The Art of KCF: Ritual Question
After a lifetime in academia, I returned to the beauty of the biography about a year ago as a means to try to make sense of my new world. At the time, that new world was one of transition, of leaving a job as a tenured Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and returning to school full-time as a very non-traditional undergraduate student studying visual arts. I sought wisdom from others in ways the distance and obsession of an outside perspective can allow. As a writer who uses the personal as a political tool, I love memoir, but about a year ago I found that reading biography provided new insights I craved. As a scholar working on reclaiming narratives and always reflecting on the limitations of traditional archives, I like to think I live my life in such a way that one day someone would have the materials they need to write about me. I am committed to creating content that marks my lifetime here; I want to leave a mark. While providing the context of where these thoughts are coming from is important to me, this essay isn’t about the biographies necessarily, but rather the lessons I keep thinking about in our current times. In August 2019 I thought my new world I would need to make sense of was just about my career transition. Instead, my new world is about that career transition and the global realities of pandemics and large-scale racial justice reckonings. It may be counterintuitive, but I like to think about biography as a window into the collective. Sure, one person’s life story becomes central, but the biography can’t exist without the person’s experiences, the archive often curated and cared for by many, and of course the writer (and all the others they must consult) who is ultimately responsible for pulling the materials together. It’s important to always see the collective when so much of the old world has been organized to highlight the singular.
Earlier this year I stumbled upon a biography about a late 19th and early 20th century Welsh artist named Gwen John. She’s mostly known for her portraiture work, but as many women artists often are, she is mostly known by her relationship to important men in her life. I won’t center them here, but rather frame Gwen John and another of my favorite artists Lee Krasner as artists of their time with lessons for us as artists, writers, and cultural workers. Gwen John (1876-1939) was an independent woman who made her life as a painter on her terms. She lived most of her life in France, and in Sue Roe’s biography we see her figuring out how to keep living her life when WWI breaks out when she’s 38. It is not lost on me, that I too, am 38 and trying to make sense of war. The US has been at war with other nations for most of my life. The Gulf War began when I was nine, and like so many continuous overarching conflicts, the violence took place mostly far away. Unlike Gwen John whose family used to worry about her in Suburban France, those of us in the US experience war as a sacrifice for sure, but many of us remain disconnected from these wars. Though complicit, we often hold these conflicts in the abstract. Our involvement (unless we are in the military or connected to those serving) is often at a distance. White, middle and upper-class homes are not being bombed, the US consumerist ways of life not totally upended. And yet, even as homes, and cities, and nations were shook with the violent new weapons of WWI, Gwen John still painted. She still found joys tending to her cat companion. She still made breakfast every morning. She still found time for sex, and pleasure, and painting. She was nearer the site of the conflict zone and still, she painted.
Can we use the example of Gwen John as valuable lessons for us as cultural workers? Does it track even as I’ve already provided such distinct differences between many (not all) of our experiences of physical conflict wars of our centuries? Well, for those who are still not convinced let’s fast forward in time then, to a more contemporary example. Lee Krasner (1908-1984) would cringe at the notion of being defined as an “American” artist, she preferred to think about artists as outside of national identity making, so let us go with a New York-based artist. She was 21, fresh out of art school when the Great Depression hit in 1929. And yet, she found a way to make art. Partly because the US Government at the end of the Depression saw fit to create jobs for artists through the WPA, so it’s difficult to square that kind of support for artists today with proposed cuts to the NEA and what feels like the Executive Branch’s complete revulsion of “the arts.” But, lest we fall into the trap of it was always better back then, let’s also remember in 1933, who had access to these grants certainly replicated the very structural oppression Black, Indigenous and artists of color face in our current reality. Back in the early 1930s, as a Jewish woman Krasner had difficulties accessing this funding/work program. The knife’s edge of progress meets oppression once again. And yet, Krasner still painted. When WWII hit and the US again entered into this armed conflict in 1939, Krasner was in her early 30s. She had artist friends deployed, faced economic hardships, and still, she painted.
These artists also both lived through the 1918 flu pandemic. They too bore witness to race rebellions happening in their lifetimes. Krasner was alive during the Red Summer of 1919 when white folks targeted Black community members across the US. Living into the early 80s, Krasner was privy to the seismic political and civic shifts with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. And still, she painted. Krasner also retreated to the East Hampton beach town, and several photos of her exist enjoying lazy days on the beach in the warm days along the Atlantic Coast with friends. And still, she painted.
Like many creatives, I’m trying to account for how to be an artist in these times. I haven’t the space here to interrogate the idea of the culture wars which some pundits would claim are in new manifestations for twenty-first century times. But these culture wars are not new intellectual conflicts either. They are simply the grandchildren legacies of the culture wars of Gwen John and Lee Krasner's generations; all still from the roots of white supremacy. It’s clear that the work of visual artists is to make sense of and shape the world around them by using the realm of the visual to inspire new ideas. Sometimes biography helps me feel like it is ok to keep my focus on my palate and what is coming out on the other side of my brush. I rationalize that I am also giving public talks, organizing my home space to provide radical retreat for other artists and cultural workers. And, other times I wonder if biography helps me feel like I only gain access to the worlds of those with race and class privilege, and truly question whether there are lessons here for me or others with even fewer privileges than I live. I fret, this work takes so much time, to write, to be, to dream. Is that why I am not painting? Could Gwen John and Lee Krasner have done more to address fascism? To speak against oppression? To organize their time differently? Did they worry about such things and at the end of the day decided their efforts would be better spent in front of a canvas instead of a protest crowd? And then I remember, of course it’s never an “either/or.” Krasner was arrested at a protest in NYC in her youth. She hung out with the communists fleeing Europe and still, she painted. Even as I work to ground a feminist and anti-racist practice in all I do, I still must pay the bills. I still must help run this household, help prep our meals, eat, and rest, and fight, and create. I keep finding myself asking, what is the role of the cultural worker in these times? How can we get away from the “either/or” trap? What does a "both/and" approach mean when only the protest “counts?” When the guilt of not being at the protest prevents us from doing our important creative work?
The answers to my questions I keep coming to, is that we each have our role. We will not live to see the legacy our presence leaves behind. And still, I must paint.
Questions to Ponder
What are you committing to do, especially as a cultural worker?
In what ways can you imagine needing the arts to survive our current moment?
How are you supporting cultural workers in your community?
What questions haunt you in this political moment?
Receive this and more to your inbox by signing up for the Art of KCF Newsletter
