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Ruth Ross

What to do with the past?

· Stitching Stories at Art at the Cave Gallery in Vancouver, WA. ·

“If nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plentitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of [Walter] Benjamin is there to prove it.” – Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin; Or, Nostalgia,” Marxism and Form, 1971 

Bonuspoints for a gallery that makes you wonder before you even set foot into the building! At least that’s how I reacted when I arrived in Vancouver to meet with one of the artists currently exhibiting at Art at the Cave and was greeted by a sign sporting multiple promises – some of which were indeed kept by the work shown inside.

Stitching Stories features multiple artists, loosely connected by work using stitching and weaving, their work triggering immediate associations of past, present and future for me, the flow of time signaling change.

Sharon Svec, part of the gallery team and one of the exhibiting artists.

Sam Yamauchi‘s A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity symbolizes the hazards of both, a search for and communication of identity to others. The stitched collages unfold in the here and now, boldly describing a process affected by variables all too familiar for many of us, rightly questioning if there is a permanent, identifiable self to be found.

Sam Yamauchi A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity

Sharon Svec‘s The Eyes Have It is an enchanting set of three eye-shaped, sculptural mobiles intricately woven from roots of ivy, some starting to sprout leaves in the warmth of the cavernous room. The robust material (have you ever tried to get rid of ivy roots in your garden?) takes on a more filigree appearance when laced together, light suffusing in both directions. The combination of light and eyes, three of them no less, triggered amused associations of clairvoyance, the third eye predicting the future – and the evanescence of such attempts. The German word for clairvoyance is Hellsehen, seeing the light. I have always believed that that is a much more applicable description of our take on the past when we come to inspect it, rather than a grasp on the future. But what do I know.

Sharon Svec The Eyes Have it.

***

The past, as it turns out, is what I came for, drawn by two bodies of work by Ruth Ross, Yiddish and The Doll Dialogues, respectively. More precisely, I was interested in how the artist approaches the past. Honoring the past in an attempt to defy impermanence, holding on to it to prevent its loss, turning nostalgic to retrieve remembered affect? Her frequent use of discarded fabrics, beyond their prime and found in thrift store bins or yard sales, often applied back to front, had a material feel of things dragged up, preserved to last. Yet with all her work, things go far deeper than that.

Yiddish is, in some ways, the perfect vehicle for considerations of preservation and loss, not just in the intimate sphere of what’s spoken in one’s family to which Ross refers. The language itself is about 1000 years old, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, with the name Yiddish itself meaning Jewish. It had other names as well, Taytsh (German), Yidish-taytsh (Jewish-German), Loshn-ashkenaz (the Ashkenazi tongue), and Zhargon (jargon,) but Yiddish remained the standard reference since the 19th century. Before the Holocaust there were over 10 million people in the world speaking Yiddish, a number that was, in addition to the murder of 6 million Jews, further diminished by processes of acculturation and assimilation in America and the former Soviet Union, and by repression of Yiddish and acculturation to Hebrew in Israel. (Ref.)

Ruth Ross Balabusta (Housewife) Details below

Feh signals contempt…

The language itself went through many permutations but generally allowed people who were living in the diaspora to have a shared means of communication. It consists of multiple elements from other languages, Romance in origin, German and Rabbinical Hebrew among them. Each new region where Jews settled after having been driven out from other countries, developed its own vernacular, creating hybrid words, just as we see in so many other languages. The different dialects spoken throughout different European regions were interspersed in American Yiddish, when the immigrants arrived, and standard Yiddish now contains many English words as well.

It has been a two-way street, clearly. Many of the words Ross chose, stitched with wit, subtle hints, allusions to childhood memories and an attentive eye for type-face design, are part of our own English vocabulary, used frequently without knowing their origins. That is even more true for the German speaker. I certainly grew up with everyday words that turned out to be Yiddish when I thought they were German, adjusted in their spelling. In fact there are over 1000 of them, with about 30 in heavy rotation, Schlamassel (Shlimazl – bad fortune or things gone wrong,) malochen (physical labor, from Maloche – work,) Ganove (Gannew in Yiddish, a petty criminal) or Techtel-Mechtel (a fling, derived from the yiddish word Tachti, which means secret) among them.

Ruth Ross Schlemiel/Schlimazel (A Schlemiel is the person who spills the soup and a Schlimazel is the person it lands on…)

Ruth Ross Nu? (Whassup)

Last year I reviewed Ross’ extraordinary series, Red Scare, about being Jewish, politically active and under threat during the McCarthy era. It had a strong political voice, something that is less obvious but still notable in the current exhibition. To draw attention to a language that has long served to identify yourself as a target for anti-Semitism is the opposite to what so many Jews, particularly of the artist’s parent’s generation, were told to do in order to assimilate. There are whole books written about the slogan Dress British, Think Yiddish that encouraged Jews to blend in, in order to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, in particular the Ivy Leagues. Keep your identity inside, think, don’t speak Yiddish. Variations on this can be found as recent as a decade ago, when the originally Jewish sartorial empire, Saks Fifth Avenue, teamed up with a company that made adjustable stays for men’s shirt collars, imprinted with Yiddish words, functionally hidden from view in their little collar slots. The special collection’s name? “Think Yiddish, Dress British.”

Ruth Ross Schmatta (A rag, or piece of clothing)

Ruth Ross Nudnik (A pestering or irritating person. As the artist related, her Papa used to call her that in exasperation when she disturbed his peace.)

Here is work that draws attention to identity, created during a time when people are physically attacked on the street just for speaking Hebrew, two months ago in Berlin. A time when, closer to home, Marjorie Taylor Green suspected that California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers, and exhibited during a time where Gaza has become a killing field. Plainly there are people in the world who will suspect us, dislike us and maybe despise us because we are Jewish. This point is certainly amplified by many people’s reactions to the horrors unleashed upon civilians in the Middle East. And therefore, unsurprisingly, there is some apprehension associated with letting people know that you are Jewish, and a Yiddish speaker. In addition to concern about vulnerability, many Jews feel some sense of shame or rage about what the government of Israel is pursuing in reaction to the horrifying attack by Hamas, and know we will be called anti-semitic if we voice our anti-Zionism, call for a cease fire or add our voices to the chorus of Jewish voices for Peace. To embrace an essential part of your identity then, in public, is a political act.

Ruth Ross The Royal OY and Gevalt

***

Ross’ second body of work references personal history as well, her life-long relationship with her dolls. Where Yiddish is explicit, straight forward, easily deciphered work, the Doll Dialogues appeared to me to be the opposite. Gauzy layers, combining laser prints on silk, gel prints on silk organza, and lace appliqués with occasional embroidery make for mysterious tableaux each with an obscured doll at its center.

If you are so inclined, they invite psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood memories, symbolized by the dolls, long veiled and inaccessible. After all, here is what Freud wrote:

. . . In the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influence of a variety of later psychological forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories”and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

—Sigmund Freud, “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” 1901

If you are like me, you will rather think about the symbolic value that dolls take on in their respective contemporary settings. They might not always be as explicit and creepy as the ones used by Hans Bellmer, who withdrew into the privacy of his obsessions in response to the Nazi’s imperatives about healthy rather than “degenerative” art. They might not be as culturally appropriated as Max Ernst‘s works derived from his collection of Katsina dolls of Hopi origin. But dolls do have a role within a political context, just as they had symbolic value since their inception so many thousands of years ago, first in religious settings, then as status symbols for the aristocracy and eventually as a plaything intended to shape little girls into their roles of care takers and mothers in the context of the nuclear family.

Ruth Ross On the Bus

Ross’ depiction of her dolls is shrouded in more ways than the visual one. Their titles refer to occasions down the memory lane of the artist, rather than serving as explanatory pointers. Their appearance is at times surreal, at times androgynous, hazy and dark. Lace and silk notwithstanding, there is no sense of an exaggerated female presence, a dress-up tool or emphasis on beauty. No hint of happy, innocent tea parties. These collages are blissfully free of nostalgia, even when tied to personal experiences of the doll’s owner.

Why do I celebrate that, you wonder? What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia?

We live in an era where nostalgia for the traditional role of women, playing house, being subservient, acting doll-like, enjoying the kitchen (Senator Katie Britt, we see you!) is making an organized come-back. It is signaled to a receptive public, yearning for a “traditional past” by ever so many flags, a baby voice appropriate for doll play among them. It has, however, nothing to do with how the dictionary defines nostalgia: “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”

