Fine Arts News

The U.S. Postal Service, in conjunction with the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in New York, unveiled five new stamps Thursday depicting the paintings of Mexican artist Martin Ramirez.

The U.S. Postal Service has just unveiled five new stamps depicting the paintings and drawings of Martin Ramirez.
An immigrant from Mexico, Ramirez was a self-taught artist who spent almost half of his life in California mental hospitals after being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

A ceremony Thursday at the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in Manhattan — which is hosting an exhibition in conjunction with the release of the stamps called "Martin Ramirez: Forever" — signaled a kind of official recognition that brought family members from across the country and his native Mexico to New York City for the unveiling.

In 1925, Ramirez left a pregnant wife and three children in Mexico to find work in California. He was 30 years old and spoke no English. Six years later he found himself like a lot of people during the Great Depression: homeless. Sociologist Victor Espinosa told NPR in 2007 that the government had to find a place for them.

"We have to remember in those days — we're talking about the Depression Era in California — people were living in the streets and the mental institutions were really like homeless shelters," Espinosa said.

Ramirez wound up at DeWitt State Hospital, outside of Sacramento, Calif., where James Durfee ran Ward 106. Durfee says the ward was filled with all kinds of patients, some of whom were violent.

"It was my opinion that he was very fearful of some of these other patients, and I believe that's why he chose to draw underneath the table in a crouched position," he says.

Durfee remembered that Ramirez made paint by mixing spit with crushed crayons and colored pencils. He used matchsticks to apply his colors — subdued reds, yellows and blues. Many of the drawings are on long sheets of examining table paper, depicting trains running in or out of tunnels, cars morphing into turtles and numerous Madonnas.

A Martin Ramirez painting from 1950 depicting a train and tunnel. The Ricco-Maresca gallery is hosting an exhibition of Ramirez's work called "Martin Ramirez: Forever."

By the time of his death at the hospital in 1963, many of Ramirez's works had been destroyed. But some were taken by a psychologist studying mental illness and art. Most of those works eventually made their way to private collectors.

Nineteen Ramirez works are now on display at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, where the postal service unveiled the new stamps last week. Fourteen members of the artist's family were on hand for the ceremony.

"We're all just so dumbfounded by the hugeness of it all," says Elba Ortega, the artist's great-granddaughter. "It's just such an honor. I know that he would be as happy and as overwhelmed as we are."

About eight years ago, the Ramirez family hired lawyers to assert the estate's ownership of the artist's works. A source close to the family told NPR that since then it's been able to sell more than 50 works. Christopher Klatell, a lawyer for the Ramirez estate, says a Ramirez Madonna was discovered at the Library of Congress last year.

"The Ramirez estate then did a part gift, part sale of that work ... so that it could remain in the Library of Congress' collection," Klatell says.

New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz is pleased that art collectors have recognized the genius of Ramirez, but he takes major art museums in New York to task for neglecting the artist's works.

"The Whitney owns none of them, MoMA owns one, the Met owns none and the Guggenheim owns four," Saltz says. "So, you know what? Big shout out to the U.S. Post Office."

The Postal Service's five Ramirez issues are "Forever" stamps, which means the general public can use and see them for years to come.


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In The Shame In Venice 2, Kenyan artist Michael Soi protests the makeup of his country's pavilion at the Biennale.

There's something sketchy at this year's Venice Biennale – the international art exhibition sometimes dubbed the Olympics of the contemporary art world.

When you come to the Kenyan pavilion, almost all of the artists will be ... Chinese.

The Biennale, one of the oldest and most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world, takes place in Venice every two years.

Thirty countries, including the U.S., have a permanent slot.



"Thank You Africa" is by one of two Kenyan citizens who will exhibit at the Biennale. He is Armando Tanzini, a 72-year-old Italian-born painter, sculptor and real estate magnate who has lived in the country for nearly a half a century.

About 50 other countries have applied for their own exhibition space, called a pavilion. The East African country of Kenya hosted its first pavilion in 2013, and plans to host another this year, featuring mainly Chinese nationals. None of them have apparently ever been to Africa or reference it in their work.

The controversial roster — including contemporary artists Qin Feng, Shi Jinsong, Li Zhanyang, Lan Zheng Hui, Li Gang, and others — has provoked outrage among Kenyan bloggers and artists. It's also provoked a sense of deja vu — the same thing happened in 2013. Kenya's first-ever pavilion was also overwhelmingly Chinese.

"I was a member of the jury for the last Biennale in 2013 and the Kenyan Pavilion was shambolic," writes Olabisi Silva on Facebook. The founder and director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, wrote that the Kenyan pavilion was "full of Chinese and Italian artists with some [Kenyan artists] in a dark room."

"A frightening manifestation of neocolonialism vulgarly presented as multiculturalism," wrote Wenny Teo in a critique of the 2013 exhibit, "to be avoided like the plague."

In Nairobi, where the Kenyan contemporary art scene is gaining traction with serious art buyers, the news is being felt not just as an artistic flop but as a colossal missed opportunity. "It's a kick in the stomach," says Sylvia Gichia, director of Kuona Trust, an artist's collective and residency program in Nairobi. Organizations like hers work hard to bring Nairobi's artistic renaissance to a global audience via art fairs and art auctions.

Needless to say she is dismayed that the 370,000 art lovers who visit the Biennale will see none of the work that's driving the contemporary Kenyan scene. "What," Gichia asks, "do the Chinese have to do with visual arts in Kenya?"

Nobody in Kenya's government will answer that question. (Calls and texts to the personal cell phone of Nairobi's Minister of Culture, Dr Hassan Wario, went unanswered.) In most countries, the government either selects the artists or assigns that duty to a private gallery. In Kenya, the government apparently played no role other than to fob off the job to an Italian curator, Paola Poponi.

Poponi cannot say she's ever stepped foot in Kenya, but her official title is "commissioner" of the Kenyan pavilion, the same title she held in 2013. She defended the choice of artists, in an email liberal with capitalizations, saying that the Kenyan pavilion ably expressed the international theme of this 56th Biennale, which is All The World's Futures.

Poponi wrote, "Talking about art FROM ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD during an art exhibition can be useful for KENYA, always more able to create its OWN IDENTITY." She said that art should not be constrained by geography and explained in a follow-up email that "MEETING THE REST OF THE WORLD" would enable Kenyan artists analyze their own experiences "more deeply."

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Artist Parviz Tanavoli with his sculpture Big Heech Lovers.

With his head of silver hair and stylish black blazer, Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli looks younger than his 77 years. He's been called the father of modern Iranian sculpture, but he hasn't had a major museum show in the U.S. in almost four decades. Now, Wellesley College's Davis Museum is giving viewers a chance to see 175 of Tanavoli's sculptures and drawings.

While leading a tour of the Massachusetts school's gallery, Tanavoli stops in front of his curvaceous sculptures known as "Heeches."

"Any Iranian could easily read this," he says, referring to the sculptures. "It's composed of three letters: H, the head is like H; then the center part is like I or double E; this curve is like CH at the end." On paper, the Heech is a slender piece of calligraphy that's popular in Persian poetry: It means "nothingness" in Farsi.

"The other advantage of this word is all the meanings behind it," Tanavoli says. "... All the great poets like Rumi, they deal with this word; they question about it. What is Heech? I mean, is there nothing?"

Tanavoli has crafted hundreds of Heeches over the past 50 years — in ceramic, bronze, fiberglass and even neon. They are graceful, almost human forms that connect with viewers and helped revive sculpture as an art form in Iran.



Parviz Tanavoli, Neon Heech, 2012.

"He's definitely the pride of the Middle Eastern art scene," says Ali Khadra of the contemporary art magazine Canvas, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Khadra flew to Boston for a 24-hour visit just to see Tanavoli's new exhibition. He calls the sculptor "a beacon of hope" for aspiring artists in his politically tense region and he hopes this show will help bring a little of the culture behind the headlines to Western audiences.

"It's like a chain reaction," Khadra says. "When a museum is interested, an education program takes place and the interest keeps growing. And this is how the West will know about Middle Eastern art."

The 'Good Days' In Iran

Sculpture died off as an art form in the region now known as Iran after the Arabs conquered Persia in the 7th century. At the time, visual depictions of the human body were at odds with the Muslim belief that art is a representation of the divine. But after studying sculpture in Italy in the 1950s, Tanavoli returned to Tehran and opened a studio that became a magnet for young artists.



