Season 1 Episode 10
Ben Binversie:
The history of racial violence in this country is long and ugly and the trauma is ever present for many people, but can art help us reckon with that history?
[00:00:30] This is all things Grinnell. I'm your host. Ben Binversie, on this week's show. We'll wrestle with the current exhibitions at the Faulconer gallery here on campus. First we'll talk about reckoning with the incident, John Wilson's studies for a lynching mural and then we'll turn to the other exhibit on display, dread and delight, fairy tales in an anxious world, which is curated by Emily Stamey a 2001 Grinnell Grad.
Also, we've got a short story on the wonderful Grinnell tradition of [00:01:00] alumni care packages. This week's show is coming up next after a word from Grinnell College.
The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Grinnell College.
In 1952 John Wilson an American artist went to Mexico and painted a powerful and haunting mural titled "The incident." It depicts the scene of [00:01:30] a racial terror lynching at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. While a young African-American family looks on. The mural is long gone, but Wilson's preparatory sketches still exist in the college's art collection and they formed the basis of the exhibit now on display in the Faulconer gallery. This exhibition comes at a time of discussion about what it means to reckon with the legacy of slavery and racial violence in this country.
Before we get to the actual content of the exhibition, I want to talk a little bit about Lynching. Kesho Scott, professor [00:02:00] of sociology, as part of the programming for this exhibition gave a presentation about the statistics of lynching. A recent report, Lynching In America documented 4,075 lynchings of African-Americans between 1877 and 1950 and many more were probably not recorded.
One of the takeaways from Scott's talk was that it's impossible to tell these stories with just numbers, coupling numbers together with stories or images is necessary in order to tell the whole story. [00:02:30] But for someone walking right into the exhibition without an understanding of the history of lynching, these drawings might not mean as much. And so I figured that would be the case for someone listening to this as well. As painful as it is, I think it's worth touching upon.
Lynching emerged as a vicious tool of racial control in the south after the civil war, as a way to reestablish white supremacy and suppress black civil rights. At the end of the 19th century, southern lynch mobs targeted and terrorized African-Americans with impunity. [00:03:00] Lynching of African-Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black communities throughout the country and we're largely tolerated by state and federal officials.
They were advertised in newspapers, postcards of lynchings were made, body parts of victims were collected as relics. Nowadays, if we talk about lynching at all, whether in our schools or [00:03:30] elsewhere, we focus on black male victims. The typical story goes something like this. White men in the south lynched black men to protect their white women from black male rapists. Even at the time though, nobody really believed this explanation, and less than 30% of black male lynching victims were ever even accused of rape. While they were certainly the majority of the victims, the focus on black men simplifies a much more complex history and negates the many women who were lynched [00:04:00] and often raped. These women demonstrate how lynching was deeply related to gender violence. Kesho Scott shared the stories of a few of these women, one of which shared her name, Scott.
Marie Scott was just 17 years old when a white lynch mob in Oklahoma seized her from the local jail and hanged her from a nearby telephone pole. She had stabbed a man likely in self defense, defending herself from attempted rape at the hands of white men. Lynching was also a way to control white women's sexuality, [00:04:30] especially those who had consensual sexual relationships with black men.
It's obviously hard to talk about these things, but silence hasn't gotten us very far. Bryan Stevenson, the director of the Equal Justice Initiative and founder of the New Memorial And Museum in Montgomery, Alabama says our country for too long has adopted a national coping strategy of silence.
Bryan Stevenson:
I think we need to create spaces in this country where we tell the story [00:05:00] of what happened to native people, where we tell the story of what happened to African-Americans, where we tell the story of slavery, the story of lynching, the story of segregation and at the end of it, people are motivated to say, "Never again." Because I don't think we've ever been required to say that.
Ben Binversie:
The Faulconer gallery has become one of those places. While the exhibition has been on display, there have been a ton of events, talks and discussions and each individual visitor experiences a personal reckoning of their own when they enter the exhibit, I sat down with Leslie Wright, director [00:05:30] of the Faulconer Gallery to discuss how the exhibition came about and about the artist. John Wilson.
Lesley Wright:
John Wilson was a prominent African American artist, lived most of his life in Boston and was a professor at Boston University in visual arts. As a young man, he trained fairly traditionally as a realist painter and went to Paris and studied with Léger, who was a very significant artist at the time. There he gained some appreciation of abstraction, [00:06:00] cubism, and the other movements that were happening.
Ben Binversie:
And he actually came to Grinnell a while ago in 2004 and did a retrospective on his work.
Lesley Wright:
Kay Wilson, who is the curator of the collection had found his work ... I think we started collecting him in 2001 and developed a relationship with his gallery and then met him and felt that this was an important project to do. It was fascinating to look at his career because it really traced some of the high points [00:06:30] of the styles of the 20th century. He was a print maker, he was a painter. He was a fantastic draftsmen and drawer, he was sort of the complete package.
Ben Binversie:
Wilson's work that's currently on display at the gallery are his studies for a lynching mural that he painted in Mexico City in 1952 while studying at La Esmeralda, Mexico's National School of art. The mural titled, the incident, doesn't exist anymore, but still kind of forms the centerpiece of this exhibition. [00:07:00] What can you tell us about the mural?
Lesley Wright:
This mural was done in Mexico city. There was a school in Mexico City that American artists and others we're going to, to learn to make murals. And a lot of African-American artists in particular were going to Mexico City because they could tackle topics there that were tied to race in a way that they couldn't in the early 1950s in the US. John had grown up hearing about the history of lynching and reading the news reports of it throughout the twenties and thirties when he was a young man.
[00:07:30] He felt the terrorism of that time, but he'd never been able to grapple with it in his paintings. He went to Mexico City and there decided to do this mural which is about 12 feet high by maybe 15 or 18 feet wide on a wall outside of a building in a relatively public space. Each student was given a wall to do a mural on and he spent his time working up all of the studies to do the mural [00:08:00] and then executing it in Fresco, as did his peers and they were intended not to be permanent. They were intended to be painted out.
Some have said that the Mexicans loved this particular mural and wanted to keep it, but it ended up not being kept. It doesn't exist anymore.
Ben Binversie:
Is that style, the Mexican muralist style, is that something he uses in his other work?
Lesley Wright:
Like any artist, those styles become part of your playbook, things that you can do depending on what you're trying to communicate in a painting, [00:08:30] and one of the fascinating things in the exhibition is that all of his studies for the hands and the feet in the mural are very realistically rendered, very carefully drawn. But when you then look at those same hands and feet in the mural, they're distorted, they're expressive, they're oversized, they're not at all realistic. And so he chose a style from the mural tradition that would evoke the emotion that he was to express instead of trying to just stick to being a realist, which didn't [00:09:00] work for the subject he was painting.
Ben Binversie:
The mural itself is gone, but the preparatory studies remain, how did you decide to turn these sketches into an exhibition?
Lesley Wright:
We've had the work by John Wilson since, the first ones I think we acquired in 2001, we acquired a few more just before the exhibition, but mostly they've stayed in the print room where they're used by classes for study.
About a year and a half ago, the curator and the assistant director at Yale University Art Gallery, [00:09:30] which is a huge art museum at Yale University reached out to us because they had acquired another one of the studies for the mural and had several other works by John Wilson. And we're in contact with his widow and we're doing an oral history with her about John's life. They were engaged with that and they thought, what if we could bring together everything that still exists about mural and we jumped on it, because it was a way to get this really important work out and seen in a much [00:10:00] more complete way than we would be able to do on our own.
Ben Binversie:
Just hearing the word lynching is enough to send shivers down many people's spines. How did you deal with that when thinking about this exhibition?
Lesley Wright:
That's a really great question. One of the things that curators have to wrestle with is the fact that our audiences are not monolithic. We have many different audiences and sometimes we forget that at our peril. And I think when we first decided to take the reckoning [00:10:30] with the incident, we were seeing it through the lens of, wouldn't this be a great educational experience for students at Grinnell who don't know about the history of lynching, whether they're 18 to 22 year old American students or international students. It tends not to be at the forefront of what people understand about the history of race in this country.
What we completely ignored to our peril, but we did catch it is that our African-American [00:11:00] faculty staff and students know this history intimately and for them it's very painful and to put it up there as an educational experience ignores what they're going to have to reckon with. With having this on the wall, which is that they perhaps knew somebody or don't know who an ancestor was, but could very well have had an ancestor who was lynched or lived in communities where this terror was ever present or had to shop at a store where the man who was selling you [00:11:30] your shoes was one of the guys who was out lynching somebody the day before, that we hadn't really stopped to think about.
Late last spring semester, there was a series of faculty workshops about race and dealing with race and K brought it up at this workshop and suddenly people's alarm bells started to go off because of that word lynching. And they thought, "Oh my God, what is this a mural of and what's it going to look like and how traumatic [00:12:00] will it be to see it?" And we took that moment to say, "Okay, we need to slow down, start talking to people. We need to think about this, whether it's even a good idea to do it." And we thought, "Okay, well let's everybody have a chance to percolate on this."
We showed them the images, we showed them the scale of the images, which is not huge, it's not a mural in your face. It's a relatively small study and then the drawings and Tilly in particular Tilly Woodward started to [00:12:30] really carefully work through this with a number of different stakeholders making sure they had personal time to reckon with what this project was going to be. And slowly people began to see that it wasn't as dangerous as they might have thought, but it was definitely provoking and it was provoking in perhaps what could be good ways.
As soon as the fall semester started, we had one of our interns, Marco Saffold and we introduced him to the upcoming exhibition and asked if he would [00:13:00] like to be engaged with it. And he jumped on it with Alacrity and said, "Let me take this to my colleagues at the CBS."
Ben Binversie:
That's the Concerned Black Students, an organization on campus.
Lesley Wright:
And they got very engaged and said, "Yes, we want to have a say in how this is presented." We asked if they would like to plan the opening and they did. And they also came up with some other programming and by engaging them early on and letting them have their own voice [00:13:30] in this, it's been a very positive experience and I hope that the exhibition will be as well.
Ben Binversie:
It sounds like a process of reckoning with the work before it even came into fruition. A lot of thought went into it, which people can't necessarily see when they come through the exhibition, but it's important to keep in mind, but like so many of the Faulconer gallery exhibitions that are so much more than just what's in the gallery, the exhibit itself is quite simple and small, yet it lends itself to so much interpretation and involve so many different disciplines and ideas [00:14:00] and histories. Starting with the opening reception which was led by students. There have been a flurry of events in the gallery this semester which touch on different elements of the exhibit from a wide variety of angles.
Tilly Woodward, the curator of academic and community outreach at the gallery helped to organize all of this activity. I asked her why she felt it was important to get all these different voices involved in the exhibition.
Tilly Woodward
: I think you have to fold in all voices and you have to think carefully through who your audiences [00:14:30] are and what your goals are for every exhibition. I'm really appreciative to all the faculty, staff and students who had very thoughtful and productive conversations about what the work's meant, how they could be seen, how they could be interpreted and helping us find our way with the development of audience and the development of programming. Programming is always important for any exhibition that we bring in that leverages a way that people [00:15:00] can connect and have a deeper, richer experience with the exhibitions.
It's always an important part, but I feel like especially for this exhibition, which talks about violence, race, history, unspeakable sorrow and the way that you can think forward to the impact of trauma over generations, that there's a particular sensitivity to this exhibition and the sorrow and the horror [00:15:30] that it represents.
And so I began to toy with the idea of bringing stories center to do a digital workshop. And so Joe Lambert, who is the founder of StoryCenter agreed to come. And in November we did a three day workshop with 10 students, staff and faculty, where I asked them to really dig deep and think about how they connected personally with the exhibition.
Ben Binversie:
[00:16:00] Participants were given the artwork to look with and latch onto a particular theme or element from the work to tell their own story. Liz Queathem, senior lecturer in biology was one of the participants in the workshop.
Liz Queathem:
I grew up in an interracial family, although nobody described it that way at the time because my sister and I were both adopted. At first I thought that the differences between us were just because we were different people. Especially after I went [00:16:30] to college, I began to realize how much of our existence was probably dictated by how people saw us in terms of our race.
Ben Binversie:
Chris Hunter, professor of sociology, was also involved in the workshop.
Chris Hunter:
The meaning and illustration of the mural as a whole. The one that depicts the lynching, I frankly found very difficult to look at. I looked at part of it, the part that depicts what appears to be a mother [00:17:00] and her child and her father kind of hiding inside a building from the KKK.
Ben Binversie:
That initial reaction of repulsion is common. We want to look away from these painful images. Yet the works are there for people to look at.
Chris Hunter:
I think unlike the imagery we get in the news, which often historically and now depicts horrendous events and does it powerfully, photography is a very powerful medium. But in some ways [00:17:30] the artistic representation for me at least and I'm not speaking as an art, historian or critic here, but it can kind of distill part of the reality of the imagery, the reality of the event.
I find it really interesting to have seen the overall representation of the mural in the context of our exhibit where most of the pictures there are the studies, the combination I think is particularly powerful in a way that [00:18:00] a single image by itself wouldn't be. For me at least, it helped me to focus on, as I say, the things that are less troublesome and personally upsetting about it. But I think having to face the fact of that kind of behavior or those kinds of horrors through the art is important.
Ben Binversie:
Each participant latched onto something different and told their own personal story, connecting deeply to the exhibit, which is really what we hope to do with any art exhibit. [00:18:30] There's a link to the videos from the StoryCenter workshop on the podcast website and there are also part of the gallery on loop in the resource area for people to view.
Tilly Woodward
: I feel like they will give other guests and visitors to the gallery multiple points of view about how you could connect with John Wilson's pieces and how you could think about lynching in the United States and how you could think about the way that art helps us [00:19:00] process and interpret the things that are most difficult in our lives and in our history as a country. I think there's real value in that.
Ben Binversie:
The opening reception featured students reciting poems by Countee Collen, Langston Hughes and other poets as well as a song and movement exercise. Farah Omer, a senior from Somali land was one of those students. [00:19:30] She read a Lucille Clifton poem during the opening reception. And I talked to her a little about how she connected to the exhibition.
Farah Omer:
Just being in the exhibition as a black person who's not an American have a very different connection and relationship to history of lynching and racial violence in the United States in that I am racialized and where there's a black person, but I don't have the history that black people do in the United States. For me it was coming to the United States, it was the first time that I learned that I [00:20:00] was black, but also that there is this history that was not just a very distant thing I learned in middle school history that was once slavery in very far away place and it may have involved people who look like ... I never really, and it’s silly to say, but I've never really made the connection until I came to the United States and it takes a lot of learning and a lot of work and for me to kind of understand what is this history that isn't mine, but I am somehow, that is also mine and I'm kind of part of, because [00:20:30] I live here now.
Being at the exhibition and reading this poem, it made me realize that I still had a lot to figure out, but somehow I'm not going to be able to do it from like very removed subject position that I had before.
Ben Binversie:
Farah also visited the exhibition with her anthropology class, studying it as a site of collective memory.
Farah Omer:
And we always talk about in that class like what is memory for certain people, it can be history for others and race in [00:21:00] the United States, like for me functioned as history, but the more I live here, the lines kind of get blurred and ...
Ben Binversie:
These personal questions are on the minds of many who walked through the gallery and viewed this exhibition. For some people, that kind of reflection happens every day, but this exhibition forces the issue. You can't avoid it.
