Articles

Dead Feminists: Historic Heroines in Living Color

by Jessica Spring & Chandler O’Leary (Sasquatch Books)

Feminism has necessarily evolved to acknowledge oppressions of race, class, gender, sex, and other identities as inextricably interrelated issues. Intersections are richly entwined and depicted throughout Dead Feminists: Historic Heroines in Living Color (Sasquatch Books, 2016). As a compilation of broadside prints celebrating an expansive variety of women speaking in defense of their beliefs, it won the 2018 Pacific Northwest Book Award. It is also more than the sum of its parts: a testament to the power of art and artists to instigate change; documentation of the relationship between co-creators Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring; and, in the wake of O’Leary’s sudden death last year, a legacy.

Dead Feminists began as an intersection of two people with a shared art form. In 2008, illustrator, lettering artist and entrepreneur Chandler O’Leary arrived in Tacoma and shortly after, met designer, letterpress printer and book artist Jessica Spring at the Seattle Wayzgoose printing celebration. They connected over their love of type and discovered they lived just blocks apart. Their conversation continued, honed during what was a volatile election year infused with  derisive commentary about the women candidates’ appearance or readiness for the job. One day, Spring came to O’Leary with an Elizabeth Cady Stanton quote: “Come, come my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see the world is moving.” Spring hoped O’Leary could merely illustrate Sarah Palin’s eyeglasses to accompany the text. O’Leary went much further, combining ornate hand lettering for the quote, intertwined with the infamous spectacles. These words, still relevant in the midst of cultural conflict, prompted the two to create their first print together.

That they expressed their work in the form of a broadside, a poster format used historically to spread the word about political ideas, was intentional. O’Leary and Spring both had backgrounds in design and typography, and experience in the male-dominated lineage of printmaking. While they didn’t know then that this would result in a series, they did create an edition. The 44 prints that were run of the Stanton piece represented a significant number, in honor of the 44th presidential election. Symbolism and layers of meaning continued to be important pieces of each subsequent broadside, a considered fusion of text, image, and content that amplified quotes by women aligned with contemporary social justice issues. While Dead Feminists compiles a collection of 24 of these prints, the series continued for a total of 33 broadsides.

As artists accustomed to being solo in their respective studios, working in tandem generated layers of meaning and labor that shaped their collaboration. It is striking to consider that while each brought individual strengths, they were both involved with every creative step of their process together. Each broadside was generated using a mix of traditional and contemporary letterpress processes that combined hand and digital applications. Chandler’s renderings were transformed into photopolymer plates that were run manually by Spring through her Vandercook press. A single color was printed at a time, so a multicolor print had to be run through the press multiple times. Each run required precise registration for accurate alignment so that transparent inks either lay beside or layered on top of each other to create the resulting multicolored image. Constant testing and adjustment happened along the way.

The fluid collaborative energy O’Leary and Spring generated while making the broadsides is evident in the book. Each broadside is augmented with explanatory text evoking issues of the time during which each quoted feminist was living. In O’Leary’s words, “We wanted it to be about all of humanity, through the lens of women’s contribution to humanity.” The array of women portrayed reveals the collaborators’ care and inclusion of diverse races, cultures, and points of view. Chapter headings are verbs that suggest actions to continue to move humanity in a more equitable direction, admonishing us to build, grow, protect, make, tell, lead, play, and share.

The artists lived into the ideas that they set forth in their book, putting words into action. Starting in 2010, the artists began giving donations to organizations that aligned with the causes embodied by the broadsides. They later started the Dead Feminists Fund, carrying forward a mission of supporting fledgling nonprofits that empower women and girls to become community forces for good. It is fitting that layers continue to be a central reason why Dead Feminists: Historic Heroines in Living Color remains relevant eight years after its initial publication. It is the combined impact of the layers of ink, the art, the way these two women connected and collaborated, and the importance of the stories they depict that keep reaching for us.

Kristin L. Tollefson

Kristin L. Tollefson is an artist and educator based in Tacoma, Washington.

For further information about the Dead Feminists book and series, visit www.deadfeminists.com and www.springtidepress.com.

Ethereal & Tangible Art 

Bainbridge Arts & Crafts • Bainbridge Island, Washington

Coming off its 75th anniversary late last year, Bainbridge Arts & Crafts continues the excitement with a show of two intriguing regional artists: painter Christian Carlson (Mount Vernon) and sculptor David Eisenhour (Port Hadlock).

Carlson is a relatively recent arrival to the Skagit Valley, a place that has long produced and attracted landscape painters inspired by the region’s natural beauty. Carlson’s spacious coastal scenes are meditative and luminous; they can seem gently severe or pleasantly serene as your own perceptions of them evolve.

