Women's History and Youth Art Month
The arts seem to be well represented this month with exhibits featuring the art of women and youth. With all this happening around us I'm not sure how the exposure will benefit artists financially, but it does enliven the spirit to see the arts sought out and displayed for everyone to enjoy. With spring right around the corner and signs that summer is not far behind this year affords us another opportunity to dare hope that better times are to come. With our globe still shrouded in the throes of the pandemic, the presence of vaccines affords us a chance to hope that maybe the worse of the pandemic is behind us. March is not only Women's History Month but it is also Youth Art Month and there will be a variety of art and music activities showcasing the talent of our youth. What better ways to lift our spirits than to see the budding talent and creativity of young people. I'd like to take this opportunity to present the work of three of my freshman students for you to enjoy. They are Sekemi Dickson, Ronnie Tenezaca and Dallas Wilkins. These students have the gift of talent and carry the spirit of the artist within them. I feel they are our budding stars at Arts High and I look forward to watching their artistic talent continue to develop during their tenure at our school.
In our section Current and Upcoming you will find a link to an awesome exhibit of work by women artists. The exhibition is called Deadlocked and Loaded: Disarming America. It presents the work of 35 female-identified women artists from across the country in a variety of media. The artwork presented revolves around gun violence and our cultural embrace of it, the fatal effects and more. The exhibit was brought to my attention by Nettie Thomas, one of the artists exhibiting in the show curated by Karen M. Gutfreund, a curator who focuses on the subjects around feminism and social justice. The artwork is shown in 3 galleries spaces across Syracuse, New York. The link below gives you an opportunity to view the artwork in all three exhibition spaces. I hope you will find the time to peruse this powerful collection of art by a dynamic group of artists. Welcome, Spring 2021.
– Toni Thomas
ART & ARTISTS
This month we present the new work of Margaret Martin. Margaret is a fiber artist who resides in East Orange and works with a variety of textile techniques including weaving, quilting, natural dyeing, upcycling and clothing reconstruction. Read about her current exploration into the Japanese zashi and sakiori weaving techniques.
When the Palette Is Made Of Fibers and Memories
An Artist Statement by Margaret Martin
My grandparents were from Eastern Europe. They brought a culture with them to use everything up until it couldn't be used again. During the Depression and World War II sweaters were unraveled and used to create new garments. Fabric scraps were used in quilts, to deconstruct and reconstruction of garments and other uses until they couldn't be used. I use this today by combining different garments to make one garment I can use. I use parts of clothing that I don't have the sewing skill to complete. My grandmother liked sewing some bling and decorative stitching into her clothing. They were just more fun to wear. She was right you can make things more fun to wear with a little bit of what makes you smile.
In Japan there was a similar culture especially in Northern Japan. With sashiko you could decorate your piece with simple stitches. With boro-boro you used scraps of fabric to line your garments, floor coverings, or bedding. They also used sustainable methods of weaving. In northern Japan, the growing season was too short to grow cotton. The growing season was long enough to grow hemp and stinging nettles which were spun into yarn to make warp threads. Merchants would sail from Tokyo to Northern Japan. Several families would pool their resources to purchase a bale of used cotton clothing. They made the clothing into strips and wove them into fabric. If they had a four shaft loom they wove the fabric into some varied and interesting patterns. In poorer households most of the sakiori was done on small (8 to 10 inch wide) two shaft looms and in plain weave. They alternated the fabric strips with the hemp yarn. The Japanese also used remainder threads/yarns and wove them into fabric. This is called zanshi. Sakiori and zanshi techniques are used today to make fashion forward clothing and woven textiles.
I have used sakiori, zanshi, applique stitching and some embroidery with thread/yarn/ beads to create pieces of art. There are two pieces here, an orange and a dark blue one. The red/orange one is based on a story from Peach Lake, NY. A development was built on a landfill of septic tank waste. In one of the homes a child was stricken with cancer. The cancer was due to septic waste. The treatment for the child was so expensive the family could not afford to move to take the child out of this toxic environment. I visited this neighborhood to see if there were other visual signs of the toxins. At the entrance of the development there were trees that were damaged. There were two trees that had no leaves in the middle of summer. One was a large Japanese Maple also near the entrance of the development. The other was in front of the home of the child, a perfectly shaped tree overlooking Peach Lake at sunset in the summer. A stunning visual seared in my memory. The blue moonlit night is a memory of growing up in the Hudson River Valley. I would often go to look at the river at all different times of day and night. Most times it was just to enjoy the beauty of the River.
– Margaret Martin
A FINAL NOTE
Remembering Augusta Savage
An American sculptor, teacher and activist
