evolve

Little Lino (12" x 12") just in time for the Roadworks Steamroller prints this Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at the San Francisco Center for the Book. A real record- I started drawing yesterday afternoon and made my first marks on the lino late last night and finished before 11 p.m. the next day. whew!

I mentioned to Minette that it looks suspiciously like a tattoo design, replete with unfurling ribbon banner. Seeing that I am going through a pretty major transition in my life right now, it seems fitting that I went through the process of carving the tattoo out of the fleshy tan linoleum without actually getting the tattoo staccato-ed onto my body.

mimi, miyeko, bachan, mom

I made this book in 1997, in honor of my maternal grandmother, Miyeko Okamura Kebo, who celebrated her 80th birthday that year (she is still alive, although extremely frail and feeble, living in Fresno with my Aunt Janis. But give her a break! She's 91 years old.) I am named after this grandmother, and this book was one of the very first I ever assembled, designed, printed and bound. In it is a collection of letters and truly extraordinary photographs of my Bachan that I solicited from family friends and relatives in her honor, and since I only made five copies at the time, I finally got down and scanned the book for wider distribution. You may note that my piece (the final letter in the book) is abnormally historical in nature. See? I was buck-toothed and hopelessly covered in archival dust eleven years ago.

One errata: the title poem is written by Kathy Kebo. Her name was accidentally left off the page in my original design (which was done with tremendous support from Bruce Smith of the Arts & Crafts Press). 

**RATS! Stupid stupid Blogger is acting jinky and for some reason, most of the images are lying on their sides. Sigh. Bear with me while I try to remedy this malfunctioning post.

portraits of Quincy

I received a blog request for color photos of Quince! 

Some quick backstory though, since you asked. Quincy came about via a high school biology teacher and closet herpetologist (hey, Mr. Herrick!) and was a graduation gift to me from my one and only brother, Doug. That was in 1992, the year I graduated from Mills College. Quince was but a little chopstick of orange delight then, so tiny that I could hold her in the palm of my hand and had to feed her baby doll pinkie newborn mice.  Photos of Quincy at that stage must exist somewhere- I'm going to have to dig into my archives to find them though, so patience, dear readers.

She is named after the "coroner of the stars" Quincy, M.D., that crazy 70s television drama starring Jack Klugman, which has an excellent theme song, by the way. Rumor has it that the tv show "Quincy" was actually modeled after the real-life Japanese coroner, Thomas Noguchi.  Noguchi has penned several memoirs about his life in the forensic sciences, and also appeared as himself in the classic high school shocker, "Faces of Death"!

Lost snake $100 reward

This past Saturday, in the heat of other personal drama, I discovered through our neighbors that Quincy the snake had somehow escaped from the house. (Fallen out the window? Took the stairs? Dumb waiter?) My kind neighbors put up an actual ad on Craigslist. 

Once it sunk in that my snake was loose in the neighborhood of East 28th Street, I realized to my horror that chances of ever finding her again were pretty much close to nil. That went over well, as you can imagine. After prodigious weeping and tearing of hair on chest, I managed to pull myself together enough to distribute flyers (the first draft was totally incomprehensible, full of blowsy sentiments and history of the snake, outrageous reward offers, etc.) and bother the neighbors, door to door. I quickly remembered that it is universally understood that Everybody Hates Snakes, a creepy feeling shared by all cultures: Chinese, Black, Vietnamese, White, Latino, Creole...So each emotional plea on my part was met with animosity and barely contained disgust ("Sure, I'll keep my eyes peeled and look around the backyard" followed by subtle nostril flaring and eye bulges).

I finally went knocking on the door of the doctor who lives in a huge Victorian mansion with acreage surrounding his property directly behind us, and when he proved to be absent, left him a flyer, then poked around his backyard with BR with no success. Woodpiles, bushes, dead leaves, cat poop. No snake. So we started the walk back to the doctor's front gate, which is long since he has a formidable sized front yard. Still leaking tears and hiccuping sobs, I kept scanning the ground for gory snake remains and as my eyes passed over to the right side of the gravel path, not but a few inches from where my foot trod, there was....a dappled pink/orange snake, hesitantly inching forward in full exposed sunlight (very unsnake like behavior! But then again, Quincy is not knowing of birds and raccoons and cats and stray dogs. bleh) It was a MIRACLE OF BUDDHA. One lucky snake. And one lucky, lucky, blessed snake mom. 

Contours in the Air

She is very beautiful, quiet, energetic, and unaffected and believes almost religiously in work. She is five feet two inches tall and has very black hair. Besides her painting and design work she likes to grow things and cultivates mad little gardens at school and she had rather dance than eat.

— letter written by Albert Lanier introducing Ruth to her future in-laws, 1948

Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier were extraordinarily talented, young, and beautiful artists who met while studying together at the renown Black Mountain College in 1946. Through the guidance and instruction of major art figures such as painter Josef Albers, dancer Merce Cunningham, and architect Buckminister Fuller, Black Mountain College gave the two lovers the self-confidence and courage to pursue careers as artists and to brave the untested waters of a mixed race marriage, just a few years following the end of WWII, which had cast a perceptible pallor over the entire population Japanese Americans like Ruth Asawa and her family. 

To understand her origins as an artist and her motivation to continue to create things of "unrefined beauty" well into her 80s, one must observe Ruth Asawa's early experiences as a child of immigrant farmers, with a strict and conservative Japanese culture cocooning her, as did the subsequent years spent in an American interment camp through the duration of the war. It is not typical for artists to begin their careers in incarceration, but despite the hardship, Asawa not only absorbed lessons from her time in camp (she first learned weaving as a volunteer camoflage net maker, and picked up the sumi brush during art classes in camp), she flourished. She was only 16 when she and her family were forcibly removed from their homes in Norwalk, California, and interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreprable harm. For Asawa, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life.

(photos by Laurence Cuneo and Hazel Larsen from www.ruthasawa.com)