Fiberglass Heech sculptures by Parviz Tanavoli.

"It was very exciting for [me]," the artist says. "I was young and I thought I was doing something and I worked very hard for it. And when I look at it today, I'm proud of it. They were good days."
But they were also challenging.

"There weren't that many people trained for art, and there weren't that many followers or fans and collectors," he says. "People weren't familiar with the modern art I was producing."

In 1965, authorities shut down Tanavoli's gallery show in Tehran because it merged materials and imagery from the East and West. Things got more complicated for the artist with the 1979 revolution and the taking of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. He ultimately left his teaching job at Tehran University and moved his family to Toronto.

A Cultural History Lesson Through Art



Parviz Tanavoli, Hands in Grill, 2005.

Shiva Balaghi is a Middle Eastern culture historian at Brown University and co-curator of the Davis Museum's show. She says you could teach a seminar on modern Iranian history through Tanavoli's work. "You see the common art of the streets of Tehran represented in his work; you see Iranian folklore; you see ancient Persian myths. But you also see that within Iranian society and culture there is this poetic and lyrical spirit and this sense of humor that withstands regardless of the day-to-day political situation."

That situation is reflected in some of Tanavoli's mor e brutal, confining imagery of cages, locks and jail cells. Still, Balaghi thinks Americans will be surprised to see how optimistic this Iranian's work is.

"There is this sense of gratitude for the simple things in life — like the image of a bird flying, like the shape of a letter in the alphabet," she says.

Tanavoli keeps a foundry and studio in Iran and lives there part of the year, but he admits that politics have hindered his country's ability to share its culture. He says, "We used to be very well connected with Westerners ... but now it's unfortunate because so much has been happening in Iran in [the] last 35 years in culture — music, film and all of that — a lot of people are not even aware of it."


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A series of 60 paintings by Jacob Lawrence captures the journeys of millions of African-Americans who left the Jim Crow South in search of better lives elsewhere.

There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
The son of a cook from South Carolina and a domestic worker from Virginia, Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917, but it was his years in Harlem that shaped some of his most iconic work: a series of 60 paintings about the black Southerners, like his parents, who fled to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration.

That mass exodus of African-Americans began a hundred years ago, and lasted until the 1970s. New York's Museum of Modern Art is honoring that history by displaying Lawrence's entire series for the first time since 2008, when it was shown at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Co-owned by the two museums, the paintings are making a rare appearance together now at MoMA in "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North."



Each of the 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's Great Migration series is accompanied with a caption. For this panel, he wrote in 1941: "In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry."

Leaving A 'Godforsaken Place'

Jim Crow laws that codified racial inequality in the South helped drive Lawrence's parents – and 6 million other African-Americans — to move to cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. Along the way, they transformed the music, demographics, and politics of the places they went.
"They were not only heroic in their courage to leave a godforsaken place for a better place," Muhammad explains, "but also that they were also going to challenge that new place to live up to its own possibilities."

Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote about the Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns, says the mass movement was a turning point in U.S. history that was overlooked for decades.
"There are many, many children and grandchildren of the Great Migration who did not hear this directly from their own families," she says. "Because it went on for so long, it was often hard to see, and I think one of the people who could see it all along was Jacob Lawrence."



"Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this."

Come out of the Bone Age, darling....1955
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York



Good thing he kept his head, 1962



In 2008, Thomas put on a similar exhibit that focused on images of African-Americans. His new exhibit is focused on white women — but American attitudes towards other races appear in works like Golly, Mis' Maria, Folks Jus' Can't Help Havin' a friendly feeling' for Dis Heah!, 1935



Aggressive loyalty, 1963



Advertisements don't need any words to say a lot about a culture.
That's one of the messages that shines through in the work of artist Hank Willis Thomas. In 2008, Thomas removed the text and branding from ads featuring African-Americans, creating a series he called Unbranded, which illustrated how America has seen and continues to see black people.

In the run-up to the 2016 election — and the possibility of a white woman being nominated — he's mounted a new exhibit, featuring women in print. It's called Unbranded: A Century of White Women, and it features images from mainstream commercial print advertisements from 1915 to today.

"Ads really aren't about the products. It's about what myths and generalizations we can attach."

- Hank Willis Thomas

Stripping away the normal elements of an advertisement and reducing it to pure image is powerful, Thomas says.
"I think what happens with ads — when we put text and logos on them, we do all the heavy lifting of making them make sense to us," he tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "But when you see the image naked, or unbranded, you start to really ask questions.
"That's why we can almost never tell what it's actually an ad for, because ads really aren't about the products. It's about what myths and generalizations we can attach, and the repetition of imagery of a certain type."

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Interview Highlights

On what surprised him when he laid out the advertisements chronologically
I actually was amazed to look at how advertising can function as a mirror for the hopes and dreams — or the anxiety — of a society at a period of time.

The one that really kind of struck a chord with me was this image from 1955 of a woman being dragged by her hair in a corset and holding a telephone. When I first saw the ad I was struck by the violence in it — it's a man, kind of dressed like a caveman ... dragging her. And the text said, "Come out of the Bone Age, darling." And the suggestion was that corsets were made with bones, and that if you wanted to be advanced, like a modern woman, you would wear synthetic [materials].

But at the same time that that image was produced, Emett Till was killed in the United States for whistling at a "white woman." And I found it fascinating that her virtue could be so challenged and maybe besmirched by him whistling at her, allegedly, but it would be OK in the public to present images of white women being dragged by their hair by white men.

You don't have to try so hard!, 1958. Artist Hank Willis Thomas and NPR's Linda Wertheimer used this "unbranded" ad from 1958 — with a man mischievously smiling as a woman laps up beer — as an example of the growing sexualization of women in ads from the late '50s.

On how in the late '50s and early '60s the images became more sexualized
I also think that it's amazing that it really happens almost immediately after World War II. And I think this sexualization in mainstream ads, which is what I use, was part of this need for women to be kind of put in a place.

On whether it got any better for women as decades passed
Mr. Mom came out [in 1983], and we see that kind of switching of positions. And then the '90s is where I think things start to get more diverse — and then into the aughts it gets, I think, crazier. Because we see really sexist images, but we see images where African-Americans appear for the first time as equals to white women, we see men being kind of in a lesser position than women in certain images, and we even see same-sex couples.

But the final image is an image from 2015 for a Ram truck, where it looks like — it's based off an image of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" ... and there's all these women in bikinis in the cold. It really speaks to the ridiculousness of it.


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Andy Warhol. Mona Lisa Four Times, 1978. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Edlis/Neeson Collection

Chicago art collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson have given a "landmark gift" of pop art to the Art Institute of Chicago, handing over 42 works that were created by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and others.

After the donation was officially accepted Tuesday night, its president and director Douglas Druick told The Chicago Tribune, "This is one of the landmark gifts in our 136-year history."

The collection also includes works by Roy Lichtenstein and photographs by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. The donation was confirmed after the museum agreed to display the 42 paintings, silk-screens and sculptures for the next 50 years.

Edlis, 89, is a former plastics executive; he and his wife, Neeson, have given their support to several large U.S. museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Edlis tells the Tribune that the agreement avoids one of his peeves about donated art.
"They always end up being shown for a short period of time, and then they end up in storage," he says.
As for the art's importance, The Wall Street Journal reports:

"Art historians say the collection is among the world's greatest groups of postwar Pop art ever assembled, collectively chronicling art's 20th century shift from the swirly abstracts of the 1940s and 1950s toward the colorful, wry images of everyday objects that define Pop art in the U.S. during the 1960s. The group from Mr. Edlis and Ms. Neeson fill a major gap in the Art Institute's Pop collection, which was widely considered weak."


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Jackson Pollock cooks with his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, and his mother, Stella Pollock, in the kitchen of his home in Springs, in East Hampton, N.Y., 1950. Courtesy Pollock

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As the weather warms up, you might find yourself staring out an office window, daydreaming about what you'd rather be doing: lazing outdoors, perhaps, on a large blanket with a picnic bounty spread before you.
In fact, people have been fantasizing about picnics as a return to a simpler life pretty much since the dawn of urban living, says Walter Levy, author of The Picnic: A History.
"Picknicking coincides with modern history — the shift from pastoral to urban living, the decline of villages and the rise of modern cities," Levy writes. "When you're having a picnic," he tells The Salt, "your intention is to break away from the ordinary."