As with anything, our experiences impact how we see and interpret the exhibit and what we take away. We often talk about how art makes us think and feel, but what about how [00:21:30] it makes us move. Two students with backgrounds in dance and movement brought their experience to this exhibit and during the opening reception encouraged others to do the same.
After the students read their poems, Naomi Worob, class of 2019, and Obuchi Adikema, class of 2021, invited the audience to look around the gallery and think about the movements that the work inspired in them. I talked to Obuchi and Naomi about how they structured the exercise.
Naomi Worob:
How we did that through dance was, ask people to [00:22:00] look at the art, find a detail and then in some way put it into your body. And we encourage that they do it abstractly so you could, rather than seeing a person and then taking on the position that that person is in, in the work, you could look at a line, you can look at color, you can look at any number of things and find a way that those qualities can be a part of a movement.
And then we wanted [00:22:30] to find a way so that people could then come back together and share it with the group. And we wanted to find a way that after kind of sitting with the art also all the poems that had been shared, we wanted to find a way to also sit with each other. And so it was a process of looking at the art, finding a movement then coming back together as a group, asking individuals [00:23:00] to share their gesture and then slowly building those gestures together to develop a phrase. And then Eden sang “Strange Fruit,” and we did our movement to that song.
Ben Binversie:
I think with a work like this, sometimes we're left speechless or our words don't feel adequate. What kind of emotions and movements did it illicit in you and in other people?
Obuchi Adikema:
I think it was sombering when I first saw it, the gallery is a gallery of [00:23:30] lynching studies. You always know it's going to be a heavy work. But I think there's something about the details in each of the different images that I could really kind of ground you. And I didn't really say much when I first saw them.
Naomi Worob:
In the movements that people offered when we were putting together the phrase at the end. I felt like there was a lot of tension in the body between moving downwards and then also [00:24:00] like being uplifted. There was a lot of images of knots, ropes, roots. And so I think the same sort of like twisting tension that we feel in those was what was felt in the movement.
Ben Binversie:
Whether it inspires movement thoughts or feelings, this exhibition really forces you to confront the painful history of racial violence in this country. Tilly Woodward agrees.
Tilly Woodward
: And I think that, that speaks to the power, the power and the importance [00:24:30] of art because one thing that happens in a work of art is that it's not a linear process. It's a process of gestalt. There are a lot of things that are happening at once simultaneously. And so the nuance that it can take on in terms of the way that it addresses the subject matter, I think is powerful. It speaks to our hearts and our minds and our bodies all at once. And I feel like [00:25:00] especially this exhibition offers a really complex mirror to connect viewers, knowledge and emotions with the artist's knowledge and emotions. There's this sense of discovery and connection 'cause there's the artist who is reflecting on this history and how it has impacted himself personally over time. And then thinking societally 'cause his work as a muralist, they are definitely thinking about the social impact of art [00:25:30] and then how that reaches forward to future generations who may not have lived through the same thing that John Wilson has lived through. But it gives them the opportunity to connect, reflect and make meaning of.
Even though there will be people who come to look at the exhibition who don't have the same depth of understanding, the artwork opens a doorway where they can begin to understand and they can [00:26:00] begin to have that empathy that they might not have had otherwise.
Ben Binversie:
Lest we forget, the history of racism isn't restricted to the south or some far off time many years ago. It is here too, right smack dab in the middle of Grinnell. Some photos recently surfaced from past year books here at Grinnell showing [00:26:30] students in blackface and other racist gestures. We like to tout our abolitionist and social justice history and rightfully so, but we too have our own reckoning to do here at Grinnell with that history and the exhibit on display at the gallery right now is one step towards doing just that.
Reckoning with the incident. John Wilson studies for lynching mural will remain on display until April 6th at Grinnell's Faulconer gallery. If you want to see some images from the exhibition as well as the digital [00:27:00] stories made by students, faculty and staff and some pictures from the event, check them out on the podcast website.
Also on display at the gallery is Dread and Delight, Fairy Tales In An Anxious World. It's a pivot from the other exhibition, but not as much as you might think. Fairy Tales nowadays have a very positive [00:27:30] veneer to them. Disney has made these stories into happy tales of princesses and princes. Beneath that shiny veneer though are a lot of troubling themes. Fairy Tales, at least the popular ones in the American canon were originally meant for adults and deal with themes of violence, abandonment and abuse among other things.
Emily Stamey, a 2001 Grinnell grad worked in the Faulconer gallery as a student and has returned again as the curator for this exhibit. She works as [00:28:00] the curator of exhibitions at the Weatherspoon art museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stamey's exhibit has painting, sculptures, videos and all sorts of fascinating art and it can be a lot to take in, but it's organized around seven fairytales, most of which you're probably familiar with. We walked around the exhibit together and discuss how she came up with the idea for the exhibition.
