dollhouse

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January 15 - February 19, 2022

DOLLHOUSE: ART AS SERIOUS PLAY

Arc Gallery & Studios

1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco CA

January 15 - February 19, 2022

DOLLHOUSE: ART AS SERIOUS PLAY

Genius is childhood recalled at will. ~ Charles Baudelaire

When you were a child you made art, probably lots of it. You, and everyone

around you, called that “playing.” Art is part of a child’s normal response to

almost any aspect of life. A small child asks an art-teacher what he does at work.

“I teach people to draw” the teacher says, and the child responds “You mean

they forget?”

Within the bounds of an imaginary dollhouse, this exhibition showcases art that

uses the tropes of playtime - storybooks, toys, dolls, games, dress-up, imaginary

friends, and secret spaces - to explore the serious and playful nature of

art-making. The works compel the viewer to recall the joys of make-believe

and to appreciate the unique interpretation of “play” that each artist brings to

the dollhouse.

Priscilla Otani & Tanya Wilkinson, Curators

Exhibition Statement

OPENING RECEPTION:

Saturday, January 15th, 7-9pm

Participating Artists

Afatasi the Artist

Glenn Caley Bachmann

Rosalia Baltazar-Schoemaker

Marie Bergstedt

Johnny Botts

Joshua Coffy

Sas Colby

Diana Elrod

Miriam Fabbri

Kathy Fujii-Oka

Dolores R Gray

Maribel Guzman, Miriam Munguia & José Nuñez

Trudi Chamoff Hauptman & Zachariah Hauptman

Dianne Hoffman

Jennifer Jigour

J.L. King

Liz Mamorsky

Kristine Mays

Michael McConnell

Erika Meriaux

Geralyn Marie Montano

Howard Munson

Tomye Neal-Madison

Sean O'Donnell

Priscilla Otani

Barbara Pollak-Lewis

Na Omi Judy Shintani

Liz Steketee

Denise Tarantino

Stephen C. Wagner

Tanya Wilkinson

Sandra Yagi

Opening Reception

Saturday, January 15th, 7:00-9:00pm

Dollhouse Events

Artists Talk About Playing and Art-Making

Thursday, November 11th (2021)

Zoom Conversation - posted online

Dollhouse Zoom Artist Talk I

Thursday, January 20th, 6:00-7:00pm

Dollhouse Zoom Artist Talk II

Thursday, January 27th, 6:00-7:00pm

A Doll's Dance

A toy performance by Amanda Chaudhary

and

Play as (serious) Art

A special afternoon of interactive performance with Jeff Raz

Sunday, February 13th, 1:30-3:30pm

Artful Play

Mixed media collage paper and bookmaking workshop with Roxanne Padgett

Sunday, February 13th, 1:30-3:30pm

Closing Reception

Saturday, February 19th, 12:00-3:00pm

About the Exhibition Team

Curator

Priscilla Otani is a founding partner of Arc Gallery & Studios and has curated

many exhibitions for Arc Gallery, Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art,

and Pacific Center for the Book Arts. She was president of the National

Women’s Caucus from 2013–2015 and currently serves on the board of

Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Otani is a mixed media artist

whose works have been selected in Bay Area, national and international

exhibitions.

Curator

Tanya Wilkinson is a Feminist artist and author based in San Francisco.

She has curated shows focused on themes of Mythology, Storytelling,

Metaphor and Political Activism for the Pacific Center for Book Arts, at the

Village Theater Art Gallery in Danville California, for the California Institute

of Integral Studies and at Arc Gallery and Studios in San Francisco.

Tanya’s own art practice focuses on collage, assemblage, mixed media

sculpture and book arts. She is also the author of several books: Medea's

Folly: Women's Relationships and the Search for Intimacy (1998), Persephone Returns:

Victims, Heroes, and the Journey from the Underworld (1996) and Women’s Dreams and

Nightmares (2018).

Video Editor

Sidney Bricker is a junior at Los Gatos High School with a passion for

creative projects. She enjoys photography, digital drawing, and video

editing. During the 2020/21 school year, she edited 7 educational art videos

for the Art Docents of Los Gatos, a non-profit organization that allows adult

volunteers to teach lessons on art history and more to the thousands of

students in grades K-8 in the LGUSD school district. Sidney currently writes

as a local news editor for her school newspaper, El Gato. Last year she

enjoyed exploring video and photo editing as a media editor. She also edited the interview

video "A Conversation with Na Omi Judy Shintani" for the Northern California Women's

Caucus for Art in August, 2021.

