February 14-March 31, 2007
Crone Celebration
March 23rd, 6-9 PM
The Scarab Club

by
Dolores S. Slowinski

In 1997, Rose Dalessandro proposed and curated the exhibition, “Goddesses,” at Center Galleries. She was inspired by the publications of Marija Gimbutas, an archeologist whose work in Southeastern Europe was responsible for the resurgence of interest in the feminine divine. Goddesses seemed to be in the air…books, calendars, postcards…everyone was capitalizing on the phenomenon. Dalessandro sensed that it was time to initiate a visual discussion; to go beyond commercial exploitation. She invited a select group of artists, both women and men, to present their interpretations of the goddess. I was invited to write the gallery statement.

As a neophyte in the world of the goddess, I absorbed information like a sponge and came to understand the three aspects of the goddess: virgin, mother, crone. The terms are linked to the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning; which in turn reflect the three stages of a woman’s life: birth to the onset of menses; fertility to the cessation of menses; post-menopausal activity to death. I thought of my daughter, myself, and my mother; of myself, my mother, and my grandmother; of my mother-in-law who had no daughters…of the cyclical nature of the relationship of women in particular, to one another. I talked to all the artists, Marilyn Zimmerman, among them.

Zimmerman is the consummate teacher on feminist, gender, racial and economic, that is, all social justice issues. She is not interested in the information for her own personal edification. She wants to share it with everyone who will listen. Every experience is to be mined for an elemental truth and every encounter is a teaching opportunity. She is self-revelatory, consciousness raising, and liberating.

I was not surprised that she would collaborate with Gail mally-mack, a feminist artist with similar interests, in co-curating the Women Image Women exhibition. What piqued my interest was that they presented themselves as Co-Crones and included a Crone Celebration with the exhibition.

American marketing culture makes much of the stage of virgin (youth, beauty, sex appeal), acknowledges the mother (Mom, laundress, cook, shopper, business woman) but completely ignores the crone. The word itself is seldom used and has developed a negative connotation: an unpleasant, shriveled, old woman; a hag.

“Women Image Women” became a multi-dimensional exhibition of 40 works by 14 women and an event that attempted to singularly change our perception of women, particularly crones.

Pi Benio, who has traditionally worked with natural materials, brought forth her familiar pod shaped pieces but made them of clear plastic tubing and tie wraps. In Eternity Cell she included gut stretched across a small steel armature to support stones that sat like fragile eggs within their cocoon of tie wrap silk. This nod to new materials is eerie. The plastic tubing is all too familiar in hospital settings as conduit for bodily fluids; similarly, tie wraps are ubiquitous, holding together everything from luggage locks after homeland security inspection to water pipes in crawl spaces. The implication seems to be that new materials/technology are as capable of nurturing creativity as organic matter in the hands of women; or that women are adaptable to working with any, even the most quotidian of materials.

Jeanne Bieri is known for her hand-stitched two and three-dimensional work. Familiar and Unknown, a mixed media work of stitched organza pockets on an old linen kitchen towel, was designed as an interactive piece. Like a toy closet organizer, the 20 pockets were filled with the detritus of a woman’s life. Sepia-toned family photographs, worn cards of various sewing notions, a felt pincushion, letters, map fragments, birthday and vacation postcards, 3x5 address cards, calling cards for Mrs. Angus S. Gray as well as for Angus S. Gray himself were randomly inserted into each pocket. Drawings of older adults, middle-aged adults, teenagers, and children done on etched glass plates were wrapped in organza and stitched closed so that the image was visible but softened by the fabric. It was a touching memorial to the experience of going through a box or drawer after the death of a parent or relative and finding bits and pieces of their life story…some of it familiar, much of it unknown. Equally satisfying were her two small paintings: Woman with Goat and Woman with Duckling. Both paintings had the spontaneity and intimacy of snapshots that contrasted with the attention to painterly technique and detail.

Sue Carman-Vian had her Mirror Dress on wheels awaiting her vivification of it in performance. The sleeveless, A-line dress has a flexed mirror exterior the full length of it on all four sides. It reflects its environment as well as anyone standing in its line of sight. Empty, it allows you not only to imagine yourself, be you a man, woman, or child, in it and strolling around the room but also to see yourself reflected in it. It is a simultaneous inside/outside view. You can ponder how you see yourself as woman, how restricted a woman’s place can be, how a woman can reflect the world around her, how distorted your self-image or your background might be. In Support Dress, Carmen-Vian gives a nod to the individuals who provide support for women, no matter what hat the women choose to wear. In it, a woman wearing a full-skirted dress is trying on a hat. On the skirt of the dress are miniature portraits in gilt frames.

Two untitled, 30” x 30”, black and white photographs by Judy Eliyas, give you goose bumps and make you laugh at the same time. Meticulously costumed and staged, Eliyas takes on the persona of the perfectionist housewife of the 1950s. In one photograph she is dressed to the nines: dark lipstick, white earrings and beads, black cocktail dress, white gloves with black polka-dots, while standing in front of a Sub-Zero refrigerator or freezer. (Sub-Zero is the premium, built-in, brand of refrigerator that was first produced for home use in the mid-1950s.) She stands holding out a plastic container, staring you in the eye, lips puckered in that “Come on honey. You better take this. I did it all for you,” look. On the table in front of her are more plastic containers labeled with contents from pickled herring to cupcakes. In the other photograph she wears an alluring housedress poised between living room and dining room. She stands with the vacuum cleaner hose draped over her arm like a serpent…a desperate housewife of a previous generation. Today we shudder at the perfection that was expected of/projected onto the housewife in the 1950s; the denial of self that it engendered. At the same time we can laugh at the familiarity of it with the ease of those who have survived it because we know that crumbling imperfection is the human condition.

Carol Jacobsen combined her compassion and service to unjustly imprisoned women with March being Women’s History Month in the two pieces: Conviction: Harriet and Conviction: Emma. These portraits of Harriet Tubman and Emma Goldman were presented in Jacobsen’s signature, large format, dramatic, black and white style. In this case, each work looked like a negative of a conviction document with a black and white photograph attached. The document included details of each woman’s “illegal” activities and subsequent judgments and sentences. The most prominent fact about Harriet Tubman was the $40,000.00 reward writ large beneath her photo. Since money is a common measure of power in this country, and in Tubman’s case a measure of the threat she posed to the Southern establishment, I decided to try to determine what that reward would be worth today. Using the consumer price index, it would be close to $1 million. Using the unskilled wage, however, because it is the most consistent means of measuring the value of money over time, that reward would be the equivalent of over $6.5 million dollars today based on statistical data currently available.

The diminutive Emma Goldman, was defined by her string of convictions: for inciting riot, for inciting assassination of President McKinley, being a suspicious person, attempting to distribute birth control information, and many more until she was finally deported for having a questionable immigrant status in 1919. As a social terrorist, anarchist, of her day, her deportation based on her “questionable immigrant status” is only too well understood today.

Shaqe Kalaj prepares to embrace the crone stage of her life in Crone Awakening, a work strongly influenced by the symbolic style of Frida Kahlo. Along the top of the assemblage, Kalaj juxtaposes a photo of herself with that of a 90 year old friend.

Gail mally-mack wants us to think about the earliest perception of the earth as mother, source of nourishment and its subsequent division into parcels of land as we look at her drawings of female figures and vessels done on surveyors reports for subdivisions in Birmingham, Farmington Township and Waterford Township. It presents us with the conundrum of our times: how to honor Mother Earth while continually carving her up.

Teresa Peterson cleverly takes old mechanical devices like time clocks to create visual puns that point to the stages of womanhood. Time Clock is a time clock from Detroit Edison. A diagram of a woman is superimposed over the glass in the center and a tiny diagram of a woman with her ovaries colored in is in the lower left corner of the glass. The piece gives form to the idea that the woman’s ‘time’ for child-bearing is running out.

Jo Powers’ Three Lizzies repeats the same tiny portrait of Lizzie Borden in a frame made from a triple switch plate cover and painted red. The center portrait is done in shades of blue and is flanked on each side by ones done in red. Is the implication is that we have immortalized Lizzie Borden as an ax murderer until she is blue in the face…when in fact she was acquitted? The murder remains unsolved. Speculation continues because evidence was handled poorly, townspeople’s testimonies were conflicting, Lizzie’s father and stepmother were not well liked in the community, and Lizzie herself suffered from epileptic seizures. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s reputation remains, thanks to a playground rhyme and Powers’ choice of colors, bathed in blood.

Claudia Shepherd’s Support pays homage to the lipstick; the magic wand that spruces up a woman enabling her to go out into the world ready to speak, smile, kiss, shout and scrawl graffiti across the women’s room mirror or stall doors.

Rita Shumaker’s detailed and complex pencil drawings, Artemis and Conjunctio are so soft as to be overlooked. They quietly speak of the mythical goddess and her multiple aspects and the beliefs and practices surrounding her.

Linda Soberman, in an untitled paper quilt-like mixed media piece, pays tribute to Jewish women of Eastern European extraction. The repeated, female face speaks of the stereotyping, the anonymity of these women. Yet their individual stories are typed and repeated over these faces as if to implant them in our memory through the act of repetition. Closer inspection reveals a male face repeated a number of times. Both of these faces, that fill the frame of the small panels on which they are printed, appear to be mannequin faces. Layered over these, here and there, are small pictures of actual women…pictures taken as mementos perhaps, about the size of passport photos which they also call to mind.

Marsha Wright in Insight gives us that moment of enlightenment in a photographic self-portrait in which her face is illuminated from the outside as if by the knowledge within.

Marilyn Zimmerman not only pays tribute to her mother, in Sarcophagus for Maxine (My Mother, Myself) but also acknowledges and embraces her own eventual death. Maxine is presented as an Egyptian queen but with several important differences. The sarcophagus is cut away. The body is not enhanced or mummified to make our viewing more palatable. Maxine’s cadaver is presented in its natural state of rigor mortis with cheeks caved in and wearing her plastic medical bracelet. In her arms is a final bouquet of flowers as a send-off to a friend taking her final journey. On her abdomen is the view of the interior of the cremation furnace consuming her remains. The life size, color portrait is mounted horizontally on the wall below the chair rail drawing our eyes downward to the underworld. Zimmerman does us a great service in this memorial. She does what good crones do. She teaches us not to fear the last of life’s experiences, death.

As mistress of ceremonies of the Crone Celebration, Zimmerman provided some “serious, great fun” with her horn blowing, and foot stomping introduction with Co-Crone, Gail mally-mack. She also informed us that she was now officially Marilyn Zimmerwoman. She interspersed bits of feminist history with four different costume changes as well as with performances by Sue Carman-Vian, Jan House, Ellen Hildreth, and Audra Kubat. She also devised a ritual in which all the standing-room-only crowd could feel comfortable participating. Together with Treena Flannery Ericson, Zimmerman promises to bring us all back for another rousing all-inclusive, multi-ethnic, trans-generational community Crone Celebration next year. Be ready.

Dolores S. Slowinski: A crone who learned her most important lessons from her mother, and grandmothers; father and grandfathers too.