And nowhere is this escape reverie more visible than in the history of art.



An illustration of noblemen enjoying a feast outdoors, from a French edition of The Hunting Book of Gaston Phebus, 15th century.

Of course, people have been eating outdoors since the dawn of humanity. And medieval hunting parties commonly carried large feasts with them as they rode out. But the picnic as we know it today – as a day outing with the expressed purpose of eating amongst nature — only surfaced about 500 years ago, Levy says.
As dining outdoors became a popular leisure activity, it became a common subject for artists attracted both to the pastoral imagery — and to the wealthy people who embraced the pastime.



Francisco de Goya's Picnic En La Ribera Del Manzanares (Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares), 1776

Francisco de Goya's 1776 painting Picnic En La Ribera Del Manzanares (Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares) is an early example of the picnic in art. The scene it sets might give us picnic-envy today.

Though the painting shows the lower artisan class merrymaking along the river, historically, its own surroundings have been much posher: It was part of a series that hung in El Pardo palace near Madrid. Kenneth Bendiner, author of Food and Art, believes that early picnics represented a fantasy of the simple life — in this case, perhaps a royal romanticizing of the freedoms enjoyed by the rest of us.



Thomas Cole's A Pic-Nic Party, 1846

The American landscape painter Thomas Cole had similar aspirations with his 1846 painting A Pic-Nic Party. As the Brooklyn Museum (where the painting hangs) describes it, "Cole chose the subject of a picnic to describe the ideal coexistence of nature and civilization." And he ups the fantasy factor: In addition to food, Cole includes women making flower garlands, rather than wearing a hat, as was customary at the time, while a guitarist serenades the picnic party.
But the picnic really came to the foreground of art history with Édouard Manet's 1862 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon On The Grass). It's considered one of the first examples of modern art.



Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe (Luncheon On The Grass), 1862

While the depiction of nude women wasn't shocking in itself, placing them in a modern setting, among bourgeois men, certainly ruffled feathers. It dropped the classical ruse that such depictions were of goddesses and suggested instead they might be, well, prostitutes. The tumbled foods sitting on a pile of clothing add to the impression that these picnickers weren't merely innocently consuming the contents of that woven basket.
"That aspect is attractive to artists, because it seems that being outdoors raises your libido," says Levy. "It's sort of a release from being urbanized."

Adults weren't the only ones who loved the escape a picnic could provide. "Children's books loved to portray picnics," Levy says. Think of the idyllic picnic Ratty and Mole enjoy by the riverbank in Wind in the Willows. Illustrator E.H. Shepard portrayed them sprawling contently in the sun after consuming a wicker basket full of food.



Henri Cartier-Bresson's Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, 1938

By the 1930s, famous photographers were capturing picnickers at their leisure. Henri Cartier-Bresson's photo Sunday on the Banks of the Marne feels almost like a painting come to life. And Levy points to an even more casual depiction of the picnic, loosely defined, in Robert Frank's The Americans. The 1955 photo shows two teenage couples canoodling on a lawn filled with parked cars. It's yet another instance where nature and sensuality intertwine on the picnic blanket.

But starting with the pop art movement in the 1970s, a seismic shift occurred in the depiction of food in art. Instead of shorthand for a pastoral ideal, food became a source of satire, Bender says. "It went against the whole history of food imagery, which was about delight of taste and the joys of consumption," he tells The Salt.



Banksy's Picnic, 2005

British graffiti artist Banksy's 2005 mural Picnic speaks directly to the separation of nature and civilization that a picnic has always attempted to bridge. In this hyper-modern picnic, the distance between the contemporary picnickers and the hunter-gatherers that surround them seems insurmountable.

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Tove Danovich is a writer based in New York.

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A visitor views a replica of Jean-Honore Fragonard's 18th century painting, Young Woman (right) as the original hangs to its left.

I'm not sure a picture is worth a thousand words. But why do some pictures sell for millions and others that seem identical go for just a few dollars?