Emily Stamey:
This moment maybe five or six years ago where I walked into this movie theater and there were two posters up, side by side for upcoming [00:28:30] movies and they were both retellings of Snow White. One was that sort of dark and creepy Snow White and the Huntsman and the other was the sparkly, it was a Disney something mirror mirror, I think was the title of it. And I just thought, why on earth are there two movies about snow white at the same time? Who on earth wants to go watch these? 'Cause I had absolutely no interest but they were these giant posters side by side and it just kind of lodged in the back of my head. And over the course of the next year I just realized we were bombarded with fairy [00:29:00] tale material and it was on TV and the TV shows, Once Upon A Time and Grimm. It was now these movie remakes with young adult literature. I mean it was just kind of everywhere.
And then of course, 'cause I hang out in art museums and galleries, I started noticing, "Oh yeah, artists are doing this too." And at that point I had to second guess myself and say, "Okay there's something to this." Why? What is this and why is this so interesting to everybody? And I was trying to wrap my head around this by looking at the art and try to make [00:29:30] some sense of it.
Ben Binversie:
And this exhibit brings together the work of 19 different artists, when you started kind of building this exhibition and thinking about what to include, were you surprised at how many artists were working and dealing with these themes of fairytales?
Emily Stamey:
I was, it was a little bit like I discovered this theme within contemporary art that I had never been taught. And we don't write about it and in great amount. There's a whole body of fairytale studies and interestingly that [00:30:00] sort of discipline doesn't really look at the fine art either. They'll look at film, they'll look at literature, they'll look at lots of other different realms where fairy show up, but no one was really writing about it in a museum or a fine art gallery context. And the truth is the show could include 40 or 50 artists. Ultimately I had to reign it in somehow. And what I decided to do was to look at specific stories, to anchor it with the fairy tales themselves and that then set parameters [00:30:30] and narrowed what I could bring into it.
Ben Binversie:
Guiding principle of sorts. Which stores did you end up including in this exhibit? I know most of them are familiar to most people, but there's also a few that are maybe a little more niche.
Emily Stamey:
Exactly. The other three liners I decided I would focus on stories by the Brothers Grimm and of course some of these stories have also been told and put into anthologies by other fairy tale authors. But in the US the Grimms is sort of the tradition that we know the best. I [00:31:00] decided that was a good grounding point. There are seven stories and like you said, five of them are quite well known. I think people will recognize them quickly and then two are not. And that was really deliberate in part because the artists had tackled those two other stories. And I found that really interesting.
But also just this reminder to us that fairytales are bigger than what we take away from Disney, in essence, there's more than just those five stories that we know really well. Five or six, there's this huge literature [00:31:30] that is fairy tales. The stories in here, some of the better known ones are Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel. And then sort of two of the very best known are Snow White and Cinderella. And then the ones that are lesser known, there is one called Fitcher's Bird. It's sometimes better known by the French title, which is Blue Beard. Sometimes that rings a bell for people.
And then one that is called All Fur. [00:32:00] In French that one his Donkey Skin and that is one the same people are the least familiar with.
Ben Binversie:
Familiar with.
Emily Stamey:
And it's in the same tale type as Cinderella. It is related to Cinderella, but a really unusual version.
Ben Binversie:
Little twist on that one.
Emily Stamey:
A little twist on that one yeah.
Ben Binversie:
What is it about this stories that lend themselves to revisiting them with a contemporary lens?
Emily Stamey:
I think what artists have found so interesting in them is the fact that [00:32:30] they wrestled with really harsh realities. I mean, the thing is fairy tales were you never meant to be kid footage to begin with, they were written by adults for adults. They deal with war, they deal with famine, they deal with completely dysfunctional families, they deal with these horrible power imbalances and the characters in them are usually these people on the margins. They're people that don't have a lot of power. The protagonists are kids who have sort of no means about them in these stories. Or they're women [00:33:00] who, especially at the time that the stories were written were definitely characters in positions of no power. And they are almost always poor.
And there is something about looking at those people on the margins that really resonates with how we're thinking through lots of different social issues right now. And so I think that's part of the appeal to artists. They're all so magical. I mean like there are some of the most vivid imagery in fairy tales that you will find anywhere and that makes for great art too.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, I think a lot of [00:33:30] people nowadays, when you think of fairytales, you're thinking of the Disney versions, and the kind of softened edges that we've put on these stories and when I was revisiting some of these tales and looking at the works here, I was kind of surprised that I, I didn't even know about like the darker side to some of these stories. And I was like, "Oh my God." I mean we read these to our children?
Emily Stamey:
They're creepy and scary and weird and Disney gave us very clean, very happy fairytales [00:34:00] and you can enjoy them and that's absolutely fine. I mean like, but the thing is, is that fairy tales originally were messy. They were really, really messy stories and they didn't always have perfectly clear endings and really terrible things happened in them. The artists are latching on to that for-
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. The artist's are definitely breathing some of the old life into some of these stories and putting a different edge on them, I would say.
Can you give me an example of the [00:34:30] kind of traditional like story that is being told and then how one of the artists might be reimagining it or putting their own story.
Emily Stamey:
Putting their own spin on it. We can talk about the carriage, this is always one of people's favorites to talk about.
Ben Binversie:
You walk in here and the care just kinda ...
Emily Stamey:
We are standing in front of the sculpture that is by the artist Tim Horn and it's titled Mother Lode and it is a nearly life size baroque carriage and [00:35:00] it is completely covered in crystallized rock candy, which is then covered in a shellac. It sparkles and it's sort of pumpkin orange colored and it has all these twists and curls and our neatness and you really could sort of sit a smallish sized human inside of it. It has a presence in the room.
