I almost didn’t write a column this week. I’m just back from Havana, Cuba, where I had some photographs in an international exhibit as part of “Noviembre Fotogarafico,” a month-long, island-wide celebration of photography. I’ve barely had time to get unpacked and packed again before heading off for Michigan to see family for Thanksgiving, much less scout out a subject for an ArtBeat column. But recent news accounts of President-Elect Trump’s staff picks and cabinet appointments have made it imperative that I talk about art.
Monday morning’s New York Times headline: Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’ was like a punch to the heart. New York Times reporter Joseph Goldstein writes of alt-right leader Richard B. Spencer addressing a conference of supporters: “America, (Spencer) said, belonged to white people, whom he called the ‘children of the sun,’ a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were ‘awakening to their own identity.’”
If you think this is just an isolated story about a fringe element and nothing to worry about, take another look at the staff picks and cabinet appointments.
I know I’m not the savviest political commentator. And what, you might wonder, does any of this have to do with art?
Here’s the thing: I know enough about American history and politics to know that America does not belong to white people. America belongs to all Americans. And if we truly want a safer and fairer world — less violence in our homes and streets, fewer acts of terrorism, fewer wars — we need to encourage understanding. We need to build bridges between us, not walls.
Art builds bridges. My experience in Cuba is just one example.
I was invited to exhibit my work in Havana by Yamilé Pardo, a Cuban artist I met while doing a story for “Provincetown Arts” several years ago. Pardo was curating a group exhibit at Arte Altamira, the gallery that she and her husband, painter and printmaker Edel Bordon, manage. The exhibit, entitled “Superficie,” which translates as “Surface,” included the work of six photographers. The five others — Roney Fundora, Sarah Solderer, Ossain Raggi, Pablo V. Bordon and José Madrigal Despaigne — are all Cuban. Fundora has emigrated to Mexico; the rest live on the island. Our shared photographic task was to explore the “surface” of the human body, particularly the face.
This strikes me now as the most basic and vulnerable of human interactions. And one of the first: think of a newborn studying her mother’s face. Despite language or cultural barriers, there is much we can understand about each other through the silent reading of facial expression and body language.
My series, “Mujer de Mirarte, Mujer Mirando Lejos,” or “Woman Looking at You, Woman Looking Away,” was based on a simple question: What effect does the act of looking have upon its subject?
I was interested in this question particularly from the point of view of women, who are so often regarded, as events in our recent election made clear, as sexual objects before they are regarded as people. In the viewer/viewed relationship, particularly if one person is holding a camera, the power is weighted toward the viewer. But what happens if the subject chooses to look away?
Each of the other photographers had a unique perspective. Bordon photographed women from the back, denying the viewer their faces, showing only the shape of their head and hair. Madrigal Despaigne photographed a black man in his hometown whose skin is gradually changing due to vitiligo, a disease that causes loss of pigment. Solderer presented a small Polaroid photo and a poem about a male friend who uses make-up to change his appearance on a regular basis. In the Polaroid, he is transforming himself into a woman but Solderer said her friend is interested more broadly in how altering his appearance affects his own sense of identity, and how others view him. Raggi’s photos were figures within somewhat theatrical spaces and concentrated primarily on the torso, rather than the face.
The largest body of work was Fundora’s “Embarcados,” which consisted of multiple panels, each a portrait of a head encased in a stretchy material, like a large sock. Hands pulled the material away from the face in various configurations that seemed both comic and eerie. Folded paper boats attached to the heads referenced the “embarcados” of the title. From a root similar to our word “embark,” “embarcados” can mean people who have set off on a journey. But in Cuba the word carries a specific undercurrent, meaning that you have been stood up or left behind by a loved one or, more generally, that you are in trouble.
Despite the disparity in the work on the walls, the emotional sense in the gallery on opening night — as we photographers examined each other’s work, and as a lively stream of people came and went and looked and asked questions — was one of unity.
We were separate but equal. We were markedly different and that’s what made it not only interesting but essential for us to be together.
Strangers standing side by side, leaning to look at the same art and then talking about it form a bridge. Even one person standing alone in front of a work of art — one person’s heart and intelligence meeting another’s — forms a bridge.
Is it enough? Absolutely not.
In this increasingly divisive social environment, we still need political activism, vigilant journalism; we still need to rally the courage to stand up for others even if that might put us in danger ourselves.
Maybe art can’t do all of that. But it’s a good place to start. And a good place to find compassion and the strength to go on.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for artists and writers for her columns. Contact her at: tcrapo@mac.com