In “Winter Light,” as in so many of his paintings, islands or spits of land occupy the middle distance—dark backlit forms that straddle the horizon line. Behind them are misty headlands, while in the foreground sits a body of water rich in reflection, undulations, shallows and depths. A diffused light from an overcast sky softens the scene before you. But this painter is not out to capture the scene and call it good—he transfigures the setting in novel ways.

For decades Carlson favored conceptual art and abstract expressionism. Only with his move to Mount Vernon in 2017 did a representational approach take hold. An abstract-expressionist spirit is present the work: stark contrasts, dynamic interplay of shapes, gestural marks, and reduction of detail—these echo New York School artists, or point even farther back to Tonalist painters and their search for essence. Carlson simplifies his landforms by rounding them off, eliminating the coniferous forests that so define this region. He excludes boats, buoys, pilings—only the natural world belongs. Even wildlife is erased, as Carlson pares down to the elemental. By these means he distances his work from the Salish Sea; his islands and peninsulas become foreign, only vaguely familiar. Carlson’s not painting a place but letting the act of painting take him places. As he himself writes: “With tenacity [artists] will eventually find themselves in uncharted territory and this is the point!”

A subtle but important part of Carlson’s pursuit is to render realistic detail. A thin stroke of white describes a wave beginning to crest (“Red Hill”); a smudge of raw sienna defines a distant bluff. These touches seem to arise spontaneously from Carlson’s fluid, unfussy brushwork, but they anchor the mood and atmosphere to the specific. As if to counter these moves he will draw a graphite pencil along the painted surface, leaving hairlines that read, at first, as cracks in the paint (“Perfectly Still IV”). Their presence snaps you out of the immersive illusory space and back into the present moment.

In one way Carlson heightens the drama inherent in coastal settings; then again his formal simplicity evokes serenity. Working with muted colors and a limited palette, he depicts calm waters and placid skies captured at the most tranquil moments of the day. Even his titles are action-free: “Winter Light.” “Red Hill.” “Perfectly Still.”

If Carlson tends toward the ethereal, the sculptor David Eisenhour is all about the tangible, usually in the form of bronze and stainless steel. Life-forms are mostly absent from Carlson’s work, but in Eisenhour’s there is nothing but the life-form—his commitment to the theme is total.

His fascination is often focused on miniscule organisms that we rarely see in life or in media. Eisenhour is entranced, too, by the patterns that creatures manifest: the precise spirals in mollusk shells, the radial symmetry of jellyfish. This aim is not only to perceive and to praise these wonders but to advocate for their protection. There’s some poetic irony in the fact that the fragile creatures Eisenhour offers up are cast in bronze and stainless steel—heavy-duty materials created under industrial-strength conditions.

Eisenhour moved to the Puget Sound in 1992 to join the legendary Riverdog Foundry in Chimicum. There at the Northwest’s first bronze casting facility he learned all phases of the casting process; he assisted such prominent sculptors as Tony Angell, Phillip McCracken, and Phillip Levine, bringing their visions to final form. Eisenhour left the foundry to pursue his own creative work in 2003.

Though Eisenhour knows how to work a bronze furnace, his process really begins with a dissecting microscope. A life-long appreciator of minutia, Eisenhour magnifies his findings for all to admire. “Lovegrass” is a single seed of grain that you’d need a micrometer to measure, but here it’s magnified to pumpkin-size and transmuted into stainless steel. We can savor its detail, trace the grooves in its patterned surface. We recognize the reality of the miniscule beings that sustain us, a reality that now becomes ours to sustain or to neglect.

The remarkable “Endless Forms” is the show’s standout piece—literally. From its coiling chambered base it extends the long elegant curve of its limb far from its pedestal and into the gallery space, where it unfurls a jubilation of foliate forms. Form from form from form—just as its title implies.

Tom McDonald

Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Christian Carlson and David Eisenhour exhibits are on view daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through March 31 at Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, located 151 Winslow Way East on Bainbridge Island, Washington. For information, visit www.bacart.org.

Every So Often

In our living room—that is also our den, dining room, and my office—there is a sweeping view of the surrounding rooftops. When I look south, I can see the sky over Elliott Bay shift from a hovering grey to open gaps of blue. Without hesitating—without thinking, really—I say aloud: thank you.

Sometimes you just have to say the words.    

Sometimes you just have to stop what you are doing, look around, and be moved.

Then, after I’ve found my words for the day, I long to leave my writing behind and be moved by anything, everything, else. I want to see people. Embrace people. Even the stock clerk at Trader Joe’s who searched the back for another bag of olive oil potato chips because I asked him to. Well, that’s not exactly true. I begged him to. The thought of those chips was all that got me through my pages that day. I didn’t hug him. But I wanted to.

Contact makes a huge difference in our lives. The world is just too lonely without it. During the pandemic, we mourned its absence on a magnified level. Email, a text, Zoom (especially Zoom) is not the definition of contact. Contact is the state or condition of physical touching. Even in 2021, I refused to interpret the word in any less meaningful way. 

Of course, getting to say this is one reason I write. Though someone will likely disagree and email to say, in anger more often than not, how mistaken I am. And I will wonder again: When did we grow so impatient with each other’s opinions? Has it always been like this? My mother used to say, “The division today is nothing compared to the war years.” I stopped reminding her that we’ve been in—and too briefly out of—“war years” my entire life.

But most of my readers are far more appreciative. Perhaps, like me, post-pandemic, they relish life on this whole new meaningful level. In so many ways, we have come to know ourselves better. As well as our limits. Which we have reached. Over and over. And over again.

But still, we hang in there.

And if my thoughts about contact had not intervened just now, I might have started this piece by saying how, as a child, I favored being alone to playing with other kids.

Every so often I like to remember that child.

Especially the way she loved books. How she’d hide behind the sectional to read the encyclopedias her parents so proudly bought and then never used, I love that memory.

Later, I overheard our priest tell my mother not to let me read too much because books would “fill my head with ideas.” And you know what? They did.

Books helped me to cope in their The-World-Is-So-Much-Bigger-Than-You way. They still do. I read about other people and what concerns them, and I think, let’s cut all this “divided” talk. We are more alike than they want us to believe. 

It’s just impossible to not be curious if you read books where we are allowed to enter the mind of another and discover so many different ways to see the world, and ourselves within it.

And I came to see that this was exactly what my parents and priest were most afraid of: that in the silence of all my reading, so much was being said.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli is the author of Every Little Thing, a collection of essays that was nominated for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her newest title, In So Many Words, is forthcoming in September 2024. She also works as a speaker and a master dance teacher. For more information about her and her work, visit www.marylousanelli.com.

Crazy

My Aunt Connie used to sit me down at the kitchen table to share tales of her great journey from Calabria to New York. About how young and scared she was, but also how hopeful. A rock in our family, we could always count on her. If one of us needed help, she’d cook up some pasta, open a bottle of red, and listen. Everything will work out, she’d say, tutto funzionerà.

Today, her stories stay with me. Especially this one: When people asked her where she was from, she was afraid to admit she came from a country that had sided with Germany in “the war” (and then she would cross herself), but she was never uncertain of how to answer. She was nothing but sure.

On the opposite side of this country, people move here from all over the world, drawn to its natural beauty, work opportunities, openness, acceptance. There have been so many new arrivals that the Northwest—the perception of it—has begun to feel more like an opinion, heightened in our minds by experience, background, political leaning, and attitude. Many of our conversations also begin with the question, “Where are you from?”  

But it’s always the same reluctance on my part. Unlike my favorite aunt, I can still be so unsure.

Am I from New England, the place of my formative years? Or am I from the Northwest because I’ve lived here longer?

Honestly, I can still have such strong sensations of displacement that when my sister called from Florida to tell me how, after Hurricane Ian, the snakes and alligators hid from view in the puddles after being flooded out of their ponds, an intense wave of empathy came over me. I kept imagining myself peeping out from under the murky pools, clinging to the bottom with my toes, moving my hips back and forth to keep from cramping. Does this make me a truly compassionate person or just one with a writer’s crazy imagination?

When I tell this story to my friend in New York, also a writer and also Italian, she laughs. As with most conversations about writing, especially between two writers, we move on to discuss our current projects at length. Writing might not offer the same challenges as scaling the side of a mountain or ascending slippery rock, but when we talk about the ups and downs, those are exactly the metaphors we use. Finally, I ask her what she would call this sense of home-uncertainty. “Well,” she says, “I don’t know what they (meaning anyone not living in New York) would call it, but I (meaning all Italians or all Italians living in New York, I’m not sure) think writing and craziness are practically the same thing.

I could almost hear her smiling on the other end.

But I don’t feel any sense of insult about my “craziness,” quite the opposite. I can easily wrap my mind around the fact that this is one of those qualities over which I have no say whatsoever.

Which makes me re-remember something: Tutto funzionerà.

My Aunt Connie was (and still is) an honest-to-God saint in my life, the largest imaginable kind, the size of my every hope (past, present, and future) and purpose.

That’s what I like to believe.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli is ts the author of Every Little Thing, a collection of essays that was nominated for a Washington State Book Award. Her previous titles include fiction, non-fiction, and a new children’s title, Bella Likes To Try. She also works as a speaker and a master dance teacher. For more information about her and her work, visit www.marylousanelli.com.

stormy weather

and we enter

another world

the dots of rain

between traveling umbrellas

the fractured patterns

of the crimson kimono

the twisted blue

of a strap

on a school girl’s backpack

the wet smack of feet

on a grey sidewalk

Alan Chong Lau

Alan Chong Lau is a poet and visual artist based in Seattle, Washington. He serves as Arts Editor for the International Examiner, a community newspaper. As a visual artist, he is represented by ArtX Contemporary in Seattle, Washington.

John Levy is a poet and photographer. In 2023, Shearsman Books published 54 poems: new & selected, works from 1972 to 2022. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Alan Chong Lau and John Levy have published three volumes of a poetry and photography collaboration that can be found by searching online for “eye2word.”

Linda Okazaki’s retrospective exhibit at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art is an exploration of painting and life that requires us to look and look again. First we experience the subtle color relationships, the extraordinary handling of watercolor. Then we register on the imagery, and finally a pervasive anxiety and discomfort.

This major exhibition includes many themes, but they are not clustered together; rather curator Greg Robinson, in collaboration with the artist, conducts a symphony of phrases that build on one another, and repeat each with a new variation. Artist Jo Hockenhull, who knew the artist well in Pullman, commented “No one attacks watercolor with such surety and knowledge as Linda Okazaki.” The transparency of watercolor conveys many moods of water, the color relationships evoke emotions. Okazaki immersed herself in a study of Goethe’s color theory and then made her own color charts in order to exactly convey emotions that she wanted to express.

The theme of water is one example: at the outset of the exhibition, we see “Evening Departure” (1980). The sea (Puget Sound) swirls around the boat, as the artist, accompanied by her dog, is held in the arms of a large wolf. The embrace is tender, but the image suggests anxiety. This represents on one level her departure from many years in eastern Washington to live in Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula.

But on another level, we can sense her fear of starting over in an entirely new environment through the imaginary—but gentle—embrace of a wolf.

In “River Story Return” (1989), the artist now depicts herself nude in the water, carrying a raven reaching for the shore as a glass vessel seems to fall toward her, and a person in a large red and black striped robe fails to connect to her. Desperation is palpable, expressed through the color, textures, and images. “Crypt Swimmers” (2012) heightens the sense of danger as several figures swim among heavy columns and arches.

Okazaki received two degrees from Washington State University and taught there in the 1970s. She became part of an edgy group of artists who cohered, not into a single style, but into a concentrated group of supportive friends, who, because of the isolation of Pullman, partied together, but had plenty of time for concentrated work. Artist Gaylen Hansen was one of her professors, and near the beginning of the exhibition is “Studio Conversation Vincent and Gaylen”(1985) of Gaylen Hansen and Vincent Van Gogh. We see Hansen’s presence in Okazaki’s benevolent animals and birds that fill her paintings. But her birds multiply and congregate and disperse as in the wonderful recent painting, “Birds Take Flight into Twilight” (2023). We see twenty different species of birds, each carefully observed, fly away in a landscape filled with a rainbow of colors. Another inspiration was the Bay Area artist Joan Brown, who also pursued a personal vocabulary of self portraits, dancing and swimming, in a fantasy world. Also important to her was the anguished imagery of Frida Kahlo, as we see in “Letter to Frida” (1985).

The formative event in Okazaki’s life occurred when she was six. Her mother was murdered by a stalker who then committed suicide. For the first time, the artist is showing several works that refer to this trauma, each more explicit than the last. The earliest is a pencil drawing made while in art school, but later large watercolors confront the subject with a courageous directness. This is the first time she has shown these works.

Not surprisingly then, the overall sensation of the exhibition is one of unease, everything is off kilter, filled with undecipherable metaphors, particularly in the still life paintings of tables set vertically against the picture plane and filled with odd objects. Much of the imagery is from dreams, dreams that suggest struggles to just find a firm footing, particularly in juxtaposition with water.

But I will end where I began, with the dazzling color: Okazaki deeply understands the subtle relationships that she creates to convey exactly the right emotion. So seeing these paintings through color first gives us a feeling of comfort and sometimes joy, even as the paintings themselves take us on a fantastic adventure.

Susan Noyes Platt

Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website, www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

“Linda Okazaki: Into the Light” is on view through February 25, 2024 at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, located at 550 Winslow Way East on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For information, visit www.biartmuseum.org.

A salmon peers from the circular opening of a bark net, graceful, silver-eyed shapes of four more on the cedar disc beneath. Carved by a First Nations artist, the piece represents an ancient culture of conservation—an effort not to exhaust the vital resources of the land and sea. Temoseng Chazz Elliott’s carving forms a counterpoint in this cross-border art exhibition, much of which interrogates the contemporary culture of consumption.

“Archipelago—Contemporary Art of the Salish Sea: Southern Gulf Islands Artists,” is the second half of a project by the San Juan Islands Museum of Art (SJIMA) working with British Columbia’s ArtSpring and Salt Spring Arts galleries. SJIMA exhibited six San Juan Island artists this summer and now is showing six artists from Canada’s Southern Gulf Islands, questioning the influence of environment on the art of a region. The current show is beautiful, even profound, although whether a common environment evokes a common artistic response remains unanswered.

Elliott, a Tsawout artist, expresses intimacy with a territory inhabited by his ancestors for millenia. Made with traditional materials and techniques, his elegant, pristine carvings are deeply rooted in the environment. In contrast, Sam Montalbetti, born and raised on Salt Spring Island, creates work that has little to do with the Salish Sea. Concerned with the extinction of analog color photography, he turns his focus from the outside world to paint with light directly on sensitized paper, printing, cutting, layering, re-shooting to build brilliantly-colored abstractions: playful visual jazz. For another series, he tosses water into a night sky to capture motes of dust, tiny orbs suggesting galaxies infinitely larger and smaller than the visible world. This is the environment to which he responds, creating new possibilities from old technology.

John Macdonald’s large-scale paintings are drawn from personal interests and experience; though painterly and abstracted, they maintain an illustrative narrative. In front of a flame-colored truck, a hanging tire quotes Rauschenberg; road signs signal “Caution” and a choice of left or right: there is politics, and a world on fire. Tagged by numbers, deer in maple move through slanting shafts of color, their wildness belied by the artificial system in which they are caught. A figure lost in a snowy forest is painted on salvaged scrap wood, the far-left roof-tar black; high on the right, a single light bulb; on the left, an eagle shape of twigs mounted on scrap metal, the head a cast of white. This is Macdonald’s most personal painting, referencing a palpable loss.

The three women artists use sewing, stitching, weaving in their art. Perhaps a result of long meditative hours of handwork, here we find a complete response to environment of the Salish Sea in both overt and hidden manifestations.

Joanna Rogers stitches leaves, shells, plastic bread ties, small empty bottles, beach glass onto felt forms taken from the shape of Joan of Arc’s armor. Although given European sources, in this show, adorned with Salt Spring Island artifacts, her work seems to refer to First Nations culture: Haida warrior armor; button blankets; dance capes: native resources exploited by colonization; nature supplanted by plastic. Her most ambitious work is an elegant series of naturally-dyed scarfs into which a line from a poem is woven in Morse code. Entirely of texture, each coded message, she explains, is a last cry from a dying species—a lament for remembrance: subtlety decoded only with close attention.

Jane Kidd’s exquisite tapestries also require close attention, though her concern for the environment is overt. A shawl-like garment hangs folded-over: on top, a fish-kill below streaks of rain; obscured beneath, industrial smokestacks spew clouds of pollution. Four tapestries draped as garments maintain a human form, each worked in gorgeous color and pattern, each a site of environmental disaster: tar sand; pit mine; deforestation; desertification. Two small gowns, dyed with rust, represent our children’s inheritance: lichen-like patterns like the regeneration of organic life from barren rock or fallout from environmental apocalypse: hope or decay? These are tapestries as masterworks.

The highlight of the exhibition is an installation by Anna Gustafson: Three birch-bark dories filled with jugs of single-use plastic wrapped in white linen are suspended in the front glassed-in exhibition space. In a small alcove, a seine net suspends another catch of enshrouded plastic over a baby grand piano. What is our cultural legacy? Gustafson’s installation is a direct reply to Elliott’s concern: soulless empty vessels replace depleted salmon runs. On the walls, messages are written in salt-encrusted twine threaded with steel wire like white neon: “Salt. Whale. Oil.”

In the past, she says, salt and whale oil were key to our economy; may our dependence on oil become as obsolete. This is our hope.

Elizabeth Bryant

Elizabeth Bryant is an art writer and English/ESL tutor.

“Archipelago—Contemporary Art of the Salish Sea” is on view Friday through Monday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. until December 4 at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, located at 540 Spring Street in Friday Harbor, Washington. Visit www.sjima.org for more information.