I think it's one of the ones that people most quickly associate with the story. I mean, you walk in, you look at it and you say, "Oh my goodness. Cinderella's carriage." And in part because [00:35:30] the carriage is such a key element in the story and part because the version of the story we know from Byro and then Disney, it's a pumpkin that gets turned into the carriage in this sculpture here is such a beautiful, bright orange color.
But the artist has started the project as a commission for a museum in San Francisco called the De Young Museum. And he had been asked to respond to something in their collection. And their collection had been founded by a woman named Alma Spreckels who had this sort of real life Cinderella story. She had been born [00:36:00] to a very poor family. She was a laundress and then she married into a sugar fortune. She married into tremendous wealth that was all made from sugar plantations in Hawaii and so she sort of skyrocketed to the upper echelons of San Francisco society at the turn of the century and a massed art and through these big parties and try to define herself as a philanthropist.
But she was always an outsider. I mean, she had that rags to riches. I mean a literal rags to riches tale, but it wasn't [00:36:30] a happily ever after in any sense. And so Tim was interested in that and so he built this sculpture that's inspired some by the furniture that was in her collection that she had collected and so directly related to things that she owned and then playing off of that Cinderella story and then of course covering it in the crystallize candy and that homage to her sugar link to wealth and then titles it Motherlode, which is sort of this frat and waited term, [00:37:00] term in that it's not all necessarily happily ever after.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. As we walk around here and kind of look at this exhibit, what strikes me is the diversity of different media and ideas portrayed here. I mean, there's a lot going on with this exhibit and a lot of the pieces themselves are very involved, whether it's through Rapunzel braids or the, I dunno what this one is called, but the end trails coming out of the pipe here. The artists themselves [00:37:30] also come from a variety of backgrounds. How do you take it all in? Like there's just so much here.
Emily Stamey:
There is, I mean it's a really, really dense show, but again the way you make your way through it or the way I made my way through it and have laid it out for people is by the stories themselves. As you walk through the gallery, all the pieces pertaining to Rapunzel are grouped together, Cinderella is grouped together, Red Riding Hood is group together so that you can think about that story and then look at the [00:38:00] different ways that two or three or four artists have unpacked it or retold it or visualized or reimagined it.
This is a piece by the artist, Gil Yefman, who is an Israeli artist whose work I know from him showing in New York quite a lot. The piece is called longing. And what we're looking at is up at the top of the wall, sort of jetting out is this plastic sewer pipe and then spilling [00:38:30] from it are all of these nit forms that maybe kind of give us an allusion to Rapunzel's braid spilling out of the tower.
But in this instance they're not dangling from a tower, they're spilling out of this pipe, and then we look more closely in the sort of first element coming out of the pipe is hair. It kind of looks like coils of hair falling down, but then you notice all these other parts in there are lungs and hearts and hands and breasts and a penis and eyes. There [00:39:00] are all these different body parts and and pointedly they're both male and female body parts and so the artist has transitioned gender wise. At the moment of making this had gone from male to female has since gone back to male. But is thinking through, what do you do with these fairytales that paint gender in such really, really dark divisions and how do you relate or what do you do if you're trying to find yourself in these stories and you are not the [00:39:30] prince or the princess or you maybe are one and then the other.
And so what is a more fluid way to think about it and since this is his more fluid Rapunzel and of course then it's sort of literally fluid and that it is mimicking water coming out of a pipe.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, there's a lot going on there.
Emily Stamey:
There is, yeah.
Ben Binversie:
Can you describe what is hanging over us as we walk through this?
Emily Stamey:
Right. Stretching up through and along the ceiling alongside it is this [00:40:00] nameth gold braid with all of these red ribbons tied to it. The braid is 1600 feet long, so the way it's installed here, which I love, which is so fabulous because the Faulconer has such great architecture and so it sort of dips up in towards the skylights and through the rafters and it loops and it spills and it falls all over the place.
This is a piece by the artist M.K. Guth, who's based out of Portland and it's called Ties of Protection and Safekeeping. And so she was [00:40:30] interested in thinking about Rapunzel from the perspective of the witch. Remember that the story of Rapunzel is that this woman was pregnant and she was craving this Rapunzel plant in the neighbor's yard and sent her husband to steal it. The neighbor happened to be a witch who said, "You've stolen my lettuce, therefore you must give me your baby." She takes the baby, names her Rapunzel. And when the baby is about 12 years old or whatever, a young girl or young woman locks her away in a tower so that nobody will get to her, so the witch can keep her for herself. [00:41:00] And we can think of that as a really terrible thing to do to a child but you can also think of it as maybe the impulsive many parents to lock their children away and not have the terrible world get to them.
Ben Binversie:
Protect them.
Emily Stamey:
M.K. Guth went across the country asking people, what to you is worth protecting or safekeeping. And she invited people to write their answers on these strips of red flannel. And then she progressively kept braiding this braid of hair. It is synthetic hair. It's not real hair and [00:41:30] tying these ribbons into it. What you wind up with is this beautiful sculptural form, but tied into it are thousands upon thousands of different individual responses to what they would protect or keep safe, and they range, some are my grandmother's tea cups or love letters if someone gave me or something very sentimental. Other ones are things like liberty or my micro diversity or the environment, things like this. And then other ones are a little bit [00:42:00] more tongue and cheek. My right to party. I think my bong is on one of these. I mean so they run the full gamut of how people responded to them.
