Waste Land and two local exhibits of art with a social conscience

Another busy weekend on the art scene. Botanical blockbuster at the Milwaukee Art Museum, of course. (See previous post.) While that was fun – and a great way to attract a crowd to see great art – I also enjoyed a couple more modest exhibits of work with a social conscience.

Friday evening I started out at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts for the opening of “Carlos Cortez and Allied Artists.” Cortez, who died in 2005, was a prolific printmaker and indefatigable advocate for immigrants, the working class, and social justice. In addition to his personal activism, he influenced the work of many who followed, some of whom pay tribute in this exhibit. The exhibit organizers must be very pleased with the unexpected topicality of this show, given recent events in Madison. It runs through May 14.

Next I stopped at Gallery 2622 in Wauwatosa where Marianne Huebner, an art therapist at Children’s Hospital, is exhibiting her own work in a series of large mixed media paintings. Unlike most artists, whose efforts to express themselves in ever more novel ways often lead to self-indulgent excess, art therapists choose to use art as a tool for healing others. Art is created for the benefit of people in some kind of distress. The show runs through April 30 and the gallery will be open for the Westside Art Walk, a good time to check it out.

When I got home it was still early, so I popped in my Netflix DVD of the Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land. It documents a project by Vik Muniz that takes art that can help others to a new scale, literally.

Zumbi is a picker. He lives in a favela (slum) near Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, in Rio de Janeiro. Every day he joins an army of 2,500 who pick recyclable materials from the garbage. It is hard, smelly, dangerous work. Zumbi is also a philosopher. He rescues – and reads – books that have been discarded. He’s read Nietzsche and Machiavelli. He sees similarities between the medieval fiefdoms of Machiavelli’s princes and the turf wars, gangs, and drug lords of Rio’s favelas.  Zumbi dreams of creating a library for the community of pickers.

Waste Land tells the story of Zumbi and other pickers whose lives are transformed by an artist who grew up in a favela in Brazil and who wants to give back. Vik Muniz is now a very successful artist in New York with an international reputation. He has long made art from unconventional materials. Inspired by the landfill, he befriends the pickers and makes enormous portraits using them as subjects and their work – the recyclables gleaned from Gramacho – as his art materials. The results astonish everyone and transform Muniz as much as the people who become his collaborators as well as his subjects.

The inhuman scale of Gramacho is replaced by the individual lives of Isis, Tiao, Zumbi, and others who become monumental works of art. Along the way Muniz has to struggle with the impact he is having on them, whether it is ethical and sustainable.

To learn more, go to Waste Land. And put it on your Netflix queue.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel misses opportunity to mention Art Therapy.

Art Therapy is an effective therapeutic discipline that rarely gets the respect it deserves. Sometimes it isn't even mentioned when it's completely consistent with the context of a story in the news.

This is the case in Jim Stingl's column, which appeared in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It's a great story about a Vietnam Vet who paints to relieve sympotions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that linger long after his experiences in Vietnam. Stingl specializes in human interest stories like this one and I generally enjoy his column no matter who he's describing. Today's story, entitled "Vietnam vet seeks peace with painting," was especially appealing due to its art related subject.

As usual, it's a good, positive story. I just wish Stingl had taken the opportunity to mention the fact that art as therapy has a history and that, although Jim Finnerty, the subject of the story, didn't avail himself of one (or if he did it wasn't mentioned), there are professsionals in the field who can help people like vets with PTSD.

For more information about art therapy, trauma intervention, and the military, go to the Internation Art Therapy Organization website.

To read a scholarly research article about art therapy and combat related PTSD, go to the ERIC database.

Jim Finnerty, as is briefly mentioned in Stingl's column, was already an accomplished artist. (See Finnerty's website.) However, art therapy can benefit anyone, whether or not they think of themselves as an artist or have artistic skills.

Urban Underground, by Jim Finnerty

Photography as a healing art

Usually, the main purpose of portrait photography is to make the subject look good. Here is a story about a photographer whose aim is to make the subject feel good. He has chosen subjects that traditionally have been portrayed in a negative fashion, even stigmatized, because of some physical condition or deformity. He treats them - what a revelation! - as human beings, as normal. And it makes them feel good about themselves.

Ths story is called "Using Photography to Create Positive Exposure," from the Healing Arts blog at Psychology Today by Cathy Malchiodi.

I recommend watching the video that's embedded in the article. Rick Guidotti, a trained and experienced fashion photographer, is infectious in his enthusiasm for this project. The one criticism I have of the video is that it shows only subjects who, to me anyway, seem inherently beautiful already. Therefore, it's even more important to visit his website and see the wider variety of subjects he works with as part of the organization he founded called Positive Exposure.

Milwaukee Chamber Theater takes a swing at art

Dana Fielding is an artist. She is also crazy (disturbed and depressed is a more PC way of describing her condition.) Whether or not she’s delusional is another question the Milwaukee Chamber Theater’s current production puts to its audience. It’s title, “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball,” alludes to this and people who go to the show expecting something related to “Field of Dreams” or “The Natural” might be disappointed to find it’s about an artist (Fielding) who assumes the identity of Darrell Strawberry in order to…well, I’ll leave that detail for those who will go see the show. Then again, the more athletically inclined might enjoy the metaphors about being an artist that fly like balls from the bat of the famous slugger.

Thankfully, I’ve never spent time in a mental institution or tried to commit suicide, and hope never to sink so low. But, aside from such personal details, I found Dana Fielding’s artistic and psychological predicaments not only entertaining, but at times uncomfortably familiar. Are we mad who want to be artists? Can we speak truth through our art without being a bit disturbed? Or do we simply experience the world with such heightened sensitivity that we cannot help but be overwhelmed at times?

As Dana Fielding and the play’s audience discovers, art can be a trying vocation. Success is both elusive and hard to measure. At one point Fielding’s agent implores “I just want you to be happy!” Fielding snaps forcefully back “no you don’t!” and the audience is left to wonder if she can make art the establishment finds acceptable if she is not depressed. And of course, happiness doesn’t necessarily follow from success. This is powerfully demonstrated by the example of Strawberry’s meteoric baseball career, which flamed out quickly.

Art and "madness" - however the topic is described - has a long history. It's most famous case subject is Van Gogh, of course. A quick google search of the subject produced over 21 million hits. My wife, who attended the play with me and who is an art therapist, says it's a regular topic at conventions - not so much art therapy conventions, but psychiatric ones. Am I crazy to be an artist? I don't know, but one of my favorite lines from a Billy Joel song (You May be Right) goes "it just may be a lunatic you're looking for!" Oh, and "don't try to save me."

The Sweetest Swing in Baseball runs through May 2. More about it at the Chamber Theater.