipper’s Wife (2015)

I believe there is something else going on here, though. For one, Pander was raised in a rigidly Calvinistic culture, a religion he long left behind with his emigration to the United States so many decades ago. Dutch Calvinism might have embedded parts of its philosophy deeply enough to exert continuing influence, if only in explicit rejection. Secondly, the artist’s formative years were spent being educated by the premier art teachers of his time in the Dutch academy, infused with the tenets of Dutch art history starting with the Golden Age of the 17th century. These two factors interact, I want to argue, producing work that is not about the witnessing of horror per se, but the fragility of our existence, caught in the very moment where something irreversibly changes, never to be the same again, raging at the claimed inevitability of it all.

The Dutch have a name for that circumstantial reversal, staetveranderinge, a term derived from the Greek word peripeteia, and a concept embraced in Dutch paintings since the 1600s. The change could be in any direction – from anguish to praise, like in Rembrandt van Riijn’s versions of The Angel appearing to Hagar, but most often captured when circumstances shifted irrevocably to disaster, like Jan Steen’s Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus.

Jan Steen, Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus, c. 1668, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

The preoccupation with “state change” corresponded with the rise of Calvinism, a religion that dominated the Dutch provinces and led to long religious wars against Catholic nations but also to boundless prosperity, shaping the evolution of commerce and empire.

Henk Pander Don’t Look (2015)

I’m obviously oversimplifying, but one of Calvinism’s tenets was about judgment and inevitability: the doctrine of predestination, which implied that G-d had already decided everyone’s eternal fate before he created the world. Some, then, were destined to thrive and find salvation, the rest were not. Election was by the grace of G-d, reprobation, on the other hand, the judgement of a G-d bent on just punishment. Calvin himself is cited: “The praise of salvation is claimed for G-d, whereas the blame of perdition is thrown upon those who of their own accord bring it upon themselves.” I will, to the end of my days, not understand this logic, somehow it’s our own fault if we are bad, all the while being predestined to end up in hell. Riddle me that. In any case, things were inevitably decided from the start.

Judgement didn’t stop with the authority on high. Calvinism had judicial assemblies composed of the church’s ruling elders and the pastor, who watched over, regulated and judged the issues of the congregation. In fact there are historians who claim that the social control of Calvinism reached all the way into the social lives of the Dutch: their windows, even on street level, have no curtains so that everyone can look in (a custom that disappeared only during the last few decades). The cultural quirk was rooted in the concept that a praiseworthy Christian had nothing to hide.

Henk Pander Harpy (2015)

Cherished protestant traits like hard work and frugality, and the eagerness to spread the gospel of Calvinism around the world, helped establish colonial empires (never mind resource extraction and slave labor and trade). The 17th century United East India Company (VOC – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) prospered from the East Indies (Indonesia) to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), bringing untold riches home to the Netherlands, as did its later sister company trading the Atlantic regions, the West India Company (WIC.)

That wealth spread among a relatively large new middle-class, highly educated and willing to spend some money on the arts – they had plenty of master painters to choose from. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel lectured in his Ästhetik:

“The Dutch painters also brought a sense of honest and cheerful existence to objects in nature. All their paintings are executed meticulously and combine a supreme freedom of artistic composition with a fine feeling for incidentals. Their subjects are treated both freely and faithfully, and they obviously loved the ephemeral. Their view was fresh and they concentrated intensely on the tiniest and most limited of things.”

This was written 200 years ago, about painters from 200 years earlier still. Applies to Henk Pander’s work across various media as well, with the cheerfulness restricted to water colors of floral assemblies and landscapes, the focus on ephemera ubiquitous in his oil paintings. But he also captures the vision that his artistic forbears were so keen on, the point of no return when the plane drowns, the earth floods, violence arrives in its devilishly incarnation, the sharpness of the Minotaur’s skull echoed in the thrust of erection, the Harpy harbinger of the fall of towers.

Henk Pander The Minotaur (2015)

Is the depiction of all these ordeals and threats, over and over again across his artistic lifetime, a nod to the inevitability of our fate? Or are the paintings, in contrast to and in rejection of religious determinism, a warning? Do they imply the possibility that there are ways to prevent catastrophe, escape harm, make the world a less violent place if we abdicate our lust for power or our addiction to materialism? Is the work about agency rather than inevitability, the possibility of change rather than a set fate?

Are the increasingly thick slathering of paint and the choice of – yes – occasional garish colors signs of the artist’s smoldering rage at the futility of his warnings? An outcry that no-one heeds the predictions of yet another prescient artist putting the writing on the wall – or the marks on the canvas, as the case may be?

Henk Pander Excerpts from Native Soil (2015)

I do know that people tend to look away, despite the awards and accolades Pander has accrued across a lifetime, with works included in the collections of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), Museum Henriette Polak (Zutphen, The Netherlands), City of Amsterdam, City of Portland, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena), Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum (Seattle), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (University of Oregon), and Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Willamette University), where a fifty-year retrospective exhibition of his work was shown in 2011.

The avoidance is not so much in judgment of the art, but likely an act of self preservation, not wanting to disturb our already fragile equilibrium. More agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation? Bad news sells in the media. In the arts, not so much, unless they are a particular contemporary darling of the art world. Historically, art that defied the powers that be or let us in on their malfeasances was censored by church and state alike. These days, free market mechanisms are all it takes. If people are avoiding that which troubles them, commercial galleries or museums who depend on sales and visitor numbers, respectively, are not rushing to put us through the ordeal of witnessing. It’s a judgement call, they say, with varying justifications, but a clear view of the bottom line. More power to educational institutions, then, that provide access, in an environment that does the work justice.

You have a chance to judge for yourself. There is an urgency in the paintings that deserves our collective attention.

Henk Pander Excerpt from Water Rising (2015)

The exhibition is free and open to the public until the end of the month, with an artist reception this Thursday Jan. 19, 2023, noon-1 p.m. Henk Pander will speak about his work at 1 p.m. There is plenty of free parking in front of the ADA accessible building.

Niemeyer Center at Clackamas Community College,

19600 Molalla Ave.

Oregon City, Oregon 97045

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Here is another review from Oregon Arts Watch.

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