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Alisa Banks Studio News $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
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Greetings, I hope this issue finds you and yours in good health and good spirits. This salutation takes on greater meaning during our turbulent year. A spring of sheltering in place lent itself to writing essays and texts for new and in-progress work. Each year unfolds in unexpected ways, bringing new challenges and extending others. Though pandemics are certainly not new on this planet, COVID-19 focused broad attention to our interdependence and the interrelationships among and between countries, and it defied our attempts to vilify and isolate, helping bring into focus the meaning and importance of community. Perhaps it is the slowing down of individual activity and subsequent coverage of increased COVID-19 mortality rates for Black Americans by news and social media that ignited discussion of the broad disparities in our healthcare system. The tandem public killings of unarmed Black citizens by those sworn to protect and to serve has served to bring our nation’s stain of racism into broader focus. Health disparity and police violence are only two issues currently at the apex of attention to a complex system that serves to keep the Black body at the bottom of the social order. The coverage of both formed a perfect storm, igniting broad public outcry. Isolation coupled with news of almost daily assaults are but a sample of how oppression works to increase anxiety, which is exacerbated by the possibility that the uproar will fade within a few news cycles and meaningful change is elusive. Individuals are posting outrage, demanding justice, joining street protests. The massiveness of designed oppression is coming into view and the racism prefixes are lining up: environmental, healthcare, agricultural, educational, etc. Analyses of racial bias in fields and organizations varying from the SierraClub to Vogue are being discussed. Sites to activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter, initiatives such as Teaching Tolerance and the 1619 Project, and thoughtful essays, such as The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates are being shared. Renewed critiques of the removal of Confederate monuments have begun. Citizens are researching their local, state, and national leaders’ records, holding their feet to the fire, and planning to protest with their vote. Organizations are generating, revisiting, or revising their plans for inclusiveness. Active resistance stretches back to “discovery” of this land. The early Europeans resisted oppression in their native countries. Indigenous peoples resisted enslavement and eventual relocation. The earliest Africans, freed after initial servitude, resisted the eventual and systematic stripping of their liberties down to enslavement. For the next 400 years, laws and policies were put in place to objectify, use, and abuse the Black body. Four hundred years is a long time to normalize a system of oppression, to seep it into every fiber of society, to harden and polish it to a resinous shine. Resistance to oppression would occur continuously in this country on individual and organizational levels – from slave rebellions to owners teaching enslaved persons to read, from individual escapes to those guided by the Underground Railroad, from the marches and court cases of the Civil Rights movement to the inclusive resistance of Black Lives Matter. This is by no means a complete or even well-rounded list, but is meant to emphasize that activists of today join a long chorus of those who find injustice intolerable and are moved to act. Public declarations of support for Black lives and self-admonishment is meaningless without significant and sustained action. It is as yet unknown how long the public and very vocal outcry from Americans of all walks of life will continue or if meaningful change will result, but steady pressure is needed to crack up a system of oppression hardened with use. It may seem as though a period of lessened activity followed the significant gains that were previously made by resistance movements, a breathing time, a cycle. But not really. Activists and activist organizations have consistently worked in front of and behind the scenes for change. They realize that the fight for justice, for equality, for inclusion, is a long game. Stay vigilant.
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The last two books of the Elemental series featuring autobiographical texts – Water and Fire – are complete. Like previous editions in the series (Earth and Air), each feature cloth pages, hand written text, and stitching, but the appearance of color is a distinct departure.
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Water, open excerpt~ …my eyes weren’t open yet, so there was nothing to see. This realm consisted solely of sound and touch. Persistent gurgling sounds, sometimes loud, most times fainter, were accompanied by a constant drum. There were the occasional short sharp sounds, but the best were the melodic ones. Much later, I would learn to differentiate between sounds of song and of survival. I was not yet aware that I would bear the mark of dolor. This safe place nurtured me. I would move along an edge to stretch and if I ventured too far, it would hold me back. Boundaries protected me. I learned many things, though the names could not be spoken. Some would call it a primitive existence, but it reached back to many, many ancestors… Water moves from solid to liquid to gas and exists on, in, and over the earth in these three states. In religion and mythology, water symbolism relates to creation, passages, wisdom, and purification. It not only has the potential to heal and to quench, but also to devastate. Water features texts about passages, purification, and wisdom that are abstract, symbolic, and realistic. |
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excerpt~ …My dad was fighting in a war, which I believed shared the same sky in the direction of the lady’s house where my mom and aunt occasionally went to get us the best hamburgers on the planet. Sometimes I would look to the sky and ask God to send my dad back home. At school, my classmates sometimes made fun of my choice of words or the way I spoke. For the most part, that didn’t bother me, though it served as a reminder that I was an outsider. There were other troubles at school, like the time the nurse came to check us for worms. She also would check us for lice, which I understood to be little bugs that crawled around in your hair and bit your scalp like tiny mosquitoes. I heard that if you had worms, they’d give you some medicine that made you throw up. I was terrified of throwing up and equally terrified of having worms or lice. Fortunately, I didn’t have either, and was therefore spared the treatments. The worst thing, though, was the violence that I witnessed every week both inside and outside the school building… Fire – orange to red, to blue, to white – is both intimate and universal. Fire catches and holds on to matter, consuming it until it is transformed into something else, an essence. Fire is mesmerizing, in turn lulling and igniting fervor. In religion and mythology, it is the element that represents awareness and consciousness. Fire is the last of the Elemental series, featuring text that unfolds to reveal at its center, an essence.
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College Book Art Association (CBAA)
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In the wee hours of 2020, I attended the CBAA conference held in New Orleans. It was a pleasure meeting librarians and fellow artists and learning about their work and ideas. Diane Jacobs and I presented Hair + Book: Body Politics in Book Arts. Thank you to those who attended and for your thoughtful questions and positive feedback. Scripps College
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In January, I retired from a 37-year career in medical laboratory science. My plan was to immediately dive into what poet Rainer Maria Rilke termed “heart-work,” but first a treat – answering an invitation to visit Scripps College in Claremont, CA to present Modeling the Message: A Fusion of the Verbal and the Visual. It was lovely to meet the book arts students to view and discuss their work, and to sample the special collection at the Dennison Library. Special thanks to Tia Blassingame, Assistant Professor and Director of the Scripps College Press.
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I am pleased to announce that Interwoven Alphabet, a collaborative work completed last year with Diane Jacobs, is featured in the annual Art of the Book exhibit at Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, California. View the exhibition here.
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