This past week, it has seemed that I am surrounded by death. None of the dead are my own loved ones, but rather people close to people I know – my dearest friend’s father, a student’s husband, a colleague’s grandfather, another colleague’s dear friend. So much death, so much love, so much grief. And so it seemed fitting that yesterday Amy and I went to the narthex of Oxnam Chapel to build the ofrenda for this year’s observance of the Day of the Dead.
As we covered an ordinary folding table with black and purple vestments; stacked open-fronted boxes to serve as niches for photographs and mementos; arranged paper flowers, electric candles, feathers, and calaveras; and set out offerings of bread and salt, I remembered doing the same thing last year at this time. Most of the objects we had gathered were the same as the ones we used before, but some were missing and others were newly offered – a life-sized Halloween skull covered with glitter, two large vases of silk flowers, and I’m not sure what else.
Last year's ofrenda
Building the ofrenda is both art-making and ritual activity, responding to the changes in ourselves, in the materials, and in the community with decisions that are both aesthetic and charged with meaning. Does the purple cloth go over the black one, or the other way around? Does this element go here or there? This space looks a little empty, shall we move this object a few inches to the right or that one to the left? As artists, our eyes are trained to look for balance, harmony, that elusive rightness that says a work is finished. As people of faith, creating a space for communal ritual, our hearts are trained to leave open spaces that others will fill in, to trust that the changes that others will make to our own collaborative effort will make it fuller, richer, more meaningful.
This year’s ofrenda is different from last year’s, and from the one that might appear next year in the same space. It is a temporary, collaborative artwork that marks a particular moment in time; a ritual space for remembering those who have died in the last year or two; and an offering into the life of the ongoing yet always changing community that is Wesley Theological Seminary.
This afternoon I spent an engaging hour with one of my colleagues, looking for artworks for her to use in her class on the construction of gender. As we thought together about what images have engraved themselves so deeply into our cultural consciousness that they serve as icons of femininity, alternately laughed and groaned at a lot of art, both good and bad.
Eventually, we settled on about a dozen sculptures and paintings that tell an abbreviated but nonetheless convincing story. Beginning with the little sculpture whose true name and function is lost, but which is known to every art student as the Venus of Willendorf; through ancient Greek depictions of the goddesses Athena and Hera, medieval and Renaissance madonnas, romantic and early modern odalisques; to Degas bathers, Duchamp's shattered Nude Descending a Staircase, Picasso's cubist Girl Before a Mirror, Tom Wessleman's Great American Nude, and Phillip Pearlstein's dispassionate, headless bodies, we reminded ourselves how much of women's self-image has been refracted through the eyes, imaginations, and needs of men.
Granted, this was a selective list, leaving out the shocking painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes by Artemesia Gentilischi, the gentle portraits of women and children by the Impressionist Mary Cassatt, and countless contemporary artworks that skilled and talented women produce daily in our time. Slowly, women are claiming the right to create our own images. But we do so in a world that already exists, against the background of thousands of years of images that defined us and told us how to look, what to wear, and how we were to function. That history is good to call to mind, so that the future does not merely repeat the past.
This morning as I arrived at work, I saw Amy and Trudi
sitting side by side on the floor, putting up the lettering for the new show.
There was something about the way they were sitting that reminded me of two
little girls, happily making some big surprise for the adults in their lives.
And, even though we are adults, that is the way that a lot of artists feel they
are treated a lot of the time—like children who are indulged and encouraged
while we play, but brushed aside when it’s time to think about serious things.
The show that Trudi has been installing for the last couple
of days invites us to think about serious things. Guest curated by printmaker
and weaver Cecilia Rossey, it carries the weighty title
BLACK.WHITE.REaD:
Nothing’s Black
Hardly White
Nearly Read
Journey Through the
Maze.
Cis has guest curated two other shows in the Dadian Gallery.
In 2009, she brought us An Artist’s
Reaction to War, in which ten artists were invited to make artworks
responding to the war in Iraq as well as the idea of war in the abstract. This
show, which first was exhibited at a gallery in Salem, NC, addressed aspects of
war including the collateral death of children, the role of money and power,
and the eternal hope for peace. A panel for Rossey’s own powerful contribution,
“War Memorial: Iraq and Afganistan”, hangs in my office, a daily reminder of
the thousands of nameless dead who are remembered only by their grieving
families.
In 2010, Rossey
gathered prints, paintings, and sculptures under the rubric Food and Form, inviting us to think
about the symbolic nature of food, eating, and the body. In her statement about
the idea behind the show, she wrote:
Acknowledged as the foundation of physical and
emotional nourishment, artists probe the impact of food in contemporary
society. Through myriad images and various media, artists highlight the beauty
of food as form as well as food creating form.
Food and Form
spans contemplation of nature’s tempting designs for human ingestion to the
corporate deviation from those original compositions to fatten profits. To ward
off a national obesity epidemic, food activists wish to provoke a debate
concerning basic nutrition, fitness and health.
BLACK.WHITE.REaD
is just as serious as Rossey’s other shows. Reminding us that nothing is black,
hardly anything is white, and very little is actually read, the works in this
exhibition explore love and hate, faith and unbelief, fate and chance, and the many
ambiguities of life. As Rossey writes,
The concept for the B.W.R exhibit began as a simple
appreciation of graphic design: the stark contrast of black and white, subtle
grays achieved in skillful etchings, red striking a bold emphasis. Over the
year, this concept became a metaphor for life’s experiences. . . Often we hear
“It's black and white,” “You knew what you married,” “You signed the contract.”
These comments isolate rather than protect delicate personalities.
As Trudi and Amy applied the stark, red letters to the
window outside the gallery, carefully making sure that everything lined up and
that no air bubbles marred the clean lines and simple forms, I thought about
the seriousness with which artists take their work of making the invisible
visible. Although what we do may look like child’s play, we know that what we are
really doing is creating worlds of meaning for others to inhabit. And that is
no trivial task.
Architects are often called upon to provide buildings for
religious communities. At some point in every congregation’s life there is the
opportunity to build a new building or to renovate an old one. Last Friday, I
was privileged to participate in a jury that looked at student projects in the
Sacred Space and Cultural Studies concentration of the Catholic UniversitySchool of Architecture, a place where students are encouraged to consider what
makes a space seem sacred.
As the invited outside voice in a group that otherwise
consisted of members of the School of Architecture faculty, I felt awkward at
first, not knowing the rules and customs in this field that is part art, part
engineering, part faith. Soon, however, I realized that, just as in any art
school critique, the tools of the jury are careful observation, metaphorical
thinking, and concern for the teachable moment. My own voice as an artist and a
liturgical scholar added one more note to the already wide and deep
conversation.
The students had spent the previous three weeks responding
to a brief to design a small monastery for twelve monks. Under the direction of
Associate Professor Julio Bermudez and master architect and guest lecturer AlbertoCampo Baeza, the students looked at the site, thought about voluntary
simplicity, beauty, and monastic buildings from earlier times. Given a mere
5000 square feet to accommodate a chapel, a library, dining room, dormitory,
and utility spaces, the students made preliminary sketches, concept models,
plans, elevations, and presentation models of their visions of sacred space.
In the twenty minutes
allotted to each group’s presentation, only some of the issues raised by
cardboard models, site photographs, and a variety of plans and elevations could
be addressed. Still, I was struck by the variety of questions. Where do people
enter the building? What is the relationship between the building, the nearby
river, and the surrounding trees? What does the building look like when it is
lit at night? How does the arrangement of open and closed exterior surfaces
speak about the space enclosed within? What is that door made of? What happens
when the river rises? What is the story you want to tell?
In the end, it is the story, whether told in concrete and
glass, wood and stone, or paint or words. These compositions in cardboard and
glue tell stories of procession and pilgrimage, of contemplation and
recreation, of eating and sleeping and studying in a place of where the natural
world intersects the human-made. In a few months, some of these elegant
explorations into light and form will be on exhibit in the Dadian Gallery, in
an exhibition called “A Box of Miracles.”