Ben Binversie:
That's funny. What do you want viewers to kind of leave this exhibition thinking about?
Emily Stamey:
I think, first of I would want them to leave with where I left the project with, which is a realization that fairytales are not fluff. That they're so much richer and [00:42:30] complex and interesting than I ever really gave them credit for. And then beyond that I hope everyone takes some thing sort of personnel away from it. I mean I think there's so many different ways to approach the artworks in here and you bring your own stories to the stories and then you take something new away from them.
Hopefully people are encountering some new artists and artworks that they've never seen before too or taking artists who are maybe a little more familiar to them but haven't been framed in this context before. 'Cause like I said, we don't really study fairy [00:43:00] tales as a particular theme within contemporary art in a really focused way. And so it's interesting to put artists in that context.
Ben Binversie:
Well. Thank you Emily for taking the time to talk about this incredible exhibition and putting it together.
Emily Stamey:
Absolutely. Thanks for coming to see it.
Ben Binversie:
Emily Stamey is the director of the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She worked in the Faulconer gallery as a student right when it first opened. Hopefully our conversation offered a glimpse into the exhibition, but you really should see [00:43:30] it for yourself if you can. It's on display until April 27th so check it out while you still can.
Faulconer galleries is such an incredible space on campus and students, if you haven't been over to check out the recent exhibitions, hopefully this inspires you to get off your bums and head over there. Okay. I'll step off my soapbox. Actually, no, I won't because this whole podcast is my soapbox, get over to Faulconer gallery right now. My mom even came down all the way from Wisconsin just because [00:44:00] she wanted to see the exhibitions. Okay. Maybe she also wanted to see her favorite son. Sorry Zach but we know it's true. Okay. Now I'm done.
Students are on spring break right now doing all sorts of crazy and exciting things while I whittle away the hours here in Grinnell chasing squirrels with my dog. I'm not salty though. Really. We all deserve a break after what was a grueling winter to help students [00:44:30] get through the doldrums of winter and make it to spring without catching Burling fever or Noyce flu, a group of generous alumni came to the rescue, sending care packages for each and every Grinnell student on campus, 1,380 in all.
The packages sent from Grinnell alums all over the world have their origins in the alumni Facebook group. Everyday class notes. The initial idea to send the care packages came about in 2014 as several alums reminisced about their old [00:45:00] mailboxes in [Carnegie 00:45:01] Hall, how they would receive notes from prior mailbox owners and send something new to the new mailbox owner after they graduated.
Some alums got the idea to send packages to current students and the care package project is now in its sixth year. Alumni from around the world have spent the past year shopping, crafting and gathering materials to create these care packages. Most of which come with a personal note of encouragement, friendly advice or words of wisdom to students. The care packages [00:45:30] require planning and coordination and it's truly a group effort. Alums help out in various ways, buying the items, assembling the packages, paying for shipping or helping to distribute them in Grinnell. Some even drive all the way to Grinnell, like Scott and Laura Shepherd, both from the class of 1982 who for the third year in a row have made the 500 mile trip from Tulsa, Oklahoma to help hand out packages including 80 of their own that they packed into the back of their SUV. Monique Shore from the class of 1990 [00:46:00] lived in town, so the trek is a little easier for her. since then.
Monique Shore:
Since I'm local, it makes it easy to be able to participate. And I have free shipping which is nice. It's really easy to come over and volunteer and I just love connecting with the students. I work with students at the library and it's fun to hear their side of it and how much joy it brings. It's just a really awesome project.
Ben Binversie:
Students look through the plethora of packages to find the perfect one that fits their wants and needs. I asked Monique if looking through the packages [00:46:30] is kosher.
Monique Shore:
It is allowed. There's definitely students that want to know what they're getting and then there's others that if it's just a plain brown box, they're going for it. Hence the decision can be overwhelming.
Ben Binversie:
I agree there's a lot [inaudible 00:46:45]
Dev Nalwa:
There's so much that yeah you only get one decision and there's like so many boxes.
Ben Binversie:
There's so many bags.
Dev Nalwa:
You want to make sure you're making the right one man.
Ben Binversie:
That's fair.
Monique Shore:
Yeah the pressure.
Dev Nalwa:
You got to make your choice count.
Ben Binversie:
Dev Nalwa is one of those students who likes to know exactly what he's getting with his care package. [00:47:00] With hundreds of packages to choose from, choosing just one can be overwhelming. Some of the packages hint at the contents within, with labels like vegetarian, gluten free, nut free and dairy free, while others have an obvious theme like tea lovers, chocolate lovers, home cooked meals, girl scout cookies or Dr. Seuss and still others are simple brown boxes offering no clues to the treasures within. With all these choices, how do you decide [00:47:30] which package to take?
For Jeremy Barnes, it was an easy choice.
J’remi Barnes:
I'm looking at this Star Wars bag and I'm feeling that. So hopefully.