Event Manager

Laura Abrams is an artist, writer, and arts manager who has worked primarily in

the live arts presenting field. She holds degrees in Art History from UCLA and

Arts Administration from NYU. As director of education and community

programs/campus

liaison

at

UC

Berkeley’s

Cal

Performances,

she

developed events designed to nourish interdisciplinary understanding in

and through the arts. Formerly the Board President of MOCHA (Museum of

Children's Art), Laura has recently joined the Board of the Northern California

Women's Caucus for Art and has taken on responsibilities as Professional Development chair.

At NCWCA, she participated in the Composing the Future exhibition and has contributed to the

monthly newsletter. Her current artwork consists of drawings and mixed media shadow boxes

that express a colorful, surrealist aesthetic inspired by nature, folk art, puzzles, and

improvisational jazz. Her blog, LA Art Notes centers on creating meaning through artistic

encounters. 

Catalog Designer

Michael Yochum is a founding partner of Arc. He currently manages the art

consulting practice at Arc and he is the curator of two of their signature

annual exhibitions: FourSquared and 48 Pillars. Since co-founding Arc in

late 2009, he has worked with many individual collections and corpora­

tions, helping them to connect with local artists. While working as a financial

consultant, he volunteered with ArtSpan, the largest artist-member

organization in Northern California and producers of San Francisco Open

Studios. He was the Chairman of that organization from 2009- 2010. Michael

studied art history at Middlebury College and ICU (Tokyo); and, he studied Japanese Art History

in the graduate program at Columbia University.

World Making

by Laura Abrams

Conventional wisdom has it that play is the stuff of childhood, When we grow up,

we are supposed to leave it all behind. But, artists don’t have to abandon play

for “real life.” In fact, artists have the tenacity to take play to a finely tuned level,

using their observation and world making skills to create exquisite works of art.

As a child, your job is to figure out the world. The word given to this is “play.” With

imagination, the tools at hand (crayons, leaves, rocks, a bit of fabric, a toilet

paper tube, a feather, a Lego set, an iPad or whatever strikes your fancy), you

make worlds. You observe and experiment, you put things together and make up

stories. If you are lucky, you spend lots of time in the land of make believe.

Remember the feeling? Working with the curators on this exhibition, I had the

good fortune to rediscover my earliest love of making dollhouses. It was

exhilarating. I realized—emerging from hours of resurrecting long-buried skills

and nascent ideas—that the process called “play” when children do it is intimately

related to the feeling adults relish as “flow.” Also known as “being in the zone,”

flow is the state of being fully engaged and focused. Ideas coalesce, problems

untangle, solutions unfold, and there is (maybe) a triumphant resolution.

Children at play are similarly engaged and focused while creating worlds,

learning to express themselves, communicating their vision to others … It’s

like making art.

I’d like to take a time out here to acknowledge that many children do not have

access to art supplies, toys, or enrichments like music, dance and theater.

Family strife, environmental violence, societal upheaval, bullying, deprivation,

and loneliness cruelly interrupt this crucial developmental time. But for all kids,

those experiencing trauma as well as those more fortunate, even limited access

to art can be the catalyst for great feats of imagination that provide order and

comfort. As David Bayles and Ted Orland, authors of the influential book on the

process of making art, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of

Making Art (2001), explain “artists make a world so that they will have a place to

belong.” Whatever the circumstance, these childhood experiences may generate

eager artists.

Of course, not every child is going to choose to pursue art. But early access to

the arts has been proven to improve outcomes in school and life, providing

avenues of focus and problem solving that expand into other fields of

knowledge and abilities. Teaching artist Eric Booth explains in The Everyday

Work of Art (2001) that the same processes that fuel art propel every life path.

An accountant or a computer programmer can enter “the zone” just as well

as any painter and derive just as much satisfaction from their pursuits. The

distinction is that when someone chooses art as a vocation, they persist in the

land of play, devoting their energy and expertise towards expressing their views

in original works of art.

Dollhouse: Art as Serious Play curators Priscilla Otani and Tanya Wilkinson

invited artists to reach back into their own way-back machines to the roots of their

own creative lives. Fascinatingly diverse works have emerged featuring not only

icons of childhood—tricycles, cereal boxes, dolls, costumes—but also sensory

memories and evocative images of wholly individual experiences of childhood.

