Alice Walker — Find A Quiet Space

I discovered my passion very early. I just love doing it. My mother claims that I was writing when I was crawling — with a twig in the sand, or on the margins of books. But I think just growing up in the South and having a somewhat difficult time, you know, really helped me to look to creativity as a way to cope, really, with life.

Art requires us to really see, to look at things with understanding. And I think because things were difficult —  for instance, you had one pair of shoes that had to last the entire year. So if you sort of wore them out, what were you going to do? Well, you had to really think hard about how people managed to clothe you, and how they managed to feed you.

The advice I would give to anyone, but especially to the young — find some quiet space around yourself and maintain it. And don’t fill your outer space or your interior space with other people’s anything. Keep a space for you. Because it’s the only way you can grow into being who you were meant to be.

–Alice Walker speaking this morning on We Have a Dream: Inspirational and Motivational Black Americans on 5 KSTP

-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

-related to post on practice, mentors, and Alice Walker on labyrinths: Labyrinth

• Alice Walker’s Blog: The Cushion and the Road: Meditation and Wandering As the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way
  

• Alice Walker’s Official Website

• Alice Walker’s Booklist
  

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Casket Arts Epilogue

–Icon Painting, May 19th, 2007, all photos © 2007 by QuoinMonkey, all rights reserved

A week ago, I was at Art-A-Whirl in Northeast Minneapolis, where I spent most of the time in the Casket Arts Building (see Casket Arts Photoblog).  ybonesy asked in a comment if the building had a funeral home during the time it was a casket factory.

The answer is no. But what I did find out was there were whole floors of needle-clad seamstresses who sewed quilted silk liners and cushions for the caskets.

I had pictured the factory as mostly men, a likely scenario for woodworking factories during the late 1800’s. According to John, one of the owners, that’s far from true. He said he thought the energy of the building was so good because of all the women that were there every day, honing their craft.

No funeral home. Mostly women. The building produced custom made caskets up until it was sold a few years ago.

I could imagine it – a woman of the time taking great pride in her needlework softening the loss of a family member (and the ride to the other side). John also said that some of the rosewood and cherry leftover from building the caskets had been used to patch the floors up on the 4th level. They discovered it when they sanded and refinished them.

I don’t know about you, but details like this light up my nights. The history of century-old people and architecture gives me something to hold on to, a thread of continuity, a place to stand. Buildings are living, breathing places we walk in and out of every day. We spend so much time there. We take them for granted.

        

         

One of the best parts of Art-A-Whirl was walking down the street a few blocks to St. Mary’s Russian Greek Orthodox Catholic Church built in 1905. Haunting melodies echoed between solid oak doors and out into the late afternoon sun. I couldn’t help but imagine some of the casket workers from the early 1900’s walking down to a summer service.

As part of their participation in last Saturday’s community art event, St. Mary’s had been giving painting lessons on iconography . Rows of jars of handground pigments graced a short table at the entrance to the service. When we arrived, they were breaking for a 30 minute service. Incense filled the air.

The man who established the church, Rev. Alexis Toth, was a rebel. What artist wouldn’t like that? The history is rich. You can read the whole account in New Advent. 

Here’s a snippet:

The first great impulse to the establishment of the Russian Church in the United States on a large scale was given in 1891, when the late Rev. Alexis Toth, then a Ruthenian Greek Catholic priest in Minneapolis, disobeyed the instructions of Archbishop Ireland and, when threatened with a recall to his native country, left his parish, went to San Francisco, turned Orthodox, and submitted to Bishop Nicholas, and on returning to Minneapolis took over his whole parish to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The guy was on fire. And so were the artists I supported last weekend. I had a peaceful evening, full of art, friends, and the creative spirit. At the risk of sounding overly romantic, these kinds of connections sustain me.

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

-see Because Sometimes Catholicism *Is* Scary for another perspective

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Casket Arts Photoblog

The Northwestern Casket Company, May 17th 2007, all photos copyright © 2007-2010 by QuoinMonkey, all rights reserved.

I went over to the Casket Arts Building on Thursday to help my friend, Gail, hang her show. She recently joined the rain collective, a confluence of artists who moved into the building this week.

I took my camera along and the pleasure was all mine. The exposed brick had been restored, the studio floors had been sanded and polished to their original luster, a stunning mix of maple and pine.

The oldest portion of the former Northwestern Casket Company, which served as a casket factory until January of 2006, dates back to 1887. It’s one of the oldest surviving buildings in the city of Minneapolis.

I met owner, Jennifer Young, and we stood in the door of Gail’s studio and chatted for a while about what kind of shape the building was in before they bought it – and what it looks like now (a photographer’s dream).

The former owner of Northwest Casket Company, Robert Berny, rose from clerk to president and spent 6 decades with the company until his death in 2004. He was buried in a custom cherrywood casket.

Yesterday, the building was bustling with artists preparing for an annual Northeast tradition, Art-A-Whirl. This is the 12th Annual Art-A-Whirl; I remember the first. I had a studio in the Northrup King seed building back then.

When artists come together, the energy is palpable – vibrating and alive. I felt like I was standing in pockets of calm when I captured these images – silent spaces between the buzz of hanging oil, acrylic, and canvas on freshly painted white walls, and lunch at Emily’s Lebanese Deli .

Exit, May 17th, 2007, all photos in this post copyright © 2007-2010 by QuoinMonkey, all rights reserved.

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

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