Rather, during (aspiring) fascistic eras it becomes a political tool: Reactionary nostalgia creates a cultural identity by mystifying past and present. The myths of racial superiority and the claimed heritage of a superior religion or immutable gender hierarchy promises succor to those who are feeling deprived and demoted in their present-day existence. That was true for historical periods in the last century, be it in Germany or Italy, or Spain. It is true now for Russian claims of rights to land and resources, and we see it in our own country when we look at the justifications for political movements, Supreme Court sanctioned and enabled, that try to turn the clock back and remove rights extended to those who did not originally occupy the top of a hierarchical ladder (for that matter, who still don’t…)

Ruth Ross She laid her Baby at my Feet detail below

Rather than engaging in nostalgia, we should acknowledge that the past cannot be completely retrieved, and should inform the present only in so far as it allows us to discern what parts of the past should not be repeated. Clinging to conceptions of power that should be assigned to certain people in perpetuity, at the expense of others, is unjustifiable. So is clinging to ideas of permanent victimhood, used as justification by people to become perpetrators regardless of the horrors that they will unleash.

Ruth Ross Love this Doll to Death

The dolls in this exhibition are ambivalent enough that they invite associations to both, object and subject, good and evil. They are a welcome reminder that we need to lift the veil that obscures some version of truth, a veil fashioned out of our clinging to an imagined past, blocking our vision of a more equitable future.

STITCHING STORIES

Ruth Ross & Sam Yamauchi

MARCH 2024: Artist Talk from 1-2 pm on Saturday March 16; a reading by Ruth Ross’ guest poet Leanne Grabel on March 23 at 3 pm.

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660,

Music today, how could I not, is the mechanical doll’s aria from Offenbach’s Hoffman’s Erzählungen.

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Addressing Affliction

· Artists processing Cancer ·

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite./For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

LIKE ANY other segment of the population, artists have not been immune to cancer. The recent loss of one of our own to this disease, Henk Pander, is a painful reminder, grief still rippling through the community. We know of numerous famous painters, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustav Klimt, Marc Chagall and David Hockney, who were afflicted. Photographers not far behind, Dorothea Lange among them as well as Ester Bubley, Arthur Rothstein, Ralph Steiner and Gordon Parks, to name just a few. (Here is a more comprehensive selection from a recent art exhibition at the Hillstrom Museum of Art, MN.)

Medical research indicates that, compared to other professional groups, the mortality patterns among male painters shows an increased risk of dying of cancer, manifesting as bladder, colon and brain cancer, and also leukemia. For women painters, it is breast and lung cancer that is found at elevated rates compared to the non-artist population. The causal mechanisms have not been established, but there are likely links to hazardous substances present in the paints and finishes painters use (Ref.) Then again, it could be the immense stress levels from a precarious existence, shared by many artists, that affect the immune system negatively. Substantially increased cancer mortality rates for photographers are clearly associated with chemicals applied in darkrooms while processing film (Ref.)

Cancer was historically something people did not talk about, an abysmal affliction associated with shame, superstition and mortal dread. You find a few portraits in renaissance art that show women who are likely dealing with breast cancer, but none of the type of work that has begun to emerge, finally, since the last century: visual artists dealing with their own illness, processing their experience through their creativity or using their experience as a means of questioning the stereotypes that surround illness and death. From attempts at personal healing to attacking the metaphors associated with the disease – “it’s a fight, a battle, a crusade” – to simply conveying insights so that others can be prepared or warned, you find a variety of artworks that embody our era’s willingness and courage to expose oneself and/or make the personal political. A late, but welcome attempt to heed Blake’s appeal to “cleanse the doors of perception,” revealing underlying truths rather than keeping them out of our field of vision.

The incomparably courageous and smart artist Hannah Wilke documented her experience with Lymphoma in fascinating and brutally honest staged photographs that were evidence for her unsurpassed talent for gesture. May her memory be a blessing.

Hannah Wilke Intra-Venus Triptych 1992-93

Artists do not just expose their diseased bodies, of course. Some prefer narrative paintings that indirectly alert to what is lost, often for entire generations. I very much relate to the painting below that depicts imagined inter-generational connection when the person is no longer there to talk. If you have cancer when your children are young, one of the bottomless fears concerns what will happen to them, accompanied by an overarching sorrow that they will never really get to know you (or you them) on a more equal footing.

Ofer Katz “Things I wanted to tell you – Mark and Aliza Ainis at The Dead Sea” 2021

(This painting, by the way, is part of a project that has been of enormous help to cancer patients trying to overcome isolation. A national organization, Twist Out Cancer, offers a program called Brushes with Cancer.