Ben Binversie:
Are you a Star Wars guy?
J’remi Barnes:
Oh yeah, of course. I'm a total nerd. Geek.
Ben Binversie:
For some, the decision comes down to a matter of pure caloric content as students need food to sustain them through what can be a grueling stretch of the semester.
J’remi Barnes:
There are like 50 granola bars. Not really, but there's a lot, there are a lot of Clif bars. There are a lot of like high energy [00:48:00] fuels.
Ben Binversie:
For Inez Dufresne. She's a big believer in the benefits of chocolate.
Ines Dufresne:
Well, I saw the dark chocolate, so I had to go for it.
Ben Binversie:
Fair enough.
Ines Dufresne:
72%. You know?
Ben Binversie:
Tyler Williams also takes a practical approach to finding the right package.
Tyler Williams:
A lot of them had toys where I was like, "What am I gonna do with those toys?" I just needed the snacks. This is what I had the most. Yes.
Ben Binversie:
There are a lot of snacks in there, not necessarily healthy but to help get you through.
Tyler Williams:
I'm not a healthy person. Of course they're gonna get me through. I love skittles, sugars, carbohydrates [00:48:30] are things that I need to live.
Ben Binversie:
Tyler's utilitarian approach aside. Some students are looking for something fun just to get them through the dreary winter. Many are far from home or going through a rough patch and these care packages come at the right time and really do make a difference. Whether they're looking for snacks, toys, or just randomly choosing. Students love the connections they feel with the alumni who send the packages. Mira Berkson reflected on three years of receiving care packages.
Mira Berkson:
First year I got one from someone I think in Hong Kong, [00:49:00] it was crazy. I got some cool toys last year. I got some socks with two cans on them. Yeah, it's a happy time.
Ben Binversie:
Mira was concerned that I didn't receive a package myself.
Mira Berkson:
Did you get a care package?
Ben Binversie:
Back in the day. Yes. I always got a care package.
Mira Berkson:
But you can't now.
Ben Binversie:
Oh I'm not a student.
Mira Berkson:
Yeah, but you're like fake or a fake student.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. I am a fake student you are right. I can get a fake package.
Mira Berkson:
Yeah, I think you can get a real package. You lurk.
Ben Binversie:
Mirrors allergic to nuts and kindly offered to share them with me.
Mira Berkson:
Do you want [00:49:30] these? I'm going to give you my snacks. 'Cause I'm allergic to nuts.
Ben Binversie:
Can you say that again? Do I want what?
Mira Berkson:
These walnuts and almonds.
Ben Binversie:
Do I want these?
Mira Berkson:
These.
Ben Binversie:
Deez what?
Mira Berkson:
Deez nuts.
Ben Binversie:
The giving spirit of the care packages is truly infectious. Picking the right package can be a tall order, but in the end it's not so much about what's in the package as the message it sends. Sometimes quite literally, it's the note in the packages that resonates with students.
Mira Berkson:
It's [00:50:00] from Hope Rokosz Morrison, a class of 99, from Montana. Oh my God. She played gamelan. What on my first year of tutorial was encountering Indonesia. We did that once. Oh and the picture of her with her bicycle, I'm assuming her apologies. From 1999 [inaudible 00:50:24].
Ben Binversie:
Wow. They had pictures back then.
Mira Berkson:
They had pictures back then.
Ben Binversie:
And bicycles. Alums and students alike [00:50:30] enjoy interacting through these care packages. Many packages have letters like this one and students often follow up with the alums to thank them. Charles Carr, a senior fired off an email to his alum almost immediately after opening his package.
Charles Carr:
They both happened to be from LA, the people who sent to, which was a nice coincidence and it had some homemade treats like fudge, bark and toffee. It's a nice little pick me up, especially because of the fact that they just happened to be where I'm from. And one of them was a warrior, which is what I want to do. It's a nice [00:51:00] coincidence and it's just one of the perks of being at Grinnell.
Ben Binversie:
The highlight of Andrea Baumgartel’s package was not the food, but a five page letter from one of the alums. As for Dev, he eventually made up his mind and chose a package.
Dev Nalwa:
Toys, Sport package, play.
Ben Binversie:
You're gonna presumably share this love with others. You're have to play some games.
Dev Nalwa:
A hundred percent placement. I'm gonna go play some [inaudible 00:51:23] right now.
Ben Binversie:
If you're an alum and want to get involved in the care package project, you can join [00:51:30] in Facebook.
A quick shout out to two Grinnellians who have started a new podcast of their own, Mamata Pokharel, class of 2007, and Raji Pokhrel, class of 2008, are both from Nepal and work as therapists. The podcast talk about mental health issues and the first two episodes deal with exam anxiety and culture shock. The podcasts are in English and Nepali. You can find links to the podcast on our website.
[00:52:00] And with that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. Next time we're going to talk to Ella Williams, who graduated last semester and set off touring around the world under her musical name of squirrel flower. One of her songs, Conditions was featured on NPR's all songs considered. We'll talk about her musical influences and how her time at Grinnell influenced her music. If you'd like to contact the show, email us at podcast@grinell.edu or check out our website, grinnell.edu/podcast for more information about the guests [00:52:30] from today's show, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen.
I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird Grinnellians.