Category: art

Poetry, Permeability, and Healing

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Essay by Jane Hirshfield from 2018 via poets.org.

At the etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” To heal, then, is to take what has been broken, separated, frag­mented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness.

[…]

Many things beyond physical illness and physical fracture need healing. Some are personal, some are collective, and these two realms are not disconnected. We don’t live in compartments; we live in our lives.

[…]

kintsugi, done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s his­tory, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial.

[…]

Poems are words that live in the fractures, […] they make new by rejoining parts into a visibly changed whole.

[…]

a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence.

[..]

[Poems] loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality. The particularity and unexpectedness of poetry’s language shake us from sleepiness, complacency, habitual mind. Empathy breaks us from the hypnosis of ego’s grip on its own sense of purpose.

[…]

The rational mind, untempered by poetry, divides; […] fierce rational power, in isolation, is inhuman. Art dwells at the crossroads between what in us is body, what in us is emotion, what in us is history, and what in us is mind. To step into wholeness of seeing and feeling, under any conditions, is in itself restorative.

Jane Hirshfield

Feminist City, Leslie Kern

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On creating the non-sexist city. Kern’s article in the Guardian.

society’s historical and ongoing ideas about the proper gender roles for men and women (organised along a narrow binary) are built right into our cities – and they still matter. They matter to me as a mother. They matter to me as a busy professor who often finds herself in strange cities, wondering if it’s OK to pop into the neighbourhood pub alone. Ask any woman who’s tried to bring a pram on to a bus, breastfeed in a park, or go for a jog at night. She intuitively understands the message the city sends her: this place is not for you.

Yet the city can be a place of great freedom. The anonymity of urban life breeds possibilities easily stifled in a claustrophobic small town or suburban enclave. Education, work, pleasure, politics: the city broadens our horizons and gives us choices our foremothers never had. Despite its hostilities, it remains our best hope for radical change.

Book by Verso.

Photographs for Purpose

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Photographs for Purpose is a fundraiser supported by the work of 68 photographers, who have agreed to sell prints of their work to benefit four organizations devoted to racial, economic, and social justice in America. We hope to draw attention to these organizations, their causes, and the role that artists play in this Country.

In support of Equal Justice Initiative, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Southerners on New Ground, and Planned Parenthood.

Organized by Kathryn Harrison and Michael Adno, Photographs for Purpose is inspired by similar efforts like The Sunny Project, Work for Workers, From Hartford With Love and Pictures for Elmhurst.

The sale is live from June 25 until July 31, 2020.

Untitled (BLCK-We wear the mask)

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PAMM

“Untitled (BLCK–We wear the mask)” is part of a series of multimedia works that Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier created in 2007-2008 in the guise of “BLCK”—a fictitious collaborative comprised of artists of color ostensibly based in Miami in the late 1960s.

Guerrier imagines the group’s members living and working amid the warehouses and apartment complexes of Liberty City, a predominantly African American neighborhood that appears in a set of monochromatic photographs that hang on the wall. A monitor on the floor plays vintage video footage, establishing the tumultuous 1960s as the context. Against the wall are black-on-black wood protest signs and collaged prints inscribed with powerful yet hard to read messages jumbled with abstract imagery.

Combining the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the artist’s own meditations, the signs and the accompanying prints evoke artifacts from an era that brimmed with public demand for radical change, reminiscent of our own moment. #ShareBlackStories

Adler Guerrier. “Untitled (BLCK-We wear the mask),” 2007–08. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase. © Adler Guerrier

PAMM

Installation view from Adler Guerrier : Formulating a Plot, Pérez Art Museum Miami, August 7, 2014 – January 25, 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Miami Fine Art Studio LHOOQ.

AG_Untitled(BLCK-We wear the mask)_2007-JeffreySturges8_Detail_5

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties,

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar