The bleakness of the weather and my personal life led me to hibernate for the winter. My hibernation entailed coming straight home after work to exercise, cook, and read. I saved my studio time for the weekends. When 2011 began, I was afraid to dream, and I didn't want to want anything anymore. Wanting things would only lead to disappointment.
I'd rather not even bother looking back at 2020. I almost wrote a retrospective about it, but decided not to. Why dredge up so much misery? Instead, I'm looking back 10 years ago to 2011, a year that I began by deliberately setting no particular goals other than the aforementioned plan of self-imposed winter hibernation. Interestingly, I was able to accomplish a great deal in 2011, not by setting lofty goals for myself, but by just taking things a day at a time. And I think that hibernation period was good preparation for my current social distancing hermitage. Here are 10 things turning 10 this year, in no particular order:
1. My artist statement for Post-Consumerism
2011 was when I finally came up with an artist statement about Post-Consumerism that I found satisfactory. Here's my blog post about it.
2011 was the year I had my very first Fall in Love with Art event at my studio for Valentine's Day. A serendipitous discovery of a beautiful Black Barbie doll wearing a dress covered in red lipstick kisses (while wandering the aisles at Target) inspired me to create a photo series showcasing miniature artwork with a Valentine's Day theme.
4. Ruby Horizon
My second commissioned painting, Ruby Horizon, was made for my cousin's home.
A visual depiction of what being in a long engagement can feel like.
9. Flower Power Collage
I made this collage in the spring of 2011 when my outlook on life was improving. There's no blog post about it, but it is available in my Zazzle store on variety of products.
10. Cerulean Rhapsody
Cerulean Rhapsody is still my biggest painting, made from the box my easel was shipped in, inspired by the color of my laptop (which is also turning 10 this year!).
Finally, here's something turning 5 this year: my young adult novel, A Bitter Pill to Swallow. I published the final version January 20th, 2016.
Looking back at 2011 helps me as I look forward in 2021. And hopefully this year will be better for all of us.
If you're familiar with my blog, you probably know that Laurie Simmons is one of my favorite contemporary photographers. When I was in graduate school, I did a video presentation on her work, which you can watch in this old blog post. I've always considered her work an influence on The Doll Project. I was very excited to find out that the MCA would be featuring her work in a retrospective this year.
The show is called Big Camera, Little Camera, and shares its title with one of Laurie Simmons' first photos using miniatures. What I like about her work is that it's often whimsical, or appears so at a distance, until you take a closer look.
When I was working on my video presentation, I saw clips of her film, The Music of Regret, and she talked about the process of making it in her interviews. But as an art film, it's not readily available to view. So I was very happy that it was playing in one of the galleries in the show. It is a musical in three acts and features original music, puppetry, ventriloquist dummies, and a performance by Meryl Streep. It brings her still photographs to life.
There was a glass case with many of the miniature props she used in her photographs. Most of the dollhouse furniture is plastic, and appears to be 3/4" scale. My guess is that a lot of it was made by companies like Marx to go into the tin dollhouses they made in the 1940s through the 1960s.
Her work with miniatures led to an opportunity to create The Kaleidoscope House with architect Peter Wheelwright for Bozart toys in 2001. My Kaleidoscope House is the jewel of my dollhouse collection and I was glad to see one on view in the museum. The other people visiting the show seemed to enjoy it too. Accessories for the house were sold separately. There were sets of contemporary miniature furniture by designers including Ron Arad and Karim Rashid, as well as miniature artwork by artists including Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons. The house itself is a spiritual successor to the Imagination House made by Marx toys in 1965. Action figures based on the artist, the architect, and their children were also sold separately, and they are featured in the museum's dollhouse.
The museum itself resembled the Kaleidoscope House in some ways, thanks to the site-specific work on the windows and atrium wall by Federico Herrero and the rainbow of products from the museum store arranged on this table by hue.
