I was all consumed this Winter and early Spring holed up in the studio making Wet Kiss. The work shipped and free of the deadline I spent the first weekend bopping around the city making my way through the shows I’ve been itching to get to: from the Upper West Side to see the prolific and cross-disciplinary Sonia Delaunay at Bard Graduate Center, to downtown to see performance pioneer Joan Jonas and one of my first high school loves, Käthe Kollwitz, both at MoMA, to Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art at The Met, which could have been three times bigger.
The three retrospective exhibitions by Delaunay, Jonas, and Kollwitz gave me a deep sense of calm. Witnessing the accumulative effects of their lives devoted to art and pursuing the questions that come while in the studio brings levity to my own practice and the state of unknowing, which for me is a condition of creativity.
My high school art teacher, Cindra Avery, insightfully taught us German Expressionism, a perfect subject for angsty teenagers, our inner lives being so wrought and our deep need to communicate. She also introduced me to Käthe Kollwitz. Whose pathos resonated with my awakening to the horror and sorrow of world history I was learning down the hall: from Holocaust documentaries, to reading Gandhi's autobiography, or watching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X at home. Kollwitz’s images of women huddled with their children or death’s spindly hands reaching down to touch a battered wife and mother speaks to the destruction from war, industrialization, and oppression - images we witness regularly as families mourn their children’s preventable deaths.
Kollwitz has returned to me before this new MoMA retrospective. I’ve been charting a reading list that weighs heavily on the topic of the artist as mother. In many of the books on the topic, some covered here in this newsletter, her name appears again and again.
Ursula K. Le Guin in her speech turned essay, The Fisherwoman’s Daughter from 1988 addressed Kollwitz as she lays out the competing interest, secrecy, and task of being a writer and a mother with this quote from Kollwitz:
“I am gradually approaching the period of my life when work comes first. When both boys were away at Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate, and went for short walks. but above all I worked.
And yet I wonder whether the “blessing” isn’t missing from such work, no longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow gazes.
Perhaps in reality I accomplish little more. The hands work and work, and the head imagines it’s producing God knows what, and yet, formerly, when my working time was so wretchedly limited, I was more productive, because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything…Potency, potency is diminishing.”
Looping through these shows, my history, my studio practice, and my own state as an artist and mother I feel this potency and energy. It surges in tandem with the intimacy of being with my son in this phase of life and the dashing sense of being alone that the studio provides. Wet Kiss is another tribute of that relationship as it visits me in my creative life.