I am delighted to have had a small part in this important exhibition that connects

the dots between art, flow, and play. It is especially wonderful to see how the

artists here have artfully channeled play into serious work. Art is serious play.

They knew it all along!

Imagination at Play

Priscilla Otani

I meant to do my work today—

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,

Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out its shining hand—

So what could I do but laugh and go?

― Richard Le Gallienne

Dollhouse: Art as Serious Play shows the many ways artists capture the elusive

essence of play. The exhibition features images, objects, words, and scenes that

relate to generalized childhood; quirky works that provoke flights of fancy; works

based on folklore, fairy tales and mythology; and still others that teach us about

childhoods unknown. A common thread for all the artists in this exhibition is that

the process of making of art is the purest form of play.

Have you ever been inspired by the discovery of art created in your own

childhood? I remember finding a pile of crayon drawings from kindergarten on a

visit to my home in Kobe. At the age of five I believed that birds had four legs.

Sadly, I didn’t take the drawings home with me and they were lost when the

house was sold. Diana Elrod’s Knights series was based on a line drawing

included in a shipment of childhood ephemera from her mother. Her adult

versions include greater complexity in materials and colors but the rendition of

the knights retain the simple, free-form lines of the original.

Reimagining everyday objects is an essential component of play. Even now

when elaborate toys boast new and better features, it can be fun to take objects

apart or reshape them. It can take just a small tweak to change the original

intention of a commercial object, as seen in Glenn Caley Bachmann’s Tragically

Delicious cereal box. His collage transforms the friendly Lucky Charms mascot

into who he really is: a ghoulish sugar-peddling leprechaun juggling skulls.

Just as children find more magic in packing boxes than in the gift inside,

simple, raw materials can be amazing sources of inspiration. Creativity

Explored artists Maribel Guzman, Miriam Munguia, and Jose Nunez’s work

Untitled is a beautiful wall hanging made from fabric scraps, paint and

threads. The artists combined their drawing, embroidery and sewing skills to

depict the pretty girl in the center delighting in the abundance of people,

animals, and flowers all around her.

Many children love collecting things, like baseball trading cards, dolls, stamps

and coins. Some leave their collections behind, but others continue their

passions into adulthood. Others begin collecting as adults as a new hobby or

because they were denied the pleasure of collecting before. Rosalia Baltazar

Schoemaker amassed a huge collection of cute Japanese erasers to create

Erase Me Not, a simulated confectionery tower topped with female anime

heroines. Despite her cheerful sculpture with its abundance of colorful toys,

Baltazar Schoemaker was a child denied. She was given a beautiful doll each

birthday that was taken away to be displayed out of her reach after a brief

period of play. After creating Erase Me Not, Baltazar Schoemaker noticed that

she had recreated her childhood memory by placing the figures at the top. But

she realized she was no longer powerless. Now she could purchase whatever

she wanted and display it however she wished. Perched triumphantly atop the

hill of erasers, the Erase Me Not heroines represent her own feminist

empowerment.

Some artists favor objects that less imaginative people might label as “junk”

over mint condition manufactured items. Artists who collect ephemera,

obsolete parts, and broken objects see endless possibilities and stories in

each object. They love the process of making something marvelous with the

aid of tools, adhesives and pure imagination. Sean O’Donnell’s Pipe Dream

is a musical instrument that doesn’t play a tune but fills the audience’s

imagination with funny, eccentric music. Liz Mamorsky’s family of Coronabots,

constructed from obsolete computer components, look ready to march out into

the human world. Dianne Hoffman’s A Departure, An Affectionate Melody, and

Lucid Dream incorporate broken bits of immediately recognizable objects and

images that have been retrieved from the scrap heap and given center stage

in their reborn lives.

I do not believe in childhood innocence. Dolores R Gray’s childhood

recollections come closer to the truth – the occasional wickedness that

overcomes good behavior and leads to tearing apart dolls, smashing delicate

objects, or stealing someone else's prized toy. After all, even with best

friends, siblings and cousins, closeness inevitably leads to fights and

arguments. In Mis Fortune Teller and Playing in Mommie Dearest's Closet,

Gray reconstructs childhood memories using broken bits of found toy parts

and games Her visually striking compositions reassemble her childhood: a

jumble of fun times, tomboyish games, and occasionally tormenting a sibling.

A superhero costume emboldens the child and the child within. With a quick

change into colorful, stretch Lycra, we are invincible comic book heroes, flying

in the air, tearing down walls and saving people in distress. In costume, we

can also speak more freely. Wearing BLACK SPACE: Afronaut Suit #2,

Afatasi the Artist becomes an Afronaut, a Being from the Future, with a

mission to go back in time to right the wrongs of the past. She exposes the

wrongs visited upon the former African American inhabitants of the Fillmore

neighborhoods and restores the true history behind gentrified San Francisco.

The Afronaut Suit wows us with its powerful feminine shape and makes its

presence known even when hung empty of human form on the gallery wall.

Michael McConnell’s Little Coyote: Adaptive Complexity is from his

anthropomorphic Little Animal series. The painting of a boy wearing a coy­

ote mask reminds me of children secretly confiscating their parents’ fur

stoles, coats, or pelts for play-acting purposes. I remember my grandmother’s

huge leopard skin pelt with its fangs and glittering eyes that terrified me as a

baby but later became a favorite dress-up prop. In Little Coyote the boy stands

in a relaxed, casual posture and carries a limp toy dog, his quarry. This painting

depicts the adaptive complexity of our times: as COVID forces humans into

social isolation, a wild coyote can now wander city streets midday to seek its

prey.

In the realm of transformative possibilities, Kristine Mays’ fantasy crowns, Shine

Your Light, Flower Child and Where the Wild Things Are bestow the opportunity

for all of us to attain instant royalty. The whimsically titled headdresses remind

us of the joy of playing dress up, whether as queens or storybook characters.

Geralyn Marie Montano’s Defiant Daughters of the Sacred Braids and Apples is

one of the largest works in the exhibit. Two life-size female figures with a barrel

of apples between them and some scattered woven vines on the ground are

seen from a distance. Once closer, the viewer realizes that the vines are

actually shorn braids, the girls are shouting, and the apples spill like bloody

tears from the basket between them. In this work, Montano skillfully combines

her childhood heritage reclaimed as an adult with researched cultural history.

The work depicts Geralyn and her sisterhood of Native American girls who

defied brutal attempts to obliterate their culture and beliefs.

There are two theater pieces in Dollhouse. J.L. King’s ABECEDARIANS, a

trompe l’oeil painting that features a proscenium stage with a giant blow fly

holding up the curtains. On the stage, glass-helmeted boys engage in

mysterious activity. The title suggests that the boys are learning the rudiments

of something, but we don’t know what that might be. Howard Munson’s

MAQUETTE is a colorful parade of Dadaist characters who pop out in turn as

the accordion book pages are opened. The geometry and skilled cuts of

pop-up books bring surprise, visual delight, and movement into an otherwise

static object.

In discussing his collages Saturday and Star 69, Johnny Botts describes his

fondness for decorating his envelopes for pen pals. He reminds me of how I

relied on correspondence to stave off isolation during my grade school

summers. Despite the awkwardness of writing to strangers, it was a complete

joy to get mail from someone living far away. Botts uses cheerfully optimistic

mid-century imagery in his collages, reminiscent of a period when letter writing

was something children engaged in to make friends with strangers.

At my request, Trudi Chamoff Hauptman created a life-size crocheted doll of

her child, Zach, for Dollhouse. I did not consider the discomfort Zach might feel

in watching their mother create a life-size image of themself out of yarn. As a

collaboration between mother and child, this project went well beyond baking a

batch of cookies together. The two agreed to join forces and worked closely to

make a remarkable work titled The Twin. At first, this piece reminded me of the

sprawling dolls in the Bunny series1 by British artist Sarah Lucas. But Twin is a

loving tribute to mother-child collaboration rather than a commentary on female

passivity. On the outside of Twin, Zach added a white dragon, symbol

of supernatural power, wisdom, and strength, and also placed mysterious

tokens and a poem they wrote inside the doll. Trudi and Zach call their creation

a gilgul, the Hebrew word for a soul reinvited back to life.

Nostalgia is defined as “a wistful…yearning for return to or of some past

period.”2 Nostalgia renders memories warm and fuzzy and wipes the past clean

of negative realities. Miriam Fabbri’s nostalgic painting, Raggedy Ann, features

the doll’s sweet expression and its slightly faded, floppy body that would mold

perfectly into a child’s arms. One imagines this must have been the artist’s

favorite, well-played doll. In reality, Fabbri’s attachment to this doll is related to

her mother, who acquired it after Fabbri grew up.

Some imagery has generational appeal. For Baby Boomers, it’s Stephen C.

Wagner’s American Dream series – small house-shaped blocks of wood with

sunny, idealized scenes of youthful, homogenous families living in homes filled

with modern appliances. In this nostalgic view, family roles are clearly defined

and everyone is engaged and happy. For Gen Xers, Barbara Pollak-Lewis’

TV Dinners and Food series bring back memories of quick meals that latchkey

kids could heat up and dine when their working mothers came home late.

Frozen foods’ simple flavors were palatable for young children and so, looking

back, we might nostalgically remember them as “delicious.”

The cartoon-like smiley face was designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 at the

request of an insurance company. Untrademarked and uncopyrighted, the

optimistic ball-shaped symbol became universal, surpassing even Andy

Warhol’s ubiquitous pop art imagery. The smiley face’s cachet faded through

hyper-commercialism but it has never completely gone away. It re-emerged in

the 1990’s as an emblem for rave culture and continues today through emojis.

Johnny Botts’ Smiley Series: Yellow restores this iconic image to Harvey Ball’s

simple belief in the “power of a smile and a kind act''3 to change the world.

Tomye Neal Madison never owned a rocking horse, nor had anyone in her

family, but a photograph she found in a second-hand store reminded her of

“imagined sentimental moments from books and TV.”4 Her Rockin’ Horse

conveys a strong nostalgic moment, as if the child on the rocking horse could

be Tomye. Notice her smile just starting to break out, anticipating imagined

adventures she will have on the galloping horse.

Nostalgia and memory can intertwine, especially when they relate to someone

who made a big impact in a child’s life. Kathy Fujii-Oka’s kokeshi doll in I broke

my foot is a touchstone for her beloved mother. Memories and love flow vividly

from the small, humble object. Joshua Coffey’s House of the Parrot symbolizes

his grandmother, the most important person in his childhood. His painted bird

houses represent home and safety, his grandmother’s many kindnesses, and a

tribute to her passion for birds.

Nostalgia and memory are not the only subjects addressed in Dollhouse.

Using toys and dolls, two artists specifically address the current pandemic as

a time to be remembered. Both Liz Mamorsky and Liz Steketee felt compelled

to document COVID times with works representing a family unit. Mamorsky’s

imaginary Coronabot family are toy robot bodies with funny facial expressions

to bring a smile or two for the viewer. Steketee’s Wrapped Pandemic Mummy

Family have partially obscured faces, something we recognize from the mask

mandates of the past two years. Their tightly wrapped and contorted rag doll

bodies reflect her own family’s sense of isolation and suffocation during the

pandemic lockdown.

Marie Bergstedt’s Triker is an installation of a tricycle and a girl covered in

doilies and lace. Initially it seems nostalgic, except disquietingly, the

toddler-sized figure is headless and armless. This omission represents

Bergstedt’s childhood as a foster child when she was prevented from having a

say in anything. The toddler’s sturdy legs represent her resiliency, while the

tricycle depicts an intermittent means of escape from her unhappy reality.

Her triumph in overcoming her bleak childhood is represented by the vintage

stained lace. Like old lace and obsolete traditions, her childhood is

remembered, but her painful experience has faded and has been relegated

to history.

As a child I loved to read anthologies of fairy tales, mythology and folklore

because the books were thick and it took a long time to finish them. I was,

however, dismayed by slight differences in familiar stories from one anthology

to the next. Later I understood that many of these stories originated in oral

tradition so storytellers interpreted them freely. So too, the artist. In Cybele,

based on Phrygian mythology5 and with a nod to hermaphroditism, Erika Meriaux

paints a boyish girl asleep among lionesses and a man in the distance staring

at her, hands suggestively in his pockets. Tanya Wilkinson’s two works in the

exhibition are based on fairy tales. In Swan Brother, inspired by Grimm’s The

Six Swans,6 Wilkinson creates a blood-red background to highlight the white

vest frantically woven by the princess to turn her swan brothers back to

humans.“ Her Mossycoat is based on an old English fairy tale.7 Here, Wilkinson

transforms the magical wish-granting coat into Wonder Woman armor. Na Omi

Judy Shintani’s Ghost Whale (Bakekujira), based on a mythical Japanese yokai,

is depicted as a scrimshaw on a white glove form. My own Ectoplasmic

Kitsunes included in the exhibition originated from the Japanese folklore of

shapeshifting kitsune (foxes), here depicted as half human and half fox.

The most popular stuffed animal is still the Teddy Bear but rabbits take star

billing in picture books such as Peter Rabbit, Velveteen Rabbit and Goodnight

Moon. The bunny is recognizable and loveable in Sas Colby’s Greek Bunny, but

there is more to this drawing and to her artist book, bunnies on ice & other

experiments. The rabbit is Colby’s alter ego, a toy rabbit that engages in

human adventures and wild behavior that she may or may not consider out of

bounds for herself. Colby uses the rabbit in a similar way that children do, to

spin fantastical tales and to work through real-life experiences. And as the

rabbit becomes Colby’s alter ego, so does Kathy Fujii-Oka’s kokeshi in It’s

Raining. This mixed media piece is a sweet depiction of dolls and toys living in

a doll house, but for Fujii-Oka, it also represents the distress she felt about her

unrepaired roof each rainy season.

Jennifer Jigour’s delicate watercolor and pen drawings, La Manege Enchante

and Gilded Age Romantic Friendships remind me of a Rococo-style romance

novel covers that also retain the innocence of Kate Greenaway’s children’s

books. Her works revise the fairytale with antidotes against antagonistic

females (wicked stepmother versus innocent orphan) and stereotypical

male-female romance (woman in distress rescued by heroic man). Gilded Age

Romantic Friendships portrays two young women in embrace, their feminine

love amplified by the gilded mirrors on the wall, the twined table lamp, and the

lush room furnishings. The title of La Manège Enchanté with its feminine article

“la” is borrowed from the title of a French children’s TV series, "Le Manège

Enchanté"8 (The Magic Carousel). Jigour’s drawing upends the traditional

knight in shining armor tale by depicting two women galloping off together

as equals on their carousel horses, neither taking a passive or heroic role.

Initially the exclusive purview of cloistered monks, “by the end of the Middle

Ages, illuminated manuscripts were created for secular use, resulting in an

archive of decorated texts in mythology, poetry, and history.”9 Sandra Yagi’s

It – Pennywise from her Movie Monsters series blends contemporary popular

culture with the decorative flourish of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Children laugh at a clown’s antics much as they do when they watch Punch

and Judy violently go at each other with their slapsticks, but they are also afraid.

Yagi shines the spotlight on the clown’s deathly white face and scarlet nose to

induce the same sort of primal fear that medieval readers felt when they cast

their eyes upon an illustration of a skeleton, devil or dragon devouring one of

their own.

What are some of the ways an artist captures the act of play? J.L. King explores

this idea as a central and mysterious focus of her surrealistic painting,

ABCEDARIANS, while Stephen C. Wagner incorporates nostalgic images of

children playing inside a home in his American Dream series.

Denise Tarantino’s photograph, Motion #2, captures the act of play with more

immediacy through the movement of shadows. The employment of vignettes to

frame the shadowy children on swings gives this photograph a timeless appeal.

With political unrest, social dysfunction and pandemic disease closing in

on us I felt an urgency to mount an exhibition that was filled with fun and

lightheartedness. With their imaginations, stories and humor, the artists in

this exhibition forge a path through the thorny darkness. Viewing these works,

we are enchanted once more by fables, fantasy and superheroes of our

childhoods. Revisiting these memories we can remake our past, relive happy

experiences, heal past hurts and remember to be courageous.

footnotes:

1 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lucas-pauline-bunny-t07437

2 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nostalgia

3 https://www.worldsmile.org/

4 Tomye Neal Madison artist statement

5 https://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Kybele.html 6 https://www.worldoftales.com/fairy_tales/Brothers_Grimm/

Grimm_fairy_stories/The_Six_Swans.html#gsc.tab=0

7 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/11/fairytales-mossycoat-philip-pullman

8 https://www.purefrance.com/en/blog/the-magic-roundabout-le-manege-enchante

9 https://www.parkwestgallery.com/what-are-illuminated-manuscripts-and-how-were-they-created/

Afatasi the Artist

In her conceptual mixed-media work entitled, BLACK SPACE, Afatasi hones her

textile skills and love of Afrofuturism to dispel the progressive and liberal myth

of her hometown of San Francisco. This work captures the many ways in which

the city has been criminally complicit to the discrimination, minimization, and

purposeful erasure; all while honoring the paces, contributions, and hidden

histories of the American Decedents of Chattel Slavery (ADOCS), most of

whom fled extreme violence and discrimination in the American south, and now

call the city their home.

website:

www.afatasi.org

instagram:

@afatasitheartist

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