“… it strategically matches artists with those touched by cancer to create unique pieces of artwork reflective of their journey. Over a period of 4 months, pairs will connect virtually and their relationships are guided and supported by Twist Out Cancer mentors with the intention of creating a support system for both the artist and inspiration. The program finishes on a high note with our signature celebratory art exhibition, gala and auction.”)

Then there is Prune Nourry’s public art signaling healing, to which I am admittedly partial, even though her Catharsis series skirts the edges of metaphors that I abhor. Amazons are of course warriors, implying an ongoing war with the disease. I continue to be floored by Nourry’s ideas and instantiation of mammoth projects (I wrote about her work I saw in Paris some years back here.) The battle metaphors so lend themselves to focus on winners and losers, victors and victims, survivors and fallen, all of which imply an either/or categorization and a hint of fortitude (or lack thereof) in dealing with the illness. As any cancer patient will tell you, the implications that one isn’t tough enough, fighting enough, optimistic enough, radical enough, tend to add insult to injury.

Here are some images of Nourry’s work processing breast cancer and an explanation from her website.

“Catharsis was born in 2018 with The Amazon, a monumental four-meter concrete sculpture with glass eyes, inspired by an ancient marble statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art representing an injured amazon. Prune Nourry created the sculpture as a cathartic act in her fight against cancer. Inspired by ex-voto traditions, particularly the Japanese mizuko kuyo, the piece is entirely covered in thousands of incense sticks. During a public performance in the heart of Manhattan, the incense went up in smoke to symbolize healing.”

Breast cancer seems to be the dominant topic for artists processing cancer – perhaps because it is so prevalent, has been suppressed as a subject for so long or, importantly, because patients more often than not live to tell the tale. Gallery shows focus on the resilience of survivors, and museums draw attention to the topic, like this ingenious stunt at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum of Art in Madrid in October last year. They featured an exhibition titled “From the skin to the canvas: another take on breast cancer,” displaying digital copies of works by Francisco de Goya, Peter Paul Rubens and Hans Baldung Grien which had been altered to make it look like the nude subjects have undergone mastectomies. (Unsurprisingly, most of the media reports did block out the images – I really had to hunt to find one….)

Thoughts about breast cancer seem to be manageable, compared to, say, lung cancer which has a far worse prognosis and less visible damage, as well as being associated with un/spoken assumptions that it is your own fault because of bad habits (I wrote about this recently here.) Breast cancer survivors’ day-to-day functioning is not as affected by missing breasts (non-withstanding the emotional losses tied to female beauty ideals, or those of sexual pleasure) once you’ve left the cancer behind you, compared to living with the aftermath of lung cancer. The absence of breasts becomes an integrated norm, with all other physical functions intact, allowing you for long stretches to forget the ordeal. That is not the case with a lung removed which affects every step you take, every breath, really. The knowledge that this dreadful beast tends to spread surreptitiously much more frequently makes ignoring your state near impossible. Seen in that light, the prevalence of breast cancer-related art becomes understandable.

In fact, to my knowledge there seems to be no art by established visual artists engaging with lung cancer, although a few rather depressing novels and autobiographies by afflicted authors exist: “The Quarry” by Iain Banks, “In gratitude” by Jenny Diski “When breath becomes air” by Paul Kalanithi , and “Stadium IV” (Stage IV) by Sander Kollaard. Two authors who died of lung cancer wrote poems about their ordeal: Raymond Carver (“What the doctor said” and John Updike (“Needle biopsy”). Illness perception – in this case one of doom and resignation – has consequences, for coping as a patient as much as for the obviously lacking desire or energy to create an artistic representation of the trauma.

***

“A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and un-compromised, in its innermost structure.” 
― Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music

PROCESSING the illness experience can have enormous benefits, for artist and beholder alike, regardless what disease gave rise to the art. That point was driven home for me last week when shown the new work by artist and cancer survivor Ruth Ross. I had written about Ross’ thrilling exhibition Red Scare last fall, embroidered fabric and photographic collages about growing up in the shadow of the Rosenberg trials during the McCarthy era, and was curious where she would go next. Once again, her projects fuse the personal with the political, this time embodying contradictions that belie the surface harmony of the portraits.

Photographs of the artist taken during her chemotherapy and transformed into cyanotype prints are embroidered with fanciful, phantasmagorical hats that are often quite beautiful, sometimes resembling overbearingly heavy crowns.

In Ross’s own words:

Marking 11 years out from chemotherapy for breast cancer, I came across a series of stark photos I had asked my husband to take when I was at my weakest and most debilitated. Seeing from those photos how frail I seemed, I created a series of cyanotype prints to silk organdy, a delicate and nearly transparent textile that would reflect my vulnerability.

What if I were to revisit that troubling time with a more tender view? Could layers, image, and stitching, endow that self with what I thought I had lost? Or perhaps with what I never even had? An elaborate hat made of flowers from a far-off paradise. A fanciful silver bird grasping some golden threads. With this work I revisit a difficult time. I can now express joy, self-indulgence. Ignore my judgmental self and invest it with wit, frivolity, and forgiveness.

For me, the work elicited a less personalized interpretation. It embodies contradictions that are structural, not just based in private experience. Hats during chemotherapy are meant to hide the stark nakedness of the head, the ugliness of a skull bereft of one of culture’s (or myth’s, literature’s, religion’s) greatest symbols: hair.

Hair is a powerful signifier of individual identity (lustrous locks signal fertility and health, for example,) as well as gender and group identity – think of hair styles reserved for elites, shorn hair for skin heads but also nuns, indicating celibacy in the latter case, long hair for politically active males in the western 1960s and so on. Women were constrained to certain hair styles before, during or after marriage entering widowhood, cross-culturally so, as anthropologists exploring initiation-, marriage- and mourning rites can attest. And of course, women in multiple religions are not allowed to reveal their hair at all to people outside the family. Hair has a place in witchcraft rituals, and it surely plays a role in the economy: The global hair care market size reached US $82.3 BILLION in 2022. That is a lot of gels, rinses, oils, tonics, serums, masks, dressings, shampoos, conditioners, and sprays, to treat hair to be shiny and voluminous, much to the envy of those of us born with something more resembling chives…

Black hair in this country was also a subject of policies driven by structural racism: only now have we done away with prohibitions of natural hairstyles, like afros, braids, bantu knots, and locs, policies used to justify the removal of Black children from classrooms, and Black adults from their employment. The Crown Act, (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) passed in March 2022, banning hair-related discrimination.

Hair, then, is public, not just private. Drug-induced loss of hair is to be hidden from the public, however, to spare others the reminders of mortality, and to not call attention to what is perceived as our own decimation in (assumed) attractiveness value. In that sense, chemo-caused hair loss is both a public and private representation of the illness. It can cause individual distress as well as societal stigma (honestly, how do you even separate these two variables?) National Institute of Health data reveal as recently as 2 years ago that up to 14% of women refuse life saving chemo treatment because of their fear of hair loss. Risking death because of internalized beauty ideals imposed by a society that judges women by this standard, and easily dismisses those who no longer conform to it, imagine!

Hats, in this context, serve as a means of hiding visible signs of cancer treatment to protect societal denial of illness, and help avoiding dreaded negative attention. Ross’ hats, of course, do the opposite. All attention goes to these flights of fancy, then extending to the transparent emanations of suffering beneath, forced to confront the ravages and all they imply. The contradictions of joy and pain are inextricably linked.

The assumption of one being in the present, the other in the past, however, is an illusion, just like the possibility that these hats could ever not slip off the bald skull unless artificially glued or pricked by pin needles. You might be cancer free at this moment, but you will never be free of the thoughts that it might raise its ugly tentacles again. All you can do is cherish the here and now that is the potential ante-room – and Ross does that with luminous defiance. The choice of materials that simultaneous imply decay and lusciousness in itself is ingenious, with tropical splendor growing out of the ripped fabric of our lives.

The sobering realization that the exuberant blossoming of the flora echos the relentless proliferation of cancer cells is, alas, inevitably not far behind.

The artist’s expressed intention to create these pieces as a way of ending a hard chapter on a high note are a welcome reminder of healing. But there is an implicit way of forcing us to look at the consequences of cancer treatment for women that is radical in her art: part of the suffering during this affliction has to do with stigmatization, and desperate attempts to escape it and the isolation it imposes are often futile.

No hat, however beautiful (or unobtrusive) can make that fact disappear. Might as well bring it to the forefront, then, as Ross does, with gusto. Her work opens our perception to experiences during illness that go beyond the physical affliction or the psychological realm of dread induced by cancer. We are driven to hide our deterioration from the eyes of a world that has made beauty a commodity and reminders of mortality a taboo.

One of Ross’ collages is part of the group exhibition: Not Just: A World Collage Day.

