It Will Be Artists

It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and thinkers, who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing, and shout the big dreams. ~Leonard Cohen

I have been thinking of that Leonard Cohen quote a lot lately—after hearing the piano music of a local musician and after visiting the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore, MD. These times we are living in are calling up the very questions that humans invested in the great and ancient faith traditions first began asking: What does it mean to be human? Who are we going to be to one another? How do we want to live?

Perhaps this is answered in the work of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, who survived the Holocaust with her younger sister—the only two members of their family to live to see the other side of this time. In 1942, 15-year-old Esther sensed that she and her 13-year-old sister should not go to the train station where Nazi soldiers had ordered her family and every other Jewish family in the village to arrive. Instead, the sisters slipped away and hid out in the woods when they were turned away by local friends and neighbors out of fear. Eventually they made their way to another village where no one knew them and pretended to be Polish Catholic farm girls separated from their family. They hid and worked in this way until the country was liberated in 1944.

Esther eventually married and immigrated to America. At 50, she began using her embroidery skills to create what would become her 36 fabric pictures (some of which are shown above), adding text story to each, to depict first her early life in the idyllic Polish countryside, then this same countryside under occupation, and on to the time that she spent working in hiding and finally living to see liberation, all the while with her sister. The body of her work is titled “Esther and the dream of one loving family.”

Imagine it, her work seems to ask of viewers, for even though I’ve experienced the horrific and the worst of humanity, I will refuse not to imagine the beautiful and best of us too.

Read more here: Esther and the dream of one loving family or watch a short video with her daughter speaking and revealing the pieces here: Esther video.

What does it mean to be human, how will we live, and who will we be to one another? The artist, the musician seems to offer a way forward that suggests there is more story to tell, there is beauty within and among us that can not be snuffed out. What if this story were for everyone, not just for some?

Like the story of artist Judith Ann Scott, also featured at the AVAM and at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. Judith and her twin sister Joyce were born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1943. Unlike Joyce, Judith was diagnosed with Down Syndrome and was deaf and largely mute. She was deemed “uneducatable” by her local school board.

When she was 7-years-old she was separated from her family and institutionalized for 36 years, until Joyce fought for and gained custody of her in 1986, bringing her to Oakland, California, where Judith was able to live in a nurturing environment with her sister for the rest of her life. Joyce enrolled Judith at a nearby art program and, from this, the spirit that was said to be uneducatable flourished into its innate capacity for creativity and beauty.

What were these creatures that Judith created? She began with found or pilfered items, like an electrical fan, keys, a bicycle rim, objects that were bound together as her creature’s central core. Then she enveloped the core in successive layers of malleable materials, like yarn, strips of fabric, twine, even power cords or tubing. She’d work for months sometimes before an object was complete, often producing works that were quite sizeable, each final product eventually resembling a kind of nest or cocoon.

Inside Judith, all along, there was a secret world. Joyce, a poet, wrote of her sister’s works, and imagined them as something far more than found objects wrapped up in old scraps:

Cocoons  

Perhaps inside each wrapped cocoon 
Is a child unborn, 
Who might have been hers, 
Had she and the world been something different.  

Perhaps inside each wrapped cocoon 
Is a spirit protected, 
Of an earthbound wingless being waiting to be born 
When the whole world will be changed.  

Perhaps inside, 
The past is wrapped caerfully in bright colors 
Gently preserved. 
The sanctuary wherein our love resides.  ~Judith Scott

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The artist imagines something different, a world changed, a sanctuary. Perhaps the artists, the musicians, the poets are indeed the ones who are asking the old and ancient questions best, holding them against their hearts, high up under the light and deep in the quiet of darkness. What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? Who shall we be to one another? The willingness to question, to remain curiously alive within the world as it is, asking the ancient questions is, I imagine, indeed what will ultimately save us all.

Learn more about Judith Scott here: Judith Scott at the AVAM or watch here Video of Judith Scott's Work

And finally, a poem shared with me this week that says a lot in a small space. Read it here: What to do After Voting, by James Pearson