Tag: ancestry

558: “Objects in Constant Conversation” (Hattie Lee Mendoza)

                “Histories on many spectrums—ancestral, artistic, material, personal, and cultural—fuel my practice.
                My studio is a flux of mediums and objects in constant conversation with each other…”
                -Hattie Lee Mendoza (Cherokee), in her artist statement

                Today I got to attend a workshop with Hattie Lee Mendoza. (Here’s some of her art). I got to help carry in boxes of fabric scraps and beads, old bracelets and hole-punched playing cards and thread. Mendoza led us in laying them out, inviting, to cover three tables. She described sketching as a kind of layering things together, seeing how they fit, how the colors play and interplay. How they talk.
                My piece isn’t finished. Right now it’s wrapped up in my backpack, waiting for more stitches. Stitching makes me feel close to my mom, who taught me how to sew. To my aunt and my mom, who sat together laughing and hemming pants for my cousin’s wedding. To a family friend who calmly suggested I could keep sewing after I’d accidentally jabbed my finger. To my grandmother whose embroidery hangs in my mom’s kitchen. To an old roommate who loaned me embroidery thread to fix a hole in a pair of jeans, showing me how I could join the tear into a little scene mountains and rising sun. To another friend whose favorite coat we repaired together. Now the pocket doesn’t swallow their keys. To the friends I sat with at the workshop table today. 
                Mendoza suggested: start with the pieces you most want to include. The found objects and scraps, keys and buttons and shower tiles. See what goes with them. Following Mendoza’s teachings, sitting down became a kind of unfolding: like joining friends to take my unfinished cloth collage out of my backpack and listen as great grandma’s embroidery speaks to the playing cards and a twig from outside and the orange-silver pattern my friend is finding next to me. I’d like to finish this piece. And I’m glad the conversation goes on.

by Azlan

466: A Riddle (Richard Wilbur)

“Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace.
In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.”
-Richard Wilbur’s “Navis,” which is a translation of a riddle by Symphosius

                I’ve been going through boxes in my mom’s garage. Some of them I packed ten years ago, or twenty. Some my mom packed when I was small, and a few have envelopes or little boxes my grandma collected when my mom was small. Today we found my grandma’s birth certificate and coins she saved, complete with a handwritten note to my mom explaining that these would be valuable and they were “for the grandkids.”
                A few days before that I found my college copy of Richard Wilbur. The poem I quoted is from a series of riddle poems. I’m trying not to give away the answer. That way you can go walk around with i if you want. (The implied question in this series is always, What am I? And Wilbur uses the answer, in its original Latin, as a title). Leafing through this book, fifteen years later, I recognize so many of the poems. Looking through these documents and pictures, so many years later, I recognize so many of the moments. I’ve forgotten or never knew so many more. So many of us, joining to brace each other. So quick the way our lives wash through each other. I like how the poem and old handwriting and the act of remembering are all riddles, or could be. Are all inviting me to sit for a moment, or walk along with the image, listening to its hints.

by Azlan

465: A “Photo of my Grandma” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “I found this yearbook photo of my grandma when she was sixteen yesterday and I can’t stop looking in her eyes. I am so grateful and proud to be in the lineage of this fierce black indigenous woman who would grow up to face her fear of flying, and all her other fears, participate in revolutions, found countless organizations, work in solidarity with women all over the world and speak destiny into her granddaughter’s ear. I love every version of you.💜”
                -Alexis Pauline Gumbs on her instagram

                I love every version of you.
                Going through boxes, today, finding photographs of my grandparents ten years younger than I am now, my great grandmother younger than I am now, I feel a kind of tickling glee. An excitement, almost mischievous, like sneaking downstairs at nine years old to taste the cookies I’m not supposed to eat and finding them something I can’t name. Ginger and cayenne pepper, maybe, and delicious. 
                And then I feel a kind of distance. All my grandparents have passed away. Looking into their eyes I wish I’d learned more from them. Sat more often with them. Stood or knelt at their elbow to work in the garden or play a game or plan a local meeting for one of the associations/clubs they joined/led. And I feel a kind of depth. It’s so easy, with instagram, with the press of a hustle culture and the fears of an expansion economy, to think that now is somehow more real than then. Today I held hair my great grandmother trimmed from my grandmother’s head. A little icky, honestly, and a lot sweet, and packed neatly in tissue paper. Today I held an award my grandparents’ won in a bridge tournament, and some of the cards they played with, and spare dice stored meticulously in my grandfather’s pill bottle. (My mom says I get my love of dice and card games from them). Today I stepped into the oceans of their wild, vibrant, chance, eclectic, chaotic lives. And those lives felt close. And those lives felt far away. And that everyday habit of pretending my life is somehow more real than theirs seemed so laughable. And Gumbs suggested one way through the distance and the closeness is gratitude and love for every version of you.

by Azlan