May 12th – June 9th, 2023

Maude Kerns Art Center Eugene, OR

1910 East 15th Avenue
Eugene, Oregon 97403

  Ruth Ross Chemo Bird Hat 2023

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Ripped Threads

“If it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

IMAGINE BEING A YOUNG CHILD ripped out of your familiar surround, transplanted into a world completely foreign to you, including a new language. Imagine being raised Jewish and now settled in a Christian school. Imagine being entrusted with an adult secret, urged not to tell that you will be leaving, unable to fill in the gaps about the reasons, a dark cloud over your mind too young to understand the facts, but old enough to pick up the feelings: pure fear. Your guess: Germany late 1930s? Guess again: America, during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.

She told me

I had a chance to talk to artist Ruth Ross, for a preview of her upcoming exhibition, Red Scare, at Gallery 114 in August, and look at her beguiling work – fabric collages, cyanotype photography and embroidery – which deals with that childhood trauma at the same time that it provides a memory cue for all of us to think back to the days of communist witch-hunts, and perhaps forward to possible witch-hunts of our own now and in years to come.

Ross was born to a young Jewish couple, Ethel and Eli Ross, both members of the Communist Party of the United States, deeply engaged in the fight against racism and the struggle for social justice and improvement of the lives of workers. Their social circle, and indeed close friends, included many such idealists, some compelled to fight fascism in Spain, sacrificing their lives to combat that scourge. Their circles overlapped with those of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, accused and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project, executed by electric chair in 1953, leaving two young boys orphaned. Insisting on their innocence to the very last, it was later confirmed that Julius had indeed handed over some secrets, though less crucial ones than was claimed, and an innocent Ethel was convicted on false testimony of her brother-in-law who tried to protect his own family.

June 19th, 1953 – Date of Execution

The artist’s parents were shellshocked and decided to leave the country to where their meager funds would take them and their 2 children, ending up in Puerto Rico. What do we know about the times that would warrant such a life-changing decision? Was it based on justified fear or mired in hysteria? What could compel a couple deeply entrenched in their Brooklyn, NY neighborhood, their work, their organizations, their family, comrades and friendships, to choose displacement?

Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation. A better world’s in birth.

Ethel and Eli Ross

The 1950s American psyche was accosted with the Red Scare, with powerful political forces inciting widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies. Fear of hostile outsiders was, of course, nothing new to Americans. Starting in colonial times until the early 19th century it focussed on Catholics, who were seen as inferior and unassimilable, stoked further by mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s. The arrival of Italians, Slavs, and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe prompted a new nativist upsurge – by the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had gained hundreds of thousands of members, with their membership exceeding 4 million people. Fear mongering worked: new federal immigration laws severely dented the numbers of people allowed to immigrate. Fears of foreign ideology – fascism, anarchism, Marxism, undermining American ideas of exceptionalism and manifest destiny, eventually culminated in decrying the specter of communism during the times of the Cold War.(Ref.)

People who are afraid often seek a protector. If protecting allows you to yield power, then it is in your interest to feed fear, particularly in those who are not (yet) aligned with the Zeitgeist or the desired ideology. If instillation of fear squashes dissent and weakens both individuals and organizations that threaten your power or the profits you derive from the system that you support, then you become pretty good at figuring out what scares people.

In the 1920s, during the first Red Scare following the Bolshevik revolution and during a strengthening of the labor movement, it was often mob rule and mob violence that affected union members or other progressives, with one particularly horrid example close to us geographically, in Centralia, WA. A detailed description and analysis – not for the faint of heart – can be found in Cal Winslow’s When Being a Red Meant Risking your Life. During the second Red Scare in the 1950s, Senator McCarthy’s and friends’ approach to generating and sustaining anticommunist actions welcomed more allies in their fight against those who threatened old regimes or existing local hierarchies, be they class, religion, race, or gender. If you wanted to bust unions that organized labor across racial lines, fight pluralism, undermine civil rights organizations offering critiques of capitalism, racism, and gender oppression, or silence writers, artists, and journalists who advocated internationalism and peace, or oppress gay people who were seen as a threat to American masculinity, you needed loyalists in place to help with the task: in the administration, in law enforcement, in the court system, with neighborhood snitches and the occasional violent mob.

Letter to Eli from Abe Schwartz I and II – I hope the comrades are proving to be good Bolsheviks.

So what did Ruth Ross’ parents face, as members of a despised and feared political party? Or if labeled as Rosenberg acquaintances? They knew about the fate of some of the latter – Joel Barr, a college friend of Rosenberg, disappeared in Paris. Another college friend, Morton Sobell, went to Mexico (and was later extradited), where another, Alfred Sarant, had already gone into hiding. William Perl was convicted of perjury .

Clockwise from Left: Arraignment. Rosenberg Boys at Sing-Sing. We are young, too young for death.

The more likely scenario, though, was what tens of thousands of leftist or progressive people faced in those years:

You were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with but a few unsavory options. As Benjamin Balthaser wrote in a March 2022 essay for Jacobin, reviewing the book In Contempt: Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC:

“If you testified, you would be called upon to publicly denounce communism and then “name names” of other Communists and former Communists, then subjecting them to the same investigation. If you refused to testify, then you could be cited under the Smith Act, which effectively banned membership in the Communist Party. If you were not a citizen, you could be further indicted for failing to register as a Communist. … if appearing at the hearing and refusing to answer questions on the grounds of the First Amendment right to free speech and free association, then you could be indicted and sent to prison for contempt and noncompliance with a congressional committee.”

“The other punishments of the Red Scare were less legalistic but no less devastating. As the Supreme Court ruled, Communists and former Communists could be legally denied jobs, fired from jobs they had, denied federal student aid and research funding, and denied a place to live.  There were no rights a Communist had that the state or a private citizen was bound to respect.”

“And in many cases, vigilante violence solved what the state could not: torchings of Communist and left-wing summer camps, labor halls, personal homes, and public beatings, most famously at Peekskill, New York, were common.” (Ref.)

No wonder, then, that many, like the Ross’, decided to start over, with so many activists silenced and organizations weakened.

At home, labor unions could often not be counted on as allies in either antiwar or student struggles. The energetic Jewish left, as well as African-American civil rights fighters had lost access to progressive institutions and could not longer trust many in their communities, with both the American Jewish Committee and the NAACP backing the Red Scare and even the execution of the Rosenbergs. (They tried to score political victories in a Cold War milieu by rejecting and denouncing “communist” allies who’d helped make those victories possible.)

No surprise, either, that the situational causes were too complex to explain to a child. A child that could only try and comfort her mother with the plea to stop crying on the day of the execution of an innocent acquaintance.

Mom cried on Execution Day.

***

MEMORY IS A STRANGE BEAST. Composed of actual facts, revised notions after a change-in-circumstances, integration of facts supplied by others or derived from non-memory sources like dreams and suggestions, conceptually geared towards helping us function in our worlds, it cannot always be trusted. Unless we are on the witness stand, though, veracity of fact does not exactly matter.

What matters is the construction of a narrative that helps us understand our world, our reactions, our path and our sorrows. In a funny way that is the opposite of the Arendt quote I prefaced these thoughts with. Her assertion”... that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions…“referred to the assessment of the historical role played by the American and the French revolution in securing a memory true to fact. I had chosen the quote because I believe we must accurately remember the role that red baiting or any kind of baiting (I’ll get there in a moment) plays in a democracy or any system that aspires to uphold democratic values – a topic brought to the fore by Ruth Ross’ work that made me think about politics and justice (incidentally topics that loom large in a relatively recent biography of Ethel Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg – An American Tragedy, by Anne Sebba, a book that inspired Ross to dedicate herself to this project.)

Ruth Ross

Yet what Ross’ art does, in particular her depictions of her personal odyssey and that of her parents, is to create a narrative that considers the world from a perspective all her own, the emotional lessons learned and worked through from painful experiences, a personal, not necessarily factual truth. In some way, the entire project reminded me in this regard of Louise Bourgeois‘ often quoted phrase that “sewing is an act of emotional repair.” (I have never been able to find the actual reference, alas.) With all of her embroidered and collaged imagery, Ross walks a path brilliantly laid out in a different aspect of Arendt’s work, her use of non-standard mechanisms to help us see old assumptions with new eyes. (These mechanisms are summarized in a riveting book by Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt, who describes them as laughter, translation, forgiveness and dramatization.)

The artist includes, for example, some black, black humor when she embroiders, on quotidian kitchen towels and old tablecloths, the image of an electric chair right among the symbolism of various identifiable parties, as if it belongs into a national gallery of power symbols. However shameful, I had to laugh, distancing myself enough from the upsetting thoughts so that I did not have to turn away from them completely to preserve emotional equilibrium, thus allowing the Rosenbergs to be remembered.

Quilt for a red diaper Baby – detail below

Forgiveness lingers over the inclusion of letters from a fallen friend to the artist’s father. She is able to acknowledge her father’s role, his losses, his motivating fears, despite the fact that he was a difficult man and turned his back on some of his more youthful political passions, much less his family. Ross attributes her own emotional recovery to time spent at an upstate NY summer camp, the Lincoln Farm Work Camp, where hands-on physical work, art and politics united a group of youngsters from predominantly leftie and Jewish families, who found a place and a community there. She spent numerous years with her mother who had, for an interim time, left Puerto Rico to work in San Francisco and nurtured her daughter’s ambitions. Ross eventually graduated Parson’s School of Design in New York City with a degree in Graphic Design and worked for almost two decades as an Art Director at Random House, all the while pursuing her art.

On top: Eli Ross is a Commie. Bottom: Details from Letter to Eli from Abe Schwartz, who died in the Spanish Civil War.

The notion of translation as a tool to provide new ways of seeing old things captured my interest in multiple ways. The artist translates some of the ideas of disrupted lives, harmed existences, a demise by electrocution into visual symbols. The fabrics are frayed, some holes seem to be burnt, but above all there are loose threads hanging wherever you look, broken, ripped or snipped, if you will. I could not avoid thinking of the thread of life, so brutally cut. Yet there was also another word floating to the surface, the German compound noun Fadenriss, literally translated as ripped thread, a rupture. It is the little sister of amnesia, the inability to remember for a short while until you pick up the thread again. It is more than losing your thread of thought, in colloquial English, and less than a total black-out that comes with the biological system’s alarm reaction to overbearing trauma.

Ross’ installations acknowledge the lack of remembering, the desire to forget and the need to return to remembrance, all encapsulated in Fadenriss/ torn threat. They cover both, the personal and the public realm, which makes it very strong work indeed.

Left: Ethel Ross and her Firstborn. Right and Below: Ethel Rosenberg in her Kitchen. Ethel Ross.

Remembering our past is surely important in the face of a resurgence of political movements that use baiting to establish a new enemy, justifying the protection by a strong man and the establishing of legal and administrative structures that undermine pluralism. Calls for loyalty and “cleansing” (feel free to explore the Schedule F plans devised by the previous administration for a future term, with the suggestion to purge tens of thousands of “disloyal” people from government positions) have become louder. A return to traditional, rigid gender roles is openly demanded, including calls for control over female bodies. Any non-traditional gender- or sexual orientation is not only vilified as dangerous, but legally challenged, and certainly not given equal rights. You have trans bans on athletes and in the military already. Schools and curricula are affected with more than a dozen bills introduced across the country to ban teaching of certain topics, specific books or specific sources, among them the Zinn Education Project. Ross’ project reminds us that public memory is short and that will not serve us well. But maybe that is my interpretation of her work, aligned with my own interest in a Jewish approach to fascist stirrings.

Julius’ Tallit (Prayer Shawl) Front and Verso

Which brings me to the last technique on our list, dramatization.

“Arendt came to see human existence as a stage.  The job of a writer, she came to understand, didn’t involve making an argument aimed to force the reader, through logic, to change his or her mind and come to accept what the writer had written. She wanted to spark a discussion in which readers were invited — indeed, expected — to take part…. The goal was to present a variety of ideas, perspectives and insights for the reader to sift through, evaluate, compare and contrast and, in his or her mind, synthesize into a new and personal understanding.” (Ref.)

Ross’ fabric works – her cyanotype photographs beneath semi-transparent veils, her curious dedication to feminine attributes from lace, to shoes, to flowers covering the image of a doomed life, her depiction of domestic closeness with hints of nightmare lurking in the back, death all pervasive from a Manhattan prison chamber to the dying fields of the Spanish Civil War – all ask us viewers to decipher the narrative meaning.

Left: Ethel Rosenberg’ Dream. Right: Ethel’s Shoes.

Items in Studio

It demands that we provide our own answers about the nature and the consequences of an intentionally designed scare, be it about communism or whatever else is handy as a useful specter.

My take? Ripped threads will be all that remains if the civil fabric is once again frayed and broken apart.

Ruth Ross  August 4 – 27
​1st Thursday, August 4, 6 to 9.

with guest artist Diane Kendall showing Harpies Furies Mercies.

Poetry Reading: Friday, August 19, 6:30 PM
Hear award-winning writer Leanne Grabel read poems inspired by Ross’s work. 

Gallery 114
1100 NW Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97209


 

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