Since February, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London has hung a fake among its permanent collection of 270 Old Masters. Maybe we should call it a "tribute" Old Master: a hand-painted, unapologetic stroke-for-stroke copy of a great painting, produced at the Meishing Oil Painting Manufacture Company, one of many art factories in China, where hundreds of artists — and given their technical skills, that word seems earned — make exact, oil-painted copies of Monets, Matisses, Picassos and other masterpieces.

The gallery invited visitors to detect the knockoff appearing among masterpieces. Nearly 3,000 people cast votes; only 347 guessed correctly that the replica Old Master was an imitation Jean-Honore Fragonard painting, Young Woman, an 18th century portrait of a young woman who has dark brown hair, tied loosely, and kind brown eyes.

Xavier Bray, the gallery's chief curator, says the idea wasn't to try to get gallery-goers to play international art detective, or to just fan out to find the Canalettos, Gainsboroughs and Rembrandts, but to look deeply and intently at every painting on their walls.

"Never before have I seen so many people actively looking at each painting," he said. "The visual exercise of comparing and contrasting will demonstrate how exciting it is to engage with an original work of art."

The last time a Fragonard came up for auction, it sold for $28 million dollars. This replica Fragonard was painted to order in China and sold for a little over $100 dollars.

Try to buy even a good pair of shoes for that price.

But does imitating an original so cheaply make the original seem less valuable?

I was prepared to be outraged when I logged into the websites of a few of the Chinese art factories. Instead, I came close to ordering replicas of Hopper's Nighthawks and Caillebotte's Paris: A Rainy Day; because I love looking deeply into both paintings, and art prints can look flat. I imagined what it would be like to hang a Seurat over our cat's food bowl, and tell visitors, "She thinks Renoir painted too many dogs."

The replica could even be a reminder: that real originality — I won't try to stretch the word genius — isn't only the skills to paint, with color, words, or notes, but to see something no one else does; and help it come alive.

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A month after her father died of sepsis, Jennifer Rodgers began creating maps.
She took a large piece of paper, splattered it with black paint and then tore it into pieces. Then she began to draw: short black lines mimic the steps she walked in the hospital hallway during her father's hospitalization.

Of I Wish You The Sunshine Of Tomorrow, Rodgers says: "The ICU room my dad was in on the day he died had yellow walls. Every time we visited him we had to wear hospital gowns that were a bright yellow. [It] was a recurring color in that whole time frame of my life."

"It was a physical release of emotion for me," she says.

The layered pieces document her father's seven-month fight with sepsis, a life-threatening condition when the body's response to infection causes inflammation that can destroy organs. They also represent her feelings of uncertainty and grief.
We talked with Rodgers, a high school art teacher in Philadelphia, about how she created the artworks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose maps to visualize your father's illness and death?

Strata Of Memories

I found a book called Geography of Loss by Patti Digh, and that has been my guidebook. A map organizes a place in a certain way and we use them to get us from one point to the next. My maps have become a way to get from a point in my life where I was very much grieving to another point where I came to a resolution with some of it.

In Strata of Memories, gold plays a key role. Why is that?

The gold comes from the idea of using a precious metal to heal. The Japanese have an art called Kintsugi that is over 500 years old. Instead of taking a bowl or mug that has been broken and throwing it out, the pieces are put back together with gold. The gold heals the broken piece of pottery and actually makes it more precious and more valuable.

In The Last Day there are a series of lines that appear to be intentional.

Last Day

The day he died we spent a lot of time in the waiting room outside the ICU and it was a lot of walking back and forth. I wanted to mimic the physical steps I took as the whole day was unfolding, almost as a way for me to honor that day.
[The red is] symbolic of sepsis and what it did to my dad's body, and watching someone die from sepsis, which was truly devastating.

Is it difficult to look back on these images?

To look at them, not so much. To talk about them and actually think about what was happening at the time, that is definitely difficult. At the same time it feels very healing to me. I don't know any other way to get through what became the most challenging time in my life. I didn't know any other way than to make art about it.

Rodgers uses abstract shapes of home and movement to evoke her father's journey to living in a hospital in Liminal Space.

Rodgers has three pieces on display through June 10th at the Henry Gallery at Penn State University, Great Valley Campus.


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