I was able to attend Laurie Simmons' opening day talk in the museum's auditorium. While we sat waiting for it to begin, there was a sudden outcry from a young woman sitting a few rows behind me. She stood up and directed her anger at Lena Dunham, who was sitting in the front row. Lena Dunham is Laurie Simmons' daughter. Over the years, in addition to making a feature film and a TV series for HBO, Lena Dunham has also made a lot of truly awful public statements, particularly on Twitter. The angry young woman had come to confront her about a particularly egregious one, in which she came to the defense of a friend of hers at the expense of the actress who accused him of assault. She later apologized, after articles like the one I linked to and numerous people with Twitter accounts called her out on her egregious behavior. The young woman's solitary protest in the auditorium was a continuation of that, angrily questioning the supposed feminism of a woman who called a rape survivor a liar. Immediately afterwards, Lena Dunham stood up and yelled to the protester that she was a real person with feelings, not just someone on Twitter, and that she had apologized. The young woman stormed out before security could escort her out. A tense silence fell over the room. We had all just witnessed an all-too common occurrence from Lena Dunham's public life, only in person and not on social media: the call-out, her defense, the apology that still comes off as self-centered somehow. And yet, after hearing her voice and the pain in it, as opposed to just reading a screenshot of a tweet on a screen, I found myself feeling bad for her. But I felt worse for the young woman who had spoken up before leaving, who told Lena Dunham that she was a rape survivor herself. I had been in the middle of a tweet about the show when the commotion began. In the uneasy quiet that followed, I decided not to tweet about the incident. I decided to save that for this blog post, where I have more that 280 characters at a time to tell the story.
I'd had a bad feeling that something like this might happen from the moment I read about the public appearances that Laurie Simmons would be making. Her daughter has become a lightning rod for criticism, and for good reason. In the era of the #MeToo movement, there is a lot of discussion about separating the artist from the art, but now I was wondering if you could separate the artist from her family. Because I like a lot of Laurie Simmons' work, but Lena Dunham has been consistently problematic.
The program began as if nothing unusual had preceded it. Throughout the talk, I was worried that something else would happen, but nothing did, not even when the time came for questions from the audience. In her talk, Laurie Simmons shared clips of favorite films that she references in her new film, My Art. She talked about an interesting theme she had observed in several of them, including Bell Book and Candle, that when women fall in love, they lose their powers. She said that she feels like artists are vampires using everything around them to make their art. She likes to use dolls, mannequins, and other stand-ins for live human models in her work to find the truth in artifice and is unapologetic about her love of fashion and its relevance to her work. During the course of the show, those who have been impacted by the gender pay gap will have the opportunity to get discounted tickets to the MCA.
I was so distracted by what happened at the artist talk that I neglected to mention something else that's problematic about this show. I don't spend much time looking at art that I don't like or blogging about it because I think life's too short for that and I'm not interested in being an art critic, but fellow Chicago artist Jenny Lam wrote about it on her blog. I was remiss not to mention it. I didn't spend much time looking at The Love Doll series because, like the How We See series, I found it creepy and weird. If I had taken the time to pay attention to it instead of walking past it quickly, I think I would have come to the same conclusions that Jenny Lam and her friend Trilbe Wynne did, which is that it's very stereotypical. For an artist so interested in how women are stereotyped in media, her treatment of Asian women in her work is a prime example of what feminists of color mean when they talk about "white feminism." Like mother, like daughter, tiny furniture is what Laurie Simmons does best.
There are two great shows at the Smart Museum right now: Solidary & Solitaryand Smart to the Core: Embodying the Self. Solidary & Solitary features work by Black abstract artists. As a Black abstract artist myself, I was so excited to see such work get recognition. I had actually planned to go to the opening reception but because the weather was so bad last week, I went there today instead. Most of the work in the show is from the collection of of Pamela Joyner, a Black art collector. There is also art that was commissioned specifically for the show. The description of the show contains a passage that particularly resonates with me:
For Black artists, abstraction is charged with the refusal of
representation that is socially dictated, both by racist stereotypes of
the dominant culture, and the pressure from within the Black community
to create positive imagery. Abstract art as a practice embodies the
possibility of individual freedom and autonomy, even within larger
social identities.
Smart to the Core: Embodying the Self is an exhibit inspired by a University of Chicago core course in the social sciences called Self, Culture, and Society (that many students jokingly referred to as Self-torture and Anxiety when I was a student there). A lot of the work in this exhibition is about the individual in conflict with society, particularly those with marginalized identities.
This piece was a collaborative work made by Amanda Williams based on the writing of Chicago journalist Natalie Moore, who recently authored a book about segregation on the South Side of the city. The red carpet is symbolic of the redlining policy that enforced segregation in Chicago.
