Category Archives: On My Mind

Female Power Project, On My Mind, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

Fannie Lou Hamer: Be inconvenient

Fannie Lou Hamer Feminist Art Feminist Graphics Protest Art Resistance Art Womanist
Be inconvenient — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Fannie Lou Hamer

I’m not saying I’m finished with this new perSISTER design for the Female Power Project. But I will post updates if I change it. Regardless, Fannie Lou Hamer’s story will remain the same. Here goes:

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917–March 14, 1977)

It was inconvenient to the racist white establishment of Mississippi when Hamer decided, at the age of 45, that she wanted to register to vote. She was prevented by an arbitrary literacy test and then fired by her boss (“we’re not ready for that in Mississippi”) and kicked out of her house and shot at by white supremacists. She failed the test a second time. On the third time she passed, but when she went to vote she was told she needed to have two poll tax receipts. She eventually did pay for the receipts and it was inconvenient that she finally did vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent such voter suppression. (See RBG)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had no sense. “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” (This fearlessness reminds me of Harriet Tubman’s)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had returned to Mississippi after attending a pro-citizenship conference in South Carolina. She was arrested and it took her a month to not-fully recover from the beating the police gave her. It was inconvenient that she never recovered because it proved the brutality of the white people in power there.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so gifted at organizing voter registration drives like the Freedom Summer.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so good at hosting and nurturing activists of all colors.

It was inconvenient that Hamer could quote a Bible passage to support every social justice initiative she embraced.

It was inconvenient when Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to contest the legitimacy of the all-white “official delegation” to the 1964 Democratic convention from that state. It was so inconvenient that President Lyndon Johnson had to interrupt the broadcast of her testimony to the credentials committee. He was afraid of it looking like the “Negroes” were taking over the Democratic party platform, and that too many scared white people would vote Republican. (Sound familiar?) After this election the racial alignment of the parties did shift, starting in the South.

In 1971 it was inconvenient that Hamer co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, created “to increase the number of women in all aspects of political life—as elected and appointed officials, as judges in state and federal courts, and as delegates to national conventions.”

More than anything else, it was inconvenient that Hamer told her story so eloquently, authentically, and clearly. It was inconvenient that people couldn’t ignore her words. “…but if I can’t tell the truth—just tell me to sit down—because I have to tell it like it is.”

At her funeral service in 1977 Andrew Young said, “None of us would be where we are today had she not been here then.”

Here are my sources and some really great resources:
Film, “This Little Light of Mine, The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer” https://www.fannielou.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
http://www.crmvet.org/docs/flh64.htm
https://timeline.com/hamer-speech-voting-rights-d5f6ddc7470a
This is a very interesting text laying out the racial politics in the US during the 1964 election. It has everything to do with what we are seeing now:
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/lbj-and-white-backlash-1.html

 

Celestial Bodies, Jewels, On My Mind, Pseudomorphs

Another Artist Statement

I spend a good bit of time regularly crafting “Artist Statements” about my work, to explain things to curators when I am proposing my work for an exhibition. This is a painfully painstaking process, but I find it to be very valuable, since I don’t always know what things might mean while I am making them. So this step of reflecting on work using words, after the fact of the act, has become part of my artistic process. I also find it invaluable to have a studio open to the public, because this allows me to test how my work is coming across, and the feedback from people sometimes helps me to understand the work in words. For example, I hadn’t seen how the Celestial Bodies might be images of microscopic things until I showed some early pieces to visitors. Now this fact has become very important to my process of creating the pieces as well as thinking about what they might mean, especially how they relate to cosmology and fundamental forces in physics.

I would like to share here a version of a recent statement about my process.

Through the activities of collecting, assembling, layering, and morphing, Leda Black explores the interfaces between things, people, psychological forces, and nature’s patterns and rules. In these works of assemblage and photo-based digital images, the found-objects themselves have a generating potency in the process, as if they speak to the artist. The artist replies by creating a deliberately constructed arena where particular items engage with each other, the artist, the viewer, and the world. There is an essential openness to the work, and a purposeful place for accident, since meaning and amazement happens in the meeting between independent elements and minds. In a sense, each new encounter with a viewer creates a new meaning in the work, tying this process to the cultural engines of ritual and myth, while remaining open to new potential each time—for a wrench isn’t always just a tool and a round thing isn’t always just an eye.

