Black History Month in Seattle II City Hall

This is the sculpture of Roosevelt Lewis who is featured in City Hall with sculptures and paintings in the main lobby. Roosevelt Lewis is a Seattle artist with roots in the Black, Creole, and Cajun people of Louisiana, a place near the Cane River of intensely mixed cultures. This piece is called Do No More Violence to Women.
It honors the women of his family and all women as they stand up to violence in our society.

This sculpture is called Generations. You can see one generation rising out of another in the single carved poplar log. The sense of a connection over time, suggests his deep connections to his past generations in Louisiana

He is also showing paintings what might be called a folk art style by mainstream critics. He is self taught and began making art by scavenging in dumps as a child in Louisiana. He had no library or art works to look at. When he was in the army in France he saw African art for the first time.The forms of his paintings are simple and flattened, his sense of color and space aligns with the work of Jacob Lawrence ( see below) as well as somewhat like Matisse. What makes the difference between what is considered folk art ( unsophisticated) and what is considered so called fine art? Of course for a long time people characterized Jacob Lawrence as a folk artist.

What is exciting about the exhibition is that it is an intervention in City Hall as you can see in this installation shot. Lewis is prominently displayed in the main lobby. On the balcony above ( which you can't see) are black and white photographs of white men lined up in rows.

This is Marita Dingus's well known work "Buddha as an African Enslaved" inspired by her visit to China in 1995 when she saw a gigantic Buddha statue. She chose to put work on a lower floor so that Roosevelt Lewis could be prominent in the main space. Her sculpture is experienced from a very close perspective as you walk down a narrow hall. I think it is hard to appreciate it from such a close perspective, but you can see in detail the way that she uses recycled materials.

Black History Month. Yes, it is true that we still need it. Our society does not yet have an integrated public discourse. So lots of focus on African Americans this month is providing us with some important insights, especially in the age of Obama. I have been hearing on our community radio station a lot of discussion by middle class black professionals about Obama. They are suggesting that he show more spunk and stand up to the pressures on him. Of course, they support him, but they wish he would be willing to be more of a leader and drop all of the bipartisan emphasis. I see Obama as surrounded by incredibly powerful forces. We can't expect him to change everything single handedly. We have to get out and shout for what we want. No more war, single payer health care, peace in the Middle East. Black man in the white house or white man in the white house, we still have to get out and shout. These exhibitions remind us of how much of our country's heritage is hidden from sight. So are many of our good ideas. We can't let the oligarchy or the tea party make off with our real identity as an energetic, diverse society.

Metamorphosis : Marita Dingus's Trash

Marita Dingus
At a presentation in Edmonds, about one half hour north of Seattle, Marita Dingus revealed some of the secrets of her approach to materials in her extraordinary art made entirely of recycled materials. Recycled we already knew, but there is a lot more to it than just reclaiming materials.

She explained in a compelling demonstration that she chose materials that were "worthless", if they have any value at all she takes them to the thrift shop she said, holding a metal ring from a lampshade as an example. Her choice of materials is based on durability as well as the fact that they are completely useless in our society. For example, she uses the shiny plastic wrap from Bertoli products, or the spirals from spiral notebooks, or the wire from Boeing airplane construction. Her criteria also includes that ( she was making flowers out of Bertoli shiny wrap and wire as she talked), the wire needs to be easy to bend.

Her own wardrobe is entirely made of recycled clothes and materials, "things get cut up many many times" she said. When she spent several years in Texas, she packed up all of her belongings in large bags made from recycled fabric, and her purse is based on a clorox bottle covered in fabric. She uses "hot sticky glue" and she said, "people say this is not art material why shouldn't it be?"

Marita is truly living close to the earth as well, she raises chickens, and eats their eggs at her home that she shares with her mother ( who also helps with her art) on five acres of old growth woods in Auburn. Her family moved there in the fifties. It is next to the cemetery, at that time the only place that African Americans could live. This is one of her bags below.



All of the talk about our carbon footprints, ecology, global warming, living green. Marita has it all figured out.
We don't have Marita's artistic ability to reclaim only the useless into art, but we can think about every single thing we throw away every day and try to cut it in half, re use it, not use it, or give it to a thrift store. Giving up take outs, plastic bags, and packaged food, even re using paper napkins as toilet paper, every little bit helps. I've tried to save some useless items, like the plastic tops of coffee cups and let them accumulate, waiting for art to emerge. I had the idea of hanging them on my Christmas tree. It didn't quite happen(family objections), but I looked at the plastic tops and lived with them for a long time, as they piled up, confronting my own waste, instead of flinging it out of sight. Of course the theme for Marita is more profound, as an African American she is reclaiming what is considered useless in our society and giving it value as an aesthetic expression.
Here are two of Marita's Water Babies as an inspiration.