Amanda Williams, Roll out the Red Carpet to White Flight (They Didn't Pitch Tents in the Open Prairie)
Both shows are on view until May 19th. The Smart Museum is on the campus of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and admission is free. Visit their website for directions and hours.
Since I have been exhibiting my artwork for ten years now, I thought it was time I participate in a large scale international art fair. For years I've attended EXPO and SOFA at Navy Pier, on the outside looking in, wishing that I could be one of the featured artists. I applied for two grants to pay for this show at the same time that I applied to be in it. The grants rejected me but the show accepted me. I think I felt a sense of urgency about taking a chance on it anyway because my aunt's sudden passing made me think about the things I hope to achieve in my lifetime. I don't want to wait to be "discovered" by someone. I'm trying to put myself in situations where I am more likely to encounter people who would want to buy my art or can otherwise help further my career. My goal isn't necessarily fame, but for the right people to know my name.
The show was a Mana Contemporary on Cermak. Though the building is gritty and industrial on the outside, it has been transformed into a sleek art space on the inside. I was very pleased with the way the show looked.
I made two new paintings for the show, Emerald Splendor and Violet Verve.
I brought a comfortable chair that goes with my artwork. I also brought one copy of each of my art books.
I really appreciated the fact that The Other Art Fair partnered with Little Black Pearl. And it was also good that there were receptions on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.
The youngest VIP to visit my booth during the VIP reception Friday was my niece.
I think she liked the colors of my business cards.
There were 120 artists in the fair. The work ran the gamut from installation art to painting to sculpture to multimedia experiences. Here are some of my favorites.
So much beautiful work, as you can see. It was a shame that more people didn't come to see it. I didn't sell anything.
red dots I never got to use; a blank sales docket
The issue may have been the location. As I have written before, Chicago is a very segregated city. There are many in this city who will not venture south of McCormick Place. What lies west of Chinatown are parts unknown to them. With Mana being as far south as McCormick Place and across the river from Chinatown, the journey to The Other Art Fair was likely too daunting for some people to take. A shuttle bus or trolley service would have made a huge difference. So would having the show closer to Navy Pier to get the most out of the EXPO traffic.
I won't lie about how I felt by Saturday night. I was profoundly disappointed. People who said they were coming back never returned. I felt like it might be too late for me to sell anything. I had fleeting despondent thoughts of dumping all my paintings into the Chicago River, which of course would defeat the purpose of trying to have an eco-friendly, zero-waste art process. So then I thought it might help if Allen Vandever were there to threaten to chop my art up with an axe again. But I remember how that went. I have a lightbox sign at my studio that currently says "BUY MY ART" on it and I had thought about bringing it. Though I'm sure it wouldn't have made a difference either. I was glad that an artist friend called me during the show and talked me out of my gloomy mindset. I had begun to wonder if my work just isn't good enough and was going back over all the hard times I had as a sales associate and thinking of all the things my old jobs had taught me and worrying that I hadn't been a good salesperson of my work. I started thinking of all the places I didn't advertise the show, and wondered if posting about it on this blog that nobody even really reads anymore would have made a difference. (But I advertised on all my social media, even LinkedIn, for goodness sake!) Then I heard other artists also saying that their work wasn't selling, either. So at least it wasn't just me. Though it was nice hearing people say they love my art, it is hard to believe that if they don't actually buy it. It's kind of like when someone says they love you but not enough to marry you.
But these are the things that happen when you do something for the first time. You make mistakes. You learn from them.
Having to return to my studio with unsold artwork after paying so much to be in a show where I didn't sell it was disheartening. So is still feeling like I don't have enough of the right people paying attention to my work. I still feel invisible, unrecognized, and unnoticed. Still, I realized that even though it is really hard being an artist sometimes, it would be even harder doing something I hate every day. I suppose the good thing about this experience was realizing this. Yes, the thing I love to do is typically a very, very hard way to make money, but I still want to do it anyway.
I don't think I will be paying to participate in any more shows for a very long time unless I finally get a grant that can cover the cost. Despite my disappointment, I'm glad I got to be a part of the inaugural The Other Art Fair in Chicago and hope that it will somehow lead to better things.