Leda Black’s process might begin with: (1) an experiment; (2) the application of simple rules; or (3) an elaboration on an observation.

(1) An experiment: is it possible to create something that is outside of our mental categories? The Pseudomorphs are specimens of things that are animal, plant, and manufactured all at once, and so are none of these things. But in the process of creating and naming things a new category leaps into being so these specimens are no longer outside of our mental categories.

(2) A rule (from the Jewels series): if you put two things together because of a shared quality (color, shape…) you will find (by accident?) that a deeper message is passing between the objects, something that maybe can’t be expressed simply but is absorbed by being present with the two images. So, in a very real sense, two Buddhist monks really are two sea stars holding resolutely to a stone at low tide.

(3) An elaborated observation: when objects are represented with a sudden drop in focus, we are unsure of their scale—they could be massive or microscopic. The Celestial Bodies series joins an experiment (combining the three categories from example (1) above) with a rule (radially organized or round things) and the elaborated observation becomes a rumination on the vastness of space and our origin in exploding stars. As Mark Jenkins writes in the Washington Post about a small selection of this series, “Whether they’re glimpses of worlds too vast or too tiny for human apprehension, these ‘Celestial Bodies’ fascinate.”

Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth, Come and see this, On My Mind, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

On Transformation

Part of my practice is to wander my neighborhood and pick things up. I pick things up and look very closely at them. (It is convenient to have a dog to walk with me so that this activity does not call too much attention to itself.) I try to hold on to things that are not “perfect” specimens of their kind: leaves which have been altered by insects; squashed bottle caps; damaged butterfly wings. These objects in themselves call attention to the way my mind tries to organize things into types and then impose an idea of a perfect form for that object, a form without blemishes. I try to challenge the well-worn paths of my expectations so that I can pursue the discipline of really seeing. Then I take my favorite things and put them on the scanner and scan them at a very high resolution—so high of a resolution that the scanner feels compelled to ask me if I really want to make such a large file. When I look at the scan I can see so much more, such fine detail. Every bite mark on the leaf is exquisite.

But I digress. I really want to talk about transformation because that is what some of my recent work is about. So. One way to call attention to the particularity, to the thisness, of an ordinary object is to make it into something unexpected. It is itself but also something contradictory at the same time. This is the project I undertook in the Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth (showing now at Brookland Pint on the Arts Walk.) I started with resonant objects, some of my favorite things: tools and food. I have been wanting to do something with this clothespin for a long time. And the antique potato smasher. And I fell in love with some crazy Hungarian peppers at the farmers market. Not to mention the supremely strange long purple turnip. Garlic scapes have always delighted me with their giggly squirms. The hammer was left in my previous house by the contractor who later died and I swore I would never hire another contractor because Tom was too damn wonderful to replace. No more renovations for me. But I cherish the hammer. Etc.

This is the point in my thought process where things don’t resolve, they stack up like layers of polyphony, and the resolution happens with the viewer of the work. I hope. I can only point at threads which I pulled together in these works. So here goes:

I thought first of making angels, and then of making dragons. Alchemy is the transformation of materials, of base materials into exalted materials. Tools have an aura, a quidity, an appropriateness, a beauty in good function. Food is a locus of passion and culture. Vegetables mean life, vitality, the transformation of light into energy. Tools and vegetables are of the earth. Tools are the transformation of matter into energy, energy in the sense of making. Tools are used to transform the world into the actualization of an idea (building with tools according to a plan). Food is transformed into our bodies, fuel for our bodies. Vegetables, from the earth, are transformed into food through the agency of fire, air, and water (cooking)—the backgrounds of the scrolls show the elements of fire, air, and water.

So this is as close as I can get to explaining what was going through my head when I was making these works. So come and see them at this restaurant if you can. I ate Saturday brunch at Brookland Pint. It was really good.

Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth, from Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions.

Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions
Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions