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