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David       Szanton	Gail Greenfield Randall	Iason Athanasiadis	Josh         Dorman

Curator's Viewpoint
by David Szanton, Ancient Gods and Modern Politics: Mithila Painting, Curator
Spring/Summer 2009

In the Winter of 1977, Raymond Owens, a friend from graduate school whom I had not seen for seven years, suddenly appeared at my home in New York with a large mysterious roll wrapped in blue plastic under his arm. When he showed me what was inside I immediately fell in love. Inside were 35 beautiful paintings he had just bought from 15 village-based artists (all women) around the town of Madhubani in the Mithila region of the Indian state of Bihar. The works derived from a unique, ancient wall-painting tradition, and were mostly of Hindu gods and goddesses, and the ritual iconography connected with marriages. But there were also several paintings of New York City, Washington DC, and Moscow. Some were in brilliant colors. Others were in extremely fine black and red ink.  Each artist had her own distinctive style.

To my barrage of questions, Raymond explained that he had been doing research on local water problems, and had “discovered” the paintings quite by accident. To his dismay, however, dealers from New Delhi had also discovered them, were demanding scores of paintings of a few popular images for the tourist market, and were only paying the artists 3 to 5 rupees per painting. In this poor, deep-rural area without access to other markets, the women were mass-producing the requested images. The care and quality of their work was declining rapidly and it seemed clear that their skills, tradition, and inspiration would soon collapse.

Pained at that thought, Raymond urged the artists to take their time, do their best work on subjects that really interested them, and agreed to buy as many as he could for 25 to 50 rupees each. What he showed me in New York was the first set of paintings he had bought. 

Aware that his one-time purchase could not sustain the painting tradition, we devised a system that essentially continues to the present. Raymond would return to Madhubani every one to two years on research trips and purchase the best paintings he could find for well over the local market price. We would then mount exhibitions and sales in the U.S., and on his following trip to India Raymond would distribute the profits to the painters - and buy a new set of paintings. As a result, the painters did their best work, received fiar prices for them, and if we managed to sell the paintings, got a second payment for them, encouraging them to keep developing their skills.

In 1980, we established the Ethnic Arts Foundation (EAF) to hold the funds until Raymond’s next trip to India. Raymond made about 10 of these trips until his death in 2000 when he left a small bequest to continue these efforts.  Now, I make the annual trips to Madhubani and the villages.

Over these three decades, five distinct painting techniques and styles have evolved, proliferated, and in some cases, merged. A few men are painting, and the paintings have expanded to include local legends and ancient epics; domestic and community life; autobiographical images; the natural world; national and international politics; and recently, powerful feminist critiques of the local patriarchal society.

In 2003 the EAF established the Mithila Art Institute (MAI), an art school in Madhubani town led by local artists to train a new generation in the techniques and iconography of Mithila painting - and then to give them free rein to paint either, or both, traditional or contemporary subjects. Every year, 150 to 300 people apply for the 25 new openings in the MAI’s free, but intensive, year-long program.

The paintings in the current exhibition, Ancient Gods and Modern Politics: Mithila Painting, suggest the extraordinary evolution, and amazing vitality and currency of this indigenous Indian painting tradition.

For more, visit www.mithilapainting.org/.

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Artist's Viewpoint
by Gail Greenfield Randall, Celestial Ash: Assemblages from Los Angeles, Artist
Spring/Summer 2009

As a small child I spent idyllic days with my grandmother. She was a loving soul who taught me to look for beauty in the things that surrounded us. I used to help her hang laundry outside and she would often stop to marvel at a glorious sunset or a particularly amazing cloud formation. On our walks at the beach she would collect sea glass and shells, and then we would sit together at the shoreline and delight in the colors and textures of these found treasures.

I remember she had a bedroom bureau she let me rummage through. One of the drawers had dividers which held all sorts of small wonders. Each compartment held objects that thrilled and intrigued me. A particularly beautiful feather, a pocket watch, a child’s lock of hair tied with a ribbon, a tiny sewing kit, a pair of old passports. I would look at these items again and again, and wonder where they came from – what they meant to my grandmother and what stories were locked away in each piece. In retrospect that drawer was a ready-made Cornell box.

As an adult, I became a wife, a mother, and a painter. I painted for twenty years. Looking back, I realize that all my paintings (and there were hundreds) contained elements of the sublime things my grandmother and I experienced together. The ocean, a night sky filled with stars, trees in full bloom. The work was filled with optimism and joy – an escape to a utopian universe.

My grandmother died in 2006. I grieved for her in a way I hadn’t expected and found that I was having difficulty expressing myself in my paintings after her death. Painting had always been my refuge and now it eluded me.

Unexpectedly, I found a new kind of self-expression. I began making memory boxes that embodied the fascination, the joy, and the mystery that I had experienced holding those items that had nested in the divided drawer of my grandmother’s bureau all those many years ago.

I have collected objects all my life and suddenly I was using them in boxes to create art that illustrated how ordinary things around us can be arranged to convey highly specific feelings.

A bird’s egg, seashells, broken clocks, a vial of clear water – the viewer doesn’t need to hold these to know what they feel like. We have a shared sense-memory that is activated just by looking at them.  Creating my own alphabet with these objects, I found a way to deal with my feelings of melancholy, yearning, dread, but mostly delight in the world. I had stories to tell, and I found solace and deep contentment in telegraphing those emotions through the arrangement of specific objects.

Whether disturbing or delightful, objects have the power to make us feel a certain way. Following my grandmother’s death, I was compelled to try and capture moments, and preserve them in a box. By doing so, memories and emotions that we all feel, but often don’t slow down enough to pay attention to, could be housed and contemplated.

We cannot control the passage of time. Our lives are made up of millions of fleeting moments. It is my intention to gather together objects to remind us of the most significant ones.

For more, visit www.gailrandall.com.

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Journalist's Notebook
by Iason Athanasiadis, Exploring the Other: Contemporary Iran, Photojournalist
Winter/Spring 2009

My first memory of Iran was watching the hideous battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War on the evening news in 1980s Greece and wanting to know more about their root cause. 20 years later, I moved to Iran and spent 3 years living in and reporting on this most extraordinary of civilizations.

Today, razor-sharp communication technologies, 24-hour reporting, and a melting-pot world have overtaken the rather romantic era of Graham Greene’s erudite gentleman journalist.

As geographical distances shrink, so do the spaces in between cultures, making an organization such as CAFAM even more important in navigating this new terrain. While technology brings different people closer together, so does it multiply the potential for misunderstanding and conflict. In the case of the events of September 11th, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it had tragic, world-altering proportions. Journalists as well as politicians are now obliged to be better culturally informed when reporting on events or policymaking.

When I moved to Iran in 2004, I found a society in flux, full of complexity and paradox. The dominant issues were cultural transformation, reforming the Islamic Republic, democratization, drug addiction, and women’s rights. Yet the majority of international reporting about Iran, carried out from outside its borders, focused almost exclusively on speculations about its nuclear energy program. It seemed that political debates in Washington, London, and Vienna were setting the reporting agenda over actual developments inside Iran. Additionally, the quality of international reporting was low with western journalists “parachuting” into the country for a week or two and covering predictable stories about the nuclear facilities or Islamic headwear. The Islamic Republic of Iran and its fear of spies were also to blame for rarely offering residency visas to Western journalists wanting to provide quality reporting by immersing themselves in the local culture.

Not wanting to commit a reporting blunder in such a charged environment, I spent a year learning Persian before starting to report on Iran. Before writing on this complex and highly nuanced society, I spent time travelling and photographing around Iran. In the process, I met people who offered invaluable insights as they guided me through the cities and the countryside. In Iraq and Afghanistan, I “embedded” with locals who understood local conventions. I travelled in battered cars rather than bullet-proof Humvees and interviewed everyday people rather than politicians or occupation authorities.

Back in Tehran, my breakthrough moment in understanding Iran came during the crisis over the detention of a group of British sailors. A London-based editor had asked me to write a piece gauging how the international confrontation was affecting the mood on the streets. It was Norooz, the Persian New Year, when the country grinds to a halt and even newspapers stop being published. Most people were completely unaware of the sailors’ detention. But they were gripped by a corruption scandal involving the son of a government official, who had escaped a lenient prison sentence to an unnamed Persian Gulf country and been dragged back in chains by the Ministry of Intelligence. It was clear to me that this story of a regime son’s rise and fall, rather than the international media spectacle with a cast of British sailors, had captured the imagination of people on the streets of Tehran.

That story spoke much more to the ordinary man on the street about the direction of the Islamic Republic than the showy grandstanding of the capture and release of Britain’s sailors reflected in the glare of the international media.

For more, visit www.iason.ws.  

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Artist's Viewpoint
by Josh Dorman, "Within Four Miles": The World of Josh Dorman, Artist
Fall/Winter 2008

My first thought on being considered for an exhibit at the Craft and Folk Art Museum  was, “Wow, I am a folk artist!” I am extremely fond of both folk and outsider art. I've visited both the American Folk Art Museum in NYC and the American Visionary Art Museum in my hometown of Baltimore many times. I am influenced and moved by work created by people who are outside of the “art world” and who are creating from their hearts, with an honesty that is rare in a commercial gallery.   
 
I am someone who wanders through contemporary art galleries with skepticism and very rarely am I moved by the art I see. In some ways, I’ve always felt artists like Martin Ramirez, Grandma Moses, and Henry Darger were making art for eternity, God, or just because they needed to create. The “trained” artists I admire most—such as Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, and J.M.W. Turner—also seemed to be creating as if they were part of nature. The materials guided their process and the works still feel like fresh discoveries to me.
  
I believe painting is a craft that requires patience and skill. I feel that my collage technique plays with the boundary between fine art and craft. The old textbooks and antique maps I use must somehow transform from decorative items into art. I attempt to build a world where disparate images (animals, machinery, scientific diagrams, creatures, and text) can exist together. Using these images on topographic maps allow me to shift scale and language constantly, yet find a visual harmony. I can tell a million stories all at once.
 
So to be considered a fine craftsman or a folk artist is a real honor for me.

For more, visit www.joshdorman.net.

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Upcoming Talks and Discussions...

Curator's Lecture:

Sunday | May 3
3 pm
FREE

Join curator David Szanton of the Ethnic Arts Foundation as he shares the history of the Mithila painters and explores the evolution of their techniques and symbolism.

RSVP to rsvp@cafam.org or 323.937.4230 x50.

Sunday | May 31
3 pm
FREE

Join curator Kristine McKenna and artists Gail Greenfield Randall, Matjames, and Michael McMillen for an engaging discussion of each artist's work and the inspiration behind the exhibition.

RSVP to rsvp@cafam.org or 